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MacDonald:
Things were going so well here. What drew you to New York?
Snow:
Well, I had been following what was going on in New York very closely. For a long time, I had been moved (and still am) by the accomplishments of Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and Franz Kline. That's fantastic work, and I was carrying on my own dialogue with it, trying to define what
I
could do, what
I
could contribute, and after a while it seemed that doing this via magazines and occasional trips to the Albright Knox (in Buffalo) or to New York was not enough. I decided I should just get there. I was scared shitless, and Joyce was even more scaredso we went.
All during this period I kept thinking that in order to get somewhere and get something out of myself, I should make a choice. It seemed like the lesson was that Willem De Kooning
paints
and that's why it's so good. That's what he does; he does just that. And there's really a lot in that argument. So I tried not to play when I first went to New York. Mind you, I didn't know how I was going to make a living. It turned out that I did play a couple of times to make a couple of bucks, but basically, I was trying to get rid of music, to make it a hobby.
But when I got to New York, I had something I hadn't counted on, a contact with the most inventive music that was going on at that time, the "free musicians." I already knew about Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. I had their records. But I met a guy named Roswell Rudd, a great trombone player, through a Dixieland clarinetist named Kenny Divern, another fabulous musician. I had a studio with a piano in it that I made available. There was no place for them to play, and the public antipathy was incredible. Cecil was considered a total nut. It certainly seemed that way the first time you heard him, but he was, and is, amazing.
Anyway, music wouldn't go away. But I was trying to be a painter. I was working on
The Walking Woman,
which, as you said earlier, involved works of many kinds in many places. A lot of it was what I call lost works: making things that were outside, in public spaceson subways, in the street, in bookstores . . . it had a lot of range, despite the fact that it was concerned with this single outline.
The main thing I was trying to do was concentrate on visual art and get a gallery. I watched everything that was going on and gradually met people. That's when I met Hollis Frampton. I first noticed him at openings at Green Gallery. He was very noticeable! And he was at every opening. Gradually, I started talking to him, and at first I only knew that he was a photographer who was interested in art. I guess when I first met him he hadn't made any films.
MacDonald:
When did you meet him?