Kirjahaku

Essential texts on the work of the influential artist Michael Snow: essays and interviews spanning more than four decades.Few filmmakers have had as large an impact on the recent avant-garde film scene as Canadian Michael Snow (b. 1928). His works in a range of media-film, installation, video, painting, sculpture, sound, photography, drawing, writing, and music-address the fundamental properties of his materials, the conditions of perception and experience, questions of authorship in technologically reproducible media, and techniques of translation through written and pictorial representation. His film Wavelength (1967) is a milestone of avant-garde cinema and possibly the most frequently discussed "structural" film ever made. This volume collects essential texts on Snow's work, with essays and interviews spanning more than four decades.From its earliest issues, October has been a primary interlocutor of Snow's work, and many of these texts first appeared in its pages. Written by such distinguished critics and scholars as Annette Michelson, Hubert Damisch, and Malcolm Turvey, they document Snow's participation in postwar discourses of minimalism, postminimalism, photo-conceptualism, and avant-garde cinema, and examine particular works. Thierry de Duve's essay on linguistics in Snow's work appears alongside Snow's response. The volume also includes other writings by Snow, images from his 1975 work Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone, and Tape Recorder, and an interview with the artist conducted by Annette Michelson.Essays and interviewsJean Arnaud, Erik Bullot, Hubert Damisch, Thierry de Duve, Andree Hayum, Annette Michelson, Michael Snow, Amy Taubin, Malcolm Turvey, Kenneth White

An all-encompassing view of the life and work of one of Canada’s greatest living artists Michael Snow is rightly recognized as one of the greatest Canadian artists. In a productive, lengthy career, he has, in a wide variety of genres and media, asked (and often answered) some of the most vexing and important questions in the history of art. During his lifetime, the notion of what constitutes a work of art has undergone many changes, and his work has consistently been at the forefront of that discussion. Michael Snow: Lives and Works examines all aspects of the artist’s work and provides a guide to understanding its subtleties and complexities. The book also charts the life of Snow: his early years as a student and artist in Toronto, his stay in New York City, his turbulent marriage to Joyce Wieland, his reputation as a lady’s man, and his adventures in movie making and improvised music. In many ways, Snow is the visual artist as intellectual: his images are vibrant and compelling, but so are the ideas behind them. Ultimately, his work is about perception. What do we really see when we look at a work of art? What is the act of looking all about? What exactly is a work of art? Michael Snow: Lives and Works is a personal and intimate portrait of an artist who has helped shaped the face of Canadian art in our time.

An illustrated study of Michael Snow's "zoom film," which has become a touchstone for art and film studies.In 1966, at the height of minimal art in New York, artist Michael Snow chose not to make another object to be placed in a room but instead spent a year planning a film of a room: Wavelength, a forty-five-minute more or less straight-line zoom from the near to the far wall of a loft space, accompanied by a rising sine wave. In this illustrated study, Elizabeth Legge describes Wavelength as a film of virtuosically managed tensions, sensuous beauty, subtle light and color, and recession into perspectival depth. At the same time, she points out, it is also austere: the loft space where the action unfolds could be the last clerical outpost of a defunct business. The zoom is punctuated by what Snow laconically called "4 human events": a woman directs two men who carry in a bookcase and place it against the left wall of the room; two women come in and listen to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" on the radio; a man briefly appears after protracted crashing and glass-breaking noises, wheels around, and drops dead; a young woman comes into the room and makes a frightened telephone call reporting the dead man ("And he doesn't look drunk, he looks dead."). Wavelength won the grand prize for experimental film at Knokke-le-Zoute in 1967, and it was crucial to critics' efforts to establish a vocabulary for temporal art. It was a "wavelength" that could stand up to the French new wave, and it has has functioned ever since as a touchstone for art and film studies, and as a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played.

