Michael Snow

by King, James;

  The promotion of photography in the United States as a fine art was pioneered by Alfred Stieglitz and further developed later by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, two of the founders of Group f/64, the group that advocated the use of great depth of field in the rendition of landscape and the nude. All three rejected the notion of “pictorialism,” in which photography competed, often to its disadvantage, with painting. Diane Arbus was among the American photographers who took fine art photography in a new direction in her depictions of the marginalized, whom she often showed as grotesque. In so doing, she combined the surreal with strong formalist values. Garry Winogrand was a street photographer who used his strong powers of observation to produce many memorable images.

  Snow has never been interested in making fine art photography. Like his contemporaries Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler, Mel Bochner, and William Anastasi, he has employed photography as a means of recording process and as a method of uncovering new ways of thinking about art. For him, photography is about the unveiling of what the mirror eye of the camera can reveal as opposed to what the eye of a painter can accomplish.

  This distinction can be made another way. Painting is often seen in iconic terms: in recreating people, objects, and places, it, in a variety of ways, reproduces their aura, their essence. In contradistinction, photography is often considered indexical: it is so closely related to what it reproduces that it contains “traces” rather than “essences.” This point is used by those who argue that painting is a fine art whereas photography is a mechanical one.

  The dichotomy between painting and photography is, for Snow, a false one. Central to his practice is his quest to uncover painterly qualities in photography — in particular to discover how the thin surface of a photograph can be made painterly.

  His exploration of photography opened up a whole new direction in Snow’s work because it allowed him to explore how, at the moment of its taking, the photograph becomes a shadow of reality that can be transformed into art.

  Once an analog photograph is taken, the subject is metamorphosed through a chemical bath into its representation on usually thin paper. In this process, the photographed subject loses its primary identity when its negative is printed. Its new, secondary identity, it can be argued, does not have the separation that can be obtained in the fine arts. Photography is felt by some to be too close to what is represented — and thus not able to contain an aura.

  In his practice, Snow deliberately bypassed this issue. As Amy Taubin has argued, “In Benjamin’s terms, Snow is using photography, not in the service of ‘the decay of the aura’, but paradoxically, to affirm its presence. He refuses to use photography to ‘bring things closer spatially’ … [His] photographs are records of, situated within and conditioning, each work; they record their own history. As history, they are reinforcements of the aura.”6

  In November 1972, when the Center for Inter-American Relations in Manhattan hosted an exhibition of fifteen works and fifteen films by Snow, Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times labelled the artist as someone deeply committed to ideas resulting in “the kind of Conceptualism [that] aims … to eliminate chanciness and obscurity from the work of art, leaving a content of clear and structured ‘information.’” For this critic, this show “reflects modern experience.… This space-age art has still got a long way to go before it can rival the transcendent power of those other, ancient ‘media,’ painting and sculpture.”7 Well aware of this, Snow would more and more attempt to invest photography with painterliness.

  Some early experiments with Polaroids led to Authorization (1969) in which the camera was placed on a tripod. On the centre of a framed mirror, Snow made a rectangle — the size of four Polaroid prints. “The image that the first Polaroid took,” he recalls, “was of the camera, a bit of the tripod and about half my head.”8 He took that shot and glued it to the left-hand corner of the rectangle. Then he took the second shot and so on until the entire rectangle was filled. In the fourth photograph, the head of the artist is visible. Then Snow took a final photograph — the size of a single Polaroid — that he attached to the upper left-hand corner. Here, his obliteration is complete.

  FIGURE 76. Michael Snow, Authorization, 1969.

  The process by which the complete image came into being is fully revealed to the spectator. In some ways, it seems a reasonably easy image to “read” or interpret. This is far from the case, however. The title of this photograph suggests that the artist (the author) has authorized this image of himself. However, the central picture mirror area completely obliterates the maker, although he can be seen in four of the original Polaroids and in three of the smaller ones. The person likely to catch a much fuller glimpse of herself or himself is the spectator whose reflection appears when walking by the framed mirror-photograph.

  Several intriguing questions are posed by this piece. Does the artist here obliterate his own image in a kind of “death of the author” trope? Is this picture a piece of autobiography or a self-portrait? Does it belong to the realm of the real or the fictional?

  This photograph should not be taken as a piece of autobiography. It is a work in which the artist uses the genre of self-portraiture not to reveal himself; it could be said that the artist is hiding himself — disappearing from view before the viewer’s eyes. This image is a statement about the nature of art, not about the life history of the artist. Michael Snow is suggesting that there is no such thing as a stable truth. There can be attempts at telling the truth, but such possibilities are evasive and, eventually, unsatisfactory.

  Authorization is a turning point in the artist’s career. Heretofore, he had played with the notion of the instability of truth and the disparity between the real and the imagined. In this photograph, he tackles this issue straight on, and such investigations are at the heart of the work he does in the next decade. More directly and emphatically, he made pieces of art that document their creation and thus self-reference their existences.

