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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