Michael Snow

by King, James;

  According to Larry Dubin, he and Michael “played together for years in Dixieland bands. We used to play free in the rhythm section sometimes.” Snow laments the outcome: “We were playing in the New Orleans format but with a Bop influence. I think it may have actually killed the band. People started to complain. They’d say, ‘Stop fooling around, you guys.’ They wanted the same old beat; it’s part of the idiom. But Mike White liked what we were doing and he switched a little bit and started to play Ellington things, more modern material. And so this band started to lose its audience.”5

  Besides playing regularly with Mike White’s band, Snow was sometimes the leader of the Michael Snow Quartet (Snow, Dubin, Forster, and Jones), which played at places like George’s Spaghetti House. Their music was in the idiom of Monk, Davis, and Parker. For its appearance in Don Owen’s National Film Board film Toronto Jazz (1963), the same group was called the Alf Jones Quartet. Much of the jazz playing was filmed at the House of Hambourg; the film also includes an interview with Snow in which he makes a distinction between his art, in which he stops time, and his music, in which he shapes it.

  Snow’s transition to more modern jazz occurred at about the same time he began his large abstract paintings, in which he produced his own modified versions of abstract expressionism’s use of the gesture. In these canvases, it can be argued, he both stopped time and shaped it. He sometimes uses the “gesture” and its accompanying “action” as seen, for instance, in Jackson Pollock, but from the outset, he modified and “tamed” it.

  Although the “gesture” that dominated the work of Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline can be glimpsed in Snow’s abstracts from 1959 to 1961, his preoccupation is more with surfaces and how colours interact with each other in the manner of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Abstract expressionism is often discussed in terms of existential anguish, but Snow’s interest remained focused on the formal qualities of these works.

  In essence, there are two basic types of abstract expressionism. There are works that highlight “the gesture” and are sometimes referred to as “action paintings.” The other variety is concerned with surface and colour values. Snow may occasionally make use of the gesture, but his preoccupation, as argued above, is often with surfaces and how colours interact with each other. In this way, he is closer to the second group. Moreover, Snow’s originality resides in his blending of these two types of abstract expressionism, or in the manner of a jazz riff, departing from and then building upon them.

  According to Snow: “About my abstract painting and sculpture of 1959–60, several different tendencies were involved, none of which were influenced by specific painters of the New York school. Rather, my works were concerned with the principles that certain New York painters were involved in making their paintings.”

  In Secret Shout, Snow deliberately “attempt[ed] to ‘frame’ or ‘tame’ gesture” in a way fundamentally different from artists such as de Kooning and Pollock.6 Here, two black forms capture the eye immediately. The one on the right can be read as the downward shaft of a penis, the one on the left as a vagina that could be penetrated. The blue rocket-like form is both phallic and orgasmic.

  FIGURE 26. Michael Snow, Secret Shout, 1960.

  The two large black forms are gestural in the sense that they are carefully contained on the canvas, although the artist has emphasized their ragged edges. The small shapes at the edge of the canvas focus the action in the centre. The black shape on the right — and its accompanying small black rectangle — are placed into a grid, another way of framing or containment.

  (When, as above, Snow employs the word “frame,” he uses it in a variety of ways. For example, it can describe a physical frame surrounding a painting. However, the term must also be seen as metaphorical. An artist or photographer can decide what to leave in or leave out of a frame and thus “frames” what he depicts. Jacques Derrida used the term “parergon” to describe a process whereby what is in the frame and what is outside it are intimately related, and that it is necessary to take this relationship into account in assessing a work of art. In a similar way, a piece of sculpture has a frame because it is a construction in which the artist decided what to put into three-dimensional space. In referring to the gesture in abstract expressionism in his own abstracts, Snow was attempting to set limits on what kind of frame he could impose on such compositions and thus establish his own individuality as an artist.)

  FIGURE 27. Michael Snow, The Drum Book, 1960.

  Another major abstract, The Drum Book, combines finely tuned brush strokes in an arrangement of nine evenly painted rectangles. The cobalt blue is so saturated that it looks black against the yellow background. Fulford suggests that the result looks like the nine blocks are held in by a powerful magnetic field. According to the same critic, Snow, in the exhibition where this painting was first shown, was becoming “more and more intellectual. There is nothing here which could be called, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘an action painting.’ Indeed, the word ‘non-objective’ seems almost irrelevant here; there are no ‘subjects,’ but certainly the painter’s stance is close to being an objective one.” He adds that The Drum Book is “totally formal … a collection of nine rectangles and squares, arranged in a close-to-perfection dynamic tension.”7

  FIGURE 28. Isaacs Gallery, 1960: (left) Blues in Place (1959); (middle) Self-Centered (1960); (right) Bracket I (1960); and Goodbye (1959) is visible, on the other wall.

