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An Interview With Micheal Snow by Terry Dawes

Micheal Snow is a Toronto based artist whose work en-
compasses a wide variety of media: photography, film,video,
music, sound, sculpture, installation, and holography. He
has been prolifically working since the late 1940’s. His work
blurs absolutely the line between form and content. It is about
the way we see and perceive and it is about seeing in new
ways. His work today is just as vital as his previous work and
just as demanding. He visited Vancouver in October, giving
several talks (including one here at Emily Carr), playing pi-
ano at the Western Front with drummer Jack Vorvis, opening
his photography exhibit at Presentation House (which runs
until December 18), and being a legend.

POTA: I found one of the ideas in your talk last night
kind of intriguing which is the one of specificity towards a
medium. In your film work, you described trying to do some-
thing that was specific towards that medium, that couldn’t be
duplicated in another. . :

MS: Well, I think that, for example with film, if you think about that
what you are working with is light and time as material to be shaped and
motion being the byproduct, then you approach the medium a little bit
differently than if you started out, for example, thinking that it’s a me-
dium that’s made to tell stories. I think if you approach whatever medium
you're working in with some kind of investigation of what its specific quali-
ties and possibilities are, then you can make a work that draws from those
possibilities instead of imposing something on it. It just means, it’s not
exactly purity, but it means that you have a source of things to do from
within that medium itself by thinking about “What is it?” and “What can it
do?”

POTA: Is that an approach you take toward the other
media you work with?

MS: Oh, yeah. :

POTA: So to what degree do they intermingle? Like, do
you approach film, for example, in a musical way or...

MS: No, actually, I mean I’m sure there’s an effect because music is a
time art like film. But I don’t really do much that’s mixed media, really. I
work in a lot of different mediums but sort of separately. One of the
mixes, I guess, is sound film and it’s something I’ve been working very
hard on for a long, long time, trying to do something with sound/image
relationships. I like them when they’re well done but I don’t like them
when they’re practices. For example, they use music in film as a mood
producer, which is the way it’s basically used in all fiction films. You’re
not supposed to hear it. So, when I’ve used music, I’ve tried to make you
hear it as music and not use it as something that tells you you’re supposed
to be happy, you’re supposed to be sad or something like that. So I think
of sound as a really structural thing in relation to the picture. I mean, I’ve
done different things with it but it’s an area that I sort of recognize as one
where there are certain possibilities for certain experiences beyond the
mood music one and the sync sound one.

POTA: I’m interested in your history. Which was the
medium that got you started?

MS: Well, like most kids I drew, so it probably started there as a
visual artist but I didn’t really notice it so much. It was in high school, I
had these revelations by hearing certain jazz music that totally just knocked
me out and I wanted to try and play like that. It so happens that my
mother was a good pianist. She was never professional but she was very.
fine and she had always wanted me to take piano lessons but I wouldn’t do
it. Basically, I wouldn’t do anything. Then, all of a sudden, I just wanted
to play so I started to basically teach myself. This is a kind of characteris-
tic story in a way and it happens all the time with garage rock groups; I
just met some other guys who had been smitten with the same bug and we
put bands together and taught each other and that’s how we started. So
that was in high school and when I graduated, | got the art prize which
surprised me because I didn’t think I was doing anything more than any-
body else in art class, you know, throwing stuff and things like that. But
apparently, they thought what I did was good and so that made me decide
to go to the Ontario College of Art where I got really interested in painting
and before that, I hadn’t really thought about it too much.

POTA: What year was that, roughly?

MS: Well, it was not the paleolithic but it was the neolithic. I think I
got out in ’52 or3 or something like that. After I got out of OCA, I didn’t
know what to do, naturally and I got a job that I was terrible at in an
advertising company and I saved my money and I went away to Furope to
find myself. I went with a friend from OCA who was also a drummer. We
played in different bands. By the time I got out of high school, I was

playing jobs and that continued through OCA. So, I went to Europe with
three hundred bucks. and I stayed there for a year and a half, playing
occasionally. When I was in Europe, I did a lot of drawing and I came back
and had a show of these drawings. A guy phoned me up who’d seen the
show and liked the drawings very much and it so happened that he had a
film company. He said, this is really very unbelievable, he said, “Seeing
those drawings, I thought that whoever did them must be interested in
film. Are you and if so, would you like a job?” Well, I wanted a job very
much but I wasn’t interested in film. He was George Dunning who later
did the Beatles’ film “Yellow Submarine” in England. He liked the idea of
using fine artists and training them how to do animation. So that was my
introduction to film, so I got very interested in that. And then this com-
pany collapsed, largely because of people like me, and then I worked mostly
as a musician to make a living and painted during the day. And I did a lot
of pretty good work in those days, like the “Walking Woman” in ’61. So
the different mediums kept on and I used to try to talk myself out of one
or the other because I thought one shouldn’t do that. That you never
really get out of yourself what was possible if you did all these different
things. So, every once in a while, I tried to stop playing music. 1 moved
New York in 1962, and I tried to use that as an occasion to stop playing
music but it didn’t work. I got involved with a whole bunch of stuff when
I got there that was really wonderful. It seemed like a kind of problem but
after a while I just kind of figured, “Well, I guess this is the way I do things.”
And I just kind of kept on maintaining a line in each one of them, I guess.
So I made my first film when I was working at this company, as an inde-
yendent little thing to do, and it was an animated film.

