Hassan Khan
Lust
29 January - 5 March 2011
Objects of Collective Consciousness
By Brian Kuan Wood
Don’t trust the lights. Rather, look into to the darkness for what you need. Hassan Khan’s video installation Jewel (2010, 35 mm film transferred to HD) opens with a cloud of lights flickering to a soundtrack—produced by Khan himself—of hypnotic drones. But one soon discovers that these lights are not stars or a coastal hamlet at night, but a swarm of hideous fang-faced anglerfish— the elegant sparkling being nothing other than the light emitted from the strange growth on their faces: a lure for prey. As a ferocious beat sets in, the image of the anglerfish freezes and shape-shifts, “fossilizing” as a pattern of lights. The camera pulls out, and the fish pattern is shown to be punched into a revolving object—a totemic sort of disco ball surrogate—around which two men, one younger and one older, each perform a strange dance of desperate flailing, drowning, falling, grabbing, and whipping gestures. It is a spare scene of some kind of sinister, yet perfectly viable Arab subculture collectively reveling in a response to total collapse—one in which dancing, limbs flailing in the air, becomes a powerful and resilient performance of futile gestures. Moving with the ambivalence of marionettes commanded by forces that are not theirs, the work draws to a close with the scene slowly receding into darkness in a single continuous tracking shot. What is it that haunts these men and compels them to act, to move?
At Galerie Chantal Crousel from 29 January–5 March, Khan presents “Lust”, a multilayered constellation of recent works that can be seen as focal points in his practice over the past three years. While the included works are highly enigmatic in nature and communicate on a number of registers, it is simultaneously important to consider them in light of a sophisticated line of thinking that has taken place over the course of the artist’s 15-year career. Key to this thinking has been a dynamic centered on private consciousness and public address—a way of dealing with the movements of ideological forces and social constructions of value as they pass from the crowd in the street into the psyche and back. In this sense we can then address his oeuvre as a means of confronting the spectral nature of these movements throughout a flowing cultural subconscious of a “public mind.”
Key to this is Khan’s particular approach to the way ideological thinking and spectrality function in relation to physical material. In an attempt to revisit the quasi-religious and messianic thinking latent in Marx’s writing on commodity fetishism, Jacques Derrida has used the term “hauntology” to describe a spectral ontology functioning within Marx’s materialist critique of the commodity. As a subtle play on “ontology,” the term allows room for a phantasmatic form of being to precede the material commodity as the ghostly desire for such a commodity to emerge (or be produced) in the first place. Derrida goes on to propose Marx’s very materialist critique to be an exorcism of this already existing auratic, ghostly presence that surrounds an object, expelling the ghosts that would possess a piece of material such as wood to think of itself as not only a chair, but even a diamond, or a Ferrari. But, following from the “hauntological,” for Khan these apparitions are of the utmost importance, as they are themselves another form of material. It is from here that Khan’s work as an artist finds its materiality: as compressions of social desires.
If we then suppose that these collective desires, as a form of hidden consensus, also carry ideological content, then the obvious question becomes: What other errant, spectral products are floating around, and how can we perceive them? From this perspective, we have already entered another state of being—one that requires a shift in the understanding of how objects behave, and how they reflect and accommodate collective desires (or a lack thereof ). With Banque Bannister (2010), the centerpiece of the exhibition at Chantal Crousel, one finds a brass handrail trying to find its purpose—leaning on something that is missing and leading to something that is not there. Hovering in space, it assumes the shape of ordinary piping or a “stairway to heaven”—leaping forward to find stairs to rest itself on. In a twisting of an orthodox Duchampian move, similar to that of Banque Bannister, Khan’s Evidence of Evidence II (2010) is an enormous (3.5 x 3 meter) scan of a discarded flower painting, printed on vinyl, that reverses the premises of a Fountain (1917) or Bottle Rack (1914). Like Duchamp’s readymades, it assumes another character when it enters the exhibition, but, contra Duchamp, it does not gain auratic value or become formally abstracted—in fact, on a formal level, Evidence of Evidence II is barely aware of the exhibition format at all, and it arrives without suspicion or preconceived notions. As its title suggests, the aura does not lie in the context (the exhibition format, with its loaded implications), but came before it, in the flower painting’s domestic origin in the home. As a zoomed-in, scientific extraction of collective meaning latent in a staple bourgeois decorative motif, the artist has described Evidence of Evidence II as “a set of values and socio-economic facts being transformed or translated into aesthetic facts.” This is how Khan positions the objects furnishing the generally-accepted and the already- existing to make them speak about both what they are and what they are about. It is not a Duchampian sleight of hand that recontextualizes the object to introduce potential other readings, but the opposite: a fundamentally subtractive process of obliterating the potential for an already-auratic, already-inflated flower painting to say anything about the person who owns it. Blasting it back down to literal material, it becomes unrecognizable even to itself.
