Review; Christopher Dewdney
Word, Image, Object; Allegory, Ambiguity and Ambivalence in the Work of Eldon Garnet
Elusive Signifiers; The Allegorical Imperatives of Eldon Garnet
Allegory, Irresolution and Ambivalence; a Survey of Two Decades of Eldon Garnet's Work
1,652 words
"The challenge is to ... give everyone what they wanted while pushing them quietly over an unexpected edge of aesthetic and social expectations."
~ Eldon Garnet (1.)
Eldon Garnet wears many hats and slips between genres with alarming alacrity. He is an internationally acclaimed visual artist, a postmodern novelist, an accomplished sculptor, a public artist, a video-artist, a photographer and a film-maker. In the past he has been a poet, a performance artist, a magazine publisher, an editor and an anthologist.
On a more general level Eldon Garnet can be seen to operate comfortably within three distinct (usually mutually exclusive disciplines) writing, sculpture and photography - word, object and image. The fact that he has achieved more than mere competence in all these realms, is even more remarkable. For example, his most recent novel, Reading Brooke Shields, was published to considerable critical attention in 1995 and his public art commissions in the city of Toronto include the much lauded Memorial to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada and the somewhat controversial Metropolitan Toronto Police Headquarters Installation. At the same time, throughout all of his other activity, Garnet has been producing an internationally recognized series of photo-based art exhibitions. Not only does Eldon Garnet exist in three entirely separate, viable disciplines, he excels in them all.
This fact has fueled some unwarranted critical uncertainty as to the exact nature of Eldon Garnet's "central" discipline. This critical expectation, however, is a spurious concern uneccessary to understanding Eldon Garnet's work. It is not necessary to know whether photography or public installation is his paramount discipline in order to appreciate either of these productions. What is important is the fact that much of Eldon Garnet's work negotiates a visceral ambiguity, and that this ambiguity operates on a moral, imagistic and conceptual threshold that challenges both tolerance and narrative.
I first became aware of Eldon Garnet's work in the early nineteen-seventies when he was known primarily as a poet. I enjoyed his writing and I also enjoyed the magazine he started to publish in the mid nineteen-seventies called Impulse Magazine. By the time I first met Garnet, however, he had already begun his transformation into a visual artist. Our meeting took place during his 1975 performance, entitled All Dulled Out in Tartarus, at the old A- Space Gallery in Toronto.
In Greek myth Tartarus was where the Titans were punished by the Gods. The performance/exhibition consisted of Garnet himself, illuminated by a single spotlight in the darkened gallery, bound in chains just beyond reach of food and water. His body was streaked with dark pigments and he continually stretched out his hands towards the food, rattling his chains. Overall the effect was rather like a living hologram and had great dramatic impact.
His performance was errie, disturbing, but curiously unthreatening. As a viewer I felt comfortably distanced, though the distance didn't interfere with my engagement with the performance. This aspect of his performance was in stark contrast with much of the edgy performance art of the time, which enlisted threats to the audience as a strategy for attaining "profundity" via confrontation.
I mention All Dulled Out in Tartarus because it manifested four of the motifs that have continued through Eldon's work in the following decades, up to and including his current work. First of all, Garnet's preoccupation with allegory was already evident, secondly, his elusive and ambiguous engagement with the viewer was also functioning - the viewer being both uncomfortable but invited, thirdly, the unresolved aspect of the work, which left an unfulfilled narrative expectations in the mind of the witness, and finally his preoccupation with the human body.
Eldon Garnet's dadaist performance period of the early and mid-seventies metamorphosed into a conceptual period by the late seventies. His photo-documentation of a road-trip across Canada, published as the book Spiralling:JFM/232 (1979) was highly conceptual. In the Spiralling:JFM/232 work the distance that he travelled as he drove was the only determinant of when the photographs (that make up the images of the book) were taken. Thus, every one hundred miles he would snap a picture (from a different visual quadrant of the car each time) of whatever was in the viewfinder at the time. This process effectively negated the notion of subject and replaced it with unmediated, random content as determined by arbitrary rules.
Eldon Garnet increasingly began to use photography as a conceptual tool and by the mid-eighties, particularly with his Caves exhibitions (1983 -1984), his large-format, allegorical photographs began increasingly to resemble his current works. The Caves exhibitions, for example, contained photographic images of human bodies - sometimes clothed, sometimes naked - in symbolic tableaux. (Caves was also a multi-media exhibition, using sound-tracks, timed lighting and photography.)
At the same time as Eldon's photo-based art works were evolving into their Caves format, his conceptual work was evolving into another more iconic modality; the business man. This ubiquitous icon of western civilization had a number of semiotic valences that fascinated Garnet. As a result he began undertaking a series of photo-based works based on the images of business men as well as his small-scale bronzes of business men and other figures. These, in turn, led directly into his public installations. In this peculiar evolution Garnet's concept art became the parent of his representational public installations, a reversal of the general direction of contemporary art. The business man motif, and the small and large bronzes that arose out of it, were his most political works. The image of the business man, for Eldon, constellated notions of power in a way Eldon found both compelling and useful. These bronzes, both small and large, took a virulent, aggressive irony through its own vanishing point. They were post-ironic forms, obscure in their self-assurance, that denied any critical, subjective incursion into their sovereignty. As a result his larger public works were his most deadpan, ambiguous works ever.
