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

Chapter 1 Figuring Redemption: A Theoretical Frame

This page intentionally left blank The overall purpose of this study is to explore how the visual art practice of Michael Snow asks the viewer, “who?” This is the question of how spectators, you and I, implicitly renegotiate how we understand ourselves when faced with the task of making sense of a challenging piece of contemporary art. The project flows initially from the utopian idea, which has gained increasing acceptance in art practice since the period between the two world wars, that art potentially has the capacity to heal or redeem the self from the metaphorical wounds caused by the impact of rapid technological change on society. The self, my self as a problem of self-recognition, comprises my understanding of how, where, and who I am among others both real and imagined. Michael Snow’s practice has focussed extensively on techniques of mass production in visual representation , especially photography and film, which is one place where technology finds a site in visual art. It is my contention that much art criticism written concurrently with Snow’s production, and retrospectively, has placed the viewer in the artist’s shoes and implicitly attempts to return the artist’s view and its outcomes . However, what happens if the problem of the audience is turned around and addressed from the perspective of my self who comes later and faces Snow’s work across an acknowledged gap created by the factors of concrete representation , my other time, place, experience, and (in my case) gender? Do these interventions necessarily mean that some value or capacity of the art is lost, or does xi Preface this displacement open multiple new, unforeseen connections and recognitions for you or me? As I see it, engaging with Snow’s exceptionally funny, sensual, confrontational practice, with its obvious roots in the history of Western art, is not primarily an act of repeating Snow’s experience or his process of working, but a precarious act of reading my way towards self-understanding and living among others. Because this study takes being a viewer as its problem, and I can only renegotiate my own self-understanding, the voice in the text oscillates between first-person engagement with art work and third-person analysis of art criticism and theories of discourse, reading, and writing. Inasmuch as visual art, like writing, is a matter of figuration and notation, but so is computing loans or mortgages, the global phrase for the problem, “Figuring Redemption,” leaped into mind while I was thinking about the relationship between Snow’s use of mass production techniques and the running debate over technology and art. The paradox of the phrase opens a rich trove of ironic metaphors and puns about borrowing, interest, circulation of funds, etc., and frames the question of “who?” through metaphors of loans, speculations, and returns to the sight of my self. When Snow’s frames mobilize and borrow my sight (comprising my everyday understanding of who I am), can the loan ever be repaid? What do I expect as a return, or do I gamble for returns that exceed legitimate interest, and what might that interest be? How do I figure redemption on “returns” of my sight to me? Chapter 1 maps the question regarding the potential capacity for visual art, or reading and writing, to ask the question of “who?” as the problem has been considered and reconfigured by a group of twentieth-century writers. Although I have done my best to present relevant thinking by these writers as simply as possible, readers might want to return to this chapter after reading other chapters which play between the first chapter and Snow’s practice. Seeing or thinking about visual art can illuminate texts as well as the other way around, although in our culture primacy is almost always given to the written word. For myself, I developed some understanding of certain of these texts only in the light of Snow’s practice. The book studies groups of related work rather than following a narrative line or progressive argument. Consequently, the chapters can be read according to the reader’s interest. Snow’s primary visual strategy engages the expressive and interpretative effects of framing. Framing is also the central metaphor in Martin Heidegger’s meditations on how modern technology and mass reproduction cause the destruction of the self as it’s traditionally understood in Western culture, and how art might have the potential capacity...