Michael Snow

by King, James;

  In 1989, Snow installed The Audience — two groups of huge sculpted figures — on the front of two corners of the Rogers Centre (called the SkyDome at that time). Snow had been among the members of the Public Arts Committee deciding on commissioned works, but he recused himself from all discussions of his submission.

  The fourteen figures, which vary in size from ten to eighteen feet and are elevated sixty feet above ground level, look like they are made of bronze, but they are constructed of metallically painted fibreglass. They were made from wooden armatures (skeleton forms) to which was applied upholstery foam and burlap; to this, chicken wire was affixed. Then the fibreglass was applied.

  Two gesticulating groups of spectators — shown on concrete bleachers — are responding to a sporting event. In this enormous piece of public statuary, these hooliganish figures confront the audience about to enter the amphitheatre. Are you like us? The Audience asks the new audience, What kind of a person are you? The piece asks the onlookers to determine who they are. Are they going to conduct themselves like the figures pointing and waving at them? Or are they different?

  FIGURE 117. Michael Snow, The Audience, 1988–89.

  As Snow points out, these figures are unlike any stadium crowd (not necessarily at a sporting event) that ever existed because “each of the figures is directing his or her attention to a particular area: they’re not looking at the same thing. They are mostly looking at ‘you,’ the spectator, and in many cases making judgments about you that are similar to the judgments that a fan at a baseball game, for example, will make.” Moreover, each figure is directed to a particular location. One of the sculptural figures seems to call the person who has attracted his gaze an asshole. Various kinds of appraisals — positive and negative — are offered to members of the audience about to enter the stadium.

  The artist sees The Audience as an outgrowth of his earlier, much more abstract “attention-directing” and “audience-inclusive” works, such as Blind.4 The Audience can also be related to the artist’s interest in what can be taken in by the eye (as in Scope), since the focus of each figure’s eyes is a specific spot. To communicate properly with a figure, the spectator must locate that place.

  Of course, there is also a strong element of satire in the piece. The figures are grotesque, almost macabre. What person would like to see themselves as such a creature? This large work may have a comic edge, but it is sharply observed, presenting in a very graphic way how members of an audience can share in an anti-social group mentality.

  Even an early fan of Snow’s, Robert Fulford, declared The Audience a total mess. Some saw the piece as condescending in nature — a well-born Torontonian looking down on those he perceived of a lower social class. In the Toronto Star, Christopher Hume expressed major reservations about the installation: “These latter-day gargoyles, each 6 metres high, wag their fingers, thumb their noses, point, laugh, groan, stare and generally appear to be having lots of fun at visitors’ expense. The result is a work that turns the audience into the show. The watchers become the watched.”

  “They’re silly gestures made monumental,” Snow explains. “I tried to place them so they’re looking right at you. The wagger, for example, is wagging at the taxis and buses arriving at the hotel. It’s related to some of my abstract sculpture in which the audience is involved.”

  Despite Snow’s defence of it, the work has not been received well. Most see it as a caricature of those who attend events at the Rogers Centre, as Hume pointed out.

  While there’s a good deal of humour in Snow’s work, there’s also something off-putting, even silly, about the sight of these grotesque characters leering down at the crowd. There’s also a problem with the colour, a kind of high-gloss bronze, which doesn’t give the figures enough of a chance to stand out from their surroundings. Originally, the sculptures were to be bronze but because of cost and time required, that idea was abandoned. Instead, they are carved from a kind of Styrofoam and coated in a bronzed resin. Although they will develop some patina over time, they’ll never look like the real stuff.5

  The video maker Lisa Steele saw it another way: “Snow was using high art referencing in a low art context.” The artist had a similar interpretation: he once compared it to a Bernini sculpture in front of a cathedral in Rome. He also alluded to its resemblance to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, “a direct-address thing, a brothel scene — they’re all appraising you … In the sixties, I was interested in underground comics — Robert Crumb — but this is more like Daumier.”

  Five years after expressing disdain for The Audience, Hume linked it to Colin Curd: “Though I’d never seen the painting before, it was familiar. Then I realized it could be The Audience.… It has the same cast of characters.”6

  Three years later, “lightness of hand and wit,” as Adele Freedman put it, was (briefly) bestowed on the grounds of the Confederation Life Building at the corner of Mount Pleasant Road and Jarvis Street in the form of Snow’s Red Orange Green, a stainless-steel sculpture of three interpenetrating two-dimensional trees placed on a traffic island. The title, as Freedman explained, refers “to the seasons in the life of a tree, the stop-and-go phases in the life of a street, and the branching of roads. In short, it embodies a kind of conceptual complexity otherwise missing on the site.”7 Nicholas Bradbury in the Toronto Star was appreciative of the shapes created “within the boundaries of these tree forms.” These spaces contained “images not only of branches and leaves, but of the immediate surrounding — steps, of an escalator perhaps, the three circles of a traffic light, and a woman, perhaps on her way to work in one of the buildings nearby.”

  Snow has never been an arrogant or self-satisfied person or artist, but he has the capacity to enjoy his own work, take pride in it, and share that enthusiasm with others. This observation holds particularly true of the three public works described in this chapter.

