by King, James;
Peggy moved in with Michael in 1981. After two miscarriages, their son, Alexander, was born on November 24, 1982. The birth of that child caused untold grief to Joyce and brought back her earlier wish to have a baby and being unable to do so. Joyce also had mixed feelings about making the end of her marriage final. She was particularly concerned about the Newfoundland cottage, partly on the grounds that she did not want another woman inhabiting that space with Michael.
Joyce’s strong negative feelings can be seen in Untitled (Murderous Angel) from 1981, in which the angel is slaying a man whose face bears a strong resemblance to Snow. Despite setbacks in their relationship, Michael sought to maintain a friendship between himself and his ex-wife and occasionally visited her. There were times when they were both at the cabin in Newfoundland.
An important factor in Snow’s return to Canada had been Marie-Antoinette and other members of his family — aunts, uncles, cousins. He also felt that a new creative energy had, in his absence, taken hold in Toronto. Michael drew a great deal of comfort from his family; Joyce felt isolated, although Marie-Antoinette and Denyse remained deeply fond of her.*
Despite personal difficulties, Snow’s ability to uncover all sorts of new creative openings seemed endless. His time in Manhattan had unleashed many uncertainties about where he wanted to go — even if his projects were to be in a wide variety of genres. He was very certain of his art — and his ability to exploit his talents fully. In his marriage, that was not the case. He often felt guilty about his behaviour and found it difficult to sort out his feelings.
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* Denyse Rynard emphasized this point in conversation with James King.
PART FOUR
1979–1994
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:
BETWEEN ALCHEMY AND CHEMISTRY
By 1979, Michael Snow had become the best-known living Canadian artist — nationally and internationally. In 1972 he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; ten years later, he was elected to the Order of Canada as an officer (he became a companion in 2007).* Such acclaim came with a price. More and more was demanded of Snow by the art world, and if he seemed to falter, even momentarily, he became subject to adverse criticism. His remarkable success with the WW figures may have worked against him. Could he produce something to rival those creations?
He was able to do so but the results were far different from the WW. Since he constantly took risks, some results were more successful than others. If this artist’s works are his biography, they demonstrate that his search for the right forms to encapsulate his vision was a restless one, far-ranging and demanding.
Snow’s undertakings after 1979 expressed many ideas and utilized many different media. It can be said that his work flowed in a number of directions. One of the charges sometimes directed against him is that his work is too pluralistic, too willing to embrace a wide variety of genres. This observation might hold true for some artists, but Snow has mastered many approaches to making art. Unfortunately, that ability has made him suspicious in the eyes of some critics.
Constant in the artist’s works is a focus on the nature of the existence of an art object. Two works — twenty years apart — demonstrate this. Painting (Closing the Drum Book) from 1978 is a colour photograph in a wood frame on a wood base — the base adds a sculptural quality to the work. The very title of this work calls into question the nature of its existence. Of course, the artist had long been interested in investing photography with painterly qualities. In the title, Snow also alludes to his earlier abstract, The Drum Book. In what sense, then, is this photograph called Painting bidding farewell to the earlier canvas?
FIGURE 95. Michael Snow, Painting (Closing the Drum Book), 1978.
What the title is asserting is that the artist has discovered an equivalence to his earlier practice as a painter. The surface of the photograph displays a composite made of hundreds of colour patches. These collaged elements form an abstract pattern that references a past in the history of painting and Snow’s own abstract canvases while at the same time creating a new form of abstract representation. Snow put it this way: The surfaces “photographed existed but not in the same way as the people, buildings, nature, and so on that usually comprise the subjects of photography. In Painting you don’t know how big [the painted surfaces] were and in fact … you don’t even know whether they were those colours. So there’s a really peculiar representational problem because it is not a painting, it’s made of photographs of paintings.”1
FIGURE 96. Michael Snow, Immediate Delivery, 1998.
Twenty years later, in Immediate Delivery (1998), a backlit photographic transparency with gels and metal, the artist presents a different solution to the problem he was tackling earlier. Backlit transparencies — often very large, as this one is — cause the viewers to see whatever is represented in almost abstract terms since they have moved into a different sphere of existence: their size has increased and they have become silhouettes, lit from behind. Rather than using colour patches, Snow built a brightly coloured, temporary sculpture from gels, electrical and masking tapes, wires, string, and clamps. Most of the elements were placed directly on or pushed to the front of the Plexiglas plane. When squeezed together and photographed on a 10 x 12.5 cm negative, the result becomes the equivalent of an abstract painting. (The squeezing process used here is reminiscent of that used in Press.) There is a further irony at work. Since the temporary sculpture was constructed from the elements used to make a light box, the resulting abstraction references the kinds of equipment used in its making.
FIGURE 97. Michael Snow, In Medias Res, 1998.
