by King, James;
Later, Snow came to admire Judd’s work, but the similarities between the two remain limited to the fact that both were trying, in different ways, to construct sculptural objects that allude simply and directly to their physical existences in space.
FIGURE 38. Michael Snow, Window, 1960.
Using similar ideas but with different results, Snow created in Quits and Shunt sculptures that join the wall to the floor (or the floor to the wall). In another similar subject, A Day, the framed spaces in the “ladder” invite comparison to traditional two-dimensional picture areas, while at the very same time this construction is the abstract three-dimensional form of a ladder.
Snow also found a way to make sculpture-like works in his foldages. From 1936 to 1954, Matisse made a wide assortment of cut-outs, or as he put it, “carvings into colour.” The results are textured because some pieces of paper are glued on top of others. In 1960, the Hungarian-born French artist Simon Hantaï began making his own pliage (folding). Although there is some connection between the work of those artists and Snow’s foldages, in truth, his work bears little resemblance to theirs.
FIGURE 39. Michael Snow, Window, 1960.
In the eyes of Robert Fulford, the foldages were an important breakthrough for the artist:
The form is a sort of painting-and-sculpture combination — painting, because it is framed and because paint is used; paper, because the paper juts out from the basic surface. The most important aspect of all this is that it introduces into Snow’s work an element of romantic fantasy that has rarely appeared before. In a sense, it throws together and synthesizes all those elements — intellectual, comic, sensual — which have been important in Snow’s painting and drawing up to now.… [In these works] Snow is reclaiming and asserting the values of adult play in art.4
FIGURE 40. Michael Snow, Blue Monk, 1960.
Snow moved easily between figurative and abstract work, between painting and sculptures/foldages. Done at the very outset of his career, for example, Colin Curd and Blue Panel are masterful opposites. Then there are the figurative nudes constructed with photo dyes on paper collage on board. These were followed by the sculptures of tables that seem to exist in a state between the inanimate and the animate. Some of the paintings of tables and chairs from 1957 are representational (Table and Chairs No. 1); others have more abstract existences (Table Life).
FIGURE 41. Michael Snow, Table Life, 1954.
FIGURE 42. Michael Snow, Drawn Out, 1959.
FIGURE 43. Michael Snow, Drawn Out, 1959.
Drawn Out (1959) is a series of portraits done at the same time as the abstracts Notes from the Underground and Blues in Place. Inspired by a newspaper photograph of James Grierson, a convicted murderer, Snow made twenty-one charcoal drawings of his subject, depicting him using a variety of approaches: representational, cubist, cartoon-like, and so on. There is an additional drawing of the victim. The title is, of course, a pun: one photograph has been drawn out to twenty-one drawings.
Snow later recalled that he went through periods of “try this, try that,”5 and his successes came in a wide variety of ways. The sculptures Quits and A Day are ladder-like constructions, whereas Shunt is more abstract. The foldages Blue Monk and Blews are abstract, whereas the foldage White Trash is slightly more representational.
Years later, reflecting on Snow, Fulford remembered he found the artist “stimulating but also frustrating: he wanted attention, but he didn’t want to be entirely understood. He knew that critics were essential in some way, but he didn’t trust our assumptions that we could tell the public what was going on. ‘I’m interested in doing something that can’t be explained.’” Fulford also correctly placed the abstract paintings in perspective: “The habit of most artists, as abstract painting grew popular, was to show together some fifteen or twenty paintings on the same theme. [Contrary] to this, Snow was capable of producing a dozen paintings that reflected a dozen different ideas.”6
Often overlooked in assessing Snow’s early career is his brief flirtation with Marcel Duchamp and Dada. In the spring of 1961, Joyce and Michael, along with the Dada scholar Michel Sanouillet, travelled to London, Ontario, to participate, at the invitation of the event’s instigator, Greg Curnoe, in Canada’s first “Happening,” held on the second floor of the London Public Library and Art Museum, an event that left the venue in shambles. This Dada-inspired show was followed by the Dada exhibition that ran at the Isaacs Gallery from December 20, 1961, to January 9, 1962.
