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Offline Anonymous

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Dash Snow
« on: September 11, 2009, 12:21:09 AM »
Circa 1997 an individual named Dash Snow attended Hidden Lake Academy. He was a well-known and highly accomplished artist. Dash Snow passed away on july 13, 2009 at the age of 27.



Here is a New York Times article about his life and death]http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/nyreg ... wanted=all[/url]

Terrible End for an Enfant Terrible

WHEN the artist Dash Snow died of an overdose on July 13, stoned and alone at the Lafayette House in the East Village, detectives found the following items in his room: an empty can of Amstel Light, an empty can of Heineken, an empty bottle of Bacardi rum, three used syringes and 13 glassine envelopes emptied of heroin.

Mr. Snow, who would have turned 28 on Monday, had checked into the hotel that morning, the authorities say, booking a three-day stay. He spent the afternoon and a good part of the evening on a dedicated bender, but as the night drew on, he called his companion of several years, Jade Berreau, who was at a nearby restaurant with friends discussing his deteriorating state and a possible intervention. He was cheerless and dejected on the phone, ranting incoherently and hinting at a fast-approaching death. As the conversation ended, he told Ms. Berreau, who was sitting with their 2-year-old daughter, Secret: “Goodbye. I love you. I’ll see you in another world.”

Ms. Berreau, a dark-haired model, scrambled to find the hotel’s address and hurried over with a friend, the photographer Hanna Liden. The women burst into the lobby and asked the startled desk clerk for keys to Room 11, then rushed upstairs to find a bolted door.

They managed to get the lock undone but struggled with the chain, then finally kicked the door down to find Mr. Snow naked and submerged in the bathtub. They called 911 and started CPR. When the medics arrived, they, too, tried, banging on his chest for nearly 90 minutes.

But Mr. Snow’s heart had stopped. He was pronounced dead in the room at 12:24 a.m.

It was a gruesome end — a pathetic end — for an artist and provocateur who, at least according to his birthright, never should have been there to begin with. Dash Snow was, in no particular order, a jokester, a jailbird, a thief, a freak, a successful art-brut savage, a doting father, a connoisseur of various cocaine bathrooms, a retired writer of graffiti and the latest incarnation of that timeless New York species, the downtown Baudelaire. Two years ago, New York magazine anointed him one of “Warhol’s Children” in a skeptical but mostly glowing profile that served to intensify his celebrity if not elevate his artwork.

But he was also East Side royalty, the discontented scion of the famous de Menil family, whose contributions to the American art world are vast. He met a junkie’s end but did so in a $325-a-night hotel room with an antique marble hearth. His death was not unlike his abbreviated life: a violent, jumbled collage of high and low.

As the days and weeks go by, that death and life are certain to be studied as a cautionary tale. But Mr. Snow’s demise could also be read as a story about New York and the tribal immobility that undercuts the city’s reputation as a celebrated home for self-invention.

“The facts are pretty simple,” said Javier Peres, Mr. Snow’s art dealer. “Dash, as a child, rebelled against his family. There was a lot of anger and unresolved baggage with the family — especially with his mother. There might have been a blanket there at times, but he thought about himself as basically being alone.”

Being alone, of course, is not the same as being free. And after the drugs, the sex, the squats, the art, the casual stance toward hygiene and formality, some basic questions linger: Did Mr. Snow ever escape the East Side pedigree that caused him so much anguish? How long does someone have to live their life before they fully possess it? Was he on an inevitable crash course from the start?

IT was July 2007, and the myth of Dash Snow had ascended toward perhaps its steepest peak. He was married to Agathe Snow, another downtown artist, but Ms. Berreau — who declined to be interviewed for this article — was about to give birth to their child. It was during this period that two of Mr. Snow’s close friends died of heroin overdoses. His own career was on fire, but he had not yet been singed by the flames.

With the artist Dan Colen and others, Mr. Snow installed a Hamster’s Nest at Deitch Projects, a SoHo gallery. A Hamster’s Nest is what it sounds like, but with humans in the rodent roles: You shred a few hundred phone books, paint the walls, then ingest enough intoxicants so that every scrap of sentience disappears.

