Michael Snow

by King, James;

  FIGURE 106. Peggy Gale, Michael Snow, and Alexander Snow. c. 2000.

  A good measure of the closeness of the couple can be glimpsed in Conception of Light (1993), a work consisting of two 183 cm colour photographs of eyeballs facing each other across the room of a gallery — one blue, the other brown. One early viewer was pleasantly astounded when encountering the piece: “There were these two big eyeballs looking at you. Who did they belong to?” The blue is Michael’s, the brown Peggy’s. One blow-up, Snow believes, would have looked merely analytical; two suggests a relationship. He thinks the blue in his eyes looks like something underwater whereas hers are floral. Peggy saw butterflies and feathers when she looked at hers whereas her husband’s reminded her of crystal or quartz. Perhaps most important about these photographs is that they speak about a couple gazing into each other’s eyes, seeing differences and then finding ways to connect with each other.

  Conception can be read in another way also. It can be seen as a work that references a man who thought he was going emotionally blind but who has found a new way of seeing.

  In 1994 a journalist visiting with Michael, Peggy, and Alexander observed how Michael Snow the famous artist had become Michael Snow the family man, one who endeavoured to be home by six during the week in order to watch Star Trek with his son. On Saturdays, the family shopped at the St. Lawrence Market. They spent part of each summer at the cabin in Newfoundland.

  The ordinary has always been a part of Michael Snow. His second marriage simply brought him back into touch with that side. The fact remains that much of his life remains invested in his art, but, as an older man, he became more adapt at the art of everyday living.

  FIGURE 107. Michael Snow at his cottage in Newfoundland, c. 1993.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:

  THE PRESENCE OF THE ABSENT

  Snow’s interest in the differences between what we think we see and what we actually see — and on the nature of surface — is reflected in his turn to holograms. In this genre, of course, what seems present is actually absent. Michael Snow may be “present” in the hologram Egg (1985), but he is not “actually” there.

  The artist had long been interested in experimenting with holography, and the perfect opportunity arose when he was invited to produce a group of works in this medium — The Spectral Vision — for Expo 86 in Vancouver. In Egg, the artist breaks an egg over a real frying pan; the egg is then caught in “illusory space” as it descends down to the pan.

  In Maura Seated (1985), another variation is produced. From a distance, the viewer sees a three-dimensional geometrical structure made of Plexiglas. As they move closer, the horizontal plane of the structure is unclear. “Advancing further, one will see — often with some surprise — that the empty cubic volume contains the realistically convincing image of a seated woman who is looking at her reflection in a small mirror she holds in her hand. Moving optically around the image, the spectator will see that, astoundingly, the woman’s reflection in the little mirror changes exactly as it would when seen from different positions in real life.”1 In film and photography, Snow argues, people are “ghosts” — representations that haunt the actual physical world from which they have been removed; in holography, they become “mummies embalmed.”2

  FIGURE 108. Michael Snow, Egg, 1985.

  In the Globe and Mail, John Bentley Mays was intrigued by the eight “still-life tableaux, each one populated by the same cast of proletariat characters.… Walk by them, and these spectral images lose all their dumb ordinariness, and begin to move, quake, spring apart uncannily.… Snow here tames all the slick spookiness of more conventional holography, and puts it to work as one element in a brilliant, trenchant rethinking of the venerable still-life tradition, from the ground up.”3

  One visitor, René Blouin, perceived traces of autobiography in some of the works. “Children’s Parade, for instance, the first work encountered by the viewer … is definitely informed by Snow’s experience of raising his young son … [The ten holograms] offer a stylized history of transportation, with each tableau reflecting a different phase of human development through arrangements of toys.” The same observer noted that “biographical sources” were also at work in Sailboat (To Wieland), “a juxtaposition of three marine scenes executed in three different media — a back-lit transparency, a child’s drawing and a hologram of a romantic marine painting, complete with gold frame. The iconography here certainly relates to early works by Toronto artist Joyce Wieland.”4

  The ambitious, multi-genre Redifice (1986) consists of nine holograms and twenty sculptural and photographic compositions, and is the most complex of the artist’s holograms: it is a two-sided red wall (8 x 20 x 2 ½ feet) with rectangular openings. Nine openings are holograms — in one, the French flag thrusts itself out in space. Other openings have maquettes: one shows a woman entering an elevator.

