Michael Snow

by King, James;

  FIGURE 111. Michael Snow. The Windows Suite. 2006. Seven sixty-five-inch monitors in the windows, colour. Two hours and fifteen minutes in a loop. Pantages Hotel, Toronto.

  FIGURE 112. Michael Snow. Transformer. 1982. Wood, varnish, rope, cardboard. 490 x 12 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Sighting (1982) is on the wall to the right and Monocular Abyss (1982) on the left.

  FIGURE 113. Michael Snow. Core. 1984. Unglazed ceramic. 206.5 x 82 cm. Art Bank Collection.

  FIGURE 114. Michael Snow. Seated Sculpture. 1982. Steel. 1.4 m x 53 cm x 2.4 m. Art Gallery of Ontario.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Audiences

  FIGURE 115. Michael Snow. Flight Stop. 1979. Sixty life-size Canada geese, hand-tinted black-and-white photographs, cast fibreglass. 2133 x 1524 x 3932 cm in total. Eaton Centre, Toronto.

  FIGURE 116. Michael Snow. #720 (Thanks to Robert Crumb). 1988. Three slide projectors, 240 35mm colour slides, newspaper bundles, wine crates. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 117. Michael Snow. The Audience. 1988–89. Two groups of seven painted fibreglass figures. Rogers Centre, Toronto.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Sound Shaping

  FIGURE 118. Michael Snow. Piano Sculpture. 2009. Four-channel video projection, four speakers, colour, sound. Fourteen minutes in a loop. Collection Pierre Bourgie, Montreal.

  FIGURE 119. Michael Snow. Album cover for The Last LP. 1987. Art Metropole. Michael Snow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: A New Painterliness

  FIGURE 120. Michael Snow. Scraps for the Soldiers. 2007. Scrapbook. Zona Archives.

  FIGURE 121. Michael Snow. The Corner of Braque and Picasso Streets. 2009. Closed circuit video camera, real time video projection, colour, no sound, plinths. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 122. Michael Snow. Localidade. 2011. Colour transparencies, fishing line, metal clips, lighting. Variable dimensions. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 123. Michael Snow. Page spread from Illuminations. 2012. Book. Fundãçao Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Culturgest, Lisbon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Repeat Offences

  FIGURE 124. Michael Snow. Repeat Offender in La Revue. 1986–2006. Four framed black-and-white magazine prints. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 125. Michael Snow. Powers of Two. 2003. Four photographic transparencies suspended from ceiling. 259 x 488 cm. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 126. Michael Snow. Paris de jugement Le. Colour photograph on cloth. 183 x 193 x 7.6 cm. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 127. Michael Snow. VUE3UV. 1998. Colour photograph on cloth, plastic tube. 101.6 x 129.5 cm. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 128. Michael Snow. Imposition. 1976. Colour photographs, wood frame. 181.8 x 101.6 cm. Mailhot Family Collection.

  FIGURE 129. Michael Snow. SSHTOORRTY. 2005. Video, colour, sound. One minute, forty-five seconds in a loop. Michael Snow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Reshaping Fragments

  FIGURE 130. Michael Snow. Still from Corpus Callosum. 2001. Digital Betacam video, colour, sound. Ninety-two minutes. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 131. Michael Snow. D’abord Alcibiade et puis … 1996. Colour photograph, wood frame. 110 x 146 cm. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 132. Michael Snow. Times. 1979. Colour photograph and wood frame. 110 x 146 cm. Michael Snow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY: New-Found Things

  FIGURE 133. Michael Snow. Still from Sheeploop. 2000. Video, colour, no sound. Fifteen minutes in a loop. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 134. Michael Snow. Still from Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids). 2002. Video projection, colour, sound. Sixty-two minutes, thirty-five seconds. Collection Lonti Ebers.