“It was really intense,” recalled Ms. Snow, whose divorce from Dash was finalized this summer, though she remained close to him to the end. “We were all really high, and there were concerts. It was like a whole other world, an intense moment, all these people with paper, piles of Yellow Pages, no air or ventilation and fumes everywhere. We were already so drunk. The iPods kept getting lost in the paper.” Three days later — with no clue how it happened — she woke up in Berlin.

That weekend was the end of what looked in retrospect like the innocent phase of Mr. Snow’s rebellion. There was notoriety, youth and beauty in copious proportions, a big show at one of the city’s finest galleries. Six months earlier, the New York magazine profile had traced his journey into prominence from his days as a mutinous graffiti tagger roaming the streets.

It was a story that is fairly well known by now: how at 15 he helped found Irak NY, a graffiti operation led in part by a man with the Dickensian name Earsnot; how as a teenager he stole a Polaroid and always documented his location so as to remember it when he sobered up; how Mr. Colen and the photographer Ryan McGinley took him on as a fellow blithe spirit and something of a muse. They encouraged Mr. Snow to exhibit his collages of newspaper headlines, many of them revealing his obsession with Saddam Hussein, and his photographs of oral sex, nude girls, lines of cocaine being snorted off body parts. It worked: His first solo show was in 2005, and his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

The art world was not yet settled on whether Mr. Snow was an important artist, a young talent with promise or a reckless pretender. Well-known collectors including Charles Saatchi have bought his pieces, generally at five-figure prices; Benjamin Godsill, a curatorial associate at the New Museum, said Mr. Snow’s work “captures this period bracketed by the fall of the World Trade Center and the fall of the financial system.”

Jacob Lewis, the director of Pace Prints Chelsea, said, “Some people think of him as the Kurt Cobain of the art world. Other people think of him as the Paris Hilton.”

When you talk to those who knew Mr. Snow, certain phrases tend to recur: crazy, free-spirited, lived by his own rules. “Irresponsible, reckless, carefree, wild, rich — we were just kids doing drugs and being bad, out at bars every night,” Mr. McGinley wrote in an e-mail message circulated to friends after Mr. Snow’s overdose. “Sniffing coke off toilet seats. Doing bumps off each others’ fists. Driving down one-way streets in Milan at 100 miles an hour blasting ‘I Did It My Way’ in a white van.”

For such a feral presence, though, Mr. Snow understood how to turn criticism into opportunity. New York magazine derided him for making art by ejaculating on copies of The New York Post; he blew up that section of the article, ejaculated on the copy and displayed it at an art show in Los Angeles.

His sadness and his money and his drugs were a powerful dynamic, said Jack Walls, a close friend of Mr. Snow’s who is a former lover of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: the sadness was abetted by the drugs, the drugs abetted by the money.

Mr. Walls distinguished Mr. Snow from working-class addicts like Herbert Huncke — and himself. “It was like his money never ran out,” Mr. Walls said. “When it came to doing drugs, he could do these marathons for days and days on end. In my day, in Huncke’s day, in Burroughs’s day, when we wanted a fix, we had to go work — we couldn’t just sit around getting high for three straight weeks.”

A HALF-BLOCK off Fifth Avenue, on East 81st Street, down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a baroque town house rises like a monument to the Manhattan establishment. This is the familial home of the de Menils, the wealthy French-Texan clan to which Dashiell A. Snow was born.

His great-grandmother Dominique de Menil was an heiress of the Schlumberger oil fortune, an American grande dame who rode horseback in the Bois de Boulogne and married a French banker she had met in a ballroom at Versailles. One of their daughters, Philippa, co-founded the Dia Center for the Arts in Manhattan, while another, Christophe, married Robert Thurman, a famed scholar of Buddhism. Mr. Thurman eventually divorced her and remarried, fathering with his second wife (a German-Swedish model previously married to Timothy Leary) the actress Uma Thurman.

