88 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 89lament about the aging process and the body’s inescapable exiting of this
life through death’s door. “Even in my half-awake state, my eyes barely
slit,” muses the novel’s narrator in Category 28 (Garnet calls his chapters
“categories”). He continues, “I know there will be no improvement, but
rather painful, deteriorating day. Why always downward? A damaged sine
curve rolling from up to down, to up, to this down which is apparently
bottomless, the endless downward line.” Surely death, banal, workaday
death itself, is really the epidemic Garnet is describing and lamenting. Food
is neither here nor there when you’re deep into dying.
It is widely known, I imagine, that for every mise en scène making up
the photo-installations, Garnet carefully casts his dramatis personae,
oversees their costuming and make up, designs the lighting and directs the
photo as if he were directing a film. Each of his photo-images is a very
elaborate construction first, before it becomes a photograph.
Sometimes the concept for a photo-sequence comes early and the images
follow later (as with Helpless). But for Categories of Disappearance, the
photos— of glowing, sumptuous dead insects—which would eventually
settle onto the pages of this dystopian novel like dead leaves, came first.
Indeed they were made quite a long time before the book was written.
Garnet’s photographic dalliance with dead insects goes back at least 20
years: his poignant, Holocaustic photo of a pile of butterfly wings was part
of his exhibition “When?” (curated by Richard Rhodes for the Power Plant
in 1993 ), and turns up again, 14 years later, on the cover of Lost Between
the Edges. In the interning years, a lot of other insects have passed beneath
the artist’s ennobling lens.
The first appearance of the array of the 66 macro-insect photos that
would eventually find their way into the Categories of Disappearance book
was in an exhibition at Toronto’s Christopher Cutts Gallery in 2009 , whereEldon Garnet Dominion #4
2 0 0 9 C-print 101. 6 cm
x 1. 5 2 m COURTESY GEMEENTE
MUSEUM, HELMONDthey were shown along with Dominion. Although Garnet’s up-close insects
(invariably photographed against timeless dead-black grounds) are photo-
graphs of real insects, they seem inherently fantastic enough to populate
an entomologist’s fever-dream: luminous, jewel-like, golden, coppery,
indigo, phosphorescent, sunlessly milky or glowing a deep jade, folded up
or splayed, gathered or scattered, each one offers an image of the deathly
ecstasy of finality.
What are they doing laced rhythmically—like a disturbing, alien
counterpoint— throughout Categories ofDisappearance, this harrowing tale
of the end of human life? Strangely, the insects seem alarmingly right
among the novel’s bleak pages. Garnet’s vision of the end is totalizing—a
stance made clear by the fact that while insects are supposed to go on
forever, evolutionarily speaking, predating man and still flourishing after
his disappearance, these insects of his are already as dead now as we too
are someday going to be. There is a dreadful transference here.
Now, with these elegiac photos positioned throughout the novel, the
relation between insect and man is no longer biologically competitive but
is seen, rather, as in some ways symbolically interrelational—as if these
dead insects were our fellow travellers in the cosmic time machine, as if
each of us, like Gregor Samsa (in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis from 1915 ),
is also transformable, holding a disturbing insect-ness inside us.
Meanwhile, Garnet’s latest photo-installation is his mysterious afore-
mentioned photo-sequence, Garden of Hell onEarth. The work is a
development of a strange, post-apocalyptic story he published in Prefix
Photo in November 2013 , called “The Pleasure of Hell on Earth,” in which
Garnet tries to describe a huge photograph that he says he journeyed
all the way to Moscow to see, “a photographic print to be experienced
only as an original.”Garnet_ sp16_14TSLR.indd 88 02/04/16 1:54 PM