by King, James;
FIGURE 74. Joyce Wieland, Sinking Liner, 1963.
Michael’s infidelities aggravated Joyce, although she usually held her tongue. Michael remained the centre of her existence: he was, she claimed, “the only person who can help me.”2 Although Michael thought he was being discreet in various assignations, his wife knew full well what he was up to. It was difficult for her to confront him on the thorny issue of faithfulness, however. Before leaving Toronto, she had an affair with George Gingras, with whom she and Michael had worked at Graphic Associates. When Joyce and Michael were living on Charles Street, she — lonely on the nights Michael was playing at various gigs — would walk over two or three times a week to nearby Isabella Street, where Gingras lived.3 As well as the issue of sexual fidelity, there was also the issue of children. According to Joyce, Michael wanted children. Although she, too, wished to have a family, she was unable to conceive; this became an issue, one over which the two quarrelled.
Michael’s womanizing was a significant part of his existence, as he once told an interviewer. “I’ve been extremely active sexually. I’ve been involved in a lot of happiness and pleasure that way, but I’ve also caused a lot of trouble. But the positive aspect of the fact that I’ve had many relationships with many women is that we’ve been very happy together. And I now think it’s more normal than I sometimes thought when I was struggling with it. I was extremely horny, and if I was attracted to someone I would simply try to go to bed with them. It wasn’t always necessarily meeting someone [for] one night, though that certainly happened, and it was wonderful. For both of us. For all of us sometimes!”4
FIGURE 75. Joyce Wieland, The Camera’s Eyes, 1966.
For Joyce, however, her husband’s sexual behaviour remained deeply unsettling. Moreover, living in New York City remained a disquieting experience. There was the time when, as she was unlocking the door to the building where she and Michael lived, a man grabbed her. She yelled, and Michael came to her assistance. Traumatized — a chunk of her hair had been pulled out — she burned the clothes she had been wearing, including a pair of new shoes. She also took to her bed for a week. Another time a thief broke into the Chambers Street loft and took some sound equipment.
There were other important aspects to the couple’s life in Manhattan. As Michael recalled: “I’ve taken pretty much all the drugs that were possible. And I’m happy about that. It was beneficial, and it was educational. Grass is a really interesting creative aid — it was very good for my imagination in every way. I never used to paint when I was high … though dope and music are ancient companions, and it always does affect playing spontaneous music beneficially. I’ve always enjoyed grass, and I’ve taken acid and peyote and all those other things for ideas, for thinking … for a while it was an important part of [my] thinking. It’s philosophic and religious as well as aesthetic — it concentrates your attention in certain ways, and I’ve always found it life-enhancing.”5
The sixties were a time of significant political turmoil and it affected the couple’s lives. Michael and Joyce would have known of Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol in June 3, 1968, and would also have been aware of the escalating opposition to the Vietnam War and the resulting fragmentation that shattered American society. Michael and Joyce even took part in demonstrations against the war.
There were happy events. In 1968, Joyce planned and hosted a cocktail party for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau at the Columbia Pictures building: sixty Canadians living in Manhattan showed up (Trudeau did not, but he sent a filmed greeting). On November 8, 1969, she and Michael hosted a party for the prime minister — at which he did appear — at their loft. Canadian food was served and there was a free jazz group. That evening Michael stuck with Trudeau, whose knowledge of Manhattan impressed him. At one point, he introduced Milford Graves to the prime minister, praising him as a world-class drummer. Without skipping a beat, Trudeau asked: “What about Max Roach?”6
The couple travelled frequently to Toronto, usually at Christmas. Isaacs now represented Joyce, and of course Michael wanted to be in regular contact with Av. On their Christmas 1964 trip home, they had an accident near Alexandria Bay, New York, when their car skidded off the highway and hit a post. The car was a writeoff, and presents were strewn all over the road. Joyce was unhurt, but Michael was unconscious and had to be taken to a nearby hospital, where he remained for four days.
