by King, James;
This piece of writing is meant to look jumbled — almost as if it is composed helter-skelter. This not the situation, however. The text makes links between NYEEC and the lithograph, between complex and simple-minded symbols, between sex acts and printing processes, between male power and female power. The lithograph, however, privileges its image over its words because the image is enacted in a way that subsumes the text into a simply stated but visceral representation of sexual desire.
Two decades earlier, in 1979, Amy Taubin, in writing about the WW and also about Two Sides to Every Story (1974), was acerbic:
[T]here is only one side to this story. It is the story of male dominance and female submission. It is not ‘every’ story but the particular story that is told by male artists in their representations of women. For 40 minutes the filmmaker gives orders to a young woman.… She aims to please. And although she is instructed to carry this colored sheet here and that one there, the principal object displayed is her person … [the film] is a sexist one-liner. Its gestures towards formalism cannot disguise the reactionary and offensive story it tells.**6
Taubin’s point is well argued, but it must be noted that Snow is interested in examining the dynamics in male-female relationships and is quite capable of showing himself (and other men) as the victims of their own lustful desires. In such exchanges, women often find ways of obtaining control. In this sense, the artist simply depicts a reality: the shifting balance of power in the battle of the sexes.
Taubin’s comment on Two Sides was voiced when the film was shown as part of the Re-Visions exhibition at the Whitney in the autumn of 1979. In Flash Art, Jonathan Crary concentrated on the film’s revolutionary achievements, particularly its “Janus-like three-dimensionality”:
Even though [this piece is] a self-reflexive meditation on the making of a film, it contains a surplus content; as in his other work, Snow delivers more than he seems to promise. Within the flow of his structural discourse are narrative elements that can be read as veiled self-portrait. On one side of the screen we see Snow seated, impassive like a magus, giving instructions which his assistants execute. He faces the other camera like a chess player taking on both sides of his game, responding to each of his moves with a countermove, like a man trying to outfit his own image in a mirror.7
John Locke in Parachute commented on other aspects of the film’s formalist achievements: “Another director might have made two dull films using this set up, but not Snow. The action between the cameras is precisely organized so that the experience … is amazingly rich.” He was also taken with the film’s commentary on surface and framing — the “strongest, most lucid statement about the two-dimensional existence of screen images that I have seen.”8
Snow’s fascination with the notion that “there are two sides to every story” can be seen in the photograph Imposition (1976), where he placed four horizontal images one over the other and then displayed them vertically. The first shows an empty alcove, in the second a sofa has been added to the alcove, in the third a naked man and woman sit on the sofa, and in the fourth the same man and woman are clothed. The title refers to two impositions: spectators must tilt their heads to view the image. In image 4, the man and woman tilt their heads, perhaps because they are viewing the horizontal image of themselves in images 1 to 3, in the same direction as the viewer.
As Jean Arnaud has pointed out, this process is even more complicated:
FIGURE 128. Michael Snow, Imposition, 1976.
There is first an imposition on the viewer to emulate the characters in order to see the photograph in the right direction, for it is installed vertically. Thus both the characters in the image and the viewers tilt their heads. Second, the reflective glass that covers Imposition hangs slightly in front of the photograph, and the reflection of the viewer remains the final superimposed image. You see yourself imitating the two young adults, in and in front of the box, in and [in] front of the photographic space. When you stand before Imposition, you no longer know who’s imitating whom: the image stares at you, but the emulation seems to be reversed, and reality surpasses fiction. In this baroque work, seeing means activating the image in ways other than through looking: the viewer moves in space in order to move through time by crossing through the mirror.9
Of course, the reflection of the viewer is a key element in an earlier work, Authorization, but in Imposition, when the four layers are placed one on top of the other, they are difficult to distinguish, and, so, they compete for attention. As the eye tries to separate the four and isolate one, the ghostly images of the other three impede any such attempt. Snow has argued that painting can have a similar layering, although he acknowledges that photography more readily lends itself to this kind of procedure.
Another technique in imposition is used in the gallery installation video SSHTOORRTY (2005). The title refers to the layering of the word “short” over the word “story.” The incident depicted is fairly straightforward: a man (an artist) arrives at an apartment and presents the woman who answers the door with a painting; the couple walk into the room where the husband is; the artist hangs the picture on the wall, whereupon the husband says he will drink to the painting but not to the artist. When the artist asks why, the husband says that he is aware that the artist has been “fooling around” with his wife. “That’s more than you’re doing,” retorts the artist. The angry husband throws wine on the face of the artist, who, turning, removes the painting from the wall and hits the husband over the head with it. The artist, followed by the upset wife, goes to the door and exits.
FIGURE 129. Michael Snow, still from SSHTOORRTY, 2005.
