JONATHAN GARDENHIRE
A Matter of Rhythm
By Patrick Bova
AS A MAKER OF IMAGES , Jonathan Gardenhire is a troublemaker of myths . Together , his images conduct an earnest rhythm of thought , matter , and being — fragments arranged to form not a whole , but a sense of something more elusive . Untitled , ( A Mighty Fortress is Our God / Imperfect Man ) was made as a portrait of Julius Eastman , the Black , gay post-minimalist composer who passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1990 at the young age of 49 . Here , Eastman is constructed from what has been left of his making . In a wild arrangement , open books are strewn with xeroxed musical scores , hypermasculine erotica , and portraits of the composer . Several images are sampled and resampled throughout the work : a glistening , headless torso ; an inverted image of a derby race with horses mid-gallop ; men blurred , their identities shrouded . These disparate allusions constellate no singular image of Eastman , and thus leave no singular tale of who he was for us to take away .
How can a life be rendered from discrepant accounts ? Gardenhire does not claim to speak for Eastman . Instead , much like a composer , he arranges this visual score to let Eastman — and by extension the hypervisibility of Black men — project his own voice and vision out of the archive and into a more subjective being . What then echoes in the space of this still life constitutes a powerful , though incomplete , rhythm ; frequencies of Eastman ’ s thought and vision — his mythos — for years left unheard . The artist ’ s mythmaking may then best be thought of as visual translation , a kind of “ critical fabulation ”— impossible storytelling in the absence of historical certainty — as scholar Saidiya Hartman might suggest . That is , he conjures a life and so it speaks . His photographs encourage us to listen .
Ralph Ellison ’ s 1952 novel Invisible Man lays open in this work ’ s central diptych . Among the sprawling texts and musical notations , Ellison ’ s pages in particular urge me to reach through the frame and into the clutter . When I flip to the novel ’ s Epilogue , I encounter another man , Ellison ’ s unnamed protagonist , who concludes his tale as follows :
Being invisible and without substance , a disembodied voice , as it were , what else could I do ? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through ? And it is this which frightens me : Who knows but that , on the lower frequencies , I speak for you ?
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