  That process is evident in two works from 1970 that were not in the retrospective. Venetian Blind (1970) is a sequence of twenty-four Ektacolor photographs in which the face of the artist — eyes closed — in the foreground prevents the viewer from seeing the various parts of the legendary city of Venice in the background. Again, these are portraits — this time with the appearance of snapshots — but, crucially, the creator does not disappear from view. In fact, he acts as an agent for obscuring the “tourist” views behind him. In some ways, the process here is the opposite of what is seen in Authorization. In looking at Venetian Blind, the viewer can experience frustration at being deprived of the “Venetian” at the expense of the “Blind” of the artist. These photographs can be considered one of the first instances of a now common form of photography — the selfie.

  FIGURE 77. Michael Snow, Venetian Blind, 1970.

  Sink employs a carousel projector with eighty slides and a colour photograph. The slides are projected every fifteen seconds alongside the photograph — slides and photograph (a print of one slide lit by white, “normal” light) are 62.9 x 64 cm. The artist recalls: “The sink had become such a mess through my negligence, the result of painting-related stains. There are also coffee cups and paint-stained brushes sitting on it.” The slides, through the use of coloured gels and various illuminations, change the appearance of the sink — sometimes it looks more disgusting than it does in the photograph but in other combinations, the sink “becomes quite lyrical; sometimes there is a transcendent Rothoesque beauty.”9 The English art critic John Russell was taken with a piece he felt should not have been successful: “Snow gives an architecture-in-time to what should be monotonous but is paradoxically an immensely varied experience.”10

  The sink can be seen as a metonymy for the artist who, in the first place, created the mess and then recorded his handiwork in various manifestations. It could also be said that this work is, in part, an attempt to rescue the sink from its state of depravity. Again, this process can be read as a form of self-portraiture, not autob
iography. The artist contains within himself the power to redeem what he has created imperfectly and transform it. “Despite my sloppiness,” Snow observes, “the sink struck me as a beautiful elegy for painting, and I decided to do a ‘painting in light’ of it.”11

  FIGURE 78. Michael Snow, Sink, 1970.

  In Authorization, Venetian Blind, and Sink, the artist creates alternatives to painting, in that the traditional use of the texture of brush strokes on the surface of a canvas is deployed in a markedly different manner. In this regard, the artist has provided important clues to understanding this process: “I am trying to continue the soloist aspect of painting without painting. I have added the camera and its products to the traditional tools of the painter/sculptor.” For Snow, such works are “objects of contemplation which I hope will continue to add to their dialogue with the viewer.”12

  In these works, the artist is an actor “in … events-that-become-objects,” events that, through the mirror that is a camera, “are transformed to become photographs.”13 Just as earlier paintings in the Western representational tradition flattened the three-dimensional world into two, photography by its very nature does the same. It creates a “mirror” of the world. In that sense, photography in Michael Snow’s practice becomes a continuation of the painterly tradition.

  Press (1969), Authorization (1969), Venetian Blind (1970), and Field (1973–74) show the influence of cinematic practice in that each is a series of related photographs in which the concept of duration is approached in various ways. Field displays in fourteen gelatin silver prints the results of pressing objects (including an egg, a cigarette, and a pair of women’s gloves) together between sheets of Plexiglas. Plexiglas, polyester resin, metal clamps, and a wooden base are added to provide evidence of how the photographs were made. In two images, Michael Snow — his face obscured by the camera (in a manner reminiscent of Authorization) — reminds the spectator of the persona behind the creation.

  FIGURE 79. Michael Snow, Press, 1969.

  Ladders became another preoccupation in several photographic works. In these instances, Snow blends his interests in cinema and sculpture. In bringing these three genres together here, he focuses on the nature of light. Like Quits and Shunt, Of a Ladder (ten selenium-toned gelatin silver prints, fronted and backed with Lexan) is positioned on both the wall and the floor. Although the work can be described as sculptural, it also resembles a series of film stills. This installation shows the distortion that occurs when light creates a shadow on the wall. The two prints on the floor show the bottom of the ladder. The other images were created, Snow recalls, by illuminating “the ladder a bit more brightly at the top. With the camera and tripod always in the same placement, I then photographed one ‘frame’ of the ladder after another.”14 The result is that the eight photographs on the wall are placed in small intervals so that the wall itself becomes a ladder. The conceit is that a series of photographs of a ladder becomes a ladder.

  FIGURE 80. Michael Snow, Field, 1973–74.

  FIGURE 81. Michael Snow, Of a Ladder, 1971.

  The book Cover to Cover (1975) presents a sequential series of photographs that have an even stronger cinematic quality to them in that they follow a protagonist (Michael Snow) through a day. Each page records the front (recto) and the back (verso) of the action being recorded by two photographers. At one point, the reader is forced to turn the book upside down in order to follow the “action” of the story. The book becomes cinematic because, if the pages are turned rapidly, it becomes a flip book (an early form of film) in which the protagonist is seen moving rapidly from location to location. One reviewer commented:

  The book is graphically exciting with all the trappings of flips, flops, split and multiple imagery alignments.… It often reads like a cinematic film strip, one frame spilling into the next. Forcing the eye to collate the action of spins, zooms, and pans which are re-created by page alignments and possible shuffling of the entire book. [This book can be] read cover to cover — posterior to anterior/anterior to posterior, self-creating passages of the protagonist’s journey.

