Remembering Dash Snow

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Charles Saatchi flew Snow and Colen over to London for his USA Today show at the Royal Academy. He put them up at a Mayfair hotel where they holed up in their suite and created a specialty, a “Hamster’s Nest.” This was an installation though one less reminiscent of, say, Ilya Kabakov than of Led Zeppelin in the Hyatt House, ripping a great many telephone directories to bitty bits, swirling the bedding everywhere and doing enough drugs to hamsterize their crania. They decamped from the hotel in the middle of the night, apparently just ahead of the long arm of the law,In October 2007, Snow and Colen did another Next at New York’s Deitch Projects on Grand Street. Along with 30 volunteers, they ripped up 2,000 telephone books, gouged the walls and scrawled them with street-dumb drawings—an ejaculating penis—and rude texts. It seemed to me a stylish piece of Street-Dada showbiz, a deliberately unholy reference to another of the Dia Foundation’s Sacred Spaces, Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room, which is just around the corner on Wooster. Snow’s work was entering what one might call his maturely immature phase—lots of semen, including a New York Post covers coated with ejaculate and glitter—and his collectors included Anita Zabludowicz and Dakis Joannou. But then he just downed and died.

Dash Snow’s death would seem to ensure the myth, including the surely inevitable movie, and the coverage has trotted out all the inevitables from Janis Joplin via James Dean to Kurt Cobain. But some are angered by what they see as the enabling mechanisms of the art world, the support offered by those delighted with the energy pumped in by Bad Boys.

“I think some people encouraged this kind of scene, “ says Charles Finch, the acidulous ArtNet columnist. “With all the overdoses and everything that we have had in the art world and the music world, is extremely irresponsible.

“First of all, does anyone learn any lessons over the years? There’s this whole idea of watching a train wreck happen and not pulling a switch to prevent it.”

Finch’s second point relates to the art made by somebody who might easily be called an accidental artist.

“Was Dash a legitimate artist? In terms of his practice? No!” He singles out the Polaroids. “Nan Goldin, of course, is all about suffering. Dash had a sense of self-satisfaction about everything he did. That somehow he was in on something and everybody else should join.”

Neville Wakefield, the Manhattan-based British curator, included Snow in several shows, including Defamation of Character at PS1. “The excess was certainly a side of it,” he says. “But what he made, his art, was very traditional. It was American art coming from the late ‘50s and the ‘60s. People like Wallace Berman and George Herms. And the paradox is that he did walk this line of excess throughout his life but he was the sweetest, nicest guy you could imagine. He was completely charming. He touched and affected a lot of people.

“And at the same time he obviously had his demons. Which to some extent became the subject of his giant tabloid collages. And obviously weren’t finally sublimated in his art.”

Anthony Haden-Guest writes a weekly column on art collecting for the Financial Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Times (London), and many other publications. He is the author of several books, including True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World. He lives in New York and London.

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July 18, 2009 | 7:10am

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Actually

Curious to the extent that Daily Beast's extensive Snow coverage is connected to Tina Brown's friendship with Charles Saatchi, who invested quite a bit in Snow and is now left with the risk of a considerable loss if his reputation disintegrates.

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Remembering Dash Snow

Remembering Dash Snow