Here it is also important to mention the darkness that surrounds these works, for why should it be necessary to obliterate meanings, to subtract possibilities, to reduce agency in such a way—especially when so much of the language used in art contexts is geared towards the production of meaning, the multiplicity of possibilities, the celebration of heterogeneity, and even the potential for art to make positive contributions to the world? With this we can simply look to another common understanding, that “political” content in art is necessarily affirmative for initiating the possibility of political agency. But how can the political be automatically aligned with agency, with “hope,” and potentiality? What about authoritarian regimes, tyranny, the poverty of available options, endemic corruption, botched elections, and all-around collapse— a saturation of a politics that does not include democracy and activism, but point instead to defeat and withdrawal? Are these states of being not equally political, if not radically more so? What is the shape of a political dead-end in which there is no formal expression, no representation— where a political address utterly hollowed of potential might still speak? (And those looking to situate Khan’s work in an Egyptian context may begin by inferring the current political climate and regime in Egypt into the above—it would not be far off.)
Image:
Hassan Khan
Muslimgauze R.I.P., 2010
Full HD video transferred to Blu-Ray, sound
8 min 07, Edition of 6
Photo credit: Hassan Khan
Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL
10 rue Charlot
75003 Paris
France
T +33 1 42 77 38 87
GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL
Read On... GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL, Paris
Lust
29 January - 5 March 2011
Objects of Collective Consciousness
By Brian Kuan Wood
Don’t trust the lights. Rather, look into to the darkness for what you need. Hassan Khan’s video installation Jewel (2010, 35 mm film transferred to HD) opens with a cloud of lights flickering to a soundtrack—produced by Khan himself—of hypnotic drones. But one soon discovers that these lights are not stars or a coastal hamlet at night, but a swarm of hideous fang-faced anglerfish— the elegant sparkling being nothing other than the light emitted from the strange growth on their faces: a lure for prey. As a ferocious beat sets in, the image of the anglerfish freezes and shape-shifts, “fossilizing” as a pattern of lights. The camera pulls out, and the fish pattern is shown to be punched into a revolving object—a totemic sort of disco ball surrogate—around which two men, one younger and one older, each perform a strange dance of desperate flailing, drowning, falling, grabbing, and whipping gestures. It is a spare scene of some kind of sinister, yet perfectly viable Arab subculture collectively reveling in a response to total collapse—one in which dancing, limbs flailing in the air, becomes a powerful and resilient performance of futile gestures. Moving with the ambivalence of marionettes commanded by forces that are not theirs, the work draws to a close with the scene slowly receding into darkness in a single continuous tracking shot. What is it that haunts these men and compels them to act, to move?
At Galerie Chantal Crousel from 29 January–5 March, Khan presents “Lust”, a multilayered constellation of recent works that can be seen as focal points in his practice over the past three years. While the included works are highly enigmatic in nature and communicate on a number of registers, it is simultaneously important to consider them in light of a sophisticated line of thinking that has taken place over the course of the artist’s 15-year career. Key to this thinking has been a dynamic centered on private consciousness and public address—a way of dealing with the movements of ideological forces and social constructions of value as they pass from the crowd in the street into the psyche and back. In this sense we can then address his oeuvre as a means of confronting the spectral nature of these movements throughout a flowing cultural subconscious of a “public mind.”
