Michael Snow

by King, James;

  In his columns for the Village Voice, Mekas attempted to make a link between commercial films experimental in nature (as seen, for example, in the work of Resnais, Godard, and Antonioni) and the films of the American avant-garde. This was no easy task because American audiences wanted to go to the “movies” — and most film critics chose to review only those works that corresponded to mainstream tastes. Mekas thought that viewers and critics should cast their nets wider. What about, he asked, films that could be compared on equal terms to serious works of literature?

  I don’t think a responsible movie critic can go by people’s definition of cinema. That’s why I go back to the underground. I know that the majority of you cannot see this cinema; but that is exactly the point: It is my duty to bring this cinema to your attention. I will bark about it until our theatres start showing this cinema.1

  At this time, the dominant strand in advanced cinema was of a Romantic tinge that can be glimpsed in the work of Stan Brakhage, one of the premier American experimental filmmakers. He worked in a self-expressive manner:

  The lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision. In the lyrical form there is no longer a hero; instead the screen is filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a person looking.2

  For Snow,

  Brakhage was very influential in a kind of clarifying way, because I wanted to not do what he was doing.… Of his work, I thought, he’s a great filmmaker, [but], in some ways, too personal and expressionist. I thought that the machine-ness of the camera ought to be stressed, not negated. What he did was very diaristic, personal — and I think it’s great, what he did, and that was a very avant-garde thing to realize that films don’t have to be made by a crew with a 35 mm. camera. Stan wasn’t the only person who did that, but that’s what experimental film was founded on — that one person could do it. And Stan was definitely the leader. 3

  Previously, much of Snow’s attention as an artist had been on “surfaces.” Now, he became fascinated with film as a form of artistic exploration in which the thin moving surfaces of celluloid allowed him to explore the idea of duration, of how things both exist and non-exist in time. Since he was focusing on surface in the various WW figures, it is appropriate that she appears in New York Eye and Ear Control (NYEEC) (1964); here the WW figure becomes a leading lady. Earlier, in a similar vein, she had been the centre of the photo series, Four to Five.*

  In part, the inspiration for NYEEC came from Marcel Duchamp. “Rather than choosing and taking a ‘ready-made’ from the ‘world’ and putting it in an art context, I made a ‘sign’ from within the art context and put it in the world.”4 When Joyce and Michael visited Marcel and his wife, Teeny, in their Manhattan apartment, the Frenchman agreed to appear briefly in NYEEC.

  In addition to showing the WW in a number of locations, Michael, in NYEEC, placed the figure in a series of environments in which she does a variety of things: sometimes, she is a ghostlike genius loci; in other situations, she is perceived as an outsider by the humans who encounter her. Of course, she is a flat, thin quasi-sculptural cut-out — a two-dimensional being in a three-dimensional world. As such, she is a sort of alien creature. That is part of the point — the worlds of art and of ordinary human life are separate spheres of existence. On the surface of the cinema screen, however, two- and three-dimensional forms can become equals.

  Another central component of the film is the soundtrack. Snow sought out the controversial Albert Ayler, recently returned from Europe, to record it. At first glance, this is a strange choice, since Ayler’s discordant, strident, cacophonous sound is constructed from whole timbre rather than harmony and melody. However, that is precisely why he was chosen.

  The challenging soundtrack adds an essential layer of meaning because it emphasizes the uneasy tension between art and life that is at the heart of the film. Snow recalls, “One of the elements in the story is the length of a very strong, very vocal, very spontaneous, almost wholly ‘emotional’ music.”5 The result was exactly what the artist hoped to achieve: “I wanted [the music] to co-exist with the images of the black-and-white silhouette Walking Woman, shot from mostly fixed camera positions in many different locations. ‘She’ was static, though depicted as walking: a stand-in for real women who, in a sequence in the film, were imaged through and behind the negative cut-outs of the walking figure. In this ‘movie,’ most of the motion is in the music.” Since the film was edited with no reference to the music, the result is an improvisation. The film’s first audience was appalled — many walked out.

  FIGURES 55 AND 56. Michael Snow, two stills from New York Eye and Ear Control, 1964.

