Border Crossings Magazine

When the Canadian artist Michael Snow left Toronto for New York in 1962, he had already established a reputation as an artist whose carreer was on the rise. When he returned to Toronto in 1971, that reputation had extended to Europe and the United States, and had been earned in a variety of artistic disciplines, including painting, filmmaking and avant-garde music. Snow was an aesthetic polymath and in New York he was able to investigate the discrete areas of the times, and not a reflection of divisible categories in Snow’s own artistic sensibility. From the start, his interests were uncontainable, and New York provided him with the opportunities he needed to develop fully his myriad affiliations. As he said in 1967, "My Paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a musician, music by a sculptor ... sometimes they all work together." The primary tool Snow used to effect that aesthetic migration was the outlined silhouette of a walking woman, "just a drawing," he said, and "not a very good one either!"

The "Walking Woman Works," which he first exhibited in Toronto in 1962 at the Isaacs Gallery, occupied his attention for a significant portion of the years he spent in New York. She was—and remains—an image with the iconographic potency of Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes and de Kooning’s toothy women, although his image is neither fierce nor consistently eroticized. But Snow was able to use the walking woman in innumerable pieces, some 200 in total, which he made before retiring her in his 1967 film, Wavelength. "The Walking Woman" was a visual embodiment of the subject in Pound’s poem, "Portrait d’une Femme;" an encounter with her would allow you to "take strange gain away." Viewers of her multiple incarnations in paintings, sculptures and photographs, and on sweatshirts and posters were variously bewildered and charmed. Snow placed her cut-out black plywood form in different urban contexts in Toronto and New York, and then photographed the reactions of passersby. His assessment of the effect these "often beautiful compositions" had on people is telling: they were "neurotic, erotic, aesthetic."

They were also generative and recombinant; Snow saw her variations in the context of jazz, “the theme and variation thing,” and her photographed image led him to the medium of film. It was through film that Snow would first reach an international audience. The screening of Wavelength in 1967 was, in Jonas Mekas’s estimation, “a landmark event in cinema.” Snow’s own intention for the film was no less ambitious. “I wanted a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas,” he said of the 45-minute-long zoom that incorporates in its time frame four human events, including a man’s death. It’s safe to say that Snow’s artistic output has been to discover ways to make evident, and expand upon, that initial summary intention. As he said in Artforum in 1971, “I do not have a system, I am a system.” (It wouldn’t be a stretch to hear in that pronouncement an echo of Jackson Pollock’s declaration, “I am nature.”) Snow has always aimed high. Or, to put to use Steve Reich’s metaphor in recording his initial reaction to Wavelength, Snow likes to “keep all the balls in the air.”

Michael Snow has been carrying on that dazzling, acrobatic act for 40 years now and shows no sign of letting up. His practice is as varied as ever, and lately music seems to be occupying more and more of his attention. The conceptual rigour and the level of visual intelligence in his art are astonishing. He never misses a beat (unless he wants to) and he continues to dance to the rhythm of his own drum. In the following interview, he comments on the attitude he brings to the making of art: “I’m not so much investigating the world as using different kinds of representational situations to make something that doesn’t actually exist in the world.” Later on, he reflects on the possibilities offered by that newly made world. “I make up the rules of a game and I play it,” he says, the observation inflected by only the wryest of smiles. “If I seem to be losing, I change the rules.”

The following interview was recorded in the kitchen of Michael Snow’s Toronto home on Tuesday, March 20, 2007. It began as he was showing me a painting of a rambunctious jazz ensemble that he had done while in high school.

MICHAEL SNOW: This is a painting that I did in 1947 when I was in high school. It’s called Jazz Band. It’s very Picassoid. Seeing it, one would say that the artist had some knowledge of Cubism. How that came about puzzles me.

BORDER CROSSINGS: You say you had some knowledge of Cubism, but you don’t have a recollection of having looked at art books at the time?

MS: No, I’m absolutely certain that I didn’t. I think I remember where I saw my first Picassos; it was in an article in Life magazine, but in my memory, I thought it was when I was actually going to art college. But without doubt, it was when I was in high school. When I somehow graduated from high school, I was awarded the art prize. I was very surprised because as far as art was concerned, I wasn’t doing anything more than the rest of the guys. I was throwing wads of paper. Because of the prize, I decided to go to an art school, to Ontario College of Art (OCA) in Toronto.

BC: Was your intention to be an artist?

MS: I didn’t know what that meant and it took me a long time to figure out what it might mean. I didn’t know what to do, so I took what was known as a design course, as opposed to advertising art or fine art. That turned out to be very lucky because I met my teacher, John Martin, who was quite extraordinary. I started to paint for myself, really. The design course was interesting, but I did these other things and John Martin saw them and discussed them and suggested books I should read. We carried on this conversation. He told me about Mondrian and it was really fabulous. He suggested I put two abstract paintings I had done in the Ontario Society of Artists competition, which was apparently the first time a student had ever been accepted.   (See Issue 102 to read the full interview.)