Figuring Redemption: Resighting My Self in the Art of Michael Snow (review)

Tila L. Kellman's analysis of Michael Snow focuses on an active and subjective engagement with a selected group of Snow's artwork. Kellman posits the viewer as a witness, rather than as a voyeur, and understands Snow's practice as one of framing and mediation, one that 'works toward democratizing the world of art and opening different avenues by which to recognize and refigure my self.' Following Annette Michelson, who draws a parallel between Snow's and Marcel Duchamp's framing practices, the works Kellman selects for her analysis -the Walking Woman series, Sight, Portrait, Venetian Blind, Authorization,iris-iris, Scope, Press, Membrane, and La Région Centrale- are posited as frame-works. Snow's frames question the nature of mediums, their cross-over, and the problem of seeing and the mastery of seeing. In so far as the works deal with the banalities of everyday life, they have political and ethical significance, and produce reflexive spaces in which the viewer is able to ask 'who?'

Taking up Heidegger's idea that art has the power to redeem the self from the damage caused by technology, Kellman argues that Snow's practice of framing has a redemptive potential. Framing thus works as a tool for 'imaginatively detaching and mobilizing whatever falls within its bounds.' Through irony and puns, according to Kellman, Snow's framing enables the viewer (me) to explore sights and possibilities conditioned by personal memories and subjective responses, allowing me to recognize myself as metaphorically damaged and then go beyond given structures of desire, domination, and narration.

For Kellman, unlike earlier critics of Snow, we do not become aware of our own consciousness in the experience of his works, but rather of our own perception. Following Derrida, she argues that the notion of consciousness comprehends a teleological process that posits a subject (you and me) that is insufficient and vulnerable, always striving towards full recognition. Such a reading is linked to a search for higher knowledge, which remains unverifiable and bound to power relationships. Instead of a fixed notion of consciousness, truth, and knowledge, Kelman adopts the Derridean view that knowledge is subjective and expressed in language. As such, the subject is free to add his or her own interpretation, attitude, or intention. The focus is on how the subject reads and interprets these works, rather than how he or she becomes conscious of the material.

Kellman explains the subject that some of Snow's work demands through Ricoeur's definition of the subject as existence: 'I want, I move, I do,' which requires and includes my body. It becomes a question of self-designation, of desire, and action. Self-designation takes place in discourse, which is the event of the encounter with the works. Kellman, taking after Ricoeur and Derrida, frees interpretation from authorial intention, thereby destabilizing the reader's understanding by a moment of reflection, which for Ricoeur is a detour through self-understanding: 'to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text.' Therefore, Kellman's analysis consists of a series of subjective reflections and understanding processes that take place in the event of her encounter with Snow's works.

This hermeneutical position, the detour for reflection, 'assumes competing moments of self-dispossession and refiguration,' as in the process of understanding we lose ourselves only to reconstitute ourselves later. This is how Snow's frames 'steal' or borrow my sight and then return it to me, allowing me to gain a new understanding of my self and redeeming it from structures of domination and frustrating models that 'formulate you and me as the end points of messages (gendered viewer), or as consumers, or as units of technology.' Furthermore, a subjective interpretation 'transfers love and the problem of self-understanding into the public domain.' Instead of validation, redemption gives love the task to reconstitute the self, turning it into an ethical question in terms of the relationship with the Other.

For her...