  As is usually the case with Snow, he is careful in his use of words. “Control” refers to his conscious decision to place sight and sound against each other. He put it this way, he was simultaneously juxtaposing “two different animals.”6

  Michael and Joyce’s closest friend in their film world was Hollis Frampton. The couple were never introduced to the photographer, but they came across him at several film events. At this point, Frampton was a still photographer, not a filmmaker.

  Frampton’s quirky view of the world can be seen in some passages of autobiography.

  I was born in Ohio, United States, on March 11, 1936, towards the end of the Machine Age. Educated … in Ohio and Massachusetts. The process resulted in satisfaction for no one. Studied (sat around on the lawn at St. Elizabeth’s) with Ezra Pound, 1957–58.… Moved to New York in March 1958, lived and worked there more than a decade.… Began to make still photographs at the end of 1958. Nothing much came of it. First fumblings with cinema began in the fall of 1962; the first films I will publicly admit to making came in early 1966. Worked, for years, as a film laboratory technician.…

  In the case of painting, I believe that one reason I stayed with still photography as long as I did was an attempt, fairly successful I think, to rid myself of the succubus of painting. Painting has for a long time been sitting on the back of everyone’s neck like it crept into territories outside its own proper domain. I have seen, in the last year or so, films which I have come to realize are built largely around what I take to be painterly concerns and I feel that those films are very foreign to my feeling and my purpose. As for sculpture, I think a lot of my early convictions about sculpture, in a concrete sense, have affected my handling of film as a physical material.7

  Snow never saw painting as a succubus, but he was attempting to find in film and photography an alternative way of painting. Unlike Frampton, he never saw film’s painterly qualities as a hindrance to his creativity. Although Snow and Frampton had very different takes on aesthetic issues, their conversations were animated by such philosophically based ideas.

  Snow’s involvement with Frampton extended to reading the voice-over for his friend’s thirty-eight-minute film nostalgia (1971), which shows a series of black-and-white photographs being burned on a hot plate. Snow’s voice on the soundtrack comments on each photograph before it appears on screen; when a description of an image is read, it has already been burnt and the viewer is looking at another image about to be consigned to the flames. Later in his career, Snow would explore the phenomenon of burning and similar conjunctions of past and present.

  The underground film movement in Manhattan with which Snow had cast his lot was rife with controversies. Mekas was jailed for showing material deemed obscene. Andy Warhol made films with virtually no montage and replaced it with duration. Not only did such films provoke negative responses amongst the general public, visual artists generally looked contemptuously at experimental filmmaking, too. Snow, since he was both an artist and a filmmaker, was an anomaly, as he recalled: “[T]here was at that time, and still is, a separation of communities between those involved in the painting and sculpture wo
rld in whatever capacity — artist, dealer, critic, collector — and those involved in experimental film. [The audiences for film] were looked down [on as] grungy and inbred.”8

  FIGURE 57. Michael Snow in the loft at 123 Chambers Street, New York, probably September 1965.

  As Philip Glass recalls, there were exceptions to this rule: “a community of people living and working very much together … we were actively sharing the stages of our work together … we were the audiences.”9 These were the kind of people for whom NYEEC was made.

  __________________

  * There are two other early WW films: Little Walk (1964) and Short Shave (1965) made after NYEEC.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  MORE SNOWGIRLS

  Between 1961 and 1967, Snow created WW figures in a wide variety of genres. However, there are some important differences between the Toronto and New York ones. The latter respond directly to the kind of art then popular in Manhattan. Although they cannot be labelled pop or minimalist, some of the new figures teasingly appropriate elements of those genres. In other words, they show a knowledge of what was trendsetting without being seduced by it. In so doing, Snow employed the shape and surface of the WW figures to provide a critical commentary of the work being created in his new environment.

  When Michael and Joyce arrived in New York City, Andy Warhol, the doyen of pop art, had reached his apotheosis with the emergence of the Factory. In popular culture, high art had been overtaken by a charming and powerful art form often based on commercial advertisements. Elements of pop art can perhaps be glimpsed in the bright colouring of Display (1963), Hawaii (1964), Cry-Beam (1963) and Morningside Heights (1965).

