Michael Snow

by King, James;

  One carefully thought-out musical production is an elaborate hoax. The Last LP (1987), subtitled Unique Last Recordings of the Music of Ancient Cultures, supposedly presents the last music of lost cultures. Of course, the pieces are not genuine, but the exploration of the theme of loss is real. Not only does the content signal this concern, so too does the medium — it speaks of (what seemed imminent then) the approaching obsolescence of vinyl as the CD format began to dominate recorded music. The jacket, designed to look like a UNESCO-sponsored recording of ethnic music, displays a photo of an ancient clay tablet and a photograph of Dr. Mischa Cemep (Snow), the ethnologist who has collected the various recordings and written the extensive, scholarly notes — a mix of accurate and false information — provided for each of the eleven tracks:

  FIGURE 119. Michael Snow, cover for The Last LP, 1987.

  “Wu Ting Dee Lin Chao Cheu (Announcing the Arrival of Emperor Wu Ting),” performed by Orchestra of the National Music Institute, Seoul, Korea.

  “Si Nopo Da (By What Signs Will I Come to Understand?),” performed by Tribe of Niger, S.E. Africa.

  “Ohwachira, Water ceremony,” performed by Miantonomi and Cree Tribespeople.

  “I Ching Dee Yen Tzen (The Strings of Love),” performed by Tam Wing Lun on the Hui Tra.

  “Full to the Brim,” recorded in Varda, Carpathia, Romania.

  Speech in Klogen performed by Okash, Northern Finland.

  “Mbowunsa Mpahiy,” performed by Kpam Kpam Tribe, Angola, West Africa.

  “Quuiasukpuq,” performed by Tornarssuk Tribe, Siberia.

  “Amitabha Chenden Kala,” performed by Monks of the Kagyupa Sect, Bhutan.

  “Roiakuriluo,” performed by Sabane in Elahe, Brazil.

  “Raga Lalat,” performed by Palak Chawal, Benares, India.

  The introduction to the fourth selection includes these observations: “Unlike other pieces on this record, this haunting music was recorded right in Toronto where the record was produced. In a fascinating piece of international detective work, a group of musicologists (one each from Spain, Iran, USA) searched, first in China then in Vietnam, Korea and Japan for a remaining player of the HUI TRA, an ancient Chinese three-stringed instrument (note the resemblance to the English word ‘guitar’).”7

  All the playing of the various instruments and singing were made by Snow using multi-tracking recording. As he points out, “There is also a text printed backwards, which explains the whole thing is a construct and that I played all the parts.”8 The teasing playfulness of The Last LP extends to all CCMC activities.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN:

  A NEW PAINTERLINESS

  In Michael Snow/A Survey (1970), Snow had inserted family photos that occupy a significant part of that publication. Over thirty years later, he revisited the genre of the photo album in Scraps for the Soldiers (2007). In 1978, when he became the executor of the estate of Dimple Snow, his father’s sister, he found in her flat a collection of photographs assembled from 1914 to 1921 inserted into a thirty-two-page scrapbook called Scraps for the Soldiers: Items of Interest to our Soldiers in the Great War, selected and arranged by their friends at home and published by the department store T. Eaton. Co. The title may be gender neutral but presumably most of those purchasing the album would have been the mothers, wives, and sweethearts of those serving overseas. The title implies that a person filling an album would send it to a soldier serving in England, France, or Belgium.

  However, Dimple obviously never sent it to either of her two brothers, Gerald Bradley and Geoffrey, who served in the war. Instead, she used the blank volume in which to place photos she took of friends and summer holiday spots. She may have purchased the album without any patriotic intent, seeing it merely as a conveniently sized volume to store photos. The viewer can construct a narrative by looking at the photos, but each person’s narrative will be different.

  The selection processes for these two albums are quite different. In A Survey, Snow took the opportunity to construct a family history through photographs, whereas his aunt may not have had a conscious ordering methodology. In any event, both albums were intended as pieces of non-fiction reporting, and, in both cases, a fictional process takes over because both Snow and his aunt presumably privileged some photos over others — some were obviously omitted. In the case of A Survey, some pictures are larger and thus more attention-grabbing than others.