Key to this is Khan’s particular approach to the way ideological thinking and spectrality function in relation to physical material. In an attempt to revisit the quasi-religious and messianic thinking latent in Marx’s writing on commodity fetishism, Jacques Derrida has used the term “hauntology” to describe a spectral ontology functioning within Marx’s materialist critique of the commodity. As a subtle play on “ontology,” the term allows room for a phantasmatic form of being to precede the material commodity as the ghostly desire for such a commodity to emerge (or be produced) in the first place. Derrida goes on to propose Marx’s very materialist critique to be an exorcism of this already existing auratic, ghostly presence that surrounds an object, expelling the ghosts that would possess a piece of material such as wood to think of itself as not only a chair, but even a diamond, or a Ferrari. But, following from the “hauntological,” for Khan these apparitions are of the utmost importance, as they are themselves another form of material. It is from here that Khan’s work as an artist finds its materiality: as compressions of social desires.
If we then suppose that these collective desires, as a form of hidden consensus, also carry ideological content, then the obvious question becomes: What other errant, spectral products are floating around, and how can we perceive them? From this perspective, we have already entered another state of being—one that requires a shift in the understanding of how objects behave, and how they reflect and accommodate collective desires (or a lack thereof ). With Banque Bannister (2010), the centerpiece of the exhibition at Chantal Crousel, one finds a brass handrail trying to find its purpose—leaning on something that is missing and leading to something that is not there. Hovering in space, it assumes the shape of ordinary piping or a “stairway to heaven”—leaping forward to find stairs to rest itself on. In a twisting of an orthodox Duchampian move, similar to that of Banque Bannister, Khan’s Evidence of Evidence II (2010) is an enormous (3.5 x 3 meter) scan of a discarded flower painting, printed on vinyl, that reverses the premises of a Fountain (1917) or Bottle Rack (1914). Like Duchamp’s readymades, it assumes another character when it enters the exhibition, but, contra Duchamp, it does not gain auratic value or become formally abstracted—in fact, on a formal level, Evidence of Evidence II is barely aware of the exhibition format at all, and it arrives without suspicion or preconceived notions. As its title suggests, the aura does not lie in the context (the exhibition format, with its loaded implications), but came before it, in the flower painting’s domestic origin in the home. As a zoomed-in, scientific extraction of collective meaning latent in a staple bourgeois decorative motif, the artist has described Evidence of Evidence II as “a set of values and socio-economic facts being transformed or translated into aesthetic facts.” This is how Khan positions the objects furnishing the generally-accepted and the already- existing to make them speak about both what they are and what they are about. It is not a Duchampian sleight of hand that recontextualizes the object to introduce potential other readings, but the opposite: a fundamentally subtractive process of obliterating the potential for an already-auratic, already-inflated flower painting to say anything about the person who owns it. Blasting it back down to literal material, it becomes unrecognizable even to itself.
Here it is also important to mention the darkness that surrounds these works, for why should it be necessary to obliterate meanings, to subtract possibilities, to reduce agency in such a way—especially when so much of the language used in art contexts is geared towards the production of meaning, the multiplicity of possibilities, the celebration of heterogeneity, and even the potential for art to make positive contributions to the world? With this we can simply look to another common understanding, that “political” content in art is necessarily affirmative for initiating the possibility of political agency. But how can the political be automatically aligned with agency, with “hope,” and potentiality? What about authoritarian regimes, tyranny, the poverty of available options, endemic corruption, botched elections, and all-around collapse— a saturation of a politics that does not include democracy and activism, but point instead to defeat and withdrawal? Are these states of being not equally political, if not radically more so? What is the shape of a political dead-end in which there is no formal expression, no representation— where a political address utterly hollowed of potential might still speak? (And those looking to situate Khan’s work in an Egyptian context may begin by inferring the current political climate and regime in Egypt into the above—it would not be far off.)
Image:
Hassan Khan
Muslimgauze R.I.P., 2010
Full HD video transferred to Blu-Ray, sound
8 min 07, Edition of 6
Photo credit: Hassan Khan
Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL
10 rue Charlot
75003 Paris
France
T +33 1 42 77 38 87
GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL
Read On... GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL, Paris
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