Snow is perhaps Canada’s most famous and most important unknown artist. Canadians really don’t know their artists until long after they’ve died and, even then, not unless their work has been turned into posters, greeting cards and umbrellas.
Snow travelled Europe in the 50s and moved to New York in the 60s, which gave him the kind of exposure that leads to recognition. His cool, intellectual, philosophical or analytic approach to art making earned great respect while also placing him in a category relatively unto himself, certainly in Canada but also in terms of Western art.
You could say Snow was a part of conceptualism insofar as he employed strategies for making things. His ‘walking women” of the 60s are fundamentally an exercise in framing, a methodology further developed in my favourite of his works, the self-referential (a work that refers to itself by revealing the process or steps of its making) self-portrait of 1969.
A lot of what you read about Snow says it is hard to categorize his work. I think that is because of a few public artworks that are difficult to read. Snow’s geese in Toronto’s Eaton Centre may be familiar to many people but few would know that, while the forms are sculpted fibreglass, the surfaces are actual photographs of a goose (Flight Stop, 1982). The parody sculpture on Toronto’s skydome (The Audience, 1989) seemed at the time, to me, to be purposively throwing people off the scent, or perhaps it was a raspberry like the ones depicted by the characters directed at the art world that had by then devolved into a dismaying anything goes sort of anti-intellectualism then called “postmodernism”.
I think of Snow’s work as fundamentally post-structuralist. He matured as an artist just as Barthes and Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard and others’ ideas about semiotics (language theory) and deconstruction (cultural, ideological critique) began to reach North America.
Snow worked adeptly in all media, painting, sculpture but also film and music. He brought his unique sensibility and thoughtfulness to all of it.
I also have thought (mistakenly) that there is a text artwork by Snow called “Reason over Passion.” In fact, that work was made around the same time as the self-portrait above by his partner, Joyce Weiland, no doubt a poke at her so serious and more famous husband. Still I love the idea and think of it as very Canadian, to put reason over passion. If only we could more of that now.
Quilted cotton, 256.5 x 302.3 x 8 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Copied here from: https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/joyce-wieland/significance-and-critical-issues/
There’s a lot of material about Michael Snow online, including this: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/michael-snow
Look him up. He was a great person, thinker and artist.
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