POTA: Was that “A-Z”?

MS: Yep.

POTA: Do you question your motivations for the way that

ou approach various media? I’ve often wondered about it,

if it was to some extent oppositional because the predomi-
nant use of film, say, is to tell stories or as a representation
of a theatre piece.

MS: No, it’s not really oppositional. It just happens that I’m not
really interested in the theatre or the theatrical and I’ve never been really
interested in the novel. I didn’t really know there was a genre of film
called experimental film at first, when I was working at this film company
but when I went to New York, I saw some things. It was the beginning ofa
pretty active period in New York. I realized that a solo person could make
a film, And because I worked in a business, that’s the way I started out,
that’s the way it had to be done. But there were all these people who were
all very poor just making what they wanted to make. That was really

‘liberating, as they say. I’d been thinking about film ideas before I went

there. In fact, 1 made a film that was based on the same idea as that photo
piece “Four to Five,” which was called “New York Eye and Ear Control,”
which is based on the idea of putting the “Walking Woman” silhouette in
real settings only it’s a film. It has motion and stuff in it. And it’s my first
attempt to really try to deal with a sound image situation, in this case,
with some very powerful music from a group that was one of the greatest,
well, I sort of partly put it together, of the so-called free jazz area with
Albert Ayler on tenor sax. Anyway, before I went there, I had the idea to
try and make this film but the kind of energy to really do it was reinforced
by the existence of these people who just went ahead and made what they
thought they should make. And I saw some very interesting things, all of
which is also very clarifying to what you want to do yourself, you know?
So, the whole film thing for me really blossomed in New York. David
Rimmer was there in the sixties, too.

POTA: I guess it just seems natural that a group of peo-
ple can get together and inform each others’ work at the time
it’s happening but in retrospect, that’s a movement.

MS: Yeah, we didn’t know that it was but it was. Interesting. We
shared things and in some odd sense, I feel like I wasn’t influenced but
there were lots of exchanges of ideas which of course do influence. Yeah,
it was an interesting period and some really great works were produced.
You know, it has it’s sad side because Paul Sharits, who did -some really
masterpiece films, had a really difficult time. His films didn’t get shown
enough and he could never get enough money to keep going with his
work.

POTA: Yeah clearly, there seems to me to be a commonality
of vision or maybe what people were trying to achieve. There
seems to be a faithfulness to the specific qualities of a me-
dium, I’m thinking of Stan Brakhage and David Rimmer and
people like that.

MS: Yeah, one of the things we shared was a less expressionist use of
the camera than Stan, for example. There was more thought given to the
entire shape of what you were doing.

POTA: I was thinking about the film “(See You Later) Au
Revoir,” there seems to be an attempt at a concentration of
vision or something to that effect of looking at things, even
though they’re contrived, they’re set up, but almost likeina
documentary kind of a style. You’re looking at actual physi-
cal things and it’s almost scientific, it’s like a study of some-
thing and I’m just wondering what you’re trying to get at
with that kind of work.

MS: It’s, as with all art, just a way of shaping forms, in this case,
shaping time. There are some very beautiful things that happen in it in
terms of the kind of shapes that are made. For example, when the man
puts the scarf over his head, it becomes a very pure shape that gradually
compresses when the scarf comes down. What the film makes you do is to
see all the forms that are developing on the screen and not just the pro-
tagonist. One of the things that’s important in it is that the camera is
always moving and it’s not following exactly the man as he gets up. It’s
moving with him and they sort of move together and get a little ahead or
a little behind but the camera has a bit of a life of its own which reinforces
the fact that you’re supposed to look at or that it’s interesting to look at
the entire picture, not just the man. The shadows that are made. I think
it’s very rich for a small thing. It’s really funny to make a description of it
in a film distributor’s catalogue and the story would be: “A man sitting at
a desk gets up, puts on his coat, and walks out the door.

POTA: In eighteen minutes.

