bpNichol | Three Drafts

bpNichol

Three Drafts

Toronto, Canada: The Music Gallery, 1982

74.2 x 57 cm.

Edition of 53 [+2 PP] signed and numbered copies

An Ivory Arches 88 broadside printed with brick red, silver and gold silkscreen with a blind-embossed printer's mark lower right under signature. Originally created for a portfolio edited by Nobuo Kubota & Michael Snow.

The work is housed in the collections of the Burnaby Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada. 

 

Joyce Wieland | Reason over Passion

Joyce Wieland

Reason over Passion

1968

Quilted cotton, 256.5 x 302.3 x 8 cm

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Joyce Wieland reported had high hopes for Pierre Trudeau when he became Canada’s 15th Prime Minister, in 1968. She and her then-husband Michael Snow hosted a reception for the Liberal leader at their Chambers Street loft in New York City, and were impressed by his knowledge of avant-garde cinema, dance, jazz drummers, etc. 

Inspired by Trudeau's notion of “Reason over passion” ("that is the theme of all my writing,” he declared) she promptly stitched the phrase into this celebrated quilt work, which ended up in Trudeau’s home (stories differ as to whether the work was gifted to, or purchased by him.). A decade later it was almost destroyed in a domestic spat [see below].

The following year Wieland released a film of the same name, which was screened in the Directors' Fortnight program at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. The phrase (at least in online searches) is more strongly connected to her now, than to him. 

Later disillusioned by the Liberal leader, Weiland has claimed that both the party and the artwork were jokes at Trudeau’s expense. Certainly conflating reason over passion with a bedspread would seem to support her later assertion. 

“Not long after getting home, on a terrible evening full of misery and rage, I attacked a priceless quilt by Joyce Wieland, a piece of art that hung on the sitting-room wall and one that Pierre particularly loved. Stitched on the front, neatly and smugly (it seemed to me then), were his favourite words: “Reason over Passion.” I seized a pair of scissors and cut the words off. Taking a box of pins, I then switched the words round, so they read “Passion over Reason.” I was in one of my manic phases, and I had concluded that the only way to make Pierre Trudeau listen was to desecrate art.”

- Margaret Trudeau, Changing My Mind, 2010

Michael Snow | Questions and Answers

Michael Snow

Questions and Answers

San Francisco, USA: The Thing Quarterly/KADIST, 2016

7" vinyl record

Edition of 250 numbered copies

A 45 rpm single recorded on March 30, 2016 in Toronto.

Curator Joseph del Pesco and artist Euan Macdonald posed fifteen questions to the artist, such as "How does one shape the fortuitous?" and "What is your philosophy of time?". Snow answered with short musical improvisations recorded by Mani Mazinani. The replies to the questions are followed by "an Epilogue, offering reflections on the subjects raised by the questions."

In addition to the hand-numbered copies (on an accompanying card), an additional 250 copies were made available as a free digital download, all of which were consumed within minutes of the email announcement.

Questions and Answers is one of the final projects produced by The Thing Quarterly, before they ceased publishing objects in 2017. The single was released in September of 2016, at the New York Art Book Fair. It quickly sold out. 

The track listing is as follows: 

A1 What Was Your First Thought When You Woke This Morning?

A2 Why Make Films That Only A Few People Will See?

A3 What Moves You?

A4 What's Toronto Like In The First Days Of Spring?

A5 What's Left When You "Take The Spectator Out Of The Illusion"?

A6 Is There Anybody Listening To This Right Now?

A7 What's Frame-By-Frame Truth?

A8 What Are Mysterious Alterations Of Time And Mind?

A9 What Is Your Philosophy Of Time?

A10 Does The Music Start In Your Mind, Your Fingers, Or In The Piano?

B1 Do The White And Black Keys Symbolize Anything To You?

B2 How Does One Shape The Fortuitous?

B3 How Are Waves Visible Registers Of Invisible Forces?

B4 What Is Silence?

B5 What Is The World Coming To?

B6 Epilogue

Michael Snow | Walking Woman Brooch Set

Michael Snow

Walking Woman Brooch Set

Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1994

6.4 cm. length

Edition of 800 numbered copies

In the early part of this century these Sterling Silver brooches could still be had for $75 or so, if I remember correctly. Not wanting to wear one, I never bought a copy, which I now regret. I also regret that I didn’t take our friend Leah Singer’s wise advice and propose to Michael that our Nothing Else Press produce a reprint. I imagine there’d be a large audience clamouring for them. 

I love that the brooch can be worn as either the positive or negative space, of Snow’s iconic Walking Woman figure. 