  FIGURE 120. Michael Snow, Scraps for the Soldiers, 2007.

  In Scraps for the Soldiers, the authorial presence of Michael Snow can be seen in the introductory remarks he affixes to the first page. His aunt created the album; he preserved it. She may have been the original artist, but he is the work’s guardian angel. This project also demonstrates how important ancestry — family connections — remains for Snow.

  From 2017, Snow has been engaged in a similar project, entitled My Mother’s Collection of Photographs, that will contain over three-hundred entries. The artist explains that his mother “carefully kept the many wonderful photographs by the Lévesque and Denechaud sides of her family as well as some interesting images from the Snow side. She made many notes as to the identity of these people who were photographed, as well as the date the photo was taken, the location and the circumstances of the photograph.” These photographs, “are so beautiful and so historic that I wish to share them with others.”

  Since 1994, Snow has revisited many earlier themes, but there is a marked change in how this new material is packaged. Almost always, it returns, perhaps more directly than before, to the notion of painterliness. A good example of this is the installation The Corner of Braque and Picasso Streets (2009), which allows a view of the exterior of a building, pedestrians, and car traffic to be transmuted into cubist-like images. This work was first shown in Barcelona as a homage to the first years of cubism, created during the period in which Picasso lived in or near that city. Snow used plinths and made a wall of stacked white boxes with the fronts at various angles from the wall. Then a video camera was placed outside near the gallery and aimed at a street corner from a height of two storeys. The unaltered images of what happens on the street is then projected onto the front of the plinths, which create a geometrical, cubist-like breaking of surface pattern. For example, when someone walks across the street, they move from planar surface to planar surface.

  FIGURE 121. Michael Snow, The Corner of Braque and Picasso Streets, 2009.

  Although the fact that The Corner presents images that are broken up might be the first thing that a viewer notices about the work, this fragmentation is not the only important aspect of the piece. Central to this work is the sculptural conceit behind it. Looking at it, the viewer is aware of the segmentation but is also conscious of the various depths established by the boxes. Here again, the artist is playing with the surface of an image, and the viewer is aware of the various arrangements that have been used to fragment the image: the result looks more like a cubist sculpture than a cubist painting.

  FIGURE 122. Michael Snow, Localidade, 2011.

  Texture and surface are the principle concerns in Localidade (2011), a work reminiscent of an earlier work, Place des peaux (1998); in both, as Snow observes, coloured transparencies “are meant to be walked into.” The earlier work extends the “abstract color planes” of Morningside Heights”1 and is meant to be walked into and through. The thirty-four frames, each holding a different colour transparency, are suspended. There are two sources of illumination — spotlights in one section of the wall and another set in the opposite. “Walking amongst the work’s planes, one will experience an almost infinite variety of color mixing in the combination of projections, seeing through the transparencies themselves and the colored shadows they cast.”2 In Localidade, thirteen gels are suspended from a transparent fishing line, and two movie lights shine from one end of the gallery.

  FIGURE 123. Michael Snow, spread from Illuminations, 2012.

  In the book of illustrations Illuminations (2012), the artist’s hand holds up st
rips of small transparencies to remind the viewer of the surface of the coloured strips and their thinness. The addition of the artist’s hands reminds the reader that the artist is manipulating the strips and that the arrangement is anything but makeshift.

  These four projects are extremely painterly, especially in the use of colour values; they also play with notions of abstraction. In each, textures and colours are manipulated in ways that are reminiscent of the manner in which colours were deployed by Snow early in his career in various forms of abstract painting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:

  REPEAT OFFENCES

  There are other returns to the history of art in Snow’s later work. Repeat Offender (1986) La Revue (2006), Powers of Two (2003), and Paris de jugement Le (2003) — the latter is closely related to VUE3UV (1998) — juxtapose the artist’s twenty-first century sensibility with that of masterpieces from the late nineteenth century. Compositions by the likes of Ingres and Monet were deemed by some in their own time to be controversial because of the way in which the female nude was represented in their works. There is an obvious difference between representing the body nude and representing it naked. In the former, the aim of the work showcases the beauty and integrity of the human body; in the latter, the sexual availability of the subject is usually foregrounded.