FIGURE 44. Michael Snow, Blews, 1960.
This show, organized by the artist Richard Gorman, included work by Curnoe, Burton, Gorman, Wieland, Arthur Coughtry (the photographer brother of Graham), Rayner, and Snow, who contributed nine pieces: Newspaper, Window (apparently the only piece by Snow surviving from this exhibition), Cézanne, Moe Lester Scholarship, Walking Woman, Fifty Dollars (this piece of currency was for sale at seventy-eight dollars), Thelonius Monk at the Blackhawk, Bag-Walking Woman, and Central One Hour Cleaners. In retrospect, Snow feels that the only major work of his that can be linked directly to Duchamp or neo-Dadaism is Window, where the pieces in and surrounding the frame are found objects.
The spirit of creative energy and freedom of Duchamp and Dada may have fascinated Snow, but he did not, like Curnoe, create work directly from such influences. In a very general way, however, his art, like Duchamp’s, was in the service of the mind, as opposed to the purely “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye, which the French artist castigated. What Duchamp inspired in Snow was a commitment to exploring the intellectual underpinnings of art and to questioning accepted notions of what constituted a work of art.
FIGURE 45. Neo-Dada show. 1961. Av Isaacs is seated in the centre with a flight attendant standing next to him. On the floor are, from left to right, Greg Curnoe, Joyce Wieland, and Michael Snow. Standing, left to right, are Dennis Burton, Richard Gorman, and Arthur Coughtry.
Of central importance to the neo-Dada exhibition in Snow’s career were the first showings of two now-lost Walking Woman (hereafter WW) figures: Walking Woman and Bag-Walking Woman.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
A LOT OF NEAR MRS.
The WW figures emerge from various parts of the artist’s practice. He wished to move forward from the “surface” abstracts painted between 1959 and 1961; he also wanted to return to the figurative tradition. For him, abstract expressionism had become a blind alley. One day he constructed a cut-out of a figure jumping out a window and the space that left set an idea glimmering. He began to puzzle out ways of painting within this contour. He puts the process this way: “Depending on how you look at it, a shape can sometimes appear to be going deeper into the painting, like a hole, or it can appear to be coming out of the canvas. I was noticing these things in my abstracts and I got the idea to experiment with works that were just figures.”1
From 1953 to 1958, representations of the female nude form constituted a significant part of Snow’s output. The artist’s amorous sensibility can be glimpsed in a text he wrote in 1958, “Something You Might Miss,” which begins, “There’s this place in women or some women I guess.… Imagine a woman (any woman or possibly one you know) with no skirt on (I hope I can make this clear) at the very top of the legs between each leg the start of the body.”2
Seated Nude (Red Head) from 1955 is both sensual and sensuous. There is a luxuriant feeling to this canvas that was first exhibited, shortly after it was completed, at the CNE in August–September 1955; the artist then submitted it to The Winnipeg Show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery that November. Much more sumptuous in its use of colour than either Reclining Figure or Seated Figure, it is also more representational than those other two works and much less de Kooning–like. Dennis Reid describes the work:
the woman seems over life-size “as she swells up to almost fill the canvas, her opalescent body the sheen of mother-of-pearl, her wiry red hair vibrating in contrast to the green upholstered chair. Then the force of that presence begins to take over. That it is a phy
sical presence is underlined by the lack of facial features, by the lack, in fact, of all but the most rudimentary articulations of the details of the body. The blend of pulsating pinks, blues, peaches, greens, yellows and whites that appear to hover like a local atmosphere off the surface of the body seems to absorb our gaze.”3
Thinking back to the figure collages he had made in 1955 that were inspired by Conrad Marca-Relli and de Kooning, he realized that the WW is “the daughter of these early collages as it was cut out of cardboard using the same type of ‘mat’ or ‘Exacto’ knife as the collages and ‘drawing’ the same kind of forms.”4
In 1961, Snow created the collage January Jubilee Ladies. It was then, as he recalls, he realized that he could cut out a complete figure-shape that did not have any background. This realization about the form of the WW may have also come to him in part when he was working on Seated Nude (Red Head) in 1955.
