Using gitk to view changesets in a linux server using etckeeper?

gitk is a pretty good tool for viewing changesets in a git repository. Is there any way to use it locally on my workstation to view/review an etckeeper git repository on a remote server? Also should I clone the repo to my workstation and then making my changes locally on the workstation, and push them to the remote server's repo / a test server, or should I be doing something else like mounting the share locally using sshfs and just access it from there?