  “Repeat Offender” is the title of a photo spread in Penthouse in July 1982. Snow reproduced these images in black-and-white in the autumn 1986 issue of Communiqué, guest edited by Elke Town; he entitled his work Repeat Offender. The piece is concerned with the interplay between mass media and appropriation. Twenty years later, in La Revue (2006), Snow framed the four magazine spreads from Penthouse so that the “centrefold roll” is emphasized. Snow’s source is pornographic: the title refers to the second appearance of the model Cami O’Conner in the magazine but it also suggests that she has masturbated repeatedly.

  FIGURE 124. Michael Snow, Repeat Offender in La Revue, 1986–2006.

  FIGURE 125. Michael Snow, Powers of Two, 2003.

  FIGURE 126. Michael Snow, Paris de jugement Le, 2003.

  FIGURE 127. Michael Snow, VUE3UV, 1998.

  Both publications received a number of complaints because readers felt that Snow’s pieces seemed merely to reproduce a piece of pornography for which the American magazine was infamous. However, when Snow photographed the colour images in black and white, he deliberately allowed the images to be grainy and slightly out of focus — and printed backwards. In inserting these four pages into Photo Communiqué, he “played (seriously) with the gesture of hiding [an] illicit magazine that you want to read inside an issue of a beyond-reproach journal, which is visible to others.”1

  There is no question that in both Photo Communiqué and La Revue the female model is the subject of the male gaze, although the woman in two instances has a defiant look. In another, she is putting on lipstick (presumably to enhance herself for the benefit of a male onlooker); in the final image, as she touches her pudenda, she seems lost in reverie. She may be thinking of having intercourse with a male partner, but that cannot be ascertained.

  Snow’s Repeat Offender not only gives this Penthouse centrefold a new incarnation, it also places it in an entirely different context. The removal of colour might suggest that the glamorization of the female subject in Penthouse is problematic, and the fact that the new images are shoddy perhaps hints that the viewer is looking at something smutty.

  However, the form of Repeat Offender goes well beyond this by calling attention to the fact that this is a mass-produced object that many people can gaze upon — that there is absolutely nothing personal in that representation. In that sense, glamour is removed from the representation of the model, and the viewer has to construct a different kind of relationship with the black-and-white photographs.

  Two readers wrote to Photo Communiqué voicing their anger about the publication of Repeat Offender. Snow was not completely dismissive of their concerns. In one reply, he wrote, “Your observation that ‘the content of art is far more important than technique’ has some sense to it, but surely you would agree that some action has to be taken in relation to some material in order that anything be made.” Here, he is subtly defending form over content, but he is also suggesting that censorship of what can and cannot be depicted is dangerous in a free society. First, he discusses the formalist issues:

  An experience of the work would include an examination of what is actually on the page. Since I feel sure you are not capable of seeing all of what’s there, we’re at odds from the beginning. The inter-relationship of actual ink-on-paper forms with the traces of what was once before the two cameras constitutes for me a pretty interesting dialogue.2

  He then turns to the issue of content:

  “Snow’s garbage delivers a clear message that women are pieces of meat to be consumed under the guise of art. This is pure exploitation.” Such a comment is rather extreme but has a certain déjà entendu quality and it sent me back again to look at what was printed, to look at the categories “garbage,” “meat,” and “exploitation” this time.3

  In arguing that the minds of beholders can see very different things, the artist is pleading for tolerance. Although he makes it quite clear that he is thoroughly familiar with critical and theoretical writings about the objectifying male gaze, he is asserting that the issue is much more complex than his detractors insist. Indeed, in Powers of Two, he investigates the female gaze and, by implication, asks how it differs from its male counterpart.

  Like Two Sides to Every Story and Cover to Cover, the colour photograph on cloth VUE3UV (1986) is a two-sided work printed on a transparent veil.* As Snow explains, this work’s title “is ideally presented with the second three-letter repeat of the sequence V U E reversed, this making a compound of view (this way and that way) with veuve (‘widow’ in French).” The spectator inspecting the work and hoping for a front view of the young woman is sorely disappointed since front and back are identical.