Completed the same year as Immediate Delivery, In Medias Res (a huge uncropped colour photograph glued on Lexan) is placed on the floor so that the spectator must look down on it. The view is of a staged incident wherein two men and a woman react with astonishment to the escape of a parrot. The man with the tie reaches up to capture the bird. However, the focus of the lens is on the Oriental carpet — exactly the same size as the photograph — beneath the three humans. The photograph shows three spaces: the carpet in focus at the bottom, the trio and the furniture slightly out of focus in the middle, and the bird distinctly out of focus at the top. Looking at this composition, the viewer is immediately aware of a strange sight as the bird threatens to enter his or her space. Less dramatic are the colours, although the multicoloured rug complements the colour of the bird. However, that similarity helps to underscore the fact that this picture of verisimilitude is anything but real because although the carpet, the three persons, and the bird may be “real,” the photograph’s complex layers create an abstract pattern. Here again, Snow attempts to inflect a photograph with painterliness. The spectator experiences the two-dimensional rendition of the three-dimensional in a moment of fixed time.
In 1992 Snow said, “[A]s art, the best photography I find lacking when compared to the best painting, but I’ve been attempting to balance the lack by adding the camera as a tool to the ones one might use in making painting and sculpture.”2
The self-referencing work of art continued to be another preoccupation of Snow’s. Midnight Blue (1973–74) inhabits four genres: sculpture, painting, photography, and pencil drawing. There is a ledge at the bottom made of sawed boards; the panel is a photograph of two blues and is obviously constructed of the same wood boards upon which the photograph rests; in the photograph is a burning candle; on the ledge is a small pool of real wax in front of the photograph of the candle. A frame, painted a light blue, surrounds the dark (photographed) blue. (The blue in the photo appears darker than the blue of the frame, but, in fact, the original blue photograph had the same tint as the light blue paint. It appears darker because it was photographed under low-light conditions.) Black diagonal lines are placed over the light blue and continue into the dark blue.
FIGURE 98. Michael Snow, Midnight Blue, 1973–74.
Midnight Blue looks like a fairly straightforward work until its component parts are examined: ther
e is real wood and photographed wood; the two blues are the same but in two mediums and under different light conditions; the candle may be photographed, but a piece of real wax has apparently fallen from it. The burning candle is visible, but, paradoxically, so is the wax into which it has been transformed. Here, the artist deftly merges reality with illusion. The colour photograph Door (1979) is the size of a real door, but the photograph is not of a “real” door because the presence of the hand holding the candle in the middle picture area destroys this illusion. The door is also not “real” because the viewer becomes aware that it is a painting of a door.
FIGURE 99. Michael Snow, Blue Blazes, 1979.
FIGURE 100. Michael Snow, Black Burn Back, 1974.
Two other colour photographs — Blue Blazes (1979) and Black Burn Back (1979) — show, respectively, decisive moments in the burning of paper and black roofing material. These photographs document those instants in the life of the objects as they are destroyed. For Snow, capturing such moments represents the pure essence of photography.3 With the creation of these works, fire became a major trope for Snow. Prometheus stole fire to give it to mortal beings, and there is a sense in which Snow is an artist who brings light to mankind. In his work, the viewer is reminded that although fire has an alluring beauty, it both illuminates and destroys.
In his final show at the soon-to-close Isaacs Gallery in May 1991, Snow displayed a number of canvases that referenced the history of painting. (Sandy Simpson represented Snow for a short period of time after the Isaacs was shuttered. Since then, after that, he has not had consistent representation in Canada, but in 2004 the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York began exhibiting and selling his work.)
In her review of the show in the Globe and Mail, Kate Taylor was dismissive of this return to traditional painting:
These works question art simply by making painted statements. Guarded Painting, for example, shows a museum guard standing beside a cordoned-off area. Inside that area, where the expensive painting should hang, a rectangular hole has been cut out of the canvas. In Over the Sofa, a painted shape is placed above a photograph of a living room, the wall space above the sofa bare, waiting for a piece of art to finish it off. These paintings of paintings may be funny, but they are essentially one-liners, and could be easily dismissed if they were not placed in the larger context of Snow’s prolific and eclectic output.
Seeing one of these paintings in another exhibition led her to a slight change of heart. “H.M. is Supposed to Have Said features a monochromatic armchair facing a colourful abstract painting. H.M. is Henri Matisse, and he is supposed to have said that good art is like a comfortable armchair. The painting is still just a clever one-liner, but this context is kinder to it, placing it in the company of works that are capable of discussing, in a more sophisticated way, how we look at art.”4 In the Financial Post, Lisa Balfour Brown characterized these paintings “as re-cycled re-runs.”5
FIGURE 101. Michael Snow, Painting at Night, 1990.
Christopher Hume in the Toronto Star voiced sentiments similar to Taylor’s and Brown’s: “Guarded Painting, a particularly clever piece, includes a canvas with a security guard and a velvet rope painted on it. The work the guard watches and which the rope sets off is in fact a square cut out of the canvas. Though it’s clear Snow is a virtuoso painter — he can do almost anything it seems — the bravura is not readily apparent in this show. The pieces are too laid back.”6 When the art journalist Adele Freedman confronted the artist about the complaint that these works lacked painterliness, he lamented, “It’s so hard to do meaningful paintings anymore.”7
In undertaking this new venture, Snow was trying to glance back at such earlier canvases as A Man with a Line, in which he conjoined abstract and representational elements. In each of these new works, there is a painting within a painting. In Painting at Night, two framed canvases are juxtaposed. The viewer might think at first that the image on the right is a view of the outside (in contrast to the “night” of the abstract next to it); however, although the “outside” of the painting may be a window view, it is a view placed on a canvas.