  In 1960, at an out-of-town gig with Mike White’s Imperial Jazz Band, Snow roomed with the drummer, Larry Dubin. As the artist recalls, “He practised a lot, often just with drumsticks on his knee or a pillow. He had with him a book of drumming exercises. The layout of a page of illustrations in this book — nine rectangular photos — caught my attention. Back in my studio in Toronto I used this layout as the basis for The Drum Book.”8

  In the instance of Blues in Place, the name of this work also provides an excellent way of understanding it. The various areas of blue and black can be read as musical notes that form the pictorial equivalent of the blues, that mode of Afro-American jazz that uses a call-and-return pattern. Blue notes (or “worried notes”), usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are an essential part of the sound. Snow was fully aware of this genre from his time in various bands and had a great deal of experience playing the blues in both its melancholic and raucous forms. Such music must be grounded “in place,” since they contain notes and passages that diverge markedly from each other to allow improvisation to take place.

  On the canvas, the five passages in blue contrast sharply in shape with each other but are held tenuously together by the grid lines that occupy the centre of the composition. Two passages in black contrast with those in blue. The forms at the top and bottom are not connected to this grid; a horizontal shape occupies a space between the middle of the canvas and the right side of it, in what Snow would call a constructed gesture, one that comes as close as he ever does to gestural painting in the tradition of de Kooning and Pollock. This painting can be read as an attempt by Snow to visualize a form of jazz.

  The masterful Lac Clair is one of the most personal works in Snow’s canon. The greens and blues that fill most of the canvas are painted with various levels of intensity and the resultant layers on the surface immerse the viewer in its world. The four pieces of adhesive tape place a border on the inner world of the painting; in fact, they frame it. The result is a contrast between the rich texture of the blues and greens and the prosaic adhesive tape. As in nature, a body of water is enclosed. Lac Clair, the site of the Lévesque family cottage, is where Snow as a child spent many happy moments.

  When the painting was first exhibited, Paul Duval labelled it, somewhat dismissively, as “Snow’s flat blue area of canvas … unbroken except for four short lengths of brown paper stuck to the corners.”9 Elizabeth Kilbourn, on the other hand, was very appreciative of what Snow was doing. “The two-dimensional quality of the canvas is explored by the simplicity of the me
dium and calls into play the space around it to complete the image.… By the very allusiveness of the painting, it accretes to itself a new constellation of images.”10

  FIGURE 29. Michael Snow, Lac Clair, 1960.

  Although their art shows limited points in common, Snow’s career trajectory is similar to that of his near contemporary Jasper Johns, who in 1954–55, in Flag and White Flag, took contemporary art in a new direction. Like Snow, Johns was concerned with framing and surface. Flag, an encaustic, oil and collage on canvas, seems to be a reproduction of the American flag, but the heavily textured surface gives it an eerie, otherworldly presence. The image may look like the American flag, but its surface causes the viewer to consider the nature of what is being represented. This point is made even more strongly in the huge three-panelled White Flag, encaustic and collage on canvas, in which the existence of the flag, drained of its traditional colours, gives it the appearance of the ghost of a flag and thus bestows upon it a much more otherworldly presence than Flag.

  Like Snow, Johns, although he has remained mainly a painter, is relentless in moving his art in new directions. From 1958 to 1961, works such as Numbers in Color established him as an artist who not only questioned the use of the abstract expressionist gesture (he sometimes painted in short, delicate brush strokes), but also as someone who displayed a fascination with the synaesthesia that can be established in the use of numbers/letters. He later combined abstraction with objects (including photographs of his face) in the mid-sixties; and there are the cross-hatch and collage-based paintings from the 1980s. Snow’s fascination with the surface of a canvas is readily evident in Green in Green.

  The intersection in the work of Snow and Johns is best discerned in how they interrogate the nature of art and ask many questions about what constitutes a work of art. The other common dominator joining them is the way in which rigorous intellectualism is married to strong emotional commitment. Both foreground ontology, but they each insert a portion of their inner lives into their work. Each has a philosophical turn of mind generated by strong emotional forces.

  Another aspect of Snow’s work can be foregrounded. The intimate connection between Snow’s music and his art is one that Robert Fulford recognized. For him, this artist is a “romantic painter.… Lately this emotionalism has been joined in a work by a special fluidity. Many of his paintings, even the still-lifes, are essays in motion; at times the canvases seem to be caught in the act of changing into something else.”11 In 1958, he observed, when reviewing the artist’s second one-man show, that Snow’s art was unique “mainly by the fact that so much happens in it. His pictures are never still; they move … in sharp, jerky, irregular rhythms. Yet there is never a hasty feeling about them … he manages to assert a style all his own, and this is surely a statement that can be said about only a few abstract painters.”12 Elizabeth Kilbourn voiced a similar opinion: “Like experimental jazz, Michael Snow’s work is ‘cool.’ The classical underpinnings are never denied; the formal structure is firm and sure but [it is] stripped down to the absolute essentials.”13

  FIGURE 30. Michael Snow, Green in Green, 1960.

  For Snow, visual art and music occupied his daily existence. From 1958 to 1962, he had an established routine: he slept in the morning, worked on his art in his studio during the afternoon, and played with Mike White’s band in the evening.