In October of 2025, one of these was available at Waddington’s auction house, with an estimate of between $800 and $1200. It sold for more than twice the high estimate: $2500.

Michael Snow

Michael Snow was born on this day in 1928. 

Joyce Wieland Lane

Last month the Toronto and East York Commu­nity Council voted to rename a lane after renowned artist Joyce Wieland (1930–1998). Michael Snow, her husband of twenty years (1956-1976) was bestowed a similar honour in 2017. 

The proposal came from Toronto iconoclast (and Cork­town resident) John Goodwin, who first met Wieland in 1975 at the Ontario College of Art and Design. 

Michael Snow | Condimental Shifts

Michael Snow

Condimental Shifts

Toronto, Canada: Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 2007

23.5 × 23.5 × 2.8 cm.

Edition of 265 [+10 AP] signed and numbered copies

Snow conflates painting with smearing condiments around on a plate, using ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and peanut butter as pigments. The porcelain plate becomes a globe of sorts and the title puns on continental drift. 

The work is still available from Art Metropole, for $800.00 CDN, here. 

Paul Dutton | The Plastic Typewriter

Paul Dutton

The Plastic Typewriter

Toronto, Canada: Writer's Forum, 1993

[22 pp], 27 x 21 x .5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Completed in 1977, this collection of typewriter poems was made with a disassembled plastic typewriter, an intact typewriter, carbon ribbons, carbon paper, a metal file and white bond paper.

Dutton died late last month, when I was traveling. I’m a little dismayed at the lack of obituaries, given the breadth of his work. He was in two very significant performing collectives: CCMC (alongside Michael Snow, Jon Oswald and others) and The Four Horsemen (with bp Nichol, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera). He fronted the former (an avant-garde free jazz band) and was one of four vocalists in the latter, a sound poetry group. Dutton was also an accomplished writer and poet, and has produced many books, as both author and publisher.

I met Paul at Toronto’s City Hall, when CCMC were performing. Afterwards we went to dinner on Yonge Street with Michael Snow, Christian Bok and an actor from Les Miserable or some other big blockbuster theatre work from the time. We stayed in touch and subsequently I volunteered to help collate some of the publications he produced under his imprint Underwhich Editions (which co-produced The Plastic Typewriter). 

I later worked with him professionally when I helped produce a concert of CCMC and Christian Marclay, and later a compact disk recording of the event. 

I was too young to witness the Four Horsemen live, but I saw CCMC perform many times. Perhaps most notably when they opened up for Sonic Youth at the Warehouse, in 1998. I was worried that indie rock audiences would have little patience for the improvised jazz noodlings and Dutton’s odd vocalizations, but before the show Thurston Moore walked to the mic and announced that they were hand-picked to perform and that he hoped the audience would give them their full attention. Such was the sway of Moore at the time that the audience stood and watched silently and respectfully. 

Christian Marclay + CCMC

Michael Snow, Christian Marclay, Paul Dutton, John Oswald

Christian Marclay + CCMC

Toronto/London, Canada: Art Metropole/Non Musica Rex,  2002

2 CD set

Edition of 1000, 25 of which were signed

When Christian Marclay presented his first Canadian solo exhibition at Oakville Galleries, I approached him about doing a live performance in Toronto. He replied that he was no longer interested in performing live. "What about a performance with Michael Snow?” I asked. He agreed instantly. 

The pair played - alongside sound poet Paul Dutton and plunderphonics artist John Oswald - to an over-capacity crowd at the Rivoli, on December 5th, 2000. Snow performed on electric piano and synthesizer, Marclay on turntables and John Oswald on Alto Saxophone. Paul Dutton played harmonica and performed mostly non-verbal vocals. 

I had the honour of introducing the band and also designing the promotional poster (in a very rudimentary way, using ‘Word Perfect’ to create individual text circles and printing them on acetate overlays, see above). 

The performance was recorded with the possible aim of a future release, which was secured after the foursome reunited in New York City for their second and final performance on October 11, 2001. 

This double CD presents both performances in their entirety. Andrew Di Rosa designed the layout and Rachel Harrison contributed photographs. 

The CD is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC (top image). It can be purchased from Art Metropole for $20, and (shockingly) the signed version remains available for $75.00, here. 

Michael Snow died from pneumonia on this day last year, at the age of 94. 

Michael Snow | Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time

Michael Snow

Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time

Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 2003

DVD in CD case, 15 min

Edition size unknown

Wavelength is not only considered the greatest work of Michael Snow's long career, it is considered the greatest avant-garde film ever made. 