  _______________

  * In 1978, thirty photo works were commissioned for the Government of Canada Building at Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue in North York. Parts of this installation have been damaged or removed. In the same year, a complex installation was commissioned by Brock University, but only the photo mural portion has survived.

  ** Nowell (339–40) claims that the idea of geese came from Wieland and that Snow paid her five thousand dollars for the idea. Snow disputes this claim and does not recall any conversation with Wieland on this issue; he insists he did not make any payment to Wieland for this suggestion.

  PART FIVE

  1994–PRESENT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE:

  BLOCKBUSTER

  After his AGO retrospective in 1970, Snow had a large one-man show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1978–79). Two years earlier, both his films and a selection of ten photographs had been given retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There were also major shows at Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (1998) and the San Francisco Art Institute (1992).

  Dwarfing these exhibitions was the enormous retrospective in 1994 of Snow’s work hosted jointly by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant. Retrospectives are tumultuous events, emotionally and professionally, for most artists. The worry of not being able to live up to all the attention bestowed is an understandable reaction since in a retrospective, the whole of an artist’s career is put on show. The exposure that such an exhibition brings is enormous; the effect is not always positive, though — it can, in fact, be brutal. Inevitably, the display will prompt the question: When seen together, do the pieces show enough richness, variety, and interest to be assembled together and do they hold up?

  The idea for the Michael Snow Project originated in 1983 when Louise Dompierre curated a WW exhibition for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University. When she became head of the Power Plant in Toronto in 1986, she approached the AGO’s Dennis Reid and Philip Monk. The Project was postponed twice but came to fruition in 1994. Snow, of course, got caught up in the preparations to such an extent
that he could not begin any new projects for two years.

  Right now [March 1994], with everything coming together at once, it’s hysteria. There are so many events and receptions that there’s been some confusion with the mailing list. All my personal guests — including my 90-year-old mother and her friends — were mistakenly invited to a media preview instead of the AGO’s members’ preview.

  Rumour has it that Jean Chrétien [the prime minister] might come to the members’ preview, and I invited these people because I’m sure they’d like to be at a party with [him]. It’s just one more thing to take care of.

  But having to deal with problems like that is extremely gratifying.

  As Deirdre Hanna pointed out, “Canadians aren’t known for recruiting superstars from their peers. Yet the Michael Snow Project [celebrates] one artist who is still very much alive and well in Toronto.”1

  The Project was arranged in three sections: history, theory, and practice. At the AGO, Reid’s “Exploring Space and Contour” took the viewer from the last WW works back to Jazz Band. When he walked backward through his early career, the artist liked what he saw. Pleasantly surprised, he observed that most of it held up. Monk’s “Around Wavelength” consisted of ten sculptures from 1967 to 1969. The Power Plant was filled with Dompierre’s “Embodied Vision” which included Egg, Venetian Blind, and Core.

  In the Globe, John Bentley Mays was enthusiastic about the artist but disapproving of the venture:

  The Michael Snow Project is a blockbusterish exercise which curators Dennis Reid and Philip Monk (at the AGO) and Louise Dompierre (at The Power Plant) should never have talked themselves, or allowed themselves to be talked, into doing. Nor do I have any doubt that Snow, after the flashbulbs and champagne corks stop popping, will regret having been an accomplice in his own embarrassment.

  The basic problem is blood simple. Michael Snow is a genius. But as this exhibit illustrates with the force of a kangaroo punch, he has only occasionally seen fit to pull his high imaginative powers fully together, and create films and photographic installations as joyously brilliant as any art done by a Canadian in this century. Had the curators drawn a clear line in the dirt, and not let anything cross over it that did not come up to Snow’s best, the exhibit would have been smaller, but would also have glinted with diamond-like fire. As we have it, the sprawling Project has all the visual charm of a lawn sale.2

  Susan Walker’s sensitive piece in the Star carried the headline, “Blizzard of Snow Ahead,” while Time remarked that the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”3 The remaining critics were favourably impressed, although a feminist collective calling itself Snow Job Inc. began a spray-painting campaign to expose the Project as a “Wank-o-Rama.” They did not appreciate the stylized WW and argued that women’s bodies were being commodified. They added penises to the WW on some of the posters advertising the exhibition.

  In the end, there was much acclaim for the show, and despite some negative criticism, Snow’s reputation was boosted. In 1994, he was sixty-six years old but he had no thoughts of retirement or slowing down. In the following years, he would produce a wide array of new, groundbreaking work in photography, transparency, sound installation, public sculpture, cinema, photography, and book illustration. His domestic life was tranquil and happy, and the inner desire to create had become even stronger. His curiosity remained one the strongest elements in his character, and he was relentless in pursuing its leads.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX:

  SOUND SHAPING

  From the time of Snow’s boyhood, various forms of jazz have been a mainstay in his life. He began with Dixieland and then shifted to various forms of progressive jazz. Upon his return to Canada, he became involved, mainly through the CCMC but also with the Artists’ Jazz Band, with improvised music making. Playing with the CCMC gives him enormous pleasure. A journalist, expecting to hear blues or bebop, described his reaction to hearing Snow with Paul Dutton at the Rivoli on Queen Street:

