Ape Artists and the Paradoxical Photography of Michael Snow

In an article for Frieze, Andrew Dodds takes up the issue of the ape artists of the 50’s. He points out that their success had much to do with the prevailing aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism, the style by which he characterizes their work. He also points to the problem in interpreting such works: “The emphasis on immediacy and directness of action dissuaded an aesthetic reading and enhanced the ‘animalistic’ and performative elements apparent in all the paintings.” But he is skeptical of any claim that, say, Congo should be credited for Composition on buff paper in the same way one might credit Jackson Pollock for Number 8. Of 384 paintings produced by Congo, apparently only 40 or 50 were selected for exhibition. And who selected them? Congo’s handler Desmond Morris, unsurprisingly. Dodds reminds us, “as with Ham, the first chimpanzee launched into space in the 1960s, we know the ape was not at the controls.” This is naturally a great relief for the world of art.

Nevertheless, these considerations cannot help but bring to mind the role of the photographer vis a vis the objects of photography. Is the photographer in essence a kind of Desmond Morris, merely selecting from pre-existing aesthetic phenomena? In other words, should photographers, to be accurate, follow Morris’ practice and assign authorial credit to the non-human sources of the images?

Fortunately, Michael Snow provides at least one example of a photographer who transcends the passive point-and-click of everyday photography. Jean Arnaud, in an article for October explains, "He fills his work with paradoxes related to photographic presence-absence and plays on the verisimilitude of illusion… Using subterfuge, he goes beyond the haptic dimension of vision; his work stands between seeing and touching. With Snow, you have to touch in order to see.”¹ Arnaud focuses on a work entitled Imposition in which two figures are photographed in the same position, once clothed and once nude. These images are superimposed over each other and the images of a living room containing a couch and an empty living room. In this way, “he concretizes the old fantasy regarding the ubiquity of a time traveler; the narration glides in a multiple moment, and a strange curvature is established between the simultaneousness and succession of different planes.”² The image is turned on its side so that the viewer must tilt his or her head to view the image right-side-up. A pane of glass in front of the photograph reflects the viewer’s own tilted head which appears to imitate the tilted heads of the figures in the image. As Arnaud explains,

These artifices insert past and present into fiction, and Snow plays on the binocular quality of vision. He creates the illusion of continuous action between a diegetic past and the viewer’s present within the diaphanous space that brings them together. In this deepened moment, the artist exploits the expressive resources of the stereoscopic “tunnel,” and presents a photographic space that can be divided virtually ad infinitum: a temporality of the developing momentdefines Imposition. In the piece, relief and illusion work together to offer the strange experience in which the fictional characters and the viewer share a duration. It is the artist’s intention that the latter continue to be aware of the distinction between appearance and apparition; the space-time experience of this plastic space is paradoxical, for the viewer-actor is integrated into and in between an imaginary space, one that is timeless and arrested and that takes the viewer’s own movements in time into consideration.³

How could we possibly accuse Snow of a merely passive photography? Unlike tourists stealing snapshots of the Statue of Liberty, Snow transcends the haptic dimension of vision and establishes strange curvatures between the simultaneousness and succession of different planes. While a teenager snapping photos of her friends merely produces transient records of the banal, Snow manages to create “the illusion of continuous action between a diegetic past and the viewer’s present within the diaphanous space that brings them together.”⁴ Finally, whereas a well-framed portrait of a family reunion might preserve a welcome memory for future nostalgia, the works of Michael Snow are “true tools for investigating the real, which is also considered imaginary.” His photographs “determine a singular contact between the fiction of a work-duration and a viewer who experiences himself as a being-in-duration.”⁵ To my knowledge, no one has ever done anything of the kind with a cellphone camera.

1-5 Arnaud, Jean. “Touching to See,” October 114, pp. 5-16.