Reached in Italy while on vacation, Mr. Thurman — Mr. Snow’s grandfather — suggested that the family’s foundational conflict was between his ex-wife, Christophe, and their daughter — Dash’s mother — Taya Thurman. “The mother insisted she knew better — she interfered with the daughter,” Mr. Thurman said. “Taya realized at a certain point that Dash might end up going a little out of control, so she tried to instill a bit of discipline. Dash, of course, resisted.”

That resistance took the form of teenage pranks: tire-slashing, truancy. And when Mr. Snow was 15, his parents (his father was Christopher Snow, a musician) sent him to the Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia (“a little boot-campish,” Mr. Thurman said). Mr. Snow’s mother obtained a restraining order barring her own mother from seeing the boy until he was 18, but Mr. Thurman said the grandmother nonetheless set up expense accounts that Dash used to fuel his binges.

Christophe de Menil declined to be interviewed, as did Taya Thurman, who released a written statement.

“As a mother, watching Dash self-destruct through addiction has been the most devastating experience of my life,” she wrote. “My efforts seemed only to create a painful rift between us, a rift that adds to my sadness over his senseless death.”

Ms. de Menil grew up in a family whose sensibilities were such that they often had black guests at their home in Texas at the height of segregation. An artist, she is deeply involved with the family museum, the Menil Collection in Houston.

For Mr. Snow, the choice between an authoritarian mother and a creative, laissez-faire grandmother was no choice at all. At 18, he and Agathe, just married, moved in with Ms. de Menil, staying from 1999 to 2003.

But his rebellious ways continued, even deepened, until it seemed that he was not only strung out on drugs, but strung up between the poles of a privileged East Side life and a gritty existence on the street — plagued, some friends have said, by a tortured-rich-kid syndrome in a way that never seemed to bother his brother, Maxwell (a socialite who once dated Mary-Kate Olsen), or his sister, Caroline, a writer.

Other friends, however, insisted that Mr. Snow’s outlaw nature was not concocted or tormented, but authentic and instinctive.

“When I first met him, he told me his name was Tropical Fantasy — I think he was 19,” said Jesse Pearson, the editor of Vice magazine. “Say what you will about his background, he put himself into a lifestyle that only the strong survive — to a point, as we see now. He was living the life you saw in his work. There was nothing that was a pose.”

THE one thing that truly did not care if Mr. Snow was posing or not was drugs.

He tried a rehab program in upstate New York, according to several friends, and attempted treatment with an experimental drug called Suboxone. In March, he checked into a private detox center in the Caribbean, having reached that stage of addiction where his problem was not his problems; his problem was the drugs.

“He could go a month clean,” Agathe Snow recalled, “but then if he had one glass of wine, it would become a bottle, then coke, then heroin. There was not a slow buildup. It was like a beast building up.”

The last time Mr. McGinley saw him was over the Memorial Day weekend at Mr. Walls’s property upstate. “We chilled all day, picking yellow flowers, watching ‘Sesame Street’ and petting cats and dogs,” Mr. McGinley wrote in his e-mail message. “Dash stayed in his room the entire time.”

After that weekend, Mr. Snow disappeared. “Instinctively, I knew he was strung out,” Mr. Walls said, “because if he wasn’t strung out, I would have heard from him.”

The weekend before his overdose, Mr. Snow, his girlfriend and their daughter went with friends to the home of a family friend of the Berreau’s in Bridgehampton, N.Y.

“He spent about five days partying, not sleeping, and then went out to the Hamptons and slept for an entire day,” said a friend who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a code of silence adopted by some after Mr. Snow’s death. “He wanted to be left alone and didn’t come down for a dinner party. He stayed asleep the entire time. Then he went back into the city, got his drugs and knew exactly what he was doing when he went to that hotel.”

MR. SNOW’s body spent the night of July 13 in a basement refrigerator at the New York City morgue, chilled to 32 to 40 degrees. The next day, it was sent to the Andrett Funeral Home, a few blocks away.

That night, friends gathered at Ms. de Menil’s house, where Ms. Snow, Ms. Berreau and others drank Prosecco, the hostess’s favorite wine. The next day, the family held a private viewing at the funeral home.

