Hills Snyder by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, in 2005 Artpace Residencies and Exhibitions, pp. 46 - 52.
Everything’s gonna be alright
Bob Marley
Hills Snyder describes his work as being like a hook, “you can hang something on it, or not.”
This seemingly casual approach to the viewer stands in stark opposition to a type of art with
a specific ideological agenda, the genre of ‘about’ art (“my art is about…”) so common in
artists of his generation. Instead Snyder tries to open up meanings rather than narrow them
down, relishing in ambiguities and in the multiple possibilities that can be unleashed by direct
experience.
It’s hard to define what happens when you look at a work by Snyder. The visual clues seem to
be strangely incomplete, as if missing the instruction book that could tell you what to think or
how to feel. The erudition that permeates his work (through quotes or hidden references)
never functions as a key through which the ‘correct’ meanings will be revealed. What is at
stake is the very idea of meanings in art, or at least the idea of a list of correct meanings that
need to be somehow decoded. Given this self-proclaimed hermeticism and deliberate obtuseness,
what does actually happen in Snyder’s work? What makes Book of the Dead so effective that
visitors can be seen leaving exalted, crying, scared, reassured, or laughing, but never indifferent?
Snyder’s skill is in activating experiences that connect to deep structures that are hardwired
in the human psyche. Book of the Dead is structured as a mythical journey from innocence
and wonder (the antigravity chair), through knowledge of death (the Plexiglas electric chair),
a death-like stripping of the senses (the labyrinth), to the final earthly paradise of a thrift
shop furnished living room. Although this path may mirror ancient myths about the journey
of life into death, the work’s success is in its openness to different interpretations of experience.
There is no belief system at play, and no single message. Instead, each visitor’s experience
constitutes a ‘page’ of the entire book, which is being written with every visit.
Snyder is openly critical of the contemporary art system, the way that meanings, fashions, styles,
and reputations are traded. He tries to find something of a shortcut between direct experience,
the language and codes of contemporary art, and something akin to folk (or rural) storytelling.
His role model is, albeit somewhat humorously, the sociopath, the marginalized person who copies
the behavior of others because he has none of his own. According to Snyder, the romantic ideal
of the alienated artist parallels that of the sociopath: “The artist must re-mimic the sociopath in
order to disguise his special status in the marginalized condition of pathology so that he may gain
entrance to the world guarded by the practitioners of the post modern monolith. Once inside,
the slaughter can commence…but quietly…the weapon of choice being poison (art), not the knife or
bludgeon.”
For Snyder, the contemporary artist should not be a social worker or redeemer. His interest in
the marginal and sociopathic stems perhaps from his interest in popular storytelling. Snyder
identifies with a long tradition in which eccentricity and subversion are codified without passing
moral judgment in popular culture. The ambiguity present in a work like Book of the Dead finds
parallels in the fragmented and sometimes elliptical narratives of centuries of popular song and
storytelling, from medieval romances to Bob Dylan.
Snyder’s paradigm of the artist as a seer or visionary rather than social healer resonates
with Joseph Campbell’s description of the mythical hero: “It is not society that is to guide and
save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme
ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories,
but in the silences of his personal despair.” Book of the Dead takes each visitor on a journey
through hope and despair, before arriving at the reassuring domestic ‘heaven’ of the living room.
The sensations along the way are so powerful that each visitor has to struggle to make sense of
what just happened, to check in on his or her emotions about this place. The living room itself
is full of carefully controlled hints and clues, from the 19th century Romantic prints (balanced
between the sublime and the everyday), quotes from Snyder’s own prolific songwriting output
(such as “sometimes the winner comes before the fall”), or the subtle mirroring of lamps and
colors throughout the room (one of the many possible readings of Book of the Dead is to see
the whole project as a mirror).
Despite its laid-back atmosphere, the living room is the most heavily coded part of the installation.
Even the seemingly kitsch digitally-reproduced romantic paintings pick up formal references from
elsewhere: the barn in August Vischer’s Fair Dance on the Threshing Floor has a lunette not unlike
the video screen in the first room, while Caspar David Friedrich’s The Summer (Landscape with Lovers)
picks up on the Romantic/sociopath angle, the mirror/couple, and so on and so forth. The hidden
references are almost infinite, yet the space still feels relaxing and informal. During the opening
night and on special occasions afterwards, Snyder performed “The Intoxicating Angel” in this space,
serving tequila shots to visitors, while welcoming them by giving them their unique ‘page number.’
Perhaps the most significant moment in the installation is the final exit. Having passed through
the double doors to the exterior, everything outside is the same as before, yet somehow different.
According to the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, heaven is indistinguishable from everyday
life: “Man after death is as much a man as he was before, so much as to be unaware that he is not
still in the former world. He has sight, hearing, and speech as in the former world. He walks, runs,
and sits as in the former world.[…]Death is not the extinction but the continuation of life.” Leaving
the heaven/haven of the living room only reminds us that this confusing, frustrating, and emotive
experience will continue well outside the realms of anything constructed within the art world. Heaven
will follow us out of the door. Book of the Dead
Portal 1:
Lunette
video, anti-gravity chair, flat black wall paint, black carpet,
vinyl lettering
Portal 2:
Stay
acrylic sheet on birch support, cedar platform, black light,
door with window, flat black wall paint, black carpet, vinyl lettering
One-way door:
Limbo
darkness
Portal 3:
Living Room
lamps, furniture, rugs, digital prints, Autumn Festival wall paint, flowers, vinyl lettering
Fair Dance on the Threshing Floor, August Vischer
Digital print, gold molding
The Summer (Landscape With Lovers), Caspar David Friedrich
Digital print, gold molding
wall texts:
Sometimes the winner comes before the fall.
I used to be a meteor, but now I’m a vegetarian.
sentenced here am I for my writing crime
though for the act of killing you I’ll never do no time
your body holds no blood nor wind this is a truth sublime
twas ever thus my reason says or at least says so my rhyme
Intoxicating Angel
Opening night, a spectral figure appears in a white tuxedo and shades greeting guests arriving in the
Living Room with a shot of tequila and the phrase, “Welcome, Page 48 (or 76 or 222 according to the
sequence of each guest’s arrival), I hope you enjoy your stay in the living room.”
Exit:
Don’t Be A Pussy
cedar door, vinyl lettering
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