Remembering Dash Snow
When a public figure dies of a drug overdose, those circumstances of death cloud the rest of the person’s life. The person could have been an incredible filmmaker, actor, singer, musician, artist…but now they’re just a junkie, surrounded by scandal and a seedy media interest. In some cases, the person has work that is so present, he or she does begin to overcome the death story and be remembered for that work again, albeit years later. This is especially true with classic rock - or what we today call classic - like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. They are still marred by their own deaths, but we embrace their music now. Unfortunately, this dynamic isn’t present in art, because art is simply not mainstreamed like music. Often, only those who seek art out purposefully will have any idea what’s going on in the scene. And because of this, when an artist dies under more “scandalous” circumstances, that’s the first time millions of people hear of that person. I wonder if any of those people bother to look at the work of that person.
Dash Snow (born Dashiell A. Snow on July 27, 1981) died on July 13, 2009, just two weeks shy of his twenty-eighth birthday. Yes, it was reportedly a drug overdose, most certainly confirmed by Dash’s own grandmother, Christophe de Menil (Snow was a descendant of the French aristocratic family, de Menil, as well as the Thurman family, Uma is his aunt. His father was Christopher Snow). Dash was a wild child in the New York party scene, many describing his lifestyle as “debaucherous.” He had struggled with addiction, but perhaps saddest of all was that those close to him say he was clean, healthy, and happy in the weeks before his death, a move he made from desperation to kick his problem, for his work and more importantly for his three-year-old daughter. All it took was one relapse.
But while the newspapers, magazines, and blogs light up with titillating reports on Snow’s problems and decadent life, take a look at his art. His photography was part of new pop art movement in modern art, one that followed the artist’s own movement instead a mass one being taught to many young artists. You could call him a modern day Warhol, but that’s probably too mundane of an assertion. His work exposed the New York scene, he photographed the same debauchery he lived - some of his photographs deem “deviant art” an understatement. His work was raw and disconcerting at times, revealing sex, violence, and drug use. It was brutally honest. He had a punk anarchist tone to his work, taking pictures of authority figures and then defiling them. He also experimented with graffiti art under the name “Sace.” His work could have looked like the tantrums of a young, anti-authority brat, but there was such honesty and aesthetic quality - did he see beauty in this seedy underworld? - that it was instead recognized for the art it was, and exhibited worldwide.
The subjects of Snow’s work won’t help people forget how he died. But maybe it will introduce them to why they should remember him, after all his work and his life (if too short) stretched on longer than his death. Check out some of his work here: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/dash_snow.htm
July 29th, 2009 by Courtney Iseman | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)
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