Michael Snow: chance and choice

http://www.ponybox.co.uk/design/collection.asp?id=117
http://www.eai.org/eai/tape.jsp?itemID=8363

Excerpted from online galleries
Michael Snow is a cultural beacon to many with an interest in film, photography or conceptual art. He is perhaps best known for Wavelength, one of the most influential experimental films ever made. Snow’s primary concern is with perception, which is evident in the enormous variety of his production, including painting, photography, sculpture, installation and music.

Solar Breath is a 62” loop of fluttering curtains that reveal and conceal an idyllic landscape in rural Newfounland. The work, originally shot in 8mm, has now been transferred to DVD. The work is a result of artist’s observations of a window of his summer cabin in Canada. Over the years, according to him, “a mysterious wind performance takes place in one of the windows, about an hour before sunset." The artist seek to capture in the film the various movements and folds that the window’s curtain creates against the window’s screen, with the interaction of the wind. This work, according to the artist himself, belongs to a group of film and photographic works who take subjects that were not formed by the artist as “art," but rather were “taken-by-surprise” by the artist.

In a text about this work, the artist writes: “What I saw in these sun-and-wind events was their potential as art. I did not record these "events" to share this modest phenomenon from my daily life with others. No, the rich play of light, surfaces and durations said to me: this real, un-staged event contains the elements which are essential for a contemplative time-light-motion work of art, a "motion picture" with "plastic" values and reverberant associations which will reward many viewings.”

The artist adds: “While on one level, Solar Breath is merely a fixed-camera documentary recording, it is also the result of years of attention....Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) is 62 minutes of the most beautiful, eloquent movements and pliages that the sun, wind, windows and curtain have yet composed. Chance and choice co-exist.”

With each piece, Snow invites us to contemplate and put into question his chosen medium, in an oscillation between what is represented and its process and material. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life's irreversible disappearance.