  Snow uses different forms of sequencing as in his earliest photographs, and explores, among other themes, fire and burning (as in Midnight Blue, Blue Blazes, and Black Burn Back). There is a crucial difference in Redifice, however. The viewer can look through the various openings in any sequence, and can, in a sense, discover a new work of art every time the work is explored. The idea of co-creation was present in many of Snow’s earlier works but here it is dramatically underscored.

  From 1974, the artist was preoccupied with red — the colour of passion and strong emotions, and, as can be seen in Red5 of that year; burning is a recurring theme. Perhaps the colouring of Redifice references the possibility that the overall construction — it resembles an apartment building and its windows — could burn down. If that were to occur, it would become a “Red-ifice.”

  However, this work has many other meanings, as the artist has observed: “REDIFICE is a structure with many ‘levels,’ ‘many rooms,’ many ‘windows.’ Viewing REDIFICE becomes a narrative film, edited by the spectator, of ‘frames, objects, scenes, and events that [could] take place in a ‘high-rise’: a classroom? A theatre? an operating room? a living room? a bedroom? an elevator?”5

  FIGURE 109. Michael Snow, Redifice, 1986.

  FIGURE 110. Michael Snow, Redifice, 1986.

  Closely related to Redifice is The Windows Suite (2006). Redifice shows the wall of what could be a hotel, whereas The Windows Suite is placed into the windows of a hotel. In the latter work, seven sixty-five-inch video monitors are placed in seven windows (each of which is three feet wide by six feet tall) on the east facade of the Pantages Hotel in Toronto’s theatre district. On these monitors, thirty-two different moving-image sequences unconnected to each other play in a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute loop. The scenes show events that could take place in a hotel room but many are pure abstracts. In one there is a fire.

  Windows, looking at them and looking in them, are central to both works. In the later work, windows open and close; there are drapes, venetian blinds, and pull-down blinds; there is a jail window, a stained-glass window, and an ivy-covered window. The work, which can only be seen at night — it is visible from the street between 7 p.m. and 2 a.m. — is a fitting companion to the busy nightlife taking place around it.

  FIGURE 111. Michael Snow, The Windows Suite, 2006.

  In the Globe and Mail, Sarah Milroy reflected on the “incendiary variation [in which] a fire appears to burst forth in the hotel’s lower floors, making its way up inside the interior, only to be extinguished by the water jet of a free hose.” She also observed that the piece reflects the “hotel’s unique role as a kind of free zone in semi-nomadic metropolitan culture.… One of the successes, here, is the way the work changes our perception of the city around it. Snow’s passages of abstract colour suggest a digitized version of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie [1942–43], but the hotel scenes blend in with the surrounding spectacle of the city … watching, you wonder: is art imitating life, or is it the other way around?”6

  New sculptures such as Transformer (1982) and Core (1984) occupy space in much grander, expansive ways than the previ
ous ones. These pieces, and many others done in the early 1980s, also return to the themes of sight and blindness. For example, Zone (1982) is a Plexiglas wood structure with an eyepiece framed in rubber. When using the eyepiece, the viewer looks to the right and then the left and thus to the limits of the inside of the sculpture. That encounter — looking to the boundaries of peripheral vision with each eye — is one shared with the artist, who obviously sees the same thing. This is a work of art that seeks to establish the sense of a shared experience — a form of bonding. The title refers to the fact that artist and audience have entered a zone in which they are equals. The simple, elegant aluminum bars in Sighting (1982), a three-dimensional rendition of a trapezoid, forces both eyes to make right-angled rectangles when viewed from the side. Again, there is the element of a joint encounter.