Travelling between New York and Toronto may have been hazardous at times, but it was life in New York that was becoming more of a problem for Joyce. She wanted to quit New York City well before Michael did. He was reluctant to leave the place where, he knew, he had fulfilled his ambition to better himself in his artistic practice. In any event, from 1970 to 1972, Michael and Joyce, as he recalled, “were half there [New York City] and here [Toronto]” and their interest in the Canadian art scene increased. Also, for them, “Toronto [now] seemed to be fresh and young. There’s something about New York that has a worn, pushed down kind of quality.”7 The couple also became acutely aware that the United States “wasn’t our country and maybe we should do something in our country.”8 Les Levine, a Canadian-born artist who had settled in New York City, felt that there was another reason for the decision to return home: “It was virtually impossible for them to sell any work or do anything here, and if they had stayed any longer it would have started to become a real liability to them.”9
The Toronto art scene had expanded in the nine years that Michael and Joyce lived in New York City: there was the rise of Harold Town, a renewed interest in Jack Bush, and the emergence of young painters like David Bolduc and Paul Fournier. Snow’s reputation had risen during his time in New York, but he was no longer “THE Toronto Artist.”
PART THREE
1970–1979
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST
Eighteen months before Snow returned to Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario had decided to inaugurate “over the coming years a series of exhibitions of Canadian artists in mid-career. It is particularly fitting that the first of these should be dedicated to Michael Snow, an artist whose multi-sided genius has illuminated for so long, and never more brilliantly than at present, the vanguard of contemporary painting, sculpture, film and music.”1 In a sense, this exhibition, as retrospectives do, would celebrate the artist’s accomplishments — in Snow’s case, it signalled his many accomplishments up to the age of forty-two and provided a portent for the future.
In many ways, it made sense for the couple to return to Canada in 1972 in the wake of the retrospective. Snow was an established artist, certainly not someone who really needed to remain in New York. In June 1970, he represented Canada in the Venice Biennale; about the same time, Aluminum and Lead was chosen by the Government of Japan to represent Canada at Expo 70 in Osaka. From 1964 to 1976, he had sixteen one-man shows in New York City and Minneapolis; he had represented Canada at three Edinburgh International Festivals (Canada 101 in 1968, and the 1969 and 1975 film festivals).
The list of the items in the retrospective and their sequential placement go from a cartoon drawing called “Aeroplane Ace” (1938) to the early panels (1951–52), to the Klee-inspired pieces (1953), to Man with a Line and Ocul (both 1954), to the chairs/table works and female nudes (1955 to 1957), to the large abstracts (1959–60), to Shunt and Quits (1959), to various WW (1967), to Blind and Scope (1967), and to photographs, including Authorization (1969). The films from 1956 to 1969 were also shown.
The most curious entry is the last — No. 150: the exhibition catalogue designed by Snow. This is not a traditional catalogue. It is that event’s printed record; however, it deserves its place as an entry in the catalogue because it is a complex work of art in its own right.
In essence, the catalogue is a daring reinvention of this type of publication. There are some traditional parts. Four essays — “Apropos Michael Snow” by Robert Fulford, “Origins and Recent Work” by Dennis Young, “Right Reader” by Richard Foreman, and “Michael Sno
w’s Cinema” by P. Adams Sitney — provide evaluations of the artist’s work. There is a four-page list of the works; Snow provides a one-page family history (that contains a number of errors) and also a guide to the photographs that occupy pages thirty-five through sixty-six of the catalogue.
Perhaps the first glimpse of the unorthodox in the catalogue can be seen in the five photographs of the Lac Clair cottage that act as chapter divides, although the rationale for the placement of them as such is difficult to decipher. The first work illustrated in the interior of the book is Lac Clair (1960) and then, in this order, “Aeroplane Ace” (1938), Scope (1967), 432101234 (1969), Membrane (1969), Sight (1967), First to Last (1967), Aluminium and Lead (1968), Portrait (1967), Press (1969), Authorization (1969), and Atlantic (1966). After a chapter divide follow thirty-four pages of photographs of, among others, Snow’s ancestors, his father and mother, Denyse and Michael as children, jazz events, pictures of Michael and Joyce, Michael with Steve Reich, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and the WW in various places and installations (including Expo 67).