  Snow’s work in these instances might justly remind the viewer of the very cerebral Roy Lichtenstein, but their source only resides in the colours used by Lichtenstein and not the ads or comic books that inspired Lichtenstein. Marjorie Harris put it this way:

  FIGURE 58. Michael Snow, Cry-Beam, 1965.

  FIGURE 59. Michael Snow, Morningside Heights, 1965.

  [M]uch of Snow’s work is an ironic comment on Pop Art: whereas the Pop Artist brings commonplace objects into the realm of art by making them larger than life … or recreating popular objects, Snow is making his Walking Woman into a popular or common object … she is lifeless and wooden, yet humanistic and full of new forms and meanings. By using this image, pushing and coaxing her into new positions, now not only gives greater meaning to his Walking Woman, but to the familiar things she touches.1

  Harry Malcolmson observed that although Snow was the “thinking man’s artist” and his work had an ivory-tower feel to it, it nevertheless had “market place manifestations. Last summer, the Coca-Cola [C]ompany ran a series of stylized, cut-out figures bearing an uncanny resemblance to Snow’s Walking Woman figure.”2 Snow had no idea how this had happened.

  On the relationship between the WW and pop art, Snow has made it very clear: his figures were manufactured objects that he placed in the everyday world. “I was working against the flow of pop art. I was doing the opposite. I wasn’t using pop culture as the starting point for my work like they [Warhol, Lichtenstein] were.”3

  In a different vein, the simple dramatic shapes of Gone (1963), Interior (1963), and Seen (1965) have some elements in common with the work of the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. At the time these works were created, Judd and Snow exchanged pieces. Snow obtained Untitled (1964), a brass and wood boxlike structure with red enamel paint.

  Ultimately, “[w]hatever else she may be, the WW is also an it — a formal emblem used to organize on a two-dimensional plane,” John Bentley Mays pointed out. Although Snow has always insisted on its origins as de Kooning-like, the WW are a series of “obsessive images” that embrace formalism, popular culture, and the Western tradition in the depiction of women.4

  The New York WW figures obviously continue a project begun in Toronto. Very much in the manner of an artist like Monet who painted the same subjects (haystacks, lily ponds) over and over, Snow searched relentlessly to make meaningful variations on the same basic subject. In the WW series, there is always figuration in the use of the basic shape, but this limitation triggered the artist’s imagination to create new variants.

  FIGURE 60. Michael Snow, Gallery, 1965.

  Gallery (1965) — oil and enamel on canvas, Masonite, and wood — is a direct commentary on the New York art world. Here, the WW figure — a painted sculpture wearing a red dress — strides before a mystical-looking late Rothko. The imitation Rothko canvas and the lady inhabit separate worlds. She, in a philistine-like way, hurries by the Rothko; the canvas is of no interest to her. The difference between the WW and the canvas is emphasized by the clash between her dress and the blue canvas.

  There are variations within variations, as can be seen in Mixed Feelings (1965) in which the WW figure appears in fifteen different outfits. The title might hint at an indecisiveness on the part of the figure: What will be the best dress to wear today?

  One of the pleasures in looking at the over two hundred WWs is to see the artist’s ability to make each figure compelling and unique. As a group, they provide the viewer the pleasure of seeing how a single artist can make eye-catching variants on the same shape and surface.

  There are also the WW “Lost Works.” These came into being when the artist used rubber stamps of various sizes of the original outline. These were also constructed in other media. “This,” he recalls, “led to the making of many ‘illegal’ public works, where placement was precisely an important factor.”5 He made three small paintings: one was glued onto a subway advertisement, another left in a subway car, and the third taped to the entrance of the Cooper Union subway stop. Lost Works were mailed, placed in various drawers in the Manhattan apartment of the Canadian-born broadcast journalist Peter Jennings, and inserted as bookmarks into books at the Eighth Street Bookshop. A few days after that insertion, a friend phoned him: “I just bought one of your things!”