  From the beginning of his career as an artist, one aspect shines through. Snow is and remains an extremely cerebral artist. Fellow artist Dennis Burton was flabbergasted when his friend confided in him “that he gets images in his mind, creates an image and thinks about it — and while thinking about it, eliminates everything that is not important, ending up with the simplest possible statement he could make.”14 This type of image-making typifies the artist’s entire career: in addition to looking with his eyes, he creates intellectually. The push in this direction may have been assisted by his knowledge that his father had lost his eyesight.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  DRAWN OUT

  Snow’s first solo exhibition at the Greenwich Art Gallery in October and November 1956 included the sculptures Three Chairs, The Table, and Metamorphosis — Chair. Also on display were four nudes à la mode of de Kooning and the monumental, lushly beautiful Seated Nude (Red Head). On that occasion, Robert Fulford claimed that the artist “has a huge capacity to absorb human shapes and reproduce them in significant and moving form. This may indeed be the most impressive of his several talents.”1 Pearl McCarthy, in the Globe and Mail, was not taken with what she saw: “Too clever by half and without cohesion.”2

  The two critics were probably responding, in very different ways, to the female figures (two Reclining Figures, Enchanted Woman, Seated Nude, and Unseated Figure) done in photo dyes on paper collage on board. (John Martin had introduced this technique to his pupil.)

  Photo dyes were intended for use in tinting or colouring black-and-white photos. They were available with the various coloured pigments on a paper backing and were used exactly as one would use watercolours. Inspired by de Kooning and Conrad Marca-Relli, Snow cut out the forms rather than drawing them on canvas. The resulting images may bear more than a passing resemblance to Arshile Gorky’s work, such as Water of the Flowery Mill (1944), but in technique they look very much like the figurative-abstracts of de Kooning, such as Gotham News, or Marca-Relli’s Odalisque.

  FIGURE 31. Michael Snow, Metamorphosis — Chair, 1955.

  FIGURE 32. Michael Snow, Colour Booth, 1959.

  FIGURE 33. Michael Snow, Seated Nude (Red Head), 1955.

  FIGURE 34. Michael Snow, Seated Nude, 1955.

  “They [Metamorphosis, Three Chairs, and The Table],” Robert Fulford, a jazz aficionado, argued, “fit neatly and consistently into the style Snow has lately maintained, a style that is almost never static and implies motion, some sort of motion, in almost every [way, one of these] sculpture[s] contain a special sort of excitement, a kind of refined joy. [Metamorphosis] shows a chair that is warped and twisted but still very much a chair. It appears to be in the process of changing into something else — a girl, say, or a bathtub.”3

  Two years later, at Snow’s second one-man show, the centre of attention was nine large abstracts; similar canvases were front and centre at the third and fourth solo shows in 1960 and 1961, although some “foldages” were on display at the latter. Snow’s abstracts from 1959 to 1961, as discussed in chapter six, are influenced by abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction, but he creates very individual responses to those two movements.

  Snow’s mother always attended her son’s openings. A thin, gaunt, and blind Bradley came once to one of the shows at the Isaacs. He came by himself, with his white cane, and walked up to inspect the surface of one of the canvases. Michael told him how touched he was that he had made it to the exhibition. Bradley turned to his son, “That’s a nice colour, Brother. Jesus Christ! Fuck!” That moment has always stuck with Snow: the memory of the blind man finding a way to tell his son he admired his work.

  At the Isaacs’s Sculptures by Painters show held October to November 1961, the artist showed Quits, Shunt, Window and A Day — the latter is a free-standing ladder-like construction, but the spaces between the various rungs create frames; both Quits and Shunt inhabit two spaces — like canvases, they inhabit the walls against which they rest, but they also live on the floor.

  Window is meant to be viewed from both sides; in this way, it calls attention to its framing while at the same time inviting the viewer to ponder the various elements contained on the ledge of the frame, hanging within the frame, stretching across the frame, and resting on top of the frame. Window may be a sculpture, but it also invites being looked at as if it were a double-sided two-dimensional image.

  FIGURE 35. Marie-Antoinette and Michael Snow at opening of exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery.

  Quits and Shunt can be read, in their various ways, as responses to Clement Greenberg’s insistence in “Modernist Painting” that every form mu
st find an intrinsic way of inhabiting its physical existence. (The American critic’s pronouncements on this score had been articulated in 1961 and were well known to anyone with an interest in contemporary art.) A painting had to be concerned with surface values — its confinement to two dimensions had to be pronounced and had to privilege surface rather than depicting three-dimensional space. Snow had already shown such a commitment in his abstract paintings. In the same way, he realized, sculpture had to do the same. Snow’s aesthetics were congruent with Greenberg’s on the relationship between works of art and two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.

  FIGURE 36. Michael Snow, Quits, 1960.

  The sculptor Donald Judd was struggling with the same problem in his work at the same time, although Snow was not then aware of Judd’s work. The American artist created simple, minimalist forms to depict the three-dimensional reality of sculpture. In order to avoid the representational tradition, he wanted his pieces to exist in their own environments, and he fashioned them from geometric forms produced from industrialized, machine-made materials that removed evidence of the artist’s touch. Such sculptures are anti-Romantic in that they remove evidence of the existence of their creators and move away from the kinds of representation that had dominated sculpture.

  FIGURE 37. Michael Snow, Shunt, 1960.