  FIGURE 112. Michael Snow, Transformer, 1982. Sighting (1982) is on the wall to the right and Monocular Abyss (1982) on the left.

  The same observation can be extended to the monumental Seated Sculpture (1982) that was constructed from three pieces of heavy steel plate; an industrial “break” was used to bend the metal. There are four components: a solid-looking rectangular form at the top; the much thinner platform that runs parallel to it underneath; a boxlike structure at one end upon which the “seated sculpture” can sit; and a thin piece of metal that connects the top, the bottom, and the seat. The seating space can be simply looked upon or can be sat upon. The latter option, Snow says, “is permissible and desirable. Sitting in the sculpture, one sees two rectangular plate arms or wings, which come from behind you and clasp in a rectangular overlapping about seven feet in front of you. The work directs you to be a part of it in order for you to see it.”7 The viewer becomes a “seated sculpture.”

  FIGURE 113. Michael Snow, Core, 1984.

  FIGURE 114. Michael Snow, Seated Sculpture, 1982.

  This sculpture, the creator, has said, “emanates the power that was used to make it.”8 This is exactly right. Since the surface of each part of the sculpture reflects the power of the material used, the initial impression is of hard material conjoined. This bestows a sense of great power contained, but that feeling increases markedly if one occupies the seat because the resulting sensation is of power obtained from entering into and becoming a part of this construction. The seat becomes a throne.

  The unglazed ceramic Core (1984) — almost seven feet tall with a circumference of almost three feet — was created by a master potter from a small-scale model made by Snow. In the firing process the piece exploded and had to be reconstituted when installed. This large object, Snow points out, is not a pot because “its design and the way in which it is made contain the means of its making, a circling circle.”9 Put another way, Core looks like a giant thimble, a device into which a finger is inserted. In walking around this monumental piece, the viewer beholds an object completely removed from what should be its ordinary space. Or it can be understood as a giant fragment of a Greco-Roman building. Martha Baillie has observed: “Core is mute. The beloved, impenetrable. Core divulges nothing about the inside shape of things. It offers a surface.… You could be in Mesopotamia or the twentieth century. With clay, time becomes Snow’s subject, and the powerful allure of the invisible sets your mind in circular motion.”10

  In Transformer (1982), the space controlled by the huge pointed log becomes just as significant as the object itself. What exactly is being controlled? Whereas Core is self-contained, the opposite holds true of Transformer. This work, suspended horizontally, is always in the process of pointing away from itself if the thickest part of it is seen as its point of origin. That solid point is, as Snow points out, “natural and unrefined.” As the piece moves to its narrow end, it is honed to a needle point and increasingly smoothed and sanded. A contrast has been established between the natural and the artificial.

  “[T]his big pointer moves like a big compass,” the artist observed.11 One does not perceive a compass as threatening, but the narrow point could pierce an eyeball. This is another significant contrast the work establishes. Transformer is placed five feet above the floor so that it creates a relationship with a viewer of any height who approaches it. If one stands near the thick end, a sense of control or power might be an appropriate response. If one stands close to the thin tip, a sense of fragility might be the only response.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:

  AUDIENCES

  Two major public commissions have allowed Snow to leave a visible imprint on Toronto.* The first, Flight Stop (1979), is a distinctively Canadian project. The work brings the iconic Canada goose from the outside world to inhabit the interior of a building. “There was all this empty air up there. I thought, what goes in the air?” Snow recalls.**

  The title of the piece is slightly problematic because the geese have not stopped flying (although the leader is seemingly about to do so). Rather, the sixty fibreglass sculptures in three body sizes and several wing positions are in a permanent state of suspended animation.

  This installation, which is located in the Eaton Centre in Toronto, depicts the flight of the geese from one end of the complex to the other and thus gives indoor space to these creatures in a way that would not occur in reality. The blending of “inside” and “outside” is an important aspect of this piece, which also suggests, covertly, that nature, even in an urban environment, is an important aspect of the inner Canadian identity.