Without a chapter divide follow Four to Five (1962), Venus Simultaneous (1962), and other WW; then there is a chapter divide after which is a still from Wavelength (1967); after Sitney’s essay (which occupies six pages) is a still from Back and Forth, followed by a mixture of photographs: the first private showing of Wavelength, a still from One Second in Montreal, and photographs from 1937 of Michael, Denyse and Buck in Chicoutimi. After another chapter divide, three pages are allotted to Blind (1967) and then to a page of Braille. The list of exhibits is then inserted and is followed by First to Last (1967), Ocul (1954), and a photograph of Snow behind the wheel of a car.
The final chapter divide shows Paperape (1960), White Trash (1960), Red Square (1960), a portrait photo of Snow by Michel Lambeth, Secret Shout, Blues in Place, Shunt, Quits, Colour Booth, The Drum Book, a detail from 8 x 10, Blue Panel (1952), A Man with a Line (1954), Window (1962), the WW Olympia (1963), Aqua Table, (1957), a photograph of three persons at a seashore, Woman with a Clarinet (1954), January Jubilee Ladies (1960), Seated Nude (1955), Reclining Figure (1955), a photograph of a rumpled bedsheet, and a photograph of a note on adhesive tape pasted over an out-of-focus view of the loft from Wavelength. There are two more photographs: One is of the artist at eight (mentioned above): “I’d heard that if you took a photo in this position the feet would appear gigantic. So I asked my sister Denyse to take this of me (1936). I also did a pastel version.”2 The last photograph is of a deserted, overgrown landscape with an unusable swimming pool.
The photographs in A Survey seem to provide a straightforward view of the past, but this is not necessarily so. Photo albums are evidence of the so-called truth, but whose truth do they show? In looking at such an assemblage, every spectator will construct a different story of what they mean. So such snapshots enforce the past and yet distort. They recall the past in a myriad of ways and, therefore, enforce and yet distort memory.
His catalogue nevertheless provides vital clues to Michael Snow and his art. Like him, this catalogue is a combination of the orthodox and the unorthodox. In order to respond to this book in the way the editor/designer intended, the reader has to actively engage with it. Why this form? For one thing, the use of family and other photographs (not in the exhibition) invites the reader to think about who the artist is, especially his ancestry. The items from the show in the first part of the catalogue demonstrate what Michael Snow has accomplished since 1967. Then a selection of WW from 1962 to 1967 follow. Blind is then illustrated. Then First to Last and Ocul are juxtaposed — like Blind, they are about sight. The final assemblage ranges from 1955 to 1960.
In his introductory statement for the catalogue, William J. Withrow, the director of the AGO, provided an excellent evaluation of that publication: “Michael Snow himself designed and supervised the book’s production, as both a contribution to and a comment on, his life and work to date. In its almost cinematic progressions, pivotal moments, and thematic changes, the book becomes a lucid exposition of the way his mind works.”3 Just as he calls attention to his roots in the family photographs, the artist invites the reader of the catalogue to look at the works in a vastly different way from the actual exhibition, which moved forward chronologically. The catalogue zigzags backward and forward and, in the process, constructs a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, which can be pieced together in various ways.
What the catalogue insists upon is that the artist is a product of his environment. There may be intrinsic, hard-to-unravel inner reasons why a person becomes an artist, but such a person can also manipulate and shape his vocation. In the case of Snow, the past is always present in his work, and the intermingling of recent works, older ones, and family ones in A Survey suggests that Snow felt that his family and his Canadian ancestry were dominant in his formation; in surveying his life experience and his accomplishments, those two factors shaped his understanding of who he became as man and artist.
