Back and Forth
"Back and Forth" by Nancy Tousley, Spring 2007, pp. 103-04
The British-born, Berlin-based conceptualist Jonathan Monk put the finishing touch on “Back and Forth” after he arrived in Toronto, with a bouquet of roses. Bringing flowers is the gesture of an admirer, a guest, someone with a sense of occasion. It was a simple but brilliant response to the venerated Toronto avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow’s work in the two artists’ installation at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. And it was entirely in keeping with Monk’s practice of playing off of the work of artists of the 1960s and 70s, which he honours and challenges by revisiting and revising high-modernist ideas within the context of life—his own.
Forty years apart in age, Snow and Monk met in Toronto in 2003. The installation, made at Bradley’s invitation, evolved via e-mail. “Back and Forth,” also the title of a celebrated film Snow made in 1969, handily describes the process. Ultimately, Monk suggested each artist make a 16-mm film-loop projection, a form common to both their practices; the gallerist Jessica Bradley proposed each respond in some way to the other’s film. Each pairing was like a volley in an artists’ game, more match of wits than collaboration.
Monk made Fireplace (2006) by buying stock DVD footage of a burning fireplace and having it transferred to 16-mm film. It was projected on the wall at fireplace height. When he chose this ready-made, he said, he could hear his mother talking about the days before TV, when the fireplace was the centre of the home and the focus of dreams. Facing it, Snow placed a lit aquarium filled with fish of colours chosen to represent fire. Like both films, the fish presented a moving image and acted as brush strokes within a frame. If fire melts snow, water douses fire. In the give and take of “Back and Forth,” the punning gamesmen came to a friendly draw.
Each was at his best in the other pairing. Snow’s 34 Films (2006) invokes the Russian constructivist avant-garde, Duchamp’s 3 Stoppages-Étalon (1913–14), Action painting and Snow’s own works from the 1960s and 70s, such as Wavelength (1966–67) and Painting (Closing the Drum Book) (1978). Using old stock, Snow filmed 16 rectangular coloured gels falling onto a white surface, then flipped and reversed the film so that 16 gels or films fly back “into” the lens, making 32 gels. (The 33rd is the film in the camera; the 34th is the film in the projector.) Projected on the wall, the frame of light becomes like a painting, the random composition of which parallels the “total improvisation” technique Snow uses in musical performance. Entirely in keeping with his earlier work, it is a masterful summary—like other summations Snow has made.
Nearby, Monk’s dyed floral bouquet, inspired partly by Snow’s fish in water, slowly dropped its petals during the exhibition, echoing the falling gels of 34 Films. The flowers, a reference to the flower works of Bas Jan Ader, also recalled painting—the memento mori—making the bouquet an homage to Snow and a fond farewell to modernism.
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