Eldon Garnet
"Eldon Garnet" by Linda Steer, Winter 2007, p. 118
Eldon Garnet’s work at Christopher Cutts Gallery makes a wry comment on collecting and the art market. In recent years, several Canadian artists have incorporated collecting practices into their work. Most obvious is Spring Hurlbut’s “The Final Sleep,” which appeared at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2001. Using objects from the ROM’s collection as well as her own, she created a display that dismantled traditional taxonomic categories. Other artists, such as Geoffrey Farmer in a 2005 installation at The Power Plant, attempt to erase categorization altogether. Garnet takes a different approach and plays with notions of value, authorship and authenticity.
The series Authentic Artifacts includes eight “artifacts” from the artist’s collection, priced between $5,000 and $20,000. The catch is that some of the objects are authentic, whereas others are fakes. The viewer—or the buyer—cannot know whether the small object labelled “Tektite meteorite from moon 700,000 BC, discovered 1933 Maoming City, Guangdong Province, China” is an extraterrestrial rock or a painted lump of concrete. A Martin Kippenberger may be what it claims to be, or it may be a forgery. This Russian roulette of art shopping certainly leads us to question the value of art and its relationship to the market. It also deals with deeper questions about ritual, meaning and authenticity. Is the rabbit skin mounted on white card framed ephemera from a Joseph Beuys performance, or is it only a rabbit skin? Why does it matter? Is there something of Beuys embedded in the object, a trace of the performance?
Hung above the framed objects of Authentic Artifacts is another series entitled Money Dreams. For these works, Garnet has edited quotations about money to comment instead on art and the art market. These altered statements are manifested in flat stainless-steel sculptures in a sans-serif font. Karl Marx’s claim that “competition is the inner nature of capital” becomes “art is the inner nature of capital.” (The word “competition” is crossed out and replaced with “art.”) Likewise, Buckminster Fuller appears to maintain that “real wealth art is indestructible and without limit.”
Garnet reveals a slippage between money and art as he edits the words of Marx, Fuller, Adam Smith and even Marshall McLuhan. But his work is about appropriation as much as it is about money. Marx and the other original authors are not credited in the sculptures. Garnet collects their words and, with alterations, presents them as his own truisms. Only the crossed-out words suggest other origins.
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