“We went there,” Ms. Snow said. “There was no actual funeral. Only his next of kin could go in and recognize his body. Jade went in and she wanted to take pictures of his tattoos. His parents didn’t think that was a good idea and didn’t let it happen.”

By the end of the viewing, there were dozens of mourners milling on the street — friends, admirers, pillars of a certain downtown scene. There were stories, reminiscences, tears, then everyone went to eat at Lucien, a French bistro on First Street and First Avenue.

Mr. Snow’s body, meanwhile, was taken to New Jersey and cremated.
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Offline Anonymous

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Re: Dash Snow
« Reply #1 on: September 11, 2009, 12:29:25 AM »
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline Anonymous

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Re: Dash Snow
« Reply #2 on: September 20, 2009, 03:44:34 AM »
What's wrong with this disgusting, pathetic forum? Can't even highlight text. Page jumps around.

The last days of Dash Snow

He was heir to one of America's greatest family fortunes and a multimillion-dollar art collection. But Dash Snow rebelled to become a self-styled outsider, a penniless "downtown Baudelaire" obsessed with drugs, sex and self-destruction. Sean O'Hagan traces the reckless life and untimely death of New York's most controversial artist

Sean O'Hagan The Observer, Sunday 20 September 2009 Article history
Artist Dash Snow (L) with Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen. Photograph: Chad Buchanan/Getty

In 2008 Dash Snow was interviewed by the French magazine Purple Fashion. He described his art as a kind of storytelling and said it was about "trying to preserve a moment". By way of illustration, he talked about a piece he had recently made entitled A Means to an End. With hindsight, his description seems chillingly prescient.

"Sometimes the story is more important than the visuals, like A Means to an End, the table with all the stuff on it, the empty bags of coke and dope, and needles and diamond rings and all kinds of stuff. I was living on Avenue C in this really screwed-up house. When I moved it took seven days to clean it up, and this is all the stuff we found."

On 24 July Snow was found dead in a room at the Lafayette House hotel in New York's East Village. At the scene, detectives found two empty cans of beer, an empty bottle of rum, 13 glassine bags bearing traces of heroin and three used syringes. A means to an end.

Snow's body was discovered by his girlfriend, the model Jade Berreau, and a friend of the couple, the photographer Hanna Liden. They had gathered for lunch in a nearby restaurant with some friends, apparently to discuss what to do about Snow's worsening addiction. The pair had rushed around to the hotel after Berreau had received a call from Snow in which he'd sounded distressed and incoherent. His last words to her were: "Goodbye. I love you. I'll see you in another world."

Snow was pronounced dead by paramedics at 12.24am. He was just 10 days away from his 28th birthday. If his life and art constantly blurred into one, his death, too, had been foreshadowed in his work.

"If you look at the books he made, one is called In the Event of My Disappearance," says his gallerist, Javier Peres. "It was as if he was disclosing his state of mind. I never encountered anyone who lived more wildly and recklessly and freely, but I think he had lived the life he wanted to live and he was done living it. He had done what he wanted to do."

Snow's friend, the photographer Ryan McGinley, who documented their shared downtown scene - the all-night parties, the drugs, the sexual adventurism - until it grew too dark for him, says ruefully that Snow's death was not altogether unexpected. "I guess I wasn't surprised. It was one of those phone calls you always expected but hoped might never come. But it was still mind-blowing. Dash had such energy, such life force."

In death Snow, whom the New York Times dubbed "The latest incarnation of that timeless New York species, the downtown Baudelaire", has become an even more iconic figure. In downtown Manhattan, his playground as a graffiti artist, tributes to him have already appeared on walls and buildings, some depicting his raggle-taggle image, others his graffiti tag, SACE. Last month that same tag was writ large across the facade of Deitch Projects on Grand Street in Soho, one of the hippest galleries in New York. At the gallery's request, the building had been "bombed" by a graffiti artist known as GLACER, one of Snow's close friends from his years running wild with a spray can as part of the IRAK graffiti crew. In the early hours of the morning, GLACER had sprayed a jet of paint on to the facade from across the street using a customised fire extinguisher.

