Artist Michael Snow to launch his monograph Michael Snow – Sequences – A History of His Art.Dan Brinzac/The Globe and Mail
The best description of Michael Snow's approach to art-making remains the one he himself provided more than 50 years ago: "I am not a professional. My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor …"
Of course by now, on the cusp of his 86th birthday, the Toronto-born multidisciplinarian has become very much a professional at the profession of being Michael Snow. For proof, just peruse the almost 400 pages that make up Michael Snow – Sequences – A History of His Art, a new monograph of his protean, experimental output prepared by Barcelona's Ediciones Poligrafa to complement a recently completed survey in that Spanish city. The book, a hardcover, is elegant in presentation, thorough in content and pricey ($92), the images accompanied by texts from Snow, film scholar Bruce Jenkins and Gloria Moure, who both edited the monograph and curated the survey. (Moure's introductory essay is a paragon – parody? – of contemporary artspeak.)
To be sure, the book seems a touch constraining and static as a form to encompass a creator as sui generis, idiom-busting and media-mixing as Snow. Duration and space and the tension between object and image are among Snow's big "themes," and those can only be approximated on the page rather than experienced. Still, as a memento for Snow fans, Sequences succeeds; it's also a handsome, shiny thing in its own right.
Michael Snow launches Sequences at shopAGO (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), Nov. 13, 6-8 p.m.