At this time, the artist also moved in several new directions — and reinforced and reinvigorated other areas that he had explored previously. There are the holograms. There is a new approach to sculpture. There is a risk-taking public sculpture.
In revisiting some earlier preoccupations in Parked (1992), a small light box composition, he recalls the much earlier Venetian Blind. This work shows Snow “the actor” looking into the driver’s seat window with his face pushed against the glass; he blocks the view behind him. The face pressed is obviously reminiscent of earlier compositions. This time, the actor is middle-aged, and his face seems to express awareness of that fact.
FIGURE 102. Michael Snow, Parked, 1992.
The slow-motion film See You Later!/Au revoir (1990), in which a man (Michael) gets up from his desk, puts on an overcoat, walks in the direction of his secretary (Peggy Gale), says goodbye, and walks out the door depicts an action that occupies thirty seconds and extends it to seventeen minutes. This film becomes for Snow “an inner vision” in which the viewer sees inside “the time and space of a prosaic event” and is meant to arouse in him/her an awareness of “a tragic sense of mortality.”8
FIGURE 103. Michael Snow, still from See You Later!/Au revoir, 1990.
The artist’s description of this film could in many ways be applied to Wavelength. In See You Later, Snow invites the viewer to enter the interiority of an apparently mundane, everyday event and to ponder its significance. It also asks significant questions. How do time and space exist for us, especially if we stretch both beyond their usual duration? An act can take a few seconds, but does it have an inner life that can be explored?
Another film, To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991), investigates a concern that intrigued Snow in the past: the haptic quality possible in cinema. Among the accomplishments of the chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94) was uncovering the role of oxygen in combustion. Snow had previously shown a great interest in the nature of fire, and this preoccupation drew him to the Frenchman.
FIGURES 104 AND 105. Michael Snow, stills from To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror, 1991.
The fifty-three minute To Lavoisier consists of a series of separate shots that are two to four minutes in duration. The scenes are of daily life. As Snow states, there is a concentration on the “extraordinarily textual vitality of the pictures themselves. The granular photochemical film surface and image are variously flecked, stained, throbbing, flaking, flickering, spotted, dotted bobbed, soaked or chipped.… These are purely photochemical effects — an homage to Lavoisier’s place between alchemy and chemistry.”9 In demonstrating how the surface of film can be inflected with all kinds of visual effects, this film remains one of Snow’s boldest, visceral experiments in cinema.
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* He has subsequently received a number of distinctions: Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres, France, 1995; Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, 2000; Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal, 2002; Prix Samuel-de-Champlain (France-Amérique) 2006; and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, 2011.
Snow has received the following honorary degrees: UQAC (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2016); UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2008); Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne (2004); Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver (2004); University of Toronto (1999); University of Victoria (1997); Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (1990); and Brock University (1975).
He was Professor of Advanced Film at Yale in 1970 and Visiting Professor at Princeton in 1988. His other visiting professors include: Visiting Artist/Professor at MAPS (Master of Art in Public Sphere); Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre, Switzerland (February 2005, January 2006); Visiting Artist/Professor at L’école Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges, France (December 2004, May 2005); Visiting Artist/Professor, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Pa
ris, 2001; Visiting Artist/Professor, le Fresnoy, Tourcoing France, 1997–98; and Visiting Professor, l’Ecole Nationale de la Photographie, Arles France, 1996.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
THE EVERYDAY
For Michael, his second marriage allowed a domestic tranquility into his existence that he had never experienced in his first. Peggy, an independent curator especially knowledgeable about Canadian contemporary art and someone who, for the most part, specialized in time-based art, moving image work, and photography, shares many of her husband’s interests; has a strong, intuitive grasp of his art; and is not hesitant to speak her mind when she disagrees with him. But she is not, like Joyce, an artist who, at some level, competes with another artist. Peggy remains deeply sympathetic to Joyce: “I’m surprised she put up with his shenanigans all those years.”
The bond between the couple is based on a genuine change in Snow. Peggy recalls that the two were able to become a real pair, instead of just more ships in more nights, because Snow “really wanted to change. He was tired of [his previous sexual behaviour].… Both of us were quite surprised at how wonderful [their lives became]. [The decision to have a child] felt like something we wanted to do as a couple. We wanted to be a family. Both of us are rather traditional in certain substantial ways. I do the cooking and Michael cuts the wood in the summer and Aleck watches TV in Toronto.”
Despite the fact that their lives now seem somewhat traditional and that Snow leads a more settled existence, all is not as it appears. Snow, to some degree, is performing. Peggy has a clear sense of the facade that her husband presents to the world: “Michael always presents himself as vague, blurry, absentminded, fumbling,” she once observed accurately. “But there’s nothing very casual about Michael.”1
