Artist Michael Snow show in Kinderhook is severe, worth seeing

“Michael Snow: A Life Survey (1955-2020)” at The School in Kinderhook lets everyone make up their own minds. If the huge exhibition on three floors tries to persuade us that Snow was a painter, sculptor, and musician as well as a photographer and filmmaker, the photographs and films are what cement the show. The dates in the exhibition title are not when he lived, but when he worked, and any discussion of his films has to center precisely on 1967.

That’s the year Snow completed “Wavelength,” a 45-minute movie that plays with structural notions: physical (aural, optical, temporal) aspects of the medium. Snow had moved to New York by then and was engaging the intellectually fervid scene there, and his film is appropriately difficult and hard core.

The camera is fixed, inside a room. The lens very slowly zooms toward a picture on the opposite wall. Nothing “happens” — it’s not a narrative film — but there are continuous little shifts of tone or color, and the image is indeterminate enough to avoid commenting about the content of the room. Even when people show up (a man collapses, a woman makes a telephone call), the film remains about how it is filmed.

So here we have a movie (not for the first time) that is simply about the art medium called film. It is art for art’s sake. It’s probably not a coincidence that New Hollywood also kicked off in 1967, exploring the medium in new ways. But it is the dry, non-narrative aspect of Snow’s films — there are many running in the galleries — that helps us grasp their filmic, formalist essence.

“Wavelength” itself is only shown, via a 16mm film…