The WW is, like Red Head, both representational and abstract. There is a clear distinction in this oil between the nude and the background from which she emerges, and the original WW figure is cut out from cardboard.
Snow has a vivid recollection about the origins of January Jubilee Ladies: “In 1961, I reconsidered [some earlier collages] … and in a [reminiscent] mood made January Jubilee Ladies, a somewhat Matissean collage in which I used paper I found in my studio, a former storage space for a retail store. The title was written on one of those pieces of paper.”5
FIGURE 46. Michael Snow, January Jubilee Ladies, 1961.
This huge collage contains a wide variety of colours — red, blue, white, various ochres. It does not resemble Matisse’s cut-outs as much as it recalls, as Dennis Reid suggests, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon.6 The sensuousness of the floating female forms and the deliberate crudity in the use of collage bestow upon this monumental work sexuality reminiscent of the Spanish artist’s celebrated rendition of the five prostitutes. There is the strong possibility that Snow was alluding directly to Picasso’s masterpiece, since Snow’s gouache-collage contains five female figures and the spatial arrangement of the women in each painting is similar.
This is the background to the WW. Snow made some cardboard-cut figures (one was of a jumping woman). Then, one day, he drew a figure of a walking woman on a 152 x 228 cm cardboard rectangle and then cut the figure out with a mat knife. He realized that “both the positive figure and its negative shape were repeatable, that one could draw or paint around the shapes to make ‘a copy.’”7 At first the “reproductions” were of the 152-centimetre-tall positive figure and its negative outline.* Then came variations in different sizes and formats.
FIGURE 47. Michael Snow with a jumping figure cut-out and Green in Green, 1962.
FIGURE 48. Original Walking Woman cut-out on Michael Snow’s studio wall, 1961.
In most of these works, the WW figure is framed: the top of her head is sliced off, her feet are not represented, and parts of her arms are not visible. These sharp edges stylize the WW and remind the viewer that she may participate in the representational tradition but that she is — and remains — an artifact upon which various surfaces can be imposed. She may well reference Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Stair No. 2 (1912), which is a depiction of a woman walking.
In discussing a WW figure, Snow always references it as an “it,” “because the Walking Woman is a cut-out, not a woman. It may be the representation of a female form, but it’s not a woman.” He is also quite clear why the hands, feet, and top of her head have been lopped off: “It seems more a doll when all the parts are there. The cropping indicates that it’s come out of a rectangle. I like that it shows that the cut-out has a relationship to painting and drawing; that it’s been extracted from a two-dimensional object and placed in a three-dimensional world.”8
(During a visit to Snow’s studio, Don Franks, the host/narrator of Toronto Jazz, grabbed a Walking Woman cut-out, turned her on her side, and then, strutting, made her into a guitar. The artist, startled by this gesture, laughed good-naturedly at Franks’s improvisation.)
This movement between dimensions is something that Snow explored in the photographs that he took of WW. At the time, Snow was not aware of any other artist such as himself making photo work. Four to Five came about, as the artist recalled, from “placing a black silhouette Walking Woman, a two-dimensional representation, in the three-dimensional world in order to make black-and-white recordings of its placement in various locations [at bus stops and in the subway in Toronto] in relation to other people and objects in view.”9 He was putting a two-dimensional form into the three-dimensional world and then returning the object into a two-dimensional photograph. In this way, the WW leaves the confines of a gallery and wanders into the real world. A bit later, she would star in a film.
Years later, in 1994, Snow recalled the inner buzz generated by his new creation:
In [its] background is this looming achievement of the history of painting, and I wanted to add to it. In a way, artists have designed characters or types — there’s a Renoir, a Modigliani.… I wanted to continue that. I wanted to make a subject for my work, and then make my subject known to people. I wanted it to be part of the scene, anywhere people walked. It was Duchamp in reverse — not found works, but lost works. It was pretty radical.… It occurred to me to make a figure that was just a figure.10
His mind, he recalled, was jumping.