In reviewing the exhibition, the American critic Gene Youngblood claimed: “[T]he installation is best viewed as a purposive and teleologic system which progresses [through many movements] and thus becomes a microcosm of modern art in our time. It is not, however, a model of that art, for [one of the] insights afforded by this exhibition is that Snow has worked predominantly outside the mainstream in his career, primarily in advance of the trends.” In discussing Snow’s work after the WW, Youngblood emphasizes accurately that the artist had become “very much involved with process as manifested in objecthood and seems to be striving toward ever more precise statements regarding natural and man-made objects as records of their own process.” Overall, he saw Snow as attempting to resolve the modernist debate initiated by Cézanne between object and concept.4 In Canadian Forum, the artist Ross Mendes wondered if the “emphasis on ideas didn’t draw attention to the artist. Like an intellectual arrow saying ‘Look at me. Look at me.’ Instead of, ‘Look at this.’”5 For Snow, the distinction was meaningless because his art is a reflection of himself.
In addition to paying close attention to the artist’s accomplishments, A Survey provided ample evidence of two directions Snow was taking. In particular, he had begun to expand his repertoire into photography and into works that explore the Canadian Wilderness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
THE PAINTERLY PHOTOGRAPH
From the time of the invention of photography, the notion that it can be considered a fine art has been a subject of fierce debate. How, for example, can a photograph of a landscape bear any just comparison to a painting of the same subject? In painting, the sensibility of the artist selects what to depict — that person can make a naturalistic representation or the result can be rendered in any number of stylistic manners. On the other hand, the photograph, an illuminated image seen through a lens, is a representation created by a series of chemical reactions. Paintings, the argument goes, are the works of humans; photographs are the products of machines.
In this controversy, it is often forgotten that the sensibility of the photographer decides what to include in a frame, how to light the subject, and how to manipulate the negative. So, it can be said that the image in a photograph is a product of human creativity. On the other hand, the artifact — the photograph itself, its surface — is usually seen as being of no interest. The resulting images often look so integrated into the paper stocks on which they are printed that there appears to be no separation between image and paper. In other words, they lack the texture that oil paint can have on a canvas or the penetration of colours that can be discerned in many watercolours. On such terms, painting is privileged as a real art; photography is not.
The favouring of one form over another has many ramifications. The photograph, it can be asserted, in its recording of an object, captures the essence of that object in a way that painting never can. If the object depicted (its ontology) is the central concern of a work of art, the edge can then be awarded to photography over painting. In this regard, Snow feels that the “
miraculous freezing or catching an instant of an action is a factor in the history of photography” — obviously it is one in his own practice as a photographer.1 More particularly, in his photo works he remains fascinated by the “stasis of the stopped-time photographic image.”2 Despite his interest in photography, Snow was clear that he did not want to undertake “art photography.” To avoid doing so, he made “available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.”3 His work in this genre is underscored by this conviction: “[P]eople generally look through photographs to the subject with the kind of primitive faith that they are being shown the subject. I’m involved in a certain kind of skepticism that is just pointing out that the photo is a shadow of some subject.”4
Photography has often been scorned because some feel that it does not contain the kind of aura possible in painting. Walter Benjamin defined “aura” thus: “A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.”5 It could be argued that the artist’s presence — his aura — can be detected in a painting much more readily than in any photograph. In order to have an aura, a piece of art has to be separated (be distant) from its original incarnation although it must be closely connected to it. According to this line of argument, photographs are not sufficiently separated from what they depict.
Snow rejected these assumptions. Well aware of the differences between painting and photography, he chose photography for its ability to render “stasis” and “stopped-time” — new ways of exploring change. This was not a renunciation of painting as much as it was an attempt to explore objects in a way that painting could not, for him, any longer accomplish. In this agenda, immediacy is paramount. In the late 1960s, he felt that photography was the best form for exploring the self-referencing work of art in the very moment in which it is created. In his photographic works, Snow and other photographers of his generation rejected the standards by which photography had been elevated to the status of a fine art.