MS: It’s got a lot of implications apart from the banality of it because
it’s not banal. It’s full of things that you can’t see except with that process.
MONS 14VHIIW

An Interview With Micheal Snow by Terry Dawes

Micheal Snow is a Toronto based artist whose work en-
compasses a wide variety of media: photography, film,video,
music, sound, sculpture, installation, and holography. He
has been prolifically working since the late 1940's. His work
blurs absolutely the line between form and content. It is about
the way we see and perceive and it is about seeing in new
ways. His work today is just as vital as his previous work and
just as demanding. He visited Vancouver in October, giving
several talks (including one here at Emily Carr), playing pi-
ano at the Western Front with drummer Jack Vorvis, opening
his photography exhibit at Presentation House (which runs
until December 18), and being a legend.

POTA: I found one of the ideas in your talk last night
kind of intriguing which is the one of specificity towards a
medium. In your film work, you described trying to do some-
thing that was specific towards that medium, that couldn’t be
duplicated in another. :

MS: Well, I think that, for example with film, if you think about that
what you are working with is light and time as material to be shaped and.
motion being the byproduct, then you approach the medium a little bit
differently than if you startéd out, for example, thinking that it’s a me=
dium that’s made to tell stories. I think if you approach whatever medium
you're working in with some kind of investigation of what its specific quali-
ties and possibilities are, then you can make a work that draws from those
possibilities instead of imposing something on it. It just means, it’s not
exactly purity, but it means that you have a source of things to do from
within that medium itself by thinking about “What is it?” and “What can it
do?”

POTA: Is that an approach you take toward the other
media you work with?

MS: Oh, yeah.

POTA: So to what degree do they intermingle? Like, do
you approach film, for example, in a musical way or...

MS: No, actually, I mean I'm sure there’s an effect because music is a
time art like film, But I don’t really do much that’s mixed media, really. 1
work in a lot of different mediums but sort of separately. One of the
mixes, I guess, is sound film and it’s something I've been working very
hard on for a long, long time, trying to do something with sound/image
relationships. 1 like them when they're well done but I don’t like them
when they're practices. For example, they use music in film as a mood
producer, which is the way it’s basically used in all fiction films. You're
not supposed to hear it. So, when I've used music, I've tried to make you
hear it as music and not use it as something that tells you you're supposed.
to be happy, you're supposed to be sad or something like that. So I think
of sound as a really structural thing in relation to the picture. imean, I've
done different things with it but it's an area that I sort of recognize as one
where there are certain possibilities for certain experiences beyond the
‘mood music one and the sync sound one.

POTA: I’m interested in your history.
medium that got you started?

MS: Well, like most kids I drew, so it probably started there as a
visual artist but I didn’t really notice it so much. It was in high school, 1
had these revelations by hearing certain jazz music that totally just knocked
‘me out and I wanted to try and play like that. It so happens that my
mother was a good pianist. She was never professional but she was very
fine and she had always wanted me to take piano lessons but I wouldn’t do
it. Basically, Iwouldn’t do anything. Then, all of a sudden, I just wanted
to play so1Istarted to basically teach myself. This is a kind of characteris-
tic story in a way and it happens all the time with garage rock groups; I
just met some other guys who had been smitten with the same bug and we
put bands together and taught each other and that’s how we started. So
that was in high school and when I graduated, I got the art prize which
surprised me because I didn’t think I was doing anything more than any-
body else in art class, you know, throwing stuff and things like that. But
apparently, they thought what I did was good and so that made me decide
to go to the Ontario College of Art where I got really interested in painting
and before that, I hadn't really thought about it too much.

POTA: What year was that, roughly?

MS: Well, it was not the paleolithic but it was the neolithic. 1 think 1
got out in ’52 or3 or something like that. After I got out of OCA, I didn’t
know what to do, naturally and I got a job that 1 was terrible at in an
advertising company and I saved my money and I went away to Furope to
find myself. Iwent with a friend from OCA who was also a drummer. We
played in different bands. By the time I got out of high-school, I was

Which was the

playing jobs and that continued through QCA. So, I went to Europe with
three hundred bucks. and I stayed there for a year and a half, playing
‘oceasionally. When I was in Europe, I did a lot of drawing and I came back
and had a show of these drawings. A guy phoned me up who'd seen the
show and liked the drawings very much and it so happened that he had a
film company. He said, this is really very unbelievable, he said, “Seeing
those drawings, I thought that whoever did them must be interested in
film, Are you and if so, would you like a job?” Well, I wanted a job very
much but I wasn’t interested in film. He was George Dunning who later
did the Beatles’ film “Yellow Submarine” in England. He liked the idea of
using fine artists and training them how to do animation. So that was my
introduction to film, so I got very interested in that. And then this com-
pany collapsed, largely because of people like me, and then Iworked mostly
4s a musician to make a living and painted during the day. And I did a lot
of pretty good work in those days, like the “Walking Woman” in '61. So
the different mediums kept on and | used to try to talk myself out of one
or the other because | thought one shouldn’t do that. That you never
really get out of yourself what was possible if you did all these different
things. So, every once in a while, | tried to stop playing music. 1 moved
New York in 1962, and I tried to use that as an occasion to stop playing
music but it didn't work. 1 got involved with a whole bunch of stuff when
Tgot there that was really wonderful. It seemed like a kind of problem but
after a while I just kind of figured, “Well, I guess this is the way Ido things.”
‘And [just kind of kept on maintaining a line in each one of them, I guess.
So I made my first film when I was working at this company, as an inde-
yendent little thing to do, and it was an animated film.

