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You can keep “cinephile” or the awful “movie buff”—better to call it a life devoted to adventures in perception. Well, the kicks have been thin on the ground lately what with wintertime doldrums and a blizzard of OpEd posturing that makes you want to go lie down in a polar vortex and wait for the end, so let it Michael Snow. The exhibit Michael Snow: Photo-Centric opened last Saturday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and will be on display there through April 27th. I narrowly missed seeing the 84-year-old Snow at the Friday night viewing, on which occasion the strong contender for Greatest Living Canadian Artist apparently showed off his musical chops on a Steinway grand piano, but I got into town to see the exhibition a few days later, and at least until I catch up with The LEGO Movie, I can say confidently that it’s the best show going.
Photo-Centric is the first museum exhibition of Snow’s photography-based work in the United States since Projects: Michael Snow—Photographs came to the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Assembled by Assistant Curator of Art Adelina Vlas in “close collaboration” with Snow, Photo-Centric occupies the museum’s ground floor Honickman and Berman Galleries. It’s a selection of work produced over a roughly forty year period of practice in photography-based media—to use a phrase of the artist’s from an 1983 interview, these are “camera-related works, or at least things which have to do with the effects the camera has on perception.”
Born in 1929, Snow worked principally as a sculptor and painter throughout the 1950s. During this time he was engaged with the ongoing modernist project, which exhorted artists to produce work that reflected on the tools of their medium, thereby isolating the qualities intrinsic to these media themselves. This approach would carry into Snow’s engagement with photography in the ‘60s, a development more-or-less concurrent with his renewed interest in motion pictures.
Polymath, Renaissance Man, dilettante—call Snow what you will, but whatever he lost by not committing to any single medium, he gained by not being beholden to any single medium’s assumptions. Snow’s gift is a fresh perspective, of not accepting the tenets of whatever form he’s working in as a given, but rather as something to be dissected. Snow’s most famous film, 1967’s Wavelength—a zoom traversing the length of a single room over the duration of forty-five minutes—distilled cinema into its base components: the divvying up of space and time. Snow’s photography, then, is an investigation into the basic alchemy of the medium. Per Vlas, Snow seeks “to reveal the stages a subject undergoes in the process of becoming an image… interrogat[ing] the photographic medium with the self-reflexivity of a modernist.”
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The most recent pieces on display at the PMA are both from 2003. Powers of Two is a four-panel image comprised of photographic transparencies hung from the ceiling, offering a vantage on a boudoir scene rendered in life size: A couple is coupling; the woman’s face is turned out with a beguiling expression, as though she has some knowledge of her audience. In Paris de jugement Le and/ or State of the Arts, the camera is posed behind three nude women who contemplate an enlarged detail of Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, the original of which hangs at the museum. The earliest piece is 1962’s Four to Five, composed of sixteen candid street scenes that catch passersby interfacing with the stainless steel “Walking Woman” sculpture, the silhouetted female figure that was at the center of Snow’s multimedia output from 1961 to 1967. The pictures in Four to Five were taken in and around the subway system of Snow’s native Toronto, from whence he would shortly decamp for New York City and produce his first major film and second “debut,” 1964’s New York Eye and Ear Control: A Walking Woman Work, in which “She” stars.
The Walking Woman made a curtain call appearance in Wavelength, which was shot in a Canal Street loft in December of 1966, and debuted at Jonas Mekas’s Filmmaker’s Cinematheque to a small audience that included Mekas, Amy Taubin (who passes through the film), Shirley Clarke, Naim June Paik, and Richard Foreman. This was practically a Sex Pistols-at-the-Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester moment. Manny Farber, not usually prone to hyperbole, stated that Wavelength “may become The Birth of a Nation in Underground films,” while Snow would continue unabated his termitic practice in all other manner of media. In 1967 he also produced the hefty-looking photo installation Atlantic, comprised of thirty gelatin silver prints of rolling surf, photographs produced in the same shoot that captured the image at the terminus of Wavelength’s long zoom. Each of the prints is placed in the recesses of a metal compartment, with the compartments and photographs altogether forming a 5 X 6 rectangular grid. The detailed examination of any one print obscures one’s views of the other images, so one is compelled to “read” the work by moving along it from panel to panel.