Inside, Snow's work - his edgy self-reportage Polaroids, collages, ornate homemade fanzines and grainy videos - was on display alongside the work of fellow New York artists-cum-friends. One wall was covered in McGinley's photographs of Snow and his crew drinking, smoking weed, snorting coke and having sex. Another featured an array of Snow's own Polaroids, the cruel and tender snapshots of a life lived - depending on where you are coming from - in the pursuit of total freedom or utter irresponsibility.

An adjoining room was filled with impromptu tributes from friends and strangers alike: collages, photographs, prose and poems, including one from the filmmaker and fellow free spirit Harmony Korine. All were a testament to Snow's charisma as well as his burgeoning cult status.

It was clear that Snow, through his wild life as much as the makeshift art he made from it, was viewed by both the coterie of cool young New Yorkers that knew him and the young wannabees who only knew of him, as a contemporary urban outlaw, a renegade, a self-styled outsider. At a cultural moment when those terms have all but lost their currency, Snow insisted on their continued importance, drawing on an "outsider" lineage that harked back to punk, the Beats, and beyond.

Snow's friend Kathy Grayson, a curator at Deitch who organised the memorial show, elaborates: "There are very few wild spirits in New York any more. Everyone plays it safe and goes for the money. But the more shitty and shallow New York gets, the tougher the rebellious people get. The whole street-based counterculture may have shrunk, but it's more diehard, and Dash was a figurehead for that kind of rebellion. He had that spirit of no fear that comes from being on your own and living by your wits. He hated authority, the police, anyone telling him what to do. He just danced to the beat of his own drum."

In Snow the New York art scene had finally found an edgy young artist to compare with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Like Snow, Basquiat had emerged out of graffiti subculture and died at 27 from a drug overdose. Unlike Basquiat's art, Snow's art had not yet been commodified by that same voracious art world, though whether this was down to his refusal to play the game or the perceived notion that his work was not original enough is a question that has been left hanging in the air by his untimely death.

Despite, or maybe because of, his self-styled mythology, and the confrontational and often wilfully adolescent thrust of his work - he once made a series of collages by ejaculating on to tabloid images of Saddam Hussein, then encrusting the sperm with glitter - Snow leaves behind an already fiercely contested artistic legacy. Even a casual perusal of the blogosphere reveals how much he divides opinion. He is dismissed as a chancer by some, exalted as a figurehead by others. Much of the scorn seems to come from those who saw Snow, as one blogger puts it, as "a rich kid and a hyped-up scenester". Both Grayson and Peres insist he was neither.

"People say he was a child of privilege," says Peres, who knew Snow for several years before he represented him, "but he rejected his family and their wealth apart from the support he had from his grandmother, who was a kind of patron."

Even before he became an artist, Snow's life was colourful, intriguing and seemingly intensely troubled. He was born into the kind of vast wealth that is usually described as "old money". In a 2007 New York magazine profile that incensed Snow and his friends, Ariel Levy wrote: "Snow's maternal grandmother is a de Menil, which is to say art-world royalty, the closest thing to the Medicis in the United States. His mother made headlines a few years ago for charging what was then the highest rent ever asked on a house in the Hamptons: $750,000 a season. And his brother, Maxwell Snow, is a budding member of New York society who has dated Mary-Kate Olsen."

Born to Christopher Snow and Taya Thurman - his aunt is the actress Uma Thurman - on 27 July 1981, Dashiell Snow was the great-grandson of Dominique and John de Menil, French aristocrats who amassed what is generally regarded as America's finest collection of art. It is based in a museum bearing the family name in Houston, Texas and includes works by Magritte, Ernst, Duchamp, Matisse and Picasso as well as American masters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Their Rothko collection is kept in Houston's famous Rothko Chapel, itself a work of art.

"Dash grew up around Rauschenbergs and Twomblys," says Peres, "and he definitely had a sensibility that he had honed as his own, but without any formal training. He was someone who was giving voice to people who were on the outside, on the margins."