The 1967 landmark film was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century1 and the 102nd in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made. Artforum put the work on the cover and described it as "a singularly unpadded, uncomplicated, deadly realistic way to film three walls, a ceiling and a floor... it is probably the most rigorously composed movie in existence."

A 1968 Film Quarterly review describes Wavelength as "at once one of the simplest and one of the most complex films ever conceived."

However, at 45 minutes in length it also has a reputation for being difficult and dull. 

Perhaps with this in mind, and - as a comment on dwindling attention spans - Snow produced a variation in 2003 called Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have The Time. Roula remembers him coming in to Art Metropole and describing it with a heh-heh laugh, asking if we would be interested in publishing it. 

Advertised as "Originally 45 minutes, Now 15!", the new version abbreviates the title to WVLNT, and superimposes the work onto itself as simultaneities instead of the sequential progressions. 

Snow told the Brooklyn Rail last year "Now that I’m “iconic,” audiences tend to stay respectfully through even my longest films, unlike the old days when some people lost patience after just a few minutes and exited abruptly, sometimes noisily."2

1. Only a couple of other non-feature films made the list, and Wavelength beats out Salo (Pier Paolo Pasolini), Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau), Star Wars (George Lucas), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut), Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock) and many other classics. See the full list, here. 

2. Michael's wife Peggy Gale curated my film Timeline into the Montreal Biennale in 2014 and told me later that Michael stood and watched in its entirety, for all 75 minutes (or however long it was at the time - it's over two hours now). I can honestly think of no greater compliment. 

Michael Snow Tribute #14

When Michael Snow died last Thursday I felt compelled to amass as many of our books, records, CDs, videos and bits of ephemera of his that I could unearth in the house. This involved going through six different book shelves, three different storage spaces for records and countless archival (and non-archival) boxes where I store things like this. Subsequently I've spend the last few days trying to return the items, or shovelling snow as I've taken to calling it*. 

Tomorrow will conclude the week of tribute posts. It took a while for obituaries to appear, but here are a few: 

“…I was just over 30 when we made the documentary about him. It's a summation in many ways, or an extension, of the work I was doing at the AGO in 1994-1995, organizing screenings, performances and public talks as part of The Michael Snow Project.  It was a really amazing time. I can’t overstate how singular the scale of the project was – major exhibitions at the AGO and The Power Plant, four companion publications (one that I edited), Walking Woman banners designed by Bruce Mau’s studio throughout the downtown core, and complementary exhibitions and programs in various corners of the city from City Hall to the Glenn Gould Studio. All for one living artist. It’s something that we aren’t likely to ever see again."

- Jim Shedden, Manager of Publishing at the Art Gallery of Ontario

"Concurrent with his filmmaking, Snow continued to work across various media, as exemplified by the 1974 artist’s book Cover to Cover, which can be read forward or backward, and his 1987 album The Last LP, which purported to contain field recordings of vanishing ethnic musics but in fact comprised multitracked fragments composed and performed by Snow. His 1979 Flight Stop, a flock of fiberglass geese in flight created from many photos of a single goose, remains on view today at Toronto’s Eaton Centre, with which it is inextricably identified; other public works include The Audience, 1989, a group of over-life-size sculptures of celebrating people painted gold at Toronto’s Rogers Centre; and The Windows Suite, 2006, a series of plasma screens on a downtown Toronto hotel showing “impossible” sequences.

Considered by many to be Canada’s most important artist, Snow is represented in the National Gallery of Canada by seventy-five works; he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981 and promoted to Companion in 2007 for his contributions to cinema. He has enjoyed retrospectives at multiple venues in Toronto and at the British Film Institute; his work was included in the reopening exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2000, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2005.

Though he worked in a broad range of media, Snow’s own source of inspiration was not external but internal. “Cross-media pollination . . . doesn’t happen to me,” he told the National Gallery of Canada in 2014. “I have ideas, and the wish to attempt something; I muse about it, sometimes for a long time, and then finally ‘attempt’ it.”"

- Artforum

"Michael Snow was born in Toronto in 1928. He attended the Ontario College of Art and initially started out in the world of advertising design. Dissatisfied with his job, he went hitchhiking in Europe and then embarked on a career as a professional musician. He played in jazz clubs in Canada at night; during the day, he created paintings in his studio.

In 1961, he and his wife, the artist Joyce Wieland, moved to New York. Early on, he showed with Poindexter Gallery, the same space that also represented abstractionist painters like Jules Olitski and Willem de Kooning. But it was his ties to the New York film world that ultimately brought him fame.

