Michael Snow (October Files) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Michael Snow, Film, Photography
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2019-10-03T22:00:00+00:00

Michael Snow, Imposition, 1976. Color photograph, wood frame, 182.0 × 101.6 cm, 71.6 × 40 in. Collection of the Mailhot Family (Montréal). Courtesy of Michael Snow.

By establishing the temporality of this image within linear and stratified durations, the artist creates a hallucinatory trembling of the photographic moment; he develops an art of the lapse [décalage inframince] or what Duchamp calls delay. The fictional duration contracts and expands: your eye travels between images, focusing either on single, steady elements (couch, bookshelf, lamp) or on changing, spatial elements chosen at random (dressed or naked figures). In Imposition, the illusion folds and the moment develops into many possibilities; you’re surrounded by skin, the skin of the figures and the skin of the image-screens. By pushing the superimposition to the point that it disappears, Snow creates a tension of identity in plastic space. 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.8 Yet the artist’s goal is not to distort time in a purely diegetic manner,9 a principle that is almost as old as the invention of photography itself.10 Above all, he seeks to extend this disturbance into the present moment for the viewer, and uses several strategies to do so. There is first an imposition on the viewer to emulate the characters in order to see the photograph in the right direction, for it is installed vertically, the wrong way. Thus both the characters in the image and the viewers tilt their heads.11 Second, the reflective glass that covers Imposition hangs slightly in front of the photograph, and the reflection of the viewer remains the final superimposed image. You see yourself imitating the two young adults, in and in front of the box, in and in front of the photographic space. When you stand before Imposition, you no longer know who’s imitating whom: the image stares at you, but the emulation seems to be reversed, and reality surpasses fiction. In this baroque work, seeing means activating the image in ways other than through looking: the viewer moves in space in order to move through time by crossing through the mirror.

Snow ensures this contact between past-elsewhere-he/she and I-here-now12 through a third means: he places the white layer—this is how the couple can see the hypothetical image—at the edge of the imaginary plane (right on or under the parete di vetro). This vacant interface, onto which you can project mentally, establishes the quasi-physical contact with the viewer, for the male figure seems to extend the image to the viewer, so that he can in turn look at the other side. The white rectangle format is homothetic to the one in Imposition; it is another element that links real and fictional space, by speculating on what is happening on the other side of the image.

These artifices insert past and present into fiction, and Snow plays on the binocular quality of vision.13 He

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