Michael Snow’s work was finding wonder in a moment seen and lost in the same instant

In 1967, Michael Snow created “Wavelength,” a pioneering experimental film that had all the immediate charm of ragged nails being dragged slowly, painfully across a particularly janky chalkboard. Its soundtrack, in fact, may well have been the era’s high-tech simulation of exactly that: A monotone, mechanical whine growing slowly more high-pitched as the camera spends 45 minutes zooming — at excruciating slow pace — from a wide shot of a mostly-empty room to a photograph of water tacked to its far wall. It’s less something to experience than endure, pinned by the sadistic tease that, like in most any movie, something might actually happen (eventually and cut partly out of the frame, a man walks in and dies; a woman answers the phone; all the while your ears ring, and everything hurts).

In the theatres that dared show it, it prompted mass walkouts and, in a few reported cases, fist fights. The critic Manny Farber, writing in ArtForum magazine, called it the “Birth of a Nation” of experimental film, which may or may not have been meant as a compliment. Whether despite or because of all this — a little of both, I’d guess — it became an icon, a totem of a new generation of “structuralist” filmmakers for whom the medium itself — its shortcomings, manipulations, deceptions and sometimes tortures — was its own subject.

More than 50 years later, “Wavelength” is art world sacrament, and its maker a high priest. Snow, who died last week at 94, could easily have remained that man in a high tower, monastically devoted to rigour, purity, toughness. Instead, Snow did other things — so many other things, but notably, this: In 2003, with “Wavelength” canonized beyond reproach, he remade it by chopping it into three equal chunks of 15 minutes each, which he then superimposed overtop each other. He called it “WVLNT, or Wavelength for those who don’t have the time.” For Snow, nothing was so precious that it couldn’t be playfully picked apart — least of all himself.

I met Snow for the first time in 2009. I was the art critic at the Toronto Star, relatively new to the job, and his new exhibition, “Recent Snow,” had just opened at the Power Plant (he endured the endless puns on his name, and for decades, with such easy grace that I think he might actually have started to enjoy their relentless predictability). Michael was in town, the gallery’s PR person said — lucky, given his demanding exhibition schedule all over the world; he had concurrent shows in Tokyo, New York and France — and would I like to walk through the show with him? I tried to swallow my anxiety; no, I really did not want to expose my own shortcomings directly to one of the most accomplished artists in the world — who, by the way, I felt woefully inadequate to review anyway. “Sure,” I said. “Sounds great.” And so I went.

The show, a series of small, darkened spaces built to accommodate an array of video works Snow had made in the previous decade or so. They were dizzyingly different — a flickering time-lapse of a hillside above the sea in Newfoundland; an awkward stack of white cubes, over which was projected a snarl of traffic at a busy Paris intersection; text flashing a stream of non-sequiturs that might have been the art-world equivalent of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine — but united, somehow, by a clear and affable wit.

I found Snow in a larger gallery in the back, watching a video he’d made at his cabin in Newfoundland, where he and his wife, the curator Peggy Gale, spent large chunks of the summer each year. On screen, a plain white drape drifted lazily up with the breeze to reveal an unkempt expanse of green through the window; then the wind would shift, and the drape would dive back against the window screen and land with a loud thwack. It did it again and again, a primal force captured by the most prosaic of means. It was hypnotic; it was an hour long, but it may as well have been 30 seconds. I was hooked. Tellingly, so was he.

“Wow, would you look at that!” Snow said, giddily, as the drape soared and plunged, sucked back against the screen with elemental force. We shared the moment, and I understood: That for Snow, art wasn’t about posturing, outsmarting, obfuscating, outdoing; it was about the wonder of seeing — its endless possibilities, frustrations and joys.

This was the Snow I came to know: Someone whose curiosity and spontaneity allowed him to find beauty and wonder in the simplest things. He never stopped looking for it, because for him, it was all around; it fuelled his limitless energy and enthusiasm to the last. He was generous with his time, and always engaged; if you went to openings in Toronto, big museums and small galleries, you’d see Snow there, well into his 90s. He was there because he was interested — because he couldn’t not be; because it’s who he was.

Snow was undeniably a legend: In the early 1960s, he had made modular abstract sculpture from workday materials in his studio in New York before the term “Minimalism” had ever been uttered; he’d had his pipes fixed and his electricity connected to his illegal Tribeca loft by a pair of then-guerilla handymen, Richard Serra and Philip Glass. He was an improvisational jazz piano maestro for decades. His iconic form, “Walking Woman,” was a foundational form in the conceptual art staple of the artist’s multiple; him having it installed everywhere and anywhere also made it a pioneering element of the idea of public intervention — art, unexpected, giving you the chance to see the same old place in a new way.

Snow’s life’s pursuit was about finding new ways of seeing; but it was also about attuning your mind to the things your eyes take for granted and might otherwise slide by (“Wavelength,” in a way, is that: Cinema frames the world so deliberately and completely, you can choose to be blithely unaware of its manipulations; so, here they are). But really, I think, the core of Snow’s work was finding wonder in a moment seen and lost in the same instant, and the futile struggle to hold on. Whether sped up, slowed down, nudged off kilter, or pushed through a filter of his own creation, all is here, and gone.

His inexhaustible curiosity — not what to see, but how — reminds me of another artist: The Impressionist master Claude Monet, who, at his best, painted the same scene over and over, sometimes dozens of times, in changing conditions of light, atmosphere and season; his subject wasn’t a place or a thing, but time itself, and the magic its churn could conjure around the indifference of the world.

Snow was an artist like that, and made great by it: He was spontaneous but patient, and driven by his enthusiasm to look as much and in as many way as he could. Art, for him, was best left an open question: In 1967, the same year “Wavelength” was first shown, Snow more or less drew a map for the rest of his career. It went in every direction at once: “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor,” he wrote in a catalogue for a group show that year. “Sometimes they all work together.”

Why do something, I expect he thought, when I can do everything? And for more than 70 years, he did.

He leaves us with all of it, but also the question, forever open, of what he might have done next. Goodbye, Michael. You will be missed.

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