by King, James;
Depicting a single thing in different ways is potentially interesting. Snow makes his subject, and in addition, one pose, the constant part of his work; the style and techniques vary widely. This is something of a point-to-line relationship, and it [is] the reverse of the old idea of a permanent style depicting everything. But Snow’s variations aren’t developed enough yet.… I like the three-dimensional pieces best. The profile isn’t so obvious, in fact almost justifies itself.13
Judd’s discomfort with any kind of representation can be discerned here, but he was obviously moved by what he saw at the Poindexter. The Museum of Modern Art purchased one of the WW on show in New York.
FIGURE 63. Michael Snow, Clothed Woman (In Memory of My Father), 1963.
On view only at the Isaacs was a work from 1963: the enormous Clothed Woman (In Memory of My Father), which the artist has described as “a sequence of seven selective fillings-in of shapes made by a dress outline. Using a spectrum-related series of colors, all the possible shape combinations are ‘colored.’”14 Of all the WWs, this oil and Lucite on canvas displays the most perfect integration of figurative and abstract representation. Each of the colours is rendered in carefully modulated, varied brush strokes and the resulting colour values call attention to their surfaces; each of the shapes is so varied that they tease the viewer to try to put them together.
In both Toronto and New York, the WW — despite the fact that each WW is markedly different — were seen as responses to pop art. Snow gave credence to these views in “A Lot of Near Mrs.,” when he said, “I like work of Johns, Oldenburg, Dine, partly because apparently they came to similar conclusions arising out of the accomplishments of the great senior New York painters.” Put another way, Snow was recognizing the fact that pop art was a reaction to abstract expressionism. However, he draws a sharp distinction between pop art and his own practice: “I don’t see what those signs and those things are selling. Some of my ideas turn out to be similar. An unexplainable coincidence which is not leading me to work directly from that material [as in pop art] tho I often see signs, displays, etc. which are very interesting.”15
Perhaps the best distinction between pop art and the elements of that movement in Snow was made by Elizabeth Kilbourn in 1964: “Unlike pop artists who take the products of other factories, soup labels, Liz Taylor ads, comic books, beds, toasters, and use them as art and bring them into the gallery, Snow audaciously manufactures walking women and puts them in the everyday world.”16 There are connections between the WW and pop art, but the line between them is strictly drawn.
In looking at the work on display in Toronto in 1964, Fulford noticed the difference between the Toronto and New York WW:
Snow took the Snowgirl to New York with him … and began using her in a new series of paintings. But now she is used in a far less abrasive and “difficult” way — or so it seemed to me. Many of the new paintings in the new show are brilliantly original … what is new is that some of them are also charming and a few are genuinely elegant. My guess is that Snow, having moved away from his reputation, has been able to lift himself beyond it. In a city where few art lovers know him and few expect anything of him, he has been able to let his own personality spread across his art in a way that wasn’t possible in Canada.
Moving to New York City had liberated Snow from a previously “intransigent … edgy kind of art, given to bumpy rhythms and abrasive, almost unacceptable color contrasts.” In Canada, the artist had “apparently always found it necessary to bridle his talent in one important way. He tended to shun ‘fine painting,’ warm and obvious bursts of color, and charming effects. I think the reason was at least partly his reputation, and the pressure it put upon him.”17
The WW in the December 1965 exhibition at the Poindexter and in April 1966 at the slightly larger Isaacs show included Five-Girl Panels. In Art News, Jill Johnson found this piece “striking.”18 Amy Goldin in Arts Magazine was not impressed, although she remarked accurately (probably in reference to the same painting) that Snow was engaged by the “laws of perception” but that, for her, “his enthusiasm does not seem highly contagious.”19
The Toronto journalist Harry Malcolmson reviewed both shows. In his first notice, he paid close attention to Five-Girl Panels: “Each canvas reproduces a distorted Walking Woman as if we are seeing her image in a Fun House mirror…. Where the image is short and squashed, Snow uses a stubby canvas shape. Where the image is long and lean, the canvas is correspondingly tall and narrow.” For this critic, this work was “the best representation of the problems he has been exploring.” He makes another crucial point: Snow’s “work provokes a viewer’s eyes, then his mind.”20
Back in Toronto, the same critic observed: “Every piece is telling and authoritative. After several years of working with the Walking Woman, Snow knows exactly what he wants to do in each new variation, and he does it.”21 In an appreciative notice in the Globe and Mail, Kay Kritzwiser repeated what the artist had told her: “I want to make seeing more palpable. I want to say something with static things — to fix something which has stopped within the flux of what’s going on.” Quite soon, his attention would move from “static” to “moving.”22
The bubble gum–coloured Hawaii was shown only at the Isaacs, but Mixed Feelings, Seen, Sleeve, and Cry-Beam were shown in both shows. All of the WW shown in 1965 and 1966 embrace another remarkable change. Hawaii’s colours resemble pop art and the same observations can be made about Cry-Beam, Seen, Sleeve, and Morningside Heights, but, in addition, these four pieces have significant sculptural qualities.
