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Second in Montreal,
you move back toward photography and with
Side Seat Paintings
you combine photography (in the slides) and painting and sound in a kind of artist's autobiography.
Snow:
Yes. It's not exactly autobiographical, since you can't really see the paintings. It's really a redigesting or a recycling of earlier work. But it is true that other kinds of work come and go during various periods.
MacDonald:
I think of
Side Seat Paintings
as autobiographical in the sense that, as a
visual
artist, you were first a painter, then a photographer, then a filmmaker. In the film, the paintings are recorded in the slides, which are recorded in the film. Did you and Hollis ever talk about the similarities between that film and
nostalgia
[1971]?
Snow:
Well, actually
nostalgia
is more similar to
A Casing Shelved
[1970], a slide and tape piece, my only 35mm "film." It's a slide of bookshelves I had in my studio, loaded with all kinds of stuff. And the sound is a voice, my voice, discussing what's on the shelves from various points of view: what it is or what it was and where it came from. The bookshelf has many small things on it and the text is written to move your eyes around on this big image. There's a plan in the text that moves you over the whole space of the image, and through time, because some of the things and events referred to are recent and some are older. Some are art related and some are related to my so-called private life. But it is very autobiographical. And it's similar to what Hollis did in
nostalgia,
although there's no destruction involved.
MacDonald:
What strikes me as similar in
nostalgia
and
Side Seat Paintings
is that both are look-backs at the past, and in both the earlier work is "destroyed." In yours the destruction isn't literal [actually, it isn't in
nostalgia
either, since only
prints
are being burned and since they're exhibited in the film before the burning "destroys" them], but because of the processes of recording those paintings have gone through, there's no way to know what they actually looked like: what we know is that we
can't
see exactly what they were.
Snow:
That's interesting. And in both films, the works discussed are two-dimensional surfaces.
MacDonald:
There's been a tendency, at least among some people I talk to, to think of you as an old-fashioned guy who has a problem accepting women and women's independence and that this problem is embedded in
Presents
.
Snow:
Well, I am an old guy, but I've never had any problem accepting women's independence. In fact, I was very much interested in women's independence before this current wave of feminism. I was always very supportive of Joyce in her work. Everybody should have the possibility of going as far as they can with whatever they do. It's not an