old droopy eye

I posted a comment to the Globe and Mail recently criticizing their article on the sale of a Cornelius Krieghoff painting. It garnered about $300 000 CDN at auction and the person responsible for the headline had the audacity to infer that the Canadian art market was 'hot'. This after a Warhol Mao portrait sold at auction for $17 million. In my comment I mentioned one Michael Snow and the need to wait until twenty years after he was dead in order to determine the true temperature of the market. Snow was a founding member of Fluxus, if I recollect correctly, the same group that included the recently deceased Paik Nam-Jun, Korea's most famous post-modernish artist and an innovator in video art.

The first time I encountered Paik's work in Korea was at Seoul Grand Park a few months after the currency crisis in 1997 and the huge tower of televisions had been turned off, apparently to save on electricity. More recently I was able to view photographs of his collaborations with Josef Beuys at the Shilla Gallery here in Daegu, and I was delighted to encounter his twin television structures at the Sejong Cultural Centre in Seoul a few months ago. One of the videos of Paik repeatedly pushing over an upright piano while a group of men waited to lift it into position again had me grinning for some time.

Now I have never met Michael Snow even though he had monthly appearances with a jazz performance group at The Music Gallery where one of my friends named Steve worked while I was still living in Toronto. I did encounter his sculpture while still an impressionable teenager, though. His most famous work, Walking Woman, seemed to me initially to be nothing more than a feeble tribute to Woman's Liberation and I paid closer attention to the Group of Seven and other more traditional artists while wandering around the AGO.



One day, however, when I was sixteen and on a date with a lovely young lady named Valerie Bernard who was studying at the Etobicoke School of the Arts, I happened across a book of Snow's work in the gallery store. I was glancing through it not expecting much when I came across a series of preliminary drawings for one of his Walking Woman renditions. Valerie was browsing close by and I had been showing her everything of note that I found. Would I show her this? The last of the drawings had an additional figure, that of a man, walking in the opposite direction. Both figures were outlines and they nested perfectly. The man could best be described as rampant, and the woman had an additional element: a cavity extending upwards from her groin in the distinct form of an erect penis. Now even just standing next to an attractive young lady could have been enough to arouse a sixteen year old boy. Valerie was not only young and attractive, she also apparently liked me a lot. I don't remember if I showed her the drawing but between Valerie Bernard and Michael Snow, I was turned on to Art.

I haven't been able to find a picture of Valerie, but here's Michael. I like to think he's winking at me.