This distance, inherent in much of his work, is exemplified by his public installations, particularly the installation at the Metro Police headquarters in Toronto. Here the somewhat heraldic pose of the female constable adding mortar to a pyramid of granite at the front entrance to the building is disquieting because it creates an interpretive ambience that is never resolved. The viewer asks, "What am I to make of this allegorical, representational tableau?" Is Garnet somehow mocking the police with this installation or is it a tongue-in-cheek accolade to civic power? Is Garnet, from the vantage of a successfully commissioned public work, wryly mocking the art world as it comes to wonder at his tableaux? All these questions are implicit in the work, all are studiously anticipated and all are studiously unanswered by the installation. His public art works seem to shed subjective interpretation, they exclude narrative and conceptual interpretation also. They are impervious to any certainty about Garnet's intentions. In this sense they are like purposefully banal icons relfecting mass cultural expectations with droll camp.
In terms of his photo-based work, Garnet continues, to evolve. His photographic work of the eighties, which used entire bodies, was replaced in the nineties by photos of isolated body parts. Also, elements of pain, degredation and disgust have been gradually introduced into his imagistic lexicon, as well as an ambiguous eroticism. It was with his photo-based shows Trembling (1990) and Promise (1994), with their assemblages of excerpted body parts, that his current imagery began to manifest itself. The images in these shows were painful, ambiguous, and portentuous - they also foreshadowed the painful eroticism of his most recent work.
His contemporary photographic work is erotic yet asexual at once. Formally speaking the images are pointedly uncontextual and appear to portray events occuring within an infinite, dermal landscape. For example, the photo-based works in his 1997 show Fissure, at the Wave Gallery in Toronto, were more like paintings and were curiously reminiscent of a fleshly Turner, with their livid sunset hues. At the same time, however, there was something idiosyncratically impartial at the heart of Eldon's relationship to the human body, an impartiality that goes beyond ambivalence into something close to revulsion. The works in Fissure evoked a slightly gothic horror of human biology that verged on a Cronenburgian vision. What flesh we saw was covered with dirt, was bitten, punctured, shaved. As well, the photographs were formally aggressive. They managed to overwhelm the viewer with their garish formality.
Because Eldon came through literature to art, his somewhat post-ironic stance towards art is fundamentally polymathic and protean. His metaphors, unharnessed by analogical utility, become free-floating allegories that fuel the concepts and themes in his art. It is precisely his literary geneology that makes Garnet's work ambiguous, narratively contextualized and paradoxically specific at the same time. But the purposefully elusive, interpretive polish of Eldon's works is more than ambiguity. Certainly Garnet uses allegory to create narrative expectations, but once the viewer is enmeshed within the pataphysical critical structure of the work it becomes a moral labyrinth, within which the viewer has no thread to guide him or her through the work's psychological subtext. At the same time there is nothing obtusely ambiguous about the works either, rather, they are formally ambiguous. Eldon's mercurial, humourous, and critical temperment plays elusively within these pieces, as he himself slips between classification, materializing his vision in any medium; work, image or object. He is a poet of forms.
1. Parachute Magazine #63
His recent photographic images that feature close-ups of body-parts being bitten (etc) are disturbing and unsettling, example of this moral ambiguity. yet at the same time distanced.
At his show When (1994) Eldon demonstrated that he hadn't completely abandoned concept art. At the Power Plant he showed one of my favourite works of his, a piece that re-affirmed my belief that concept art has not been exhausted, but has rather, been prematurely passed over. Eldon's piece at the Power Plant consisted of a burned (or rather, charcolized), reconstructed cherry tree. He carbonized an entire cherry tree and laid it out in a 2-D manner, reconstructed, like a carbon-copy or a fossil. The work was at once a representation and a reconstitution of a real tree, a subtle and clever concept reminisecent of the best work of Guiseppe Penone.
His social realism, particularly in the frank, frontal and documentary style of his allegorical photographs using human figures, is reminiscent of Jeff Wall, yet, at the same time, there is a distinctly nihilistic strain subverting the work's social realism that indicts modern art practice in the same post-ironic approach that characterized much of Jeff Koons productions in the early nineties. That both these artists are somehow evoked in Garnet's "slick" images attests to Garnet's achievement and his opacity. Certainly his work has the international professionalism of critically acclaimed work, yet, at the same time there is an indefinite element, unsettling and denying at once.
"The allegory's intrusion inot the plastic arts could be called a harsh disturbance of the peace, and a disruption of law and order in the arts,"
"Like Brecht's plays, allegory demands an alienation to be effective. It is not a personal, particular representation, but rather a general, intellectual series of evocations."
Canadian Art, Vol. 5, #4, 1988
"It is the site demand that makes the conceptualization of a public art work interesting. The puzzle to be solved; the equation demanding resolution, the forced pragmatism."
"It is this basic collaboration, between architecture and sculpture or physical and conceptual terms, that forms the basis of good public sculpture."
"A major challenge to the public artist is how to maintain a position outside servility, and still preserve the possibility of building, of realizing the project."
"This is the position of subverting, of critique, of social intervention, of the artist who is at once inside and outside the power structure, one foot inside the "establishment" and one foot inside the factions of disruption."
"The challenge is to fulfil everyone's expectation, including your own, give everyone what they wanted while pushing them quietly over an unexpected edge of aesthetic and social expectations."
Article entitled Public Signs in Parachute Magazine #63