MOVING TOWARD THE LIGHT

OLIVER GIRLING. September 12, 1996 Ü Print Edition

detail from Aliyah, copyright Eldon Garnet 1996

Has contemporary Canadian art really got so tedious that, at international art fairs, they're telling "boring Canadian" jokes? My short answer, based solely on two major museums visited in the last couple of weeks, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is yes.
The Canadian offerings on view at both institutions were, with a couple of exceptions, dreary in surface and color, ultra-conventional in form and discreet to the point of camouflage with their surroundings.
The larger reasons for this state of affairs can be speculated on; I won't do it here. Suffice it to say that there are almost no paintings in the two displays. The photo-text works are simple to the point of conceptual starvation, while the sculptures and installations often depict fragments of unseen, greater wholes, which gives them an air of dissatisfaction and incompletion.
(For the record, my own interest in this is as a painter, represented in the National's collection. If you're interested, I could off the top of my head name 10 artists who would transform the world's view of contemporary Canadian art overnight.)
I prefer photographs to "photo-based art," in spite of current wisdom that says un-digitized photos are like paintings made with the artist's fingers tied back.
Take, for example, Eldon Garnet's current show of large photo-prints mounted on aluminum. The show is called Aliyah, which in Hebrew means being called to the light; the return of diaspora Jews to Israel; the novice mounting the podium to read from the Torah; or, most literally, illumination snatched from obscurity.
The pictures are neither boring nor dumb. They're ambiguous in their readings, rich in both color and surface texture, and a study in chiaroscuro: the juxtaposition of lights and darks made most famous by Rembrandt. Let's say the word -- they're painterly!
In spite of the uplifting title, there's plenty of gloom here. Followers of the artist's photography will recognize the mood of the work from his previous show at Genereux-Grunwald. But my memory of that work is of a full-blown morbidity, leavened perhaps by some gallows humor, but on the whole bleak. At first gasp, this show feels to be in the same territory, but a closer look reveals the superficiality of this reading.
Human flesh still reads as a papery envelope: covered up with dirt, bruised, polypous, a poor and inadequate covering against the elements and their ultimate, inevitable encroachment on our autonomy.
In these photographs, though, it isn't the grave that beckons and threatens -- though that's a viewer's first impression of these shiny, dark and light squares with body parts hovering in the middles. It's work -- human toil and activity -- that generates sweat and grime. But the suggestion is that the bodies are creating the pictorial definitions, coming out of, rather than being embraced by, the peripheral blackness.
And if the humor was a whisper before, now it's out there, explicit, sometimes uncorked as light self-parody of the project as a whole. For example, a dog's snout is just recognizable where the viewer is used to finding a human body-part. A crazily upside-down woman's face, far from being the victim of some trauma, is probably getting her hair washed.
And a man's dirty elbow that first looks like barbecued meat is actually wrapped backwards on his own back, on which he's carrying another man.
In this last picture, the soiled white arm works as a light source that illuminates the black man on the white man's back. The need for a light source in the middle of the image dictates the picture's hierarchy, which for obvious reasons could have set up an uncomfortable reading of the photograph's intentions. Remarkably, I don't think that reading even suggests itself.
Instead, it's an evocative image of human cooperation, of two men "bonded" in a way that neither the New Age nor gay liberation has thought of, as far as I know. So how did Garnet (who's also a novelist and a public sculptor) come up with it? I don't know; maybe in moving toward the light.