Writing, for Michael Snow, is as much a form of ""art-making"" as the broad range of visual art activities for which he is renowned, including the ""Walking Woman"" series and the film Wavelength. Conversely, many of the texts included in this anthology are as significant visually as they are at the level of content - they are meant to be looked at as well as read. Situated somewhere between a repository of contemporary thought by one of our leading Canadian artists and a history book as it brings to light some important moments in the cultural life of Canada since the 1950s, these texts tell their own story, marking the passage of time, ideas and attitudes. The works included here, ranging from essays and interviews and record album cover notes to filmscripts and speeches (which, in Snow's hands, often fall into the category of performance art), are not only ""built for browsing,"" they offer insights into both the professional and the private Snow. Together, they expand the context of Snow's work and show the evolution of a great Canadian artist, beginning with his early attempts at defining art, to his emergence and recognition on the international art scene. This book is one of four books that are part of the Michael Snow Project. Initiated by the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant Gallery, the project also includes four exhibitions of his visual art and music.

A captivating selection of family snapshots taken from his mother's photo albums, Michael Snow’s latest artist’s book illuminates patterns and motifs in the passage of time Over the past half-century, through works such as the milestone avant-garde film Wavelength (1967), Toronto-based artist Michael Snow (born 1928) has explored the nature of perception, consciousness, language and temporality. This last theme is particularly relevant to his latest artist’s book, which is dedicated to the life of his adventurous mother, Marie-Antoinette Françoise Carmen Levesque Snow Roig, whose trove of family photographs provide a narrative throughline here. Snow consolidates his mother’s photo albums, presenting a total of 1,500 images. In a tenderly penned foreword, he explains the simple impetus for the project: “[The photographs] are so beautiful and so historic that I wish to share them with others.” While he has integrated small samples of these albums into his work before—notably figuring in his landmark catalog for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1970, Michael Snow/A Survey—this volume provides a much larger and more unified selection. As a result, the compiled images tell a more complete biographical story—one that Snow leaves intact on the surface. He brings his own layer of interpretation to the photographs by drawing out patterns within the collection and his mother’s writing. Snow creates an album that is fully his own, embracing, as art historian Martha Langford describes, a “deep understanding and surrender to form.”

A long-awaited facsimile of Michael Snow's legendary artist's book, a classic of conceptualismFor years an out-of-print rarity, Canadian artist, filmmaker and musician Michael Snow's (born 1928) classic 1975 artist's book Cover to Cover is available once again, in this facsimile edition. Unconstrained by discipline, Snow famously remarked that his sculptures were made by a musician, his films by a painter. Flipping through Cover to Cover, which is composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, one might describe it as a book made by a filmmaker. Each individual page features a distinct moment, seen from one perspective on the front, and from a diametrically opposed angle on the back, occasionally pivoting between interior and exterior spaces. Midway through the book, the images are inverted such that the volume must be turned upside-down to be looked at right-side up. The result is an elegant, disorienting study in simultaneity. With this work, wrote Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Michael Snow has challenged the reader's/viewer's notion of a book, indeed one's very notion of perception."

Canadian artist Michael Snow (born 1929) has been a central figure in North American postwar art; his influential films, such as Wavelength, rank alongside those of avant-garde auteurs such as Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos. Sequences is a complete monograph of this contemporary Renaissance man, who characterizes his oeuvre thus: "my paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor." Accordingly, Snow's texts acknowledge the difficulties an artist faces in approaching multiple disciplines. Across 17 chapters, the artist offers a complete overview of his own work--an editorial task with which he is intimately familiar after having produced several remarkable artists' books. At almost 400 pages, this hardcover is a tour- de-force on and by one of the most outstanding artists of our time.

Fans of Disney's classic 'The Sword in the Stone' both young and old will delight at Arthur's newest adventure. Embarking on a journey filled with magic, and wonder, Arthur, Merlin, and Archimedes must overcome the greatest threat they have ever faced to save the Kingdom of Camelot. The Sword in the Stone: Arthur's Magical Kingdom is a grand continuation of Disney's beloved film, "The Sword and the Stone." This epic journey follows young Arthur, now the rightful ruler of Camelot, as he embarks on a transformative journey guided by the whimsical and wise sorcerer, Merlin. When the powerful and malicious sorceress, Madam Mim, comes back from the great beyond, she brings not only a heart of revenge but new and powerful allies. In this tale, Arthur must grapple with the challenges of ruling a kingdom, while an evil spell threatens to rewrite history and destroy Camelot as we know it. Through Merlin's guidance, Arthur learns that magic cannot solve all of life's problems and is reminded of why he was chosen by the sword in the first place.