Under the aegis of Jonas Mekas, Snow was able to screen his works for crowds that included artist Nam June Paik and filmmaker Shirley Clarke. It wasn’t until he screened Wavelength at a festival in Belgium and won the grand prize for it that he realized the following his work had gained."

- ArtNews

*Groan at the pun all you like, but note that the purple invite at the bottom right is for a show called Fresh Snow. See also, Weather Report. 

Michael Snow | Scraps for Soldiers

Michael Snow

Scraps for Soldiers

Florence, Italy: Zona Archives, 2007

36 pp., 24 × 30 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 1000

Scraps for Soldiers is a reproduction of a wartime photo album inherited Michael Snow from his aunt Dimple F. Snow (1896-1978) who created it during and after the First World War (1913-1921). Dimple’s two brothers, Geoffrey (who died at war) and Gerald (the artist’s father) fought in the war, and the album, though intended as gift to be sent to those fighting oversees, was never sent. 

Below is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Michael just over ten years ago, when the title was his most recent: 

Dave Dyment: Am I right in thinking that A Survey, which is sort of a hybrid artist book-exhibition catalogue, is your first publication? 

Michael Snow: It is. I think of it as a bookwork, I did design it as a work, but it also has all of the other aspects of a catalogue. 

DD: It’s not uncommon to have a monograph or exhibition catalogue made with the artist’s involvement now, and to have it include elements of an artists’ book, but in 1970 that must’ve seemed pretty unique. The special edition came with multiples, a poster….

MS: Right, but it’s still not a ‘pure’ work, like Cover to Cover, because it does contain information. 

DD: To me the mangled catalogue imagery from the poster hints at some of the things later explored in Cover to Cover. 

MS: Yeah. There were two version of the book, there was a limited edition in a plastic box and we were supposed to make a hundred, but I think we made three or four (laughs). 

DD: The plexi-boxed edition was incomplete? 

MS: Well, maybe they did ten, but I know that we didn’t do them all. It was more of an artists’ book than the ‘trade edition’, so to speak. 

DD: But even the regular edition included a series of photographs uncommon to exhibition catalogues, the snapshot of the ‘photo biography”. There was one that particularly struck me. You were a little boy and you had just learned that if you stuck your feet out you could manipulate the photograph by foreshortening the perspective. 

MS: That’s right. I had my sister take that photograph. 

DD: It seems particularly prophetic to much of your later work…

MS: I have many, many of those types of photographs from that time, and I’ve been planning a book of them, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. I guess I better do it soon (laughs). 

DD: Well, there’s the recent publication of your Aunt Dimple’s photo album. Is it a straight facsimile, or are there interventions? 

MS: It’s a very good facsimile. Maurizio (Nannucci) asked me if I was interested in putting something out (on his Zona imprint) and I had been thinking about this thing for a while. But it documents such an entirely different world, that I was unsure if it could be of interest to other people. But I think in a strange sort of ethnographic way, it can be. The original book was called Scraps for the Soldiers and it was an empty book that one was invited to put photographs in and then send it to a loved one fighting in the war. 

DD: So that title wasn’t yours, that was what Eaton’s titled the blank book? 

MS: Yes, everything is reproduced exactly as it was, other than the identifier on the cover. The idea was that you’d send it to your brother or father, whoever was in France, fighting the war at the time. And my Aunt bought one and put her photographs in it, from those years, starting I think in 1916. Her brother, my father, was in the war. But she never mailed it. 

DD:  There’s quite a lot of happiness in the book, so you wonder if this was a testament to joy despite the war, or if it was deliberately designed to cheer up the soldiers. 

MS: The photographs were taken in the summer time. My grandfather’s family used to go to the Royal Muskoka, one of those huge hotels in the wilderness. They were very big, with golf courses and good cuisine. A lot of these pictures were taken in relation to that time, which was admittedly unusual for Ontario of that era. So I think you’re right, they weren’t necessarily unhappy times. These are also all real snapshots, with none of the strain that would have been evident a few years earlier. This was a camera that was easy to shoot…

DD: That’s interesting, so the joy in the pictures was a possible result of being photographed? Because it was still an uncommon occurrence at the time. 

MS: I think the images are from between 1916 to 1919.

DD: I recall thinking that the dates indicated that book was in use well after the war. That when it missed its chance to be sent to a soldier, it just became a scrapbook. Is it your most recent artists’ book?

MS: Yes. 