POTA: Was that “A-27

MS: Yep.

POTA: Do you question your motivations for the way that

ou approach various media? I’ve often wondered about it,
if it was to some extent oppositional because the predomi-
nant use of film, say, is to tell stories or as a representation
of a theatre piece.

MS: No, it’s not really oppositional. It just happens that I'm not
really interested in the theatre or the theatrical and I've never been really
interested in the novel. 1 didn’t really know there was a genre of film
called experimental film at first, when I was working at this film company
bbut when I went to New York, I saw some things. It was the beginning of a
pretty active period in New York. I realized that a solo person could make
a film, And because | worked in a business, that’s the way I started out,
that’s the way it had to be done. But there were all these people who were
all very poor just making what they wanted to make. That was really
liberating, as they say. I'd been thinking about film ideas before 1 went
there. In fact, I made a film that was based on the same idea as that photo
piece “Four to Five,” which was called “New York Eye and Ear Control,”
which is based on the idea of putting the “Walking Woman” silhouette in
real settings only it’s a film. It has motion and stuff in it. And it’s my first
attempt to really try to deal with a sound image situation, in this case,
with some very powerful music from a group that was one of the greatest,
well, I sort of partly put it together, of the so-called free jazz area with
Albert Ayler on tenor sax. Anyway, before I went there, I had the idea to
try and make this film but the kind of energy to really do it was reinforced
by the existence of these people who just went ahead and made what they
thought they should make. And I saw some very interesting things, all of
which is also very clarifying to what you want to do yourself, you know?
So, the whole film thing for me really blossomed in New York. David
Rimmer was there in the sixties, too.

POTA: I guess it just seems natural that a group of peo-
ple can get together and inform each others’ work at the time
it’s happening but in retrospect, that’s a movement.

MS: Yeah, we didn’t know that it was but it was. Interesting. We
shared things and in some odd sense, I feel like I wasn’t influenced but
there were lots of exchanges of ideas which of course do influence. Yeah,
it was an interesting period and some really great works were produced.
You know, it has it’s sad side because Paul Sharits, who did some really
masterpiece films, had a really difficult time. His films didn’t get shown
enough and he could never get enough money to keep going with his
work.

POTA: Yeah clearly, there seems to me to be a commonality
of vision or maybe what people were trying to achieve, There
seems to be a faithfulness to the specific qualities of a me-
dium, I’m thinking of Stan Brakhage and David Rimmer and
people like that.

MS: Yeah, one of the things we shared was a less expressionist use of
the camera than Stan, for example, There was more thought given to the
entire shape of what you were doing.

POTA: I was thinking about the film “(See You Later) Au
Revoir,” there seems to be an attempt at a concentration of
vision or something to that effect of looking at things, even
though they're contrived, they’re set up, but almost like in a
documentary kind of a style. You're looking at actual physi-
cal things and it’s almost scientific, it’s like a study of some-
thing and I’m just wondering what you're trying to get at
with that kind of work.

MS: It's, as with all art, just a way of shaping forms, in this case,
shaping time. There are some very beautiful things that happen in it in
terms of the kind of shapes that are made. For example, when the man
puts the scarf over his head, it becomes a very pure shape that gradually
compresses when the scarf comes down. What the film makes you do is to
see all the forms that are developing on the screen and not just the pro-
tagonist. One of the things that’s important in it is that the camera is
always moving and it’s not following exactly the man as he gets up. It’s
‘moving with him and they sort of move together and get a little ahead or
alittle behind but the camera has a bit of a life ofits own which reinforces
the fact that you're supposed to look at or that it’s interesting to look at
the entire picture, not just the man, The shadows that are made. I think
it’s very rich for a small thing. It’s really funny to make a description of it
ina film distributor's catalogue and the story would be: “A man sitting at
a desk gets up, puts on his coat, and walks out the door.

POTA: In eighteen minutes.

MS: I's got a lot of implications apart from the banality of it because
it’s not banal. It’s full of things that you can’t see except with that process.