There had been latent narrative in some of Snow’s earlier films, but here he decided to make a film that told a story. The surprise here is that the film, as shot and edited, was cut in half and the two imposed on the other. This doubling is looped and can be viewed repeatedly. “As the work becomes more purely artifice — a construction — and less a ‘real narrative event,’ Snow observes, “it becomes what ‘really’ is.”10 Of course, what really is remains unstable and, in a sense, unknowable.
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* Shade (1979), the large black-and-white transparency (122 x 107 centimetres), is similar in methodology.
** It was part of the Re-Visions exhibition (the first show at that gallery devoted solely to film and video; it included six artists).
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE:
RESHAPING FRAGMENTS
The digital Betacam video Corpus Callosum (2001) is about another kind of transformation and, as Snow puts it, is “a tragicomedy of cinematic variables.”1 This piece is also about shaping. The corpus callosum is the central area in the brain that passes messages between the two hemispheres. This is an appropriate title because this film is about binaries in which “real” people are shown: what they see and what the audience sees shifts. The film has two main characters, male and female, and the film features a series of tableaux in which these two are depicted in various guises.
This animated film reminded the critic John Pruit of Snow’s very first film: A to Z. He also saw the film “reaching back” — an approach opposite to the forward zoom in Wavelength. In speaking about “The Living Room,” a twenty-minute portion of Corpus, he pointed out that, reminiscent of Wavelength, “there will eventually be a metal chair and images that recall Snow’s early Walking Woman series.”2 He also linked “The Living Room” to van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) and Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). “All three works portray full figures within a room and all have on the rear wall a small mirror which gives us a glimpse of the reverse view.”3
One observer has pointed out that Corpus continued the artist’s “exploration of the nature of mind and perception, this time focusing on the ways the brain manipulates information to create images. Here, he worked with a computer programmer to generate images of people in a Toronto office that stretch, squeeze, distort and randomly vanish.” Snow has also observed: “Corpus Callosum actually
ends with a little sketch I did when working at Graphic Films in 1955 … so in a way it was a return to animation.”4
FIGURE 130. Michael Snow, still from Corpus Callosum, 2001.
There are more instances of Snow shaping and reshaping the history of painting. In D’abord Alcibiade et puis … (1996), Snow took a photograph of an unfinished painting by Jacques Réattu (1760–1833) in the museum in Arles that bears the artist’s name. The museum is located in a small back street of Arles and was originally the Grand Priory of the Knights of the Order of Malta.
There are various accounts of how the Greek statesman Alcibiades died. According to Plutarch, assassins surrounded the villa in Phrygia where the Greek hero was living with his mistress; the residence was set on fire and seeing no chance of escape, Alcibiades, dagger in hand, confronted his assassins and was killed by a shower of arrows. Réattu shows the aftermath of his subject’s death.
According to legend, the legs of the fallen hero were painted in about 1868 by Elizabeth Grange, the painter’s daughter and heir. If this is true, she must have decided to leave the left-hand side of the painting incomplete. Snow filled in some of the unfinished, sketched-in portions — the negative space behind one of the figures, a horse blending into the dome of a helmet, the curve of muscle on a soldier’s torso. In amplifying the painting, he paid close attention to the French artist’s colour values (especially the reds) and the shapes devised by his predecessor but he added an “abstract” element in the manner he made his alterations. “I’m glad you asked about this one,” he once told a journalist. “Because I lived through the age of abstract painting, I could see it in a way Réattu couldn’t.”5 In other words, Snow could conceive of a new way to finish the painting that the nineteenth-century artist could not.
FIGURE 131. Michael Snow, D’abord Alcibiade et puis …, 1996.
Like Réattu’s daughter, Snow completed only a portion of what was unfinished; he then photographed the resulting image in the way the painting hangs in the gallery. He then photographed the resulting image off-centre so that the viewer “sees” what does not exist: the “completed” framed painting hanging in a gallery; the product is a digital photograph that is framed, but the outer and inner frames are at variance with each other. The resulting work changes the essential nature of the surviving painting by enhancing it in a way that does not exist at Arles. The viewer is also looking at a photograph of a photograph of a painting. Where, the artist asks, does the “reality” of this object exist?
Related to Mort is an early work Times (1979), a work as elaborate as Mort. For the earlier work, Snow painted an abstract. This photograph shows that framed painting hanging on a white wall. Unlike a photograph in an exhibition catalogue, the floorboards occupy a substantial amount of space at the bottom of the image; the abstract is deliberately at variance with the photograph, which is placed in a wooden frame.*
The pattern made by the planks of wood in Times echoes three patches of colour in the background of the abstract. There are other instances of the manipulation of surface in this image: in the photograph, the painting seems to float above the floor and, as it does so, it leaves its shadow on the white wall and the floorboards. At the centre of the abstract is a transparent grey square that seems to reside spatially in front of the three shapes behind it.