This isn’t the only work in which Snow, who has referred to the role of the artist as being that of “a director of attention,” effectively steers the viewer’s eyeline. 1971’s Of a Ladder is comprised of ten successive views of a ladder, mounted to climb up a gallery wall. I took the individual views to be those that one would have at successive stages of one’s ascension—to properly align one’s view with the work, one would need a guess-what?—but this is a trick of light. They’re taken from a fixed position. 1976’s Imposition is composed of four pictures taken from the same vantage and successively overlaid in the darkroom. The images are of an empty alcove, the same alcove containing a sofa, the sofa with a nude couple seated on it, and the same couple sitting on the sofa in the same position, now clothed. The composition is naturally horizontal, though the frame is hung vertically, end-on-end, causing the viewer to involuntarily crane his or her neck to the side to correct the presentation. Imposition is right: Snow is imposing himself on the viewer, interfering with our process of looking with anything like ease or comfort—or getting in a proper ogle at whichever nude one is drawn to by sexual predilection. And the impositions continue: To get a gander at 1970’s Crouch, Leap, Land, for example, you have to squat, crawl, or crab-walk your way underneath the three panels suspended from the ceiling and facing floor-wards. (The image is of a naked women performing, in sequence, the three actions described in the title, as seen from beneath.) In Media Res (1998) takes the opposite vantage, providing what is nearly a literal bird’s eye view of a riotous scene: A parakeet has escaped from its cage, and three figures around a table are shooting to their feet to look up in a fluster. But while their attention is directed at the colorful blur above, the attention of the photograph is elsewhere. The margins of the piece are determined by the dimensions of the rug that frames the action, and the rug is the only element of the piece in focus. Even more flummoxing, the image is mounted on the gallery floor, in a position that seems contrived to insure that it will keep security busy trying to prevent its being trod on.
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The diptych iris-IRIS (1979) is a key work, an eloquent summary of the exhibition’s interest in contradiction and dichotomy. Its two same-sized panels, hung pendant, each feature a postcard depiction of an alpine mountain in exactly the same location. The panel on the left is a photograph, of an unmade bed and a bedside table. There is an ashtray on the table, and a small fire smolders inside it. The postcard is mounted on the gray wall above the bed. The panel on the right is a painting, a monotonous field of precisely the same shade of gray as the wall on the left. No object from the photograph has been reproduced, but the postcard, here the actual postcard, is affixed to the surface of the painting. With the juxtaposition of two very sparse images, Snow has given us a lot to unpack—questions of space, time, the deceit of reproduction. The photographed panel is scatted with signifiers suggestive of fugitive, spent passion (the crumpled sheets), destruction (the fire in the ashtray), misty memory (the postcard). The foreshortened bed, with its out-of-focus footboard dominating the foreground, introduces the idea of distorted perspective, an idea that carries into the “false window” effect of the postcard on the bare wall. The tallest mountain in the Alps—the card reads “Mont Blanc 4807 metres”—had been reduced to a diminutive keepsake. It is triply “rendered” on the left panel—photographed, mass-produced, photographed again—but is either representation more or less an object?
Snow refers to cameras as “mirrors with memories,” and in discriminating between still and moving photographs, he has noted that “photos are suffused with nostalgia seconds after their taking/making. Cinema ghosts are more active, Flying Dutchmen.” He has variously described iris-IRIS as “a range of interconnected references from the present to various pasts and back again” and as an attempt “to make the inevitable nostalgia of photos palpable.” All of which may sound like heady stuff, but the atmosphere at the PMA show is closer to funhouse. I got a hearty chuckle, for example, at 1978’s Waiting Room, which consists of a tiny “projector” made out of cardboard, wire, and tape facing a large format photograph of a room full of similarly crude cardboard furniture, and a blank “screen” which faces the projector. It’s silly and slightly hokey, the visual equivalent of a dad joke, and Photo-Centric is full of this sort of fun—which I realize isn’t a word usually associated with structuralist cinema or the men and women who create it, any more than it is usually associated with conceptual art, a tradition with which Snow’s plastic works have traditionally been identified. Many of Snow’s films are based on deceptively simple schemata applied with a rigor that produces crystal clarity, and a number of these photography-based pieces are built around rimshot-ready visual punchlines that, though they reward scrutiny and dangle open-ended questions, are every bit as punchy as Magritte’s visual puns. When is a ladder not a ladder? When is Mont Blanc not Mont Blanc?