  Snow sat down at the piano, Dutton stood off to one side at a microphone. Dutton started to vocalize — I don’t mean sing, exactly, though many of the sounds were pitched — and Snow started to play. He played with his hands, with his fists, with his elbows. He played directly on the strings of the piano. He put coins into a metal pie plate, put the plate inside the piano, and continued playing. His legs were extraordinarily expressive — they snaked about under the piano; they curled around each other in a tight embrace; they danced. Dutton howled, gurgled, slurped, rasped and sometimes seemed to be making two different sounds at once. There were moments, I thought, when the two of them sounded like a full orchestra. I asked Dutton later how they possibly knew what to with each other. “It’s a bit like fucking,” he told me. “You get used to your partner.”1

  After 1994, one of the most significant changes in Snow’s artistic practice was the integration of his music or sound with his visual art. Of course, he had done this before in NYEEC and Rameau’s Nephew, but, in works such as Piano Sculpture (2009), for instance, he brings the two forms into conjunction in a new way by his use of improvised music. “The piano playing gestures are related to gestures used” in making visual art.2

  Earlier, in the seventies, Snow created three sound installations: Correspondance (1970), Hearing Aid (1976 [discussed in chapter nineteen]), and Tap (1969/72). Correspondance consists of an unframed black-and-white photograph (120 x 150 centimetres), an audio tape, and a tape player. The photograph is an enlargement of two actual badly typed letters superimposed on each other. The tape is a recording, played loudly in the same way that the letters have been enlarged. One of the letters contains the acceptance of an invitation; in the other, its author comments on the availability of a film. The question posed to the viewer is: Why are the two pieces of correspondence imposed upon each other? And why can the sound of the typewriter that made the two letters be heard? What is the link (correspondence) between image and sound?

  FIGURE 118. Michael Snow, Piano Sculpture, 2009.

  In Tap, a framed black-and-white photograph, a framed typewritten text on paper, a loudspeaker, documents, an audio tape, and player (not visible) are all found on different walls in a multi-roomed gallery. The large framed photo shows hands holding a microphone; the typewritten text discusses Tap from different perspectives and mentions that the sound of fingers tapping on a microphone (on the concealed tape) is part of the work. The use of typewritten text and tapping sounds is found in both works.

  While these early works have a strong formal structure, improvisation is in many ways the raison d’etre in Snow’s musical pieces, particularly after 1999. Piano Sculpture (2009) is both a sound installation and a video installation. It consists of four simultaneous projections (each two metres wide) on the four walls of a gallery. Each projection is an overhead shot of a grand piano showing the entire keyboard and interior (strings and hammers). Tiny loudspeakers are placed in each image on the strings and hammer. Each of these projections is a looped, fifteen-minute recording of a piano performance by Snow, who describes how each part is “different, [although] they all (in varied ways) use the same vocabulary of piano effects. The core effects are achieved by somewhat aggressive gestures performed by the pianist.” These gestures (e.g., hammering, carving, sawing, scraping, polishing) are “directly related to gestures made by the hands in making an object (a sculpture!).”3 What the artist is asserting is that the movements he is employing come from the plastic arts and are related to jazz riffs and the gesture in abstract expressionism. There is, therefore, an intentional linking of visual art to musical expression.

  Improvisation is central to the performance of this piece because the position of each spectator-auditor determines what is heard; these are not, according to Snow, concordant harmonic connections but the simultaneity of a family of gesture-related sounds.

  CCMC’s music is really, as Snow claims, “sound shaping.”

  We don’t play “notes” as much as invent sound qualities. No prior th
ematic arrangements are made; we just play, and the music is always new and continues to be surprising to us. Group improvisation is as much in-the-moment as any activity can be. It’s all action/reaction, there’s no time for thinking. One is simultaneously understanding (or misunderstanding) where the music has just been, where it is “now,” and where your contribution may be taking it. It took me twenty years before I realized that there was a connection [to] the democratic ensemble playing of the early New Orleans jazz that had so moved me all those years before.4

  The artist is well aware that “the theme-and-variation principles” have often been a staple in his visual art (the WW works, for example). “I don’t think that this interest comes from jazz. Rather, jazz is one of the manifestations of an innate propensity I have in general.”5

  Snow realizes that CCMC music does not appeal to most people: “One of the problems is that our music is extremely complicated. And this is going to be insulting in a way, but a lot of people sit on the familiar — especially rock ’n’ roll, but it’s all based on thump, thump on the bottom and screaming on the top. We shift the orchestral layers all over the place, and you really have to be as adventurous as we are to listen to it.”6

  Improvisation is a challenging prospect in the visual arts, although Snow remembers that the film stock used for Wavelength was outdated and that therefore the results could not be predicted; different types of film were also employed. In speaking of his visual art, he feels that it is sometimes best to classify it as “experimental” as well as “conceptual”: the artist’s mind may be in a state of flux in which it improvises, but work on a painting, sculpture, photograph, or installation has to be carefully calculated.