Snow’s last show before leaving for New York late in 1962 was at the Isaacs, and ran from March 15 to April 3. It was devoted to thirty WW in various formats. In beholding this powerful assemblage, Fulford wrote an extremely sympathetic review that showed he had a clear understanding of where Snow was going:
Snow’s paintings have rarely shown recognizable objects or persons, but for this series he has created a central image that is both arresting and puzzling. His silhouetted woman is vulgar, like a cardboard figure standing outside a burlesque house, or a character in an old-fashioned comic strip. She exists in two dimensions only; there is not even a hint that she might have substance.
This is a clue to the artist’s intentions. He apparently wanted, for these pictures and assorted curiosities, an image that would remove his work from total abstraction and yet not interfere with the picture making which is his real purpose.… The result of this unusual activity could be called abstract-painting-which-is-not-abstract painting. It has the impersonality, the objectivity, of the abstract picture; but on the other hand, there is the figure, large as life.11
FIGURE 49. Michael Snow, Four to Five, 1962.
In an essay written two years after the appearance of the first WW, Snow reflected on what he was trying to achieve. He linked this series to his abstracts from 1959 to 1961: “Process as subject in Pollock, De Kooning.” He also made explicit how process dominated his thoughts.
In fact, one of the best ways to understand the WW figure is to follow Snow’s lead when, on reflecting on the WW’s various manifestations, he insisted that he did not believe in representation. But then, he realized, a viewer looks at a WW and thinks: “It’s a woman!” However, the vehicle or “material” (cut-out, canvas, sculpture) in which the figure is confined may well be a “representation in its own right.” We must, therefore, he insists, “believe that it is. My ‘subject’ is the same in the ’59 and ’60 abstract paintings and sculpture, but now it is acted.”12 Despite his best efforts to avoid traditional representation, Snow is conceding that the various WW can be appreciated as figurative pieces of art.
The “acting” should allow a viewer to appreciate how the stylized figure is a perfect vehicle for all kinds of formalist inventions. The various WW were also inspired in large part by the infinite variety of improvisations that can be created by the twelve-bar blues, one of the most prominent chord progressions in jazz.
Venus Simultaneous (1962) — oil and Lucite on canvas, cardboard, and plywood — contains seven WW and is perhaps the work that most clearly brings together the various sides of Michael Snow the artist before
he left for New York City. One WW cut-out is positioned in front of the irregularly shaped canvas — like some early Snow sculptures, she inhabits the wall but her feet reach down toward the floor (the yellow passage at the very bottom of this piece provides her with light and space but also adds an abstract touch); a WW outlined in black against black shadows her; the top of the head of one WW juts out of the canvas; the figure on the left occupies positive and negative space; the outline of another juts out to the right; the blue WW on the right part of the canvas is complimented by the black-outlined blue on the left; the strong but carefully controlled blue and black brush strokes applied to all the figures and on the canvas are reminiscent of how Snow painted his abstracts from 1959 to 1961. This cut-out, sculpture, and oil piece displays much of what the artist had accomplished at an early age.
FIGURE 50. Michael Snow, Venus Simultaneous, 1962.
This major early work clearly shows that form takes precedence over meaning because the form of a work of art is its meaning. In this sense, form is eternal; meaning becomes variable. Here, there are manifold meanings because there is an abundance of forms. In commenting on the complexity of the Snowgirl that “absorbed” him, Fulford pointed out that its ambiguities summed up Michael Snow: “[T]he use of shallow, varying space; the play of light and shadow; and the nervous, restless activity of his art, exemplified in this case by a painting which seems to be on the point of turning into sculpture.” But, he also maintained, Snow was determined to be a difficult artist: “He never stands still long enough to be acceptable. Whenever you believe you know all he has to say, he quickly changes the conversation. He is that kind of painter; the best kind.”13