  FIGURE 135. Michael Snow. Still from Condensation (A Cove Story). 2009. Blu-ray projection, colour, no sound. Ten minutes, twenty-eight second in a loop. Michael Snow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Smoke and Mirrors

  FIGURE 136. Michael Snow. Derma. 1990. Acrylic on canvas. 170 x 127 cm. Museum London.

  FIGURE 137. Michael Snow. Biograph. 1991. Oil on canvas. Diptych consisting of two elements. 77.7 x 134.1 cm. Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.

  FIGURE 138. Michael Snow. Smoke and Mirrors. 1994. C-print. 101.6 x 76.2 cm. The Artists for Kids Trust, Vancouver.

  FIGURE 139. Michael Snow. Page from Still Living (9 x 4 Acts, Scene 1). 1982. Photograph. 55.9 x 44.5 cm. Michael Snow.

  FIGURE 140. Michael Snow. Ocul. 1954. Ink and watercolour on paper. 50.8 x 74 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario.

  FIGURE 141. Craig Boyko. Michael Snow. 2012. Photograph. Art Gallery of Ontario.

  INTRODUCTION

  Michael Snow is Canada’s most celebrated contemporary artist. In a lengthy and productive career, he has, in many genres, asked (and often answered) some of the most vexing and important questions raised in the history of art. During this time, the definition of what a work of art is has undergone many changes, and he has been in the vanguard of those seeking to explore new possibilities.

  In many ways, he is the visual artist as intellectual: his images and films are vibrant and compelling but so are the ideas behind them. Ultimately, his work is about perception. What do we really see when we look at a work of art? What is the act of looking all about? What exactly is a work of art?

  Since Michael Snow is an unorthodox, experimental artist, it is appropriate that a biography of him be unconventional. In this book, the outer shell (life events) are described and analyzed, but the emphasis is on the inner shell (the lives of the objects he has created). Within those artifacts resides the life of Michael Snow. He once observed that the artist is a biography of his art,1 and this is a particularly apt way to describe this book. The existences of many artists are dominated by their paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, and installations, and this is especially true of Snow. For him, much of the meaning of his life resides in the variety of pursuits that constitute his career.

  Although this artist rejects the label “conceptual” because he feels that any such term sets limits on what an artist is trying to accomplish, much of his work is cerebral and must be understood as such.

  He has frequently blended several genres together. He once famously said:

  My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor … sometimes they all work together. Also, many of my paintings have been done by a painter, sculpture by a sculptor, films by a filmmaker, music by a musician. There is a tendency toward purity in all of these media as separate endeavours.2

  The “purity” of which Snow speaks is actually present in all his work because he constantly asks the same questions: What is it that makes an artifact a work of art? How does one make meaningful art? How does a work of art come into being? What is the place of art in human existence? In other words, his art tends to question the nature of its own existence. In many ways, his art is about form, and the best way to understand Snow’s works is to explore their organic wholeness. The artist in 1984 told John Bentley Mays:

  Most art starts when the artist is moved by other work, and gets the ambition to do that for other people, but not in the way it was done for you. It’s the desire for originality — not novelty — but originality based on the depths of what was important to you. I’m astonished at the lack of knowledge (today) about the most amazing adventure of the last 100 years, abstraction. Kandinsky and Mondrian — especially Mondrian — were absolutely unique, opening something, an investigation of ideas, that had never been done before.3

  Snow’s use of an eclectic assortment of genres — his relentless search for what “had never been done before” — is crucial to understanding his work. The resulting plurality of approaches is pragmatic: at a particular time, he will employ a form that best encapsulates his vision. So catholic is the nature of his investigations that he moves readily among, for example, painting, sculpture, film, installations, and sound recordings. Often he combines several forms. In consistently challenging himself to produce innovative works, he has pushed back against traditional notions of the nature of
art. As an artist, he has had several lives, and his works are in many genres.

  He may create works of art that are about works of art, and he sometimes appears in those works, but Snow is neither a social nor an autobiographical artist. He avoids commenting on historical or contemporary events. He once said, “I’m interested in making art that adds to life more than it comments on life.”4 In the same way, although he is a person deeply aware of his family ancestry and of being Canadian, he does not usually reveal much more about himself in his work.