Michael Snow: Music for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder

Michael Snow

Music for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder

New York City, USA: Chatham Square Productions, Inc., 1975

2 vinyl LP set

Edition size unknown

Michael Snow released artists' records (The Last LP, Sinoms) as well as musical records (mostly in the genre of experimental or improvised Free Jazz), both solo and with his band CCMC. This disc, influenced by his association with minimalist composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, falls somewhere in between the two. 

Originally released in 1975, it was been reissued twice: once on CD (housed in the same artist-designed gatefold LP sleeves, in 1994) - and in 2016 from Song Cycle Records, again on vinyl. The original vinyl was also accompanied a double cassette release (below). 

“During the years 1973 to 1978 I was represented by the Bykert Gallery in New York, which had the most prestigious stable of any gallery I have been associated with: Dorothea Rockburne, Chuck Close, Brice Barden, and other exhibited there. Klauss Kertess, one of the owners of the gallery, started a record company called Chatam Square, which issued the first Philip Glass recordings. In 1975, Kertess asked me if I would like to issue a recording of my own music. I attempted to make an integration of the album jacket design, the label design for the two LPs, and the music itself.

The title of the album Michael Snow: Music for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder (1975), is quite explicit. The four faces of the album jacket are covered with a printed text that I wrote. By being printed in four diminishing size of type on the four faces (large on the front, diminishing on the two inner faces, and smallest on the back cover), the text design parallels the form of one of the pieces on the album, Falling Stars, which uses a little piano composition I composed and played. By means of recording at different speeds from one tape recorder to another, I made a piece in which this piano “phrase” is first played very fast (and high). The phrase is then repeated, slowing down to a normal recording speed, and then continues to slow down. The pieces takes two sides of an LP, the second side consisting entirely of the slowest version.

One of the two pieces, W in the D, is a twenty-six minute recording of solo whistling I did with a hand-held microphone as an instrument. The work is constructed of a large number of separated whistled  phrases, each of which is preceded by the sound of my breathing in. My breathing in (and out) is recorded differently during each phrase by my moving the microphone closer to or further away from my mouth. Each whistled phrase is a newly invented “line” of no particular genre that could be sustained for as long as I had air in my lungs. The amount of air inspired determined the length of the “line”, and each line is different from its predecessor or its follower. There is no development; each virtuoso whistle is frame by the recorder intake of breath. The piece was “improvised”, but it is not jazz. W in the D was recorded and had its first public appearance prior to its release on the Chatham Square recording. I had been invited to present something in an evening of performance at NYU. I had all the lights in the auditorium turned off and played Whistling in the Dark through the auditorium PA.”

- Michael Snow

Michael Snow Tribute #11: A Survey

Michael Snow

A Survey [Special Edition]

Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario/Isaacs Gallery, 1970

124 pp., 20.5 × 21.5 × 1 cm., hardcover

Edition of 125 signed and numbered copies

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, February 14-March 15, 1970, this artist book/exhibition catalogue hybrid combines images of the artist's work alongside family photographs. Designed by Snow himself, the work also includes texts by Robert Fulford, Dennis Young, Richard Foreman & P. Adams Sitney.

A Survey marks the beginning of Snow's use of repurposing earlier works for new. "The whole retrospective thing," he told Joe Medjuck in 1971, "made me look back at my old work for the first time. I was interested in the idea of using the records of old work as the material for new works."

The deluxe edition is housed in a plexiglass slipcase and includes a small magnifying glass in a glassine envelope, a fresnel magnifying sheet, three Walking Women stickers, a nude photographic bookmark, and a 22 x 23" folded print of the work Manual (above, bottom). Each copy is individually annotated, signed and numbered by the artist.

The work is valued at around a $1500, depending on condition. 

"Like Warhol before him, Snow also took on the task of designing the catalogue for his first retrospective, which took place at the Art Gallery of Ontario in February and March of 1970. Unlike Warhol’s catalogue, however, there are some concessions to the traditional exhibition catalogue format, including a list of art works in the show, as well as a biography and C.V. But, that’s as far as it goes. For A Survey, Snow combines elements of the exhibition catalogue with a family scrapbook. The layout of the book reflects Snow’s interest in serial imagery and photographic experimentation. The limited edition hardcover is encased in a clear plastic shell, and includes several extras: a fresnal magnifying sheet; some Walking Woman stickers; a signed and numbered poster picturing drawings of a soft cover version of the book twisted into various shapes; and, notoriously, a laminated ‘bookmark’ picturing, on one side, a photo booth strip picturing the artist’s erect penis and, on the other, an equally intimate portrait of his wife, the artist Joyce Weiland, who, for her exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada the following year, designed her own artist book/exhibition catalogue, True Patriot Love."

- Bill Clarke