  FIGURE 115. Michael Snow, Flight Stop, 1979.

  With this work, Snow transformed the interior of the Eaton Centre into an enormous gallery, as Virginia Nixon pointed out in the Montreal Gazette. This installation is a work of art “capable of satisfying the public’s rarely heeded desire for art they can understand. The only possible problem is that it looks so simple a lot of people may find it hard to think of it as art. It looks simple. Yet the way the birds manage to make their presence felt inside this enormous hall points out an extremely inventive designer.”

  A year after the installation, Beverly Bowen, a journalist from the Toronto Star, reported that the birds were moulting.1 This prompted an angry letter from the artist to the newspaper:

  The work is not made of papier-mâché feathers; it is not now deteriorating and the only solution anyone has come up with is to remove the molting birds from the flocks has some relationship to the truth but implies a frivolity about the work and the problem that did exist on the part of both the makers and owners that is a bit insulting.…

  In making them, we underestimated the extreme temperature changes where the sculpture is and the consequent extreme shrinkage of the photographic paper and a few months after the installation some of the photos begin to pull. We decided to take the sculptures down and repair them gradually.… These repairs were completed about two weeks ago and the entire group of 60 is now as it should be.2

  In December 1982, when the Eaton Centre management tied red Christmas ribbons around the necks of the geese, Snow took them to court. At the one-day hearing, his attorney, Julian Porter, argued that the ribbons distorted Flight Stop and made the installation look ridiculous: “An artist is no bigger, no less, and no greater than his works of art. We want the ribbons off.” The lawyer for the Eaton Centre countered: “We’re not looking at somebody who has gone into an art gallery and put a codpiece on the David.” When an artist worked in the service of Mammon, he maintained, he had to take his chances. Justice Joseph O’Brien agreed with Porter and Snow: the ribbons were removed.

  Snow’s childhood cartoons are his first surviving works of art. Although he later showed little interest in this genre, the installation #720 (Thanks to Robert Crumb) (1988) demonstrates his admiration for the controversial, prolific, and usually vulgar American cartoonist. This work consists of three slide projectors, 240 35 mm colour slides, newspaper bundles, and wine crates. Each carousel is aimed at one of the three walls in the installation space; the newspaper bundles (of newspapers from the day before) are used as seats for the audience. Carousel number 1 displays copies of
the image of page 1 of a four-page Mr. Natural comic; carousel number 2 contains eighty slides of page 2; carousel number 3 has slides of pages 3 and 4. Each slide is projected for ten seconds. The unsynced projectors play rhythms and perform as clocks. Mr. Natural remains static in each of the three series. Snow has said: “The constancy of [Mr. Natural ruminating] is a very important part of the experience of seeing this very meditative work.”3

  FIGURE 116. Michael Snow, #720 (Thanks to Robert Crumb), 1988.

  Mr. Natural, who first appeared in 1967, is a mystic guru who pontificates on the evils of the modern world and offers mysticism and natural living as alternative lifestyles. He is always costumed as an Old Testament figure, with a long, flowing, white beard. In contrast to what he proclaims, Mr. Natural is a foul-mouthed, pleasure-seeking narcissist. The glaring contrast between what this character preaches and what he does allows Crumb to offer scathing critiques of all kinds of fads and belief systems.

  In many ways, Crumb is a social artist; Michael Snow is not. In that sense, this is an unusual work in his canon. The three large projections force the viewer to look at what are intended as pieces of social commentary rendered in comic-book format. As such, social satire is part of the mix, but Snow is also highlighting Crumb’s artistry and the genre in which he chooses to render it — this work has a strong formalist element. And that is perhaps the point: comic books have a unique way of organizing images, and Crumb is a master of this technique. Nevertheless, a strong element of satire (via Crumb) is present.