The difference in the rendering of the face in the middle panel (on canvas) of Cry-Beam and the two jutting-out painted boards offers not only a contrast in textures but also something between representational and abstract modes. In Seen, the long panel (viewed from the front) looks mainly like a minimalist work but seen from the left-handed side the figure is much more visible.
The two parts of both Morningside Heights and Sleeve use window-like structures as in Window, but they take that fascination in a different direction. One part of Morningside Heights is a sculpture — a long rectangular floor box painted blue — that has a pink plastic window. On the wall near the sculpture is a trapezoid-shaped painting on canvas of a WW head. The painting is brightly coloured; if one looks through the window the colours become only pink and blue. Snow has observed that this is the first work in which he included the spectator’s participation in his work.23
Sleeve provides a free-standing, two-sided wall in which there is a rectangle viewing space of red plastic. The view through this window is of various WW: a 152-centimetre painted cut-out; a torso modelled in oil paint; three photographs; a small, heavy-impasto horizontally placed but not on the wall; at the top is a yellow foldage. This assemblage becomes a deep red when looked through the window.
The use of window-like structures to change colour might have been the artist’s attempt to talk about the effects of LSD on perception — the same observation could be extended to Five-Girl Panels. More importantly, these two works are preludes to the artist’s later, more direct works, which emphasize perception and how changes in perception alter the way in which a work of art is viewed.
The WW has not escaped its share of negative criticism. In 1979, Amy Taubin castigated the entire concept:
Most critics have dealt with “Walking Woman” in terms of how she is represented rather than what she represents. But she is a very particular representation of a woman, fascinating and repellent at the same time. In psychoanalytical terms, the “Walking Woman” is the classic female figure of plenitude and lack, the repository and symbol of male castration anxiety. This anxiety is expressed and simultaneously alleviated and reinforced by the obsessive viewing or exploring of the female body. The resulting behaviour may be predominately either voyeuristic or sadistic. The deprivations of the “Walking Woman” — her lack of hands, feet and crown — symbolize and reinforce the image of the woman as castrated, but this framing
of her body also emphasizes the curving plentitude of her sexual characteristics: breasts, buttocks and legs.
The WW, Taubin also observes, “doesn’t have two feet to stand on, let alone walk. Her ‘walking’ is dependent on the assistance of her maker.”24
For Snow, the issue of objectifying women in his celebrated series is a non-starter. For him, how the figure is represented is central — not what the figure represents. There is, however, a very fine line between how and what. The clothed or nude female figure is a commonplace subject in the history of Western art, but that may originate in large part because objectifying women has long been part and parcel of Western society.
Perhaps the most balanced critical evaluation of the WW came from John Bentley Mays, who dismissed the idea that these works were made in the wake of de Kooning’s nudes.
If a modern precedent is wanted for the WW, the strong working women of Fernand Léger will do very well. Like Léger, Snow in this series seems genuinely to like and enjoy women, with none of the intense sexual anxiety we find in Picasso and de Kooning. Again, like Léger, Snow appears to be happy with women like the WW, who know what they are, know where they are going, and are on the move. Snow is one of the few male artists of the twentieth century who have created a gently humorous, convincing, complex sexual icon of woman on her feet, moving in freedom, in her own way.25
The artist himself has always insisted that the WW must be seen in formalist terms, especially in the way in which they are framed:
Every image that we ever look at has been cropped. I think you can say that without question. If I show you a photograph, it’s been cropped. It has to be because of the way a camera’s viewfinder frames what’s to be photographed — it cuts out whatever it can’t fit in. In the case of a photo, cropping means that the image has been fit into the shape of a rectangle. In the example of the Walking Woman, the cropping indicates that the Woman has been taken from a rectangle, that gives it a defined relationship to painting or drawing. I find that the interpretation that she’s been amputated to be funny, but it shows how people don’t really look at how they look.26
Ultimately, the WW portray women in action — in the process of walking rather than simply standing. As such, the figure inhabits and explores a wide variety of existences. Ultimately, she is active rather than passive. In that sense, she is not objectified.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
WAVELENGTHS
During his early stay in Manhattan, despite the remarkable freedom he found in his new WW works, Snow could be prickly. For example, he was deeply bothered by his encounter with Marcel Duchamp, who had invited him and Wieland to his walk-up apartment on 11th Street near Fifth Avenue. Beforehand, Snow was “nervous, apprehensive.” On the walls of Duchamp’s flat were works by, among others, Matisse, Ernst, and Tanguy, but Snow was reminded that the Frenchman, who had given up art for chess, made money by brokering the sales of works by his confreres. “My mind sneered,” Snow recalled. Duchamp “basked in our adoration,” and as a result Snow “became supercritical of everything he said.” The young man also felt he’d “gone in there on my knees and it hurt.” Although Snow asked Duchamp if he would appear in NYEEC, he loathed what he considered Duchamp’s condescending behaviour.
Once they had left, Wieland asked her husband what had gone wrong: “I gradually realized with deep dismay how far I had sunk under an Oedipal lump.… I don’t believe I wanted to marry Teeny [Duchamp’s wife], but I sure had wanted to kill my Dada.” His ego was “so frail at that particular time that [he] was unable to encounter a superior with [sufficient] respect and curiosity.”1 Michael was able to maintain the facade of the superior young man, but that was in many ways a role he was play-acting.