Snow's rebellion against his family, and his mother in particular, seems to have begun in earnest when, as a disruptive child, he was sent by her to a boarding school called Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia which specialised in the treatment of children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. It was recently described by a local fundamentalist clergyman as "a last-chance boarding academy that offers objectively defined teenagers an alternative to prison". Whatever happened to Snow during his enforced tenure there, he held it against his mother until his death.

"He hated his mother more than anything," says McGinley. "But he never really spelt out why. He would even tell people his mother was dead. He never mellowed out on that.

I did meet his father once, and he was cool, a musician with a more bohemian spirit that Dash chimed with. I guess his closest family relationship was with his grandmother, Christophe. She kind of supported him and he loved her. She was a big part of his life."

When Snow was 18 he married a Corsican-born artist, Agathe Aparru, five years his senior. They lived with his grandmother for four years. It was Christophe who provided him with money when he was living by his wits on the streets of New York as a young teenager after coming out of Hidden Lake and fleeing forever the family home, and she who funded him as a struggling artist.

"His grandmother's help and support was considerable," says Peres, "but I think the amounts of money have been exaggerated considerably. Put it this way, I'm used to working with struggling artists before they make it, and I was shocked when Dash told me how much he was living on. It was small. Then again, he was a guy who didn't need much. He grew up in a world where he could not reconcile his wealth with what he was feeling. I think he rejected it in order to find some kind of freedom beyond it."

Initially that freedom manifested itself in petty crime and the buzz that being a graffiti artist constantly dodging the law brought. One unforgettable, and to a great degree, defining image of the young Snow in excelsis is McGinley's photograph of him balanced fearlessly and precariously on the ledge of a New York hotel roof, spray can in hand. His art, too, tended towards the transgressive and often the wilfully destructive. Alongside his friend Dan Colen, Snow created a series of installations called "hamsters' nests" that adhered to a ritual wherein they got off their heads on liquor and drugs, then shredded hundreds of books and whatever else came to hand. The nests were supposedly a male-bonding ritual and were created in hotel rooms - they famously trashed a suite in the Mayfair Hotel while staying there as guests of the Saatchi Gallery - as well as galleries.

"The one and only show they did at Deitch was a nest," says Grayson, smiling ruefully at the memory. "This crazy expression of bonding and freedom that got so out of hand.

It was absolute madness, sustained for over four nights, with different people dropping in and out, graffiti kids, street people, artists, all helping to essentially destroy the place. There's a photograph of Dash igniting a jet of vapour from a spray can amid all this paper and stuff while a skateboarder jumps over it. When my boss saw that, I almost lost my job."

Grayson tells another wild tale of Snow inviting a local homeless character, who goes by the name of Pap Smurf, to live in the gallery while the show was on. "Dash just had this ability to connect with every kind of person on the street. I watched him a million times walk up to truly terrifying-looking people and ask them if he could photograph their gang tattoos or their missing teeth. He had no fear and no sense of his own safety."

The artist Jack Walls, partner of the late Robert Mapplethorpe and someone whom McGinley describes as " a kind of mentor to us all", remembers the first time he met Snow. "He must have been 15 or 16, and he was friendly with Patti Smith's son Jackson because as children they had attended the Little Red School House together, which is where all the artists' kids go. I was walking along with Jackson and I saw this gang of graffiti and skate kids across the street. Suddenly one of them came running over and just stood right in front of us, blocking our way. That was Dash. He was kind of in-your-face even then, a little rebel."

Grayson, too, attests to Snow's "ability to be friendly and open and mischievous to everyone", then adds, laughing: "Except the cops." Snow's loathing of authority is the stuff of legend among the kids he ran with. It crops up again and again in conversation often as the defining element of his all-important street cred, his authenticity. Like the addiction that laid him low, though, it seems also to have been a symptom of something deeper and darker.

"He hated any kind of authority so much," elaborates Grayson. "Not just the cops, but anyone telling him what to do. So much so that it was hard to talk to him sometimes about certain things, or even advise him. Basically, if you didn't accept him for who he was, the way he was, he would not accept you. You could never tell him what to do, you had to just..." Her eyes fill up with tears and she shakes her head:

"Just appreciate him, I guess."

