by King, James;
FIGURE 84. Michael Snow, still from La Région Centrale, 1970.
Almost fifty years later, in the summer of 2018, Snow was one of a small group of artists commissioned to make short films for IMAX. In the ten-minute Cityscape, he employed a similar methodology as Centrale. This new work, filmed on Centre Island, displays the Toronto skyline. The camera pans slowly, returns to starting point and then moves rapidly and then even more quickly; the camera also pivots in the manner of the earlier film.
The purpose-built camera-activating machine entered into a new sphere of existence when it became De La (1971) and joined Blind and Scope in sculptural works that involve the participation of the spectator. In its second incarnation, a black-and-white live video camera is mounted on the original camera, and the machine now moves in orbit displaying the space in the room where the sculpture resides; its travels are captured on four monitors and images of the audience often swim slowly across the screen.
FIGURE 85. Michael Snow, De La, 1971.
FIGURE 86. Production still of Michael Snow while making La Région Centrale, 1970.
Another major piece involves the work of the members of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, who invented a new approach to landscape painting that eschews the European tradition and established a distinctively new Canadian modernism in the arts. To create Plus Tard, Snow visited the National Gallery of Canada, photographed twenty-five paintings and placed each photograph in a heavy black frame. As an entity, these photographs, when hung together, create a new, alternative, gallery.
In describing this photo series, Snow has observed that a crucial aspect of them “is that each photo involves a different use of gesturing which came while shooting. The gestures were each enacted at different speeds, slow to fast, but also, for example, moving then hesitating, slow to fast, then moving again. Some photographs did not contain a gesture. The gestures were like painting brushstrokes in my concept.”4
The language the artist uses here is very revealing. “Gesturing” or “the gesture” is, as we have seen, a term usually used to describe abstract expressionist art. By inserting that phrase into his discussion, Snow is suggesting that he is updating the paintings of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson.
Snow is doing several other things. He intimates (correctly) that these legendary paintings are usually seen in a confined, somewhat backward way; they have become museum pieces that enshrine a now old modernism. They are often valued as the summation of Canadian painting and, as such, no room is left for other Canadian painters to create newer modernisms. By transferring the paintings into photographs, by the incorporation of gesture, and by including the museum walls against which the paintings are hung as parts of the photographs, Snow invites the viewers to reimagine and thus reinvent these master works. He admires the paintings, but he is intimating that they must be seen in a new way. If that occurs, there is the possibility for newer forms — still distinctively Canadian — to emerge.
FIGURES 87, 88, AND 89. Michael Snow, photos showing Plus Tard, 1977.
Plus Tard is a work that has garnered immense praise and contempt. Ben Lifson in the Village Voice understood that this series of photographs was about “how we look at pictures.… Snow tells us things about how we don’t look at exhibitions themselves. And details like light switches, exit doors, and shadows of walls … how the context of art creates the art, becomes part of it, and, when viewed by the artist, becomes art itself.” Despite his sensitive response to how this series of photographs interact with each other, Lifson feels that it ultimately turns into an attack on Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven: “Much later, it implies, a Canadian has succeeded in transcending his predecessors’ provincialism, and at their own game of landscape art to boot. It’s mean-spirited work, as well as dull.”5 Adele Freedman in the Globe and Mail responded to this work in a completely different way: “The movement of the still camera during the exposure has made abstractions of images which were already abstractions of nature. Snow has painted over the originals using his camera as a paintbrush.… But there are temporal layers as well. Snow has been imposing himself again — overlaying the past with the present and making a new unity of what was formerly a collection of separate paintings.”6
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
A GIANT SENTENCE
Upon finishing work on NYEEC in 1964, Snow wanted to make another film that explored the dialogue between sight and sound in the way that the cinematography of the stationary WW is challenged and disrupted by Ayler’s music. In other words, he wanted to work again on the discrepancy between the two modes. He even made notes in 1963 envisioning a “dialogue” film. Plot elements were, as in Wavelength, to be ignored; the dialogue was to be as banal as possible so that the disjunctions/connections between word and sound could be explored without any unnecessary distractions. Jonas Mekas attempted to help Snow obtain a grant for this project but nothing materialized.
Six years later, the artist began work on Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (hereafter Rameau). The film, over four hours long, is built, according to Snow, like a “giant sentence.”1 The twenty-five scenes are of varying length — from three to fifty minutes. It is truly, as the artist once pointed out, a “talking picture.”
The intellectual conceits behind the film are manifold and layered. First of all, Wilma Schoen (“beautiful” in German) is an anagram for Michael Snow. Dennis Young, the curator at the Art Gallery of Toronto who oversaw Snow’s retrospective, had given the artist the Penguin edition of Rameau’s Nephew. Denis Diderot was the editor and chief contributor to the Encyclopédie, wherein he used the opportunity to write many entries antagonistic to orthodox points of belief. The composer Jean-Philippe Rameau was an expert on the theoretical aspects of harmony — Diderot was an admirer of his. Jean-François Rameau was petulant, jealous of his uncle, and never stuck to any project he initiated. The book is cast into the form of a dialogue with the “he” being the nephew and the “myself,” the composer.
Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew is to a large extent a Socratic dialogue with the older man taking on the role of the wise philosopher. In some ways, Michael Snow assumes the role of both the composer and the Greek philosopher in that he intends to educate his audience in the intricacies in the relationship between words and sounds. In this context, the viewer is the nephew.
Martha Langford has commented on this film’s extraordinary range:
Rameau’s Nephew is episodic, situational, without plot or reprise. It is a long film — four and a half hours — but is cleanly divided into segments that take up various aspects of the theme. The players are mainly gifted amateurs, though Snow did engage professional actors for the so-called Fart scene, which involved learning to perform their lines backward. Elsewhere he featured already developed skills, such as the ability of the Canadian painter Dennis Burton to speak “Burtonish,” a language based on English but different in its arbitrary fracturing of words and repurposing of punctuation, or [Snow’s] own capacity to make music at the kitchen sink.
Rameau’s Nephew, which is sometimes described as polyphonic in its musical sense, is generally analyzed as a “talking film.” At this stage in his cinematic work, however, Snow was averse to any storytelling structure. His desire, frequently expressed, was to make image-sound compositions. If there is no obvious narrative, the “film’s images — Snow’s settings and framings — are unforgettable, for their colour, if nothing else. Holding this film together, leading the viewer from scene to scene, are the extraordinary breadth of its variations on [its themes] and its sometimes mute comedy.”2
As mentioned, Diderot used the vehicle of his encyclopedia to attack rigidly held belief systems, and in his film Snow takes issue with conventional views of the relationship between sight and sound. The artist is also taking the opportunity to make his film encyclopedic — it will deal with its chosen subject in a manner that covers it from almost every conceivable angle. However, the film ranges far beyond its initial p
remise to include discussion of illusion, allusion, the so-called real, so-called truth, and so on. In this sense, it becomes a springboard for Snow to discuss a wide range of issues that he had considered in his previous work. (Other works that are encyclopedic in that they conjoin a wide variety of images on a single plane include 8 x 10 [1969], Press [1969], Field [1973–74], and Timed Images [1973].)
In her assessment of the film, Regina Cornwell comments on the range of encyclopedic sounds it explores:
The recorded sound is representational and abstract involving music, speech, animal calls, other outdoor as well as machine noises. Sync and non-sync sound are used. And there is a wide range of variation in the uses of sync sound: playing sync material backwards, as in [sequence] 12; recording undecipherable speech patterns as in sequence 9 (Burton), cataloguing sounds made through breath and speech exercises as in [sequence] 1 (Snow whistling) and [sequence] 15 (the embassy). It also records pissing and sink sounds.3
An early reviewer, Bill Auchterlone, described the structure of the film as a series of containers.4 Put another way, as Cornwell suggests, the segments of Rameau’s Nephew can be seen as a series of frames:
[C]olour transparencies are used in a number of sequences. Sometimes they function to frame and to reframe the image.… Framed numbers appear in several sections of the film.… And in the tradition of Boccaccio, stories are framed.… Tableaux, poses, events, standing out in time, become analogues for the practice of framing.5
FIGURES 90 AND 91. Michael Snow, two stills from Rameau’s Nephew, 1974.
For Snow, framing has always been a central issue: the frame is a form of container and a metaphor for the window-like structure of a canvas. In this film, he adapts various ways of inserting many kinds of frames as a way of controlling his speculations on the many ways that sound exists and functions.
Rameau is a pivotal work in Snow’s career as a filmmaker because, with the possible exception of NYEEC, his earlier cinema had emphasized visual perception. With his return to Toronto and his much more active involvement in music making, Snow constructed a work that dealt with the complexities of sound making. The ambition of this project was significant. The scope of that artistic ambition had an impact on the scope of the work: its length is due in part to the fact that the artist tackles in a single work the nature of sound whereas visual perception had been dealt with in eleven previous films.
Hearing Aid (1976–77) is another bold attempt to redefine a genre — this time, sculpture. When this work was shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery as part of the 1978 Another Dimension II exhibition, Art Perry commented on how it “illustrates the extent to which contemporary sculpture has pushed its ability to comment on our space. At one time, sculpture was a static exercise in manipulation of marble and metal that drew concrete forms into our space. A twisted metal form was seen as visually occupying a pocket of space, and that’s where our artistic curiosity ended.”6 The components of Hearing Aid are a metronome in a corner and then four cassette players arranged at increasingly long distances from each other. The work is played thus: #1 records the metronome playing; this recording — accompanied by the actual metronome playing — is then recorded by #2. This process continues until #4 is reached. The finished work consists of the simultaneous playing of the four tapes and the metronome. The sound of #4 — the farthest from the metronome — is obviously more degraded than #1, the nearest.
In many ways, this work extends the issues treated cinematically in La Région Centrale to sculpture. Just as Centrale explores cinematic space in a novel series of camera movements, the use of the metronome and four tape recorders extends the kind of space in which a sculpture can exist.