A week later, feeling “like apologizing” to Duchamp, Snow phoned and “asked if [they] could meet again and shoot the little scene: Joyce and Marcel walking across the street, seen through a mask of the Walking Woman outline. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use this shot in the film.”2
In some ways, Snow’s career at this time bears comparison with his contemporary, the American artist Alfred Leslie, who began in an abstract expressionist mode and then ventured into film with Robert Frank to make Pull My Daisy (1959), the Kerouac-inspired underground film. In Manhattan, Snow also discovered, there was great fluidity in what constituted being an artist, but such knowledge can, at first, be unsettling to someone still in the process of formation. Nevertheless, he was determined to make a new film.
Once again, he wanted to make a film in a completely different mode from Brakhage. He was also trying to evade another kind of cinema. As Elizabeth Legge explains, “Snow’s zoom could be seen to allude to the very long duration of some of Andy Warhol’s films, such as the eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building in Empire (1964); but, in contrast, Wavelength is a constructed — not a ‘documentary realist’ — recording, and the time of Wavelength represents real time as well as taking place within it, as day turns to night twice during its 45 minutes.”3
However, Snow did see several links between Empire and NYEEC, especially in their shared fascination with time, and he was pleased when Warhol told him he thought NYEEC wonderful.4 Snow and Warhol also share a penchant for using photographs in serial arrangements, but Warhol tends to repeat the same image multiple times (e.g., Lavender Disaster [1963]) whereas Snow is more complex in arranging similar photographs (Authorization, Venetian Blind) in a manner that follows from his practice as a filmmaker.
Undeterred by the hostile reception of NYEEC, Snow, after one year of studying and “muttering,” made Wavelength in one week in December 1966. He wanted, he recalled, “to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time [a] monument in which beauty and sadness would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of ‘illusion’ and ‘fact,’ all about seeing.”5 The resulting forty-five-minute film is a continuous zoom from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera from one end of an twenty-four-metre loft.
In Wavelength, the space of the loft — Snow’s studio at 300 Canal Street — slowly disappears and the film ends with a single photograph of a wave. The film deliberately eschews traditional narrative action, although it does so teasingly. During the course of it, four moments of narrative are briefly inserted. In the first, two delivery men deliver a bookcase to a woman (Joyce Wieland), who instructs the men where to place this piece of furniture and they all leave. Later, the same woman returns with a female friend; they drink and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. After they leave, the sound of breaking glass is heard. At this point, a man (Hollis Frampton) enters and collapses on the floor. Later, a woman in a fur coat appears and makes a phone call, speaking, with a strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.
There is the hint of a murder or some other nefarious deed, but this plot thread is not developed. The film, in deliberately avoiding narrative coherence, provides its own take on the kind of film Wavelength does not seek to be. The year before, Antonioni’s Blow-Up had caused a storm in advanced film circles. In that film, the photographer protagonist may or may not have inadvertently taken snapshots of a murder. The blow-ups do not provide evidence to prove either scenario convincingly. The Italian director was using narrative film to talk about the difficulty in obtaining any kind of stable truth. Snow is interested in similar ideas but goes about it in a completely different way.
The real plot development in Wavelength is between the slow, steady zoom and the coloured gels and their accompanying noises that momentarily distract the viewer from the inexorable move toward the window and, then, the photograph. As one reviewer put it, the “cool kick … was seeing so many new actors — light and space, walls, soaring windows, and an amazing number of color-shadow variations that live and die in the windowpanes — made into major esthetic components of movie expe
rience.”6 For Hollis Frampton, this film in particular “modified our perception of past film.… This is an astonishing situation. It is like knowing the name and address of the man who carved the Sphinx.”7
There are many possible readings of Wavelength. One is that the film is about loss and accompanying dislocation. Since the room obviously disappears as the zoom proceeds, the viewer is left with less than when the film began. As that process takes place, there is an uncanny sense of displacement, but that sense of dislocation, it can be argued, is ultimately augmented by the photograph of the wave that ends the film. The water can signify that what the viewer sees at the film’s completion is part of the natural world and that the world of art merges into the world of nature.
Another interpretation might claim that the film re-enacts sexual intercourse in that the slowly moving zoom represents the phallus heading into a tight small space that denotes the vagina. If this is so, the camera’s actions can be said to be a manifestation of the male gaze objectifying women.
However, as Adelina Vlas has observed, as the camera’s trajectory goes forward, “we find two images of the Walking Woman at different scales, echoed by two photographs of a nude woman just above and to the left. Overlapping slightly, these two parts of female silhouettes — one photographic, the other painterly — are the focus of the zoom for most of the film. But as the film approaches its end, it becomes clear that the actual focus of the camera is another image pinned below this double representation — a photograph of waves on the surface of a body of water.” It can be argued that in the final portion of the film, when the zoom moves to the photographs of the wave, any gendering in the film is literally washed away. As Vlas also observes, the shift from the WW to the water image “parallels Snow’s transition from painter to photographer to filmmaker.”8