  Nevertheless, clues to Michael Snow the person are sometimes present in his art. Defining concerns include presence and absence; finding and losing; the experience of the Wilderness; the meaning of surface and texture and, thus, the exploration of the haptic; seeing and blindness; the relationship between the contemporary artist and the history of art; and the various shapes and framings that works of art can take.

  He has strong opinions on the nature versus nurture debate. “There’s a fashionable idea now, especially among academic theorists, that the person — the subject, as they say these days — is totally culturally shaped. I don’t believe that at all. I think somebody is born, that there is an organism that has functions. It can be twisted; it can be hurt, but there’s still a specific person there.”5 He certainly investigates the nature of his own subjectivity.

  In addition, Snow has, in exploring the themes mentioned above, consistently questioned the nature of truth. Is there such a thing? Aren’t we always searching for truth but find it evading us just as we get close to it? Doesn’t truth disappear just as we are about to touch it? Is memory real or false? Snow is fascinated with the importance of the past, but, at the same time, he is aware of how difficult it is to remember and thus know the past. The artist Robert Fones has spoken of how his friend “presents visual material in a way that makes viewers question the nature of what they are looking at and become aware of the process of cognitive understanding.” As part of this process, Snow “deliberately sprinkles his work with misleading clues and visual puns to make it harder to resolve some of these questions, therefore encouraging closer scrutiny.”6

  For Snow, there are no certain truths. So, although his work does reflect a search for truth, it is a series of reflections on the human condition in which certitude is absent. Since humanity is cast adrift in the universe, the artist explores the nature of that condition. Since much of Snow’s work is interrogative, this biography asks many questions.

  Snow’s work is consistent in its addressing of the aims listed above, but there are important turning points. There is an emphasis in his early paintings and sculptures on surfaces and framing that leads to a series of variations centring on the Walking Woman figure. He then focuses on how subjects, once considered to exist only in the traditional fine arts, can find new life in other forms of art. From there, he turned to examining how the appearances of works of art can take on extraordinarily deceptive aspects. Finally, he returned to the question of how painterliness can find new forms of expression.

  Each of the above elements coexists with the others in the works produced throughout his entire career — it is the emphases that change. The subjects of his work, as he observes, are quotidian: doors, windows, rooms, sofas, chairs, sinks, curtains, mirrors, fire, and people: “If the ‘subject’ as a class is familiar,” he has noted, “it hopefully makes it easier for the spectator to see what has been done with it to make it art.”7

  For example, in the dry coupler photograph Red5 (1974), Snow took a snapshot of the coloured rectangle that occupies the entire area of the photograph; he then took three more shots — each, respectively, containing one, two, and three photographs taken against the coloured rectangle. The resulting image shows four photographs placed at various points on top of the rectangle. At first glance, the result appears to be a series of additions to the original rectangle. This is true. However, this image can be said to be about loss because the viewer never sees the complete rectangle except in the first small image placed on top of it. This process might be seen as a commentary on how the revered tradition of framing a canvas in order to create a space in which to represent has been disrupted in contemporary art.

  FIGURE 1. Michael Snow, Red5, 1974.

  Overall, Snow’s work is ontological in nature — it is about being, and, in this regard, the artist asks the same questions that Paul Gauguin did in 1897 in the oil painting he titled Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Snow’s great task was to create modernist works that respond to those questions from the nineteenth century.

  This account describes the importance of his parents in Snow’s coming into being as an artist; his deep-seated, abiding love for Quebec; his romance with Georgine Ferguson; his marriage to Joyce Wieland and its breakup; and his happy second marriage to Peggy Gale and the birth of their son, Alexander.

  The narrative told here moves chronologically but frequently moves away from such concerns when dealing with works that are best discussed as a unit in order to avoid the constraints of placing works in the order in which they were made. The resulting storyline is divided into five sections.