CHAPTER TWENTY:
NO LONGER IN PLAY
During visits to Toronto in the 1960s, Snow had sometimes played with the Artists’ Jazz Band (that included, among others, Gord Rayner, Graham Coughtry, Robert Markle, and Terry Forster). Upon his arrival back, he, as he recalled, rejoined that group. Having worked as a professional musician, Snow had some doubts about attaching himself to an amateur group. Then he found the experience magical:
They didn’t “know what they were doing” at first and didn’t care. Now they know and don’t care. The music always takes everybody by surprise. Chance + fate + skill.… The music grew until sometimes it wanted someone else to hear it. The process is spontaneous group composition.… The art-making-seeing-hearing experience can colour everything or transform anything. Art sense ebbs and flows but it rarely turns off.1
A bit later, at the invitation of the drummer Larry Dubin, Snow joined a group of experimental freestyle players. That led him, in 1974, to become one of the founders of the Canadian Creative Music Collective (CCMC), a free-music group (still active) whose mandate is to play improvised music. (Snow plays on the piano and synthesizer.)
FIGURE 92. CCMC at the Music Gallery, 1978. From left to right: Casey Sokol, Al Mattes, Nobuo Kubota, and Michael Snow.
For Snow, improvised music became (and remains) a form of the gesture practised by American expressionists and by himself in some of his early abstracts. According to him, it is really an outgrowth “from the ensemble style of early Jazz,” in which the rhythm section members typically improvised (made up) their accompaniment parts.
FIGURE 93. CCMC in concert at Arraymusic, Toronto, 2015. From left to right: Michael Snow, Paul Dutton, John Oswald, and John Kamevaar.
FIGURE 94. Michael Snow, still from Snow in Vienna by Laurie Kwasnik, 2012.
Snow now returned to a schedule reminiscent of the early days of his marriage in Toronto. He and Joyce worked separately but discussed their work and provided each other with support and encouragement. He was often absent in the evenings because of music-making activities. The couple shared some strong interests, such as protesting the appointment of an American, Richard Wattenmaker, as chief curator at the AGO; they were also actively involved in forming the Committee to Strengthen Canadian Culture.
But things did not fall into place. During the making of Joyce’s narrative film about Tom Thomson, The Far Shore, conflicts between the couple increased markedly, and so, four years after moving back to Toronto, Michael and Joyce purchased a house at 497 Queen Street East as a place that Joyce could use as a studio and, when she wanted to, live. Michael recalls that they had debated whether having two places might be a solution. He also states that the purchase of the second house had been “part of us coming apart”; at that time, he and Joyce wondered whether “it might be a good idea for us to have two separate places that were complete, not that we were totally separating, but that we would try that.” At that time, he recalls, “whatever balancing acts we were involved in [that] were working before,” no longer were in play.2 Reflecting further, he added: “We were just kind of going through the motions. It wasn’t exactly boredom … all I can say … it was an imitation marriage.”3
For her part, Joyce had reached breaking point regarding Michael’s womanizing. She had tolerated such behaviour in New York City because, in a sense, she and Michael had been outsiders there and had to join forces in order to survive. This state of affairs obviously did not hold true in Toronto. Joyce may have felt emotionally stronger in her birthplace, but she still remained dependent on Michael. As she sensed his increasing detachment, she prepared to take steps to protect herself.
Joyce put it this way: “I had my husband on a pedestal. I got tired of having him on a pedestal. I started seeing him as a person and stopped elevating him. The more I changed my behaviour, the less he liked it. He said I was being very boring.… I couldn’t stand it anymore … Eventually I got the message: I’d been beating myself up for years, holding on to a marriage that was dead, that was killing me. I started to do things for myself.”4 In fairness to Michael, it should be pointed out that Joyce had resumed her romantic relationship with George Gingras in about 1975, just at the time she felt that her ties to her husband were disintegrating. However, his encounters with other women tended to be of shor
t duration. What had been a tolerable status quo in New York City slowly unravelled back in Toronto.
In 1982, while the couple were severing their ties with one another, they had to join forces because of a legal fracas. Sixteen years before, Joyce, while visiting Hollis Frampton, noticed two painted-on canvases in the garbage of her friend’s building. They were the work of Frank Stella, who also lived there. Michael, who never looked at the canvases before 1981, agreed with Joyce to market the paintings. In 1982, the Mazoh Gallery in Manhattan placed them on sale. Stella, who was an international art star by this time, was outraged. He claimed that the canvases had been improperly removed — he had discarded them because they were water damaged and clawed by his cat. Selling such works, he felt, would be damaging to his reputation. When the case was heard in New York, the judge dismissed the case because it was a trivial misunderstanding the parties could settle between themselves. Stella, for the sum of one dollar, released Michael and Joyce from all actions, and Stephen Mazoh returned the paintings to Stella.5
The disintegration of the Snow-Wieland marriage took place in stages. They separated early in 1975, but only about four years later did Michael begin divorce proceedings when he informed Joyce that he wanted to marry Peggy Gale, fifteen years younger than he. The delays caused by changing the Wieland-and-Snow joint company into two separate ones and also selling off a number of small properties took a considerable amount of time. The final decree for their divorce was not granted until January 1990. Peggy and Michael married on April 12, 1990.