GEOMETRIE VARIABLE

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

Whether you bought into him as an artist or not, there was something arresting if not strangely poignant about the death of Dash Snow this past July. Maybe because it felt like the delayed, startlingly apposite coda to the end of an era, or maybe because it so symmetrically conformed to expectations that its utter, cliché predictability became somehow moving. Dash Snow assuaged a very specific and transparent need in contemporary art. It was questionable whether or not the work he produced, so to speak, had any value in itself at all, or if it had value only in relation to Snow himself, or rather, to the myth of Snow. Furthering his mythological status was the “crew” that Snow associated with, and that art institutions so loved to contextualize him in. The most explicit annunciation of which is in the forthcoming exhibition at MACRO Future in Rome, “New York Minute,” which will be Snow’s first posthumous exhibition. It goes without saying that this aforementioned role was romantic, but how or why was it romantic? One need only turn to the market for that answer. For while the market boom was in swing, Snow willingly participated in a somewhat complex nexus of serviceability: a kind of sacrificial lamb, he represented the romantic, ungovernable force that supposedly transcends market pressures and interests, and thereby proved that contemporary art, as a whole and still “despite it all,” retained some sense of purity and integrity.

At the heights of market frenzy, the need for the token insouciant, auto-decimating and ungovernable artist was proportionately necessary. This force, this raw kernel of artistic quiddity capable of not only resisting, but eluding the all-corrupting taint of the market, supposedly contradicted and even miraculously counteracted the reality of an absolutely market-driven art world. Valorizing, say, a Murakami or a Koons with one hand, the market could contritely point with the other at the likes of Snow, as if his onanistic riotousness legitimized an otherwise almost exclusively commercial activity. (That his practice should be onanistic could hardly be more appropriate: the majority of Snow’s works consisted of him masturbating on printed media, such as newspaper articles. Onanism symbolically demonstrated his profligacy, i.e., abundantly spilling his seed as opposed to fertilely investing it into productive work.)

Was Snow, then, a martyr? (And to what cause?) Scion of de Menil art nobility, he was far too informed, and therefore, inevitably too complicit in his own instrumentalization to achieve any such status. But the real question, the one nobody really wants to ask because not only would it require the shedding of certain black-and-white terms, but also because it has no easy answer, is where does complicity begin and end here? Was it only the market that needed Snow, or the likes of Snow? Who else benefits by the continued circulation and exploitation of these myths? One could say not Dash Snow, for he is dead—but then again, no one is ever as talented and full of potential as those who die young.

Chris Sharp

Extracted from the free and exelent Kaleidoscope magazine