  Part One (1928–1962) recreates Snow’s coming into being an artist, his use of painting and sculpture in a variety of representational and abstract forms and his invention of the Walking Woman figure. Part Two (1962–1970) is centred on the artist’s prolonged stay in New York, where he further developed the Walking Woman and made a series of experimental films, including Wavelength. Part Three (1970–1979) begins with the retrospective Michael Snow/A Survey and then emphasizes the artist’s growing interest in photography, his use of Canada as a setting for his work, and his “talking” picture Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen. Part Four (1979–1994) emphasizes Snow’s use of holography and discusses three large public commissions for the City of Toronto. Part Five (1994–present) begins with The Snow Project and then examines the extraordinary range in the projects developed by the artist since 1994 up to the present.

  Although the artist has provided a detailed account of his career, that narrative differs markedly from Michael Snow: Lives and Works. In Michael Snow — Sequences — A History of His Art, he looks at his output genre by genre and explains in detail how those works came into existence. That narrative is subjective. Lives and Works — written from a more objective, biographical point of view — attempts to read and thus interpret the artist’s accomplishments. In the process, this book becomes a critical overview of an artist whose ideas are paramount. Although this biography is written for the general reader and not intended as an “academic” account of Snow’s career, I am indebted to the many important theoretical writings on him and have utilized them in writing my account.

  In my meetings with him, Snow answered my many questions precisely, patiently, and fully. He knows all of his considerable body of work extremely well and can recall the circumstances that led to the creation of each. Like many artists, he leaves questions of interpretation to others. Humility runs deep in his character, but at the same time he takes great pride in what he has accomplished. He is not a person who takes himself seriously, but as an artist he is well aware of his stature in Canadian art. One friend accurately observed: “He’s got a zero-megalomaniacal reading on the ego dial.” The same friend added: “He’s not modest, but he is shy, which is kind of endearing.”8

  At the age of ninety, Snow is slightly stooped and he may look, to use his word, “ancient,” but his blue eyes sparkle and twinkle with an unmistakably youthful vigour. He is reticent to speak about his marriage to Joyce Wieland and his various affairs, but otherwise he is candid in responding to a biographer’s interrogation.

  As one journalist observed, Snow remains “an inveterate scribbler. He writes in much the same way he plays piano: quickly and freely, ideas pinging off one another.… He keeps two rooms as offices on the top floor[s] of his house, and there are papers scrawled with notes and diagrams stacked on the desks, the flo
ors and the shelves.”9 Once, when another journalist asked him if it was a bitch getting older, he quietly responded: “Only when I look in the mirror.”10 The Globe’s Kate Taylor had a different impression: “The artist regularly aims his little witticism at himself, sometimes approaching his work with a gee-shucks-isn’t-it-neat-the-way-it-does-that attitude, sometimes cracking a joke at the art’s expense. But like most self-deprecating people, he isn’t modest.” He talked about one piece of work, observing that it was really good, “If I do say so myself.”11 He “has never lacked for ideas.”12

  Or for a rigorous commitment. I once asked Snow why, in the 1960s, he abandoned the traditional forms of painting and sculpture — with which he had established his career — to pursue filmmaking and photography. I observed that those two forms of art were not particularly lucrative. Hadn’t he taken a huge risk in doing so? He smiled. “I had no choice. I had to go in the direction my imagination led me.”

  For Snow, his feelings as an artist were — and remained — paramount. If he were not true to them, his art would be meaningless. In many ways, this narrative is about those feelings. Overall, this book is the story of an artist who, having relentlessly explored a wide variety of genres, has never come to a resting point. As an artist, he has had many lives and worked in many genres.

  PART ONE

  1928–1962

  CHAPTER ONE:

  ORIGINS

  In Michael Snow’s ancestry, the two solitudes of Canada are resolutely conjoined. His father, Gerald Bradley Snow, was of Anglo-Saxon lineage, his mother, Marie-Antoinette, was Quebecois.