  FIGURE 82. Michael Snow, spread from Cover to Cover, 1975.

  FIGURE 83. Michael Snow, still from Two Sides to Every Story, 1974.

  This book narrative is very similar to the film Two Sides to Every Story (1974) done at about the same time. In book and movie, each side of an image has a counterpart, and the reader or viewer is presented with double-sidedness. In the film, both sides were filmed continuously in a studio from directly opposite points of view. At one point a woman paints a green disk on the transparent screen and passes it through to the other side. Gradually the spectator, as Jean Arnaud points out, “identifies the real screen in front of him, and which he sees in the two films, as well as the room in which he finds himself and where the film takes place.” In the end, the viewer wonders “if the woman didn’t tear the actual screen projection.”15 Book and film attempt to give sculptural presence to the two dimensional as in Of a Ladder and, in so doing, establish new ways of experiencing books and cinema.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

  THE CANADIAN WILDERNESS

  Upon returning to Canada, in November 1971, Michael and Joyce purchased a house at 137 Summerhill Avenue in Toronto for thirty thousand dollars; their new home was across the street from Canadian Pacific Railway tracks and was situated on the corner of two streets at the end of five houses surrounded by trees and bushes.

  Earlier, in 1970, a year before settling back in Toronto, the couple taught at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design. There, Joyce became preoccupied with purchasing a summer home. Nothing came of this plan, but then, when they were in Newfoundland that autumn, Joyce persuaded her husband to drive down a rustic rural road that eventually turned into rocky terrain. Since it was not possible to turn around, they continued onwards. Their car got stuck, and they were forced to walk out to get help. The land, they noticed, was stunningly beautiful.

  The couple finally reached a fishing village where they were able to hire someone to rescue their car. On the journey back to their car, Joyce asked the driver if any land in that area was for sale. As it turned out, this man and his brother had some. Snow’s recall of the turn of events is sketchy: “I think we must have stayed there a day. I seem to remember sleeping in some cabin.”1 The couple decided to lease two acres on a cape on the southwest coast on the Gulf of St. Lawrence; in the summer of 1971 they purchased them.

  Snow laid out stakes for a nine-metre-square log cabin. Local workers cut and put up the logs; he did everything else — windows, interior, and furniture. There was no running water or electricity and the cabin was eight kilometres from the nearest village.

  The return to his native land — especially the purchase of property in Newfoundland — initiated a new, more direct concern with Canadian subject matter in the artist’s work. As discussed above, this commitment is first of all evident in the complex intertwining of photographs — especially of Chicoutimi — with reproductions of Snow’s avant-garde works in A Survey.

  This preoccupation surfaces in his second major film, La Région Centrale (1971), shot one hundred miles to the north of Sept-Îles in Quebec, which meditates on the nature of time; the velocity of the camera here introduces an entirely different transformation of space from Wavelength.

  Snow had used rooms in three of the films preceding this one. In each instance, he hoped that viewers would not feel confined to a specific realistic place but would, instead, feel like they were inhabiting an area of metaphysical space. Since he wanted to do much more with panning, landscape became the genre of choice in La Région Centrale, which would take place in an “open” space not confined to the rectangle shape of rooms. In essence, he was now looking for the “unbounded.” Soon he realized that there was no kind of film camera that would do what he wanted. Eventually, he met Pierre Abbeloos, a camera modifier at the National Film Board in Montreal, who built the “camera activating machine.”

  One early reviewer provided
an accurate description of what this 190-minute film accomplishes: “In the first frames, the camera disengages itself slowly from the ground in a circular movement. Progressively, the space fragments, vision inverts in every sense, light everywhere dissolves appearance. We become insensible accomplices to a sort of cosmic movement.”2

  The viewer experiences the wilderness — one of the prevalent tropes in Canadian art — in a completely new way. Rather than looking at ground level, the camera swoops in all kinds of directions over primitive terrain. Members of the audience are forced to see landscape in a revolutionary manner and, in the process, reflect on their place in it. Without the semblance of a traditional view, it is possible to experience — and imagine — land in a new way. The camera’s view of the wilderness is mediated by Xs that divide the film and by sightings of the shadow of the camera.

  Annette Michelson has pointed out that Snow’s intent in making this film can be linked to Kant, particularly this passage from the German philosopher: “Since through the senses we know what is outside us only insofar as it stands in relation to ourselves, it is not surprising that we find in the relation of those intersecting planes to our body the first ground from which to derive the concept of regions in space.” She also connects this film to the landing on the moon of Apollo 11 in July 1969: “Snow’s film conveys most powerfully the euphoria of the weightless state; but in a sense that is more intimate and powerful still, it extends and intensifies the traditional concept of vision as the sense through which we know and master the universe.”3