  The form of VUE3UV is a trap. The photograph remains a photograph: what is there is “the almost-nonexistence of the photograph or the non-existent woman.”4 In addition to rendering the erotic body paper thin, “the artist destroys the temporal lapse between the moment the shot was taken and the present, when it is seen. This confusion,” Arnaud observes, “is transferred to the naked body that seems to erupt like an apparition into the room where the observer finds himself.”5

  A different aesthetic governs Paris de jugement Le (2003), although it resembles VUE3UV in its presentation of rear views of three nudes. Here, three women are placed in front of a reproduction of Cézanne’s 183 x 244 cm The Large Bathers (1900–1906) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Snow considered the Cézanne deplete of eroticism, and he wanted to juxtapose it with the backs of the three women he considered sexually attractive.

  As Snow knew, Cézanne did paint a depiction of The Judgement of Paris, and in his title he referenced the myth wherein Paris had to decide which of the goddesses Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena was the most beautiful. He chose Aphrodite because she bribed him with Helen, the wife of Menelaus, and thus began the Trojan War. As in Venetian Blind, the view of the spectator is hindered. In the earlier work, the viewer is not able to see tourist spots; in the new work, a monumental painting is blocked from view. The spectator, put into the place of Paris, must decide whether he prefers the flesh of the three ladies or the painting — the distinction can be said to be between nude bathers and naked women.

  The immense double-sided transparency Powers of Two is composed of four panels suspended so that a viewer can easily pass from one side to another — each side is identical. The transparency allows the room in which it is hung and gallery-goers to be replicated on either side. Since the viewers are reflected in Powers, they become part of the art object and a co-conspirator with Snow in voyeuristic activity. More significantly, the viewer can look through the transparency to viewers on the other side — in this sense, the transparency is a pure image residing in re
al space.

  In a bedroom, a man, his face hidden, lies on top of a woman; the clear implication is that his penis is inside her. She looks out toward the audience. Her face seems to have a triumphal expression, but remains difficult to read. Has she somehow obtained — through her body — some sort of control over the man? That is a strong possibility. There is another conceivable reading. In place of the male gaze, we have here the female gaze: one of power and control.

  In this group of photographs, actual touching and the invitation to touch are shown. At the same time, however, Snow plays with the surfaces — the flesh — of these works: a double-sided transparency, a two-sided veil, a comparison of the skin of nude models to a reproduction. The “subject” of these compositions and their “framing” become synonymous. There are always two sides to every story.

  Snow is making a distinction between libidinal desire as a feeling and libidinal desire transferred into a work of art. The former phenomenon can be undisciplined, an expression of all kinds of conflicted, id-driven emotions; the second must be harnessed in a work of art. This dissimilarity can be made clearer by looking at the lithograph Projection (1970), a work in which a man with an erect penis grips and stands next to a WW. This image was originally intended for NYEEC and then cut out. The title can also refer to a movie projection.

  Underneath the image is this text:

  TITLE. EXCUSE. EXPLANATION. RATIONALIZATION. EQUIVALENT ANALYSIS. DEFENSE. EXTENSION. COMMENTARY (SUB-TITLE) PROJECTION OF A FRAME FROM A 1964 FILM TO A 1970 LITHOGRAPHIC PRINT. PRESENT FUCKS PAST. WHITE INKS. BLACK PAPER. LIGHT FUCKS DARKNESS. WET FUCKS DRY. SOFT FUCKS HARD. MALE CHAUVINIST PRINT. THE KING WOMAN MEATS HER MAKER. A SYMBOL MINDED EXAMPLE. CUNTLESS PRICK. PRINTS = FAKE FUCK. ENLARGEMENT ART HARD-ON/ CUT-OUT; PRESENCE MAKES ABSENCE. TOKEN, POKIN’ FLAT FUCK. ART OF LOVE, MUSE POSED. PRINTER COURSE. 16 MM 8” X 5”; 18” X 13½”; 24 X 20” LAY.