One commentator has suggested that the “made-to-fit painting” and floor motif “not only echo each other but are also rendered in importance, a gesture that challenges the primacy of painting as a medium in the field of representation.… More abstract than representational, Times presents a highly cerebral exercise to the viewer, as decoding each layer of the composition brings a new level of awareness how visual perception operates.”6
The photograph is even more complex than suggested above because the abstract painting purpose-made for this photograph was very small (about 20 x 25 centimetres) and all the other components in the resulting image are in proportion to it. However, the photograph gives the impression of a large abstract painting hanging in the gallery. There is a further complexity: the centre square of the abstract is at variance with the outward frame and so the resulting image is lopsided.
FIGURE 132. Michael Snow, Times, 1979.
What Mort and Times share is Snow’s propensity to question the status of the works of art he creates. In Times, he deliberately compares the reality of the abstract to the reality of photography. The attempt is not to privilege one over the other as much as to show the connections between the two. He never forgets his commitment to painting and his wish to infuse his photographs with painterly qualities, and Mort amply demonstrates the artist’s abiding love for painting as a genre.
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* Martha Langford has suggested that the off-kilter technique may be indebted to Malevich in a composition such as Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (1915), where the lack of confinement of the red — its ability to extend into the white — gives it far more power than if it was simply positioned neatly against the white.
CHAPTER THIRTY:
NEW-FOUND THINGS
In the summer of 2017, at Toronto’s Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, four early videos by Snow were shown as a unit in a work entitled Newfoundlandings. (The title suggests that the artist is a stranger who has landed in Newfoundland; it also refers to the fact that all four pieces — Sheeploop [2000], Solar Breath [Northern Caryatids] [2002], Condensation [A Cove Story] [2009], and In the Way [2011] — investigate land from varying perspectives.) This installation, undertaken by Prefix in co-operation with the artist, provides a new context in which to view these four pieces and, in the process, reimagines and reinvents them.
The no-sound, fifteen-minute Sheeploop is, as the artist observes, classically pastoral, much in the manner of a painting by Constable. Snow set up his video camera on a tripod quite distant from the grazing animals who move in and out of the frame. Then, the lead sheep walks casually out of the frame and then back into it. After that, the entire flock slowly follows its leader out of frame and thus create a perfect “organic loop.” The sixty-two minute Solar Breath records a phenomenon the artist has witnessed only a few times in thirty years at his remote Newfoundland cabin:
Near sunset the wind blows the single curtain on a window in the room, each time with varying style and force and then, mysteriously, sucks the curtain back to make it smack against the pane of a nonexistent window (or at least a non-visible window, because the window appears to be open). Each time the curtain slaps loudly … it stops, and stays still, for surprisingly long periods of time. Each time it does so a different beautiful static composition of folds is manifested, hence the caryatids in the title.1
These compositions are, of course, forms of the gesture in painting — and are equivalents to the broad strokes one finds in a Pollock.
The ten-minute Blu-ray projection Condensation also highlights the weather near Snow’s cabin by showing giant cliffs descending to the sea. The title refers to the fog, mist, rain, and clouds that constantly shift and change; it also indicates the condensed use of time.
FIGURE 133. Michael Snow, still from Sheeploop, 2000.
FIGURE 134. Michael Snow, still from Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids), 2002.
FIGURE 135. Michael Snow, still from Condensation (A Cove Story), 2009.
Hundreds of sequences were shot using a digital camera with a time-lapse mechanism attached, which had the camera, for instance, taking a picture every ten seconds. The most interesting of these sequences were computer-assisted to become twenty-four projected frames per second. The sequences were also composed to dissolve from one to the other, in the same way the actual weather events do.2
The twenty-three-minute In the Way (2011) is projected onto the floor and shows a rocky, muddy road that gradually gives way to wild grasses and flowers; the camera moves at varying speeds and invites the viewer to travel with it and, in a sense, join it on its journey.
Sheeploop is quiet, reflective an
d serene; the same can be said for Solar Breath, although the sound of the curtain hitting the frame is present — in fact, the sound creates its own irregular, pleasing rhythm. The manipulated transitions in Condensation provide the viewer with a series of awe-inspiring views of the collisions between the weather elements and the sky and the mountains — the effect is similar to looking at a series of Turners (as opposed to the Constable-like Sheeploop). The action in In the Way is frenetic — this is a very high-intensity promenade.
These pieces represent very different “takes” on the rugged Newfoundland landscape. (In that sense, they share an affinity with La Région Centrale — all five works can be said to be investigations of the Canadian Wilderness.) At the installation in Toronto, Sheeploop was by itself in an anteroom. The gallery in which the other three works were shown is arranged so that a member of the audience enters a large gallery where Solar Breath is placed on the extreme right corner with some chairs in front of it. The clear invitation is to sit there. Once in place, In the Way is in back of the viewer, who must turn around to look at it. Immediately, two actions are in conflict — the slow pacing of one work versus the quick speed of the other. Then, the viewer looks across to the left side of the room to view a large screen where a variety of painterly, sublime landscapes merge slowly and majestically into each other.