  For Snow and Wieland, surviving in New York continued to be arduous. In order to make ends meet, Snow relied on Av Isaacs, who regularly sent him money in payment for works he had sold — or, quite often, in anticipation of being able to sell them. The artist playfully called these payments welfare cheques or his “bread and butter.” Isaacs obviously had a large inventory of unsold works in his storage space, and in 1964 he gave Snow another one-man exhibition (although he regularly included him in group shows). In Manhattan, Snow was anxious to find a dealer to supplement Isaacs — in that undertaking he was fully backed by Av, who obviously hoped that such exposure would make Snow a more marketable artist in both the States and, of course, Canada.

  FIGURE 61. Michael Snow, Mixed Feelings, 1965.

  FIGURE 62. Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow with Graeme Ferguson’s car, 1963.

  In 1955 the Montreal-born Elinor (Ellie) Poindexter took over a defunct gallery and gave it her surname. An avid collector of both abstract and figurative artists, she showed the work of artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Al Held, and Jules Olitski. She had a good eye for talent but once told Robert Rauschenberg that she could not act for him because shipping his work back and forth was too expensive. Taken by Snow’s work, she gave him one-man exhibitions in 1964 and 1965.

  In October 1963, Isaacs expressed some trepidation about the Poindexter Gallery. “Is she really that great … are her artists that great?” Av was a bit exasperated because Ellie had implored Snow to ask Av if news of the Isaacs exhibition scheduled after hers could be squelched; however, Snow asked Av to tell others about his breakthrough in New York. The Canadian dealer was not pleased. He told the artist: “I am not the Canada Council; I cannot afford to promote another commercial gallery. I would have imagined that you are showing at the Poindexter to advance your reputation in the States and your sales.”6 He added that Mrs. Poindexter was rich whereas he was not.

  Snow became “cheesed off” in June 1964 when Isaacs, on a visit to New York, pitched Graham Coughtry to Mrs. Poindexter, complaining
that he did so without “mentioning it to me.”7 Isaacs shot back: “I approached the galleries that I thought would be receptive to [his] work.… I was not riding on your coat-tails.” Although Snow had told Isaacs he had serious reservations about the direction Coughtry’s work had taken at this time, the dealer refused to take sides. “I am aware of your feelings about Graham’s paintings, and accept your feelings as a fact of your beliefs. To accuse me of subterfuge is completely unfair and unnecessary.”8

  The relationship between Michael and Av was such that Snow could express feelings of frustration or scorn openly. In March 1964, the Art Gallery of Toronto purchased Venus Simultaneous. In response to this good news, Snow told his dealer that he thought that the decision had a “charity element” to it. They had, in fact, purchased a work that Snow in his “ego moments … consider[ed] to be a masterpiece … I think you’ll agree that it felt as if they had finally decided that ‘oh well, we just have to have something.’”9 (Two years earlier, the gallery had purchased its first Snow, another WW work: Rolled Woman I.)

  The WW’s and Snow’s first New York show in late January 1964 and the Isaacs Gallery’s second WW exhibition in April 1964 shared only six works. Toronto had twenty-one pieces, New York, twenty-seven. The exhibits in Manhattan were mainly from 1963 with a few from 1962. The Isaacs had one work from 1962 but the works were mainly from 1963, although it had eight from 1964, including Grey Panels.

  In the New York Times, Stuart Preston envisioned the work he saw as pop art meets the prototypical American girl: she had become “a heroine of Pop art’s Coke culture.”10 In Art News, Natalie Edgar offered a very dismissive reading: Snow “reduces and then freezes subject-matter into the form of a 152-centimetre silhouetted female figure, which he then treats in a number of styles.” She flippantly concluded: “It’s like having a paper doll all your own.”11 Emily Genauer, in the New York Herald Tribune, also trivialized the exhibition: “All together, the constant presence of the woman [WW] creates an environment like that of a too-small apartment shared with an obsessive wife.”12 In his sensitive evaluation, Donald Judd paid close attention to the formalist qualities he beheld, especially Olympia — the title alluding to Manet’s celebrated painting of 1863.