For a while, Snow seemed to have found a degree of contentment with Jade Berreau and their young daughter, Secret, but the demons that helped propel his art once again began to stalk him. In March of this year he checked into a rehab facility for the second time in a year. "He could go a month clean," his ex-wife Agathe told the New York Times, "but then if he had one glass of wine, it would become a bottle, then coke, then heroin. There was not a slow build-up; it was like a beast building up."

Ryan McGinley spent the Memorial Day weekend in late May at Jack Walls's house in upstate New York. Snow was there also but the two did not actually meet. "Dash never came out of his room the whole weekend," says McGinley.

"I didn't see him. He had gone to rehab just before that, but he had started using again. He was probably high in his room. I spent the day with Secret. It was kind of sad that I didn't see him. But it was a really great day, too."

Looking now at Snow's work, and his Polaroids in particular, you get a glimpse of a certain kind of early 21st-century urban American youth cultural sensibility: a sensibility that has its roots in punk and notions of outsiderdom and authenticity, and that, like punk, trails a recklessness bordering on nihilism as a kind of defining badge of identity. That sensibility is detectable in disparate places - in the early work of Harmony Korine, in the extreme outer reaches of rap and indie-rock culture, in some of the more reportage-based photographs of McGinley, and to a degree in the messy, always unfinished-sounding music, of Pete Doherty. You can trace it back through the work of photographers such as Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, mythmakers whose myths depend on an unvarnished and often hardcore portrayal of the lives of the beautiful losers they ran with, took drugs with and whose defiance and despair - and sometimes even their deaths - they turned into art of the most relentlessly uncompromising kind.

Snow was in, and of, that lineage, just as he belonged to that arty, druggy, downtown demi-monde that has survived even the gentrification of the entire Lower East Side. His art was not so much a reflection as an extension of it. He undoubtedly had an eye for the telling detail, the captured moment, and because of this, I think, his often unflinchingly confessional Polaroids will live on. They possess a grim beauty that those of us who do not live such wild and reckless lives seem to find irresistible.

"He wasn't a flash in the pan," says Walls. "He was up there with any of them. He had it. Completely. He was the whole ball of wax. He was for real."

Grayson concurs. "Was he a great artist? Hell yeah. He has the most impressive photo archive of any young American artist in decades, though most of it is unseen. There are boxes and boxes of Polaroids that just took my breath away. It's an extraordinary documentation of an extraordinary life. He had what all great photographers have: a signature. I just hope," she adds, again fighting back the tears, "that his work will come out in a considered way and that everyone will eventually see the legacy. There certainly won't be anyone like him again, that's for sure."
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Offline Anonymous

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Re: Dash Snow
« Reply #3 on: September 20, 2009, 09:05:14 AM »
Quote from: "HLA Success Story"
What's wrong with this disgusting, pathetic forum? Can't even highlight text. Page jumps around.

 link to article?
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Offline Anonymous

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Re: Dash Snow
« Reply #4 on: September 20, 2009, 03:15:05 PM »
This all sounds quite typical of a certain demographic of HLA attendees. The rejection of wealth, the vilification of parents into adulthood, the hardcore anti-authoritarianism, it's all very common among a certain breed of rich kids that made their way through HLA while it was still around. I know two people personally who attended HLA around 04'....many of you probably know who i'm talking about.....Kids of wealthy NYC socialites, who are virtually dash's mental twins. Highly intelligent, highly artistic kids who never find themselves a place in their family's high-society culture, and reject it completely and embrace the street culture instead - becoming starving artists, vegabond hippies, wannabe rappers, drug dealers, etc. It's not endemic to just kids who attend HLA, many, many kids who never make it to programs who are raised in such a way in NYC end up this way. It's just that the HLA grads seem to be the worst off out of them all.


It's worth pointing out that Dash was 27 when he died. Another member of the 27 club.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club
(note the above list is incomplete, the 27 club stretches beyond just rock and blues musicians)
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