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Snow’s gauntlet-toss at Cézanne doesn’t quite resound, but other dialogues with the PMA collection are there for the taking. For example, you can find some extraordinary examples of trompe l’oeil art elsewhere in the museum, including Philadelphia native and mad genius of the early Republic Charles Willson Peale’s 1795 depiction of sons Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay descending a staircase, the last step of which is three-dimensional and projects from the “canvas.” In works like Midnight Blue (1973-74) and Door (1979), Snow is exploring the same tradition. Midnight Blue—is the title a reference to the late, lamented Screw publisher Al Goldstein’s public access program, which debuted in 1974?—consists of the image of a single candle that stands out against a blue background, placed on a backing of rude wooden slats. The candle and blue background comprise a mounted photograph, yet the photographed boards align with the actual, raw boards, and a fringe of actual blue paint haloes the mounted photograph. Further complicating matters is a dribble of wax that, on a small eave jutting out from the bottom of the piece, has collected beneath the “candle.” Similarly, the subject of Door is a “door,” which is actually a small, highly detailed watercolor painting. The dimensions of the door determine the frame, and at seven-and-a-half feet tall it’s seemingly of functional size. The sense of perspective is undermined, however, by the presence of a disembodied hand holding up a match to the door, with both hand and match relatively huge and disproportional. We’re in Alice in Wonderland “Eat Me”/ “Drink Me” country.
A number of Snow’s works are similarly designed to frustrate or baffle a viewer’s sense of scale—the tiny projector in Waiting Room was built to scale with the furniture in the photographed room, though the process of photographic enlargement renders them wildly disproportionate. Both Multiplication Table (1977) and X60 (1979), like Door, involve the enlargements of tiny hand-drawn artworks, cranked up until the distortion creates a new machine-made, art. Meanwhile Times (1979) is a photograph of what looks to be a color field painting hanging on a white gallery wall. If the label next to it offers any context, it would appear to be a sizable canvas, but the relatively straightforward image is discreetly complicated by the fact that the width of the visible floorboards beneath the painting are wildly disproportionate. I thought of Elaine musing over the Sack Lunch poster in Seinfeld: Is it a tiny painting, or are they giant floorboards?
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The distortions of perspective to which Snow is drawing attention are one effect of the “process of becoming an image.” Another, the three-dimensional object’s compression into two dimensions, is addressed in Press (1969), which is composed of sixteen prints arranged in a 4×4 layout. The photographs, backed with polyester resin that smooshes out from around their margins, are sandwiched between two sheets of plexiglass held together at the corners by c-clamps. The subjects in the photographs mirror the circumstances of their presentation: they are photographs of variety of objects—two fish, a stick of butter, an egg, a clump of spaghetti—that have been pressed between Plexiglass held together by c-clamps, visible on the corners of each frame.
In the upper right hand and lower left hand corners of Press, one sees an image of Snow himself, face hidden by the camera. He can also be glimpsed in the same year’s mirror autoportrait series Authorization, in which the artist is gradually obscured and disappeared by an accumulation of photographs. Like Press and Atlantic, Authorization is another of the gridworks that populate the show—including 8 X 10I (1969), Glares (1973), Field (1973-74), The Squerr (Ch’art) (1978), Still Living (1982). All of these gridworks suggest nets, traps set by the artist to capture the astonished medium and, having captured it, to extract its essence. Such an experiment must necessarily fail, something implicitly acknowledged in the defeat of Authorization. As happens to the crushed objects in Press, the process of being placed under glass must hopelessly mangle the subjects of inquiry. Photo-Centric is therefore a laboratory of specimens and scribbled hypotheses, of failures which amount to a grand success.
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.