Influential multimedia artist speaks at Guelph
At 85-years-old, Canadian sculptor, photographer, and sound artist Michael Snow is a sort of national treasure. His lecture on March 25 at War Memorial, the ninth installation of the annual Dasha Shenkman lecture series, acted at once as a retrospective, an elaboration on his artistic practice, a showing of the development of his jazz-inspired piano performances, and a screening of his 1967 experimental film Standard Time. Coinciding with the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program’s open studio exhibit, showcasing the program’s innovative works and works in progress, the famed artist’s lecture acted as a perfect counterpoint to view where Canadian art has been and where it is going.
One of Canada’s most influential 20th century multimedia artists gave a talk for 2015’s Dasha Shenkman lecture. This article is a brief retrospective of his extensive, vital career.
This article seeks to elaborate on Snow’s career as a retrospective, and highlight some of his more significant works. It’s a heavy task to pick out only a handful of such a diverse artist’s work, but I felt it apt to choose the works at once dearest to me and works most significant within the wider context of Canadian art history and contemporary theory.
Snow was born in Toronto and studied at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University). His installation work is largely preoccupied with sculpture, but he mainly works in holographic and photographic mediums that are highly formalist and with a marked attention to the spatializing – both materially and viewer-response wise – of the photographic form. One notable sculpture installation was Walking Women, displayed at the landmark Expo ’67 in Montreal.
A contemporary of experimental, formalist film artists such as Canadian Arthur Lipsett, and New Yorkers Hollis Frampton and Stan Brakhage, Snow’s contributions to experimental cinema have been crucial. Film critic J. Hoberman has said of his 1967 film Wavelength that it is “The Birth of a Nation of experimental film.” For context – D.W. Griffith’s 1919 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, while contentious in nature with its subject matter on American Civil War racism, established crucial technical innovations in narrative cinema. Snow’s film thus foregrounded innovations in structuralist/experimental cinema, with its slowly paced zoom-ins on the fixed subject of rooms, and its grating, abecedarian electronic noise soundtrack – techniques also shared by other directors such as Chantal Akerman (most notably her 1972 film Hotel Monterey).
Snow is also a noted musician and musicologist, most notably a jazz pianist cum-experimental piano music composer. His recording The Last LP: Unique Last Recordings of the Music of Ancient Cultures is a sort of “mock-ethnography,” to borrow artist Steve Reinke’s term, in which Snow recontextualizes the music from Tibetan and African cultures, among others, into a sort of metafictional “joke.” This joke takes on the most striking form in the track “Si Nopo Da,” which purports itself as a field recording of a coming-of-age ritual from Niger, but is actually Snow’s own multi-tracked vocal rendition of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know,” mediated and appropriated to the point of unrecognizability. This work is perhaps the most salient signifier of Snow’s artistic concerns – it straddles a careful line between the private and public, highlights the ontologies of auditory/visual cultures, and anxiously posits the cultural and commercial power of recording technologies.
At 85-years-old, Canadian sculptor, photographer, and sound artist Michael Snow is a sort of national treasure.
Snow is a difficult artist to write about for someone like me, whose grasp of art is, admittedly, pedestrian at best. But his significance to Canadian art is undeniable – according to SOFAM (School of Fine Arts and Music), “No other living Canadian artist has made as profound a contribution to international visual culture and Canadian artistic identity.” I hope this article has at least scratched the surface of what Snow has accomplished and how important his works have proved to be.