MULTIMEDIA
Throughout his career, Don Snyder combined his love of chemistry, painting, photography, sculpture, and motion pictures to invent exciting new art forms.
A prolific photographic printer in the classical sense, Snyder regularly worked from dusk until dawn in the darkroom of his 23rd Street studio, developing film and making prints with elaborate chemical processes. This experimentation led him to produce a series of brilliantly colored abstract paintings made with aniline dyes on slide glass that could be projected on a screen. Combining his novel slide paintings with the use of various projection techniques, Snyder created elaborate slide shows that attracted the attention of the public and the media.
LIGHT ART
In 1965, Snyder was invited to exhibit his work at the launch of the Expanded Cinema Festival produced by the filmmaker and renowned Village Voice film critic, Jonas Mekas. Creating Spectro-Mach 1 for the exhibition, Snyder projected his slides onto models and dancers, creating a three-dimensional kaleidoscopic effect of mesmerizing substance and depth.
Jonas Mekas wrote in The Village Voice: “It is Don Snyder who is the Master of Slide Art. His slide photography merges completely with the medium of cinema, a kinesthetic experience of color and motion that should be judged not by the design of a single slide (frame) but by the patterns of visual impulses.”
Howard Junker, writing for The Nation, described Snyder’s film and slide show Epiphany of Light at the St. Mark's Church as a "Visually stunning experience. The imagery was projected onto translucent screens made of net that were dispersed by a moving wall of 3D projected and real white cubes. Black vinyl-clad dancers moved to disperse and fragment the imagery, creating a magical effect." Junker praised the show for its complexity and beauty, calling it ". . . the best of the festival."
In his biography of Warhol, David Bourdon referred to the influence Snyder and other Psychedelic Light Artists were having on the art world: "Warhol's involvement with psychedelic light shows stemmed from his participation in The Expanded Cinema Festival at the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Jonas Mekas and his colleagues at the Cinémathèque organized an ambitious series of programs that surveyed a broad spectrum of formal innovations involving projected images. The participants included several widely known figures, such as Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman, as well as a number of emerging psychedelic 'light' artists such as Jackie Cassen, Don Snyder, and Gerd Stern."
ASPEN MAGAZINE
Snyder’s slides, projected onto models, were printed on an array of perforated stamps and included in issue No. 9 of the multimedia magazine Aspen.
JACK LENORE LARSON
Snyder's light shows soon caught the eye of high-end fabric designer Jack Lenor Larsen, who printed Snyder's slides onto innovative fabrics for his new collection. Commissioned by Larsen, Snyder created a spectacular multimedia light show to present the new fabric line to fellow designers and members of the fashion industry. Modern dancers, draped in Larsen's novel fabric, undulated down the runway bathed in an ever morphing sea of Snyder's original slide projections.
Electrical mishaps were a frequent accompaniment of early light shows. An assistant at the Larsen event recalls: "We were in the projection booth above the stage when suddenly huge bursts of electricity blasted across the cubicle. We all dropped to the floor, cowering."
ANGUS MACLISE
In a multimedia collaboration with Angus MacLise (poet, artist, and the original drummer for the Velvet Underground) Snyder projected his slides on slowly spinning translucent disks of various sizes that were hung from the rafters of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.
Snyder's slide images formed the solar centers of Angus MacLise’s New World Solar Calendar.
JEAN HOUSTON & BOB MASTERS
Snyder was commissioned by Jean Houston and Bob Masters to create an altered-states multimedia chamber at their Foundation for Mind Research.
THE ELECTRIC CIRCUS
Multimedia exhibits took place at venues such as The Millennium Film Workshop and The Electric Circus, a psychedelic nightclub in New York City's East Village that epitomized the vibrant counterculture scene of the 1960s.
Photographer Unknown
Photographer Unknown
Snyder was commissioned to produce a psychedelic environment for the Electric Circus. His slides projected against the asymmetrical walls of the club reverberated with the music of The Velvet Underground, The Grateful Dead, and the electronic sounds from pioneer Morton Subotnick, creating what some described as an "electro psychedelic dream".
"The walls crawled with protoplasmic blobs of colored light throbbing with the beat...."
Season 6 of Madmen, in an episode titled "To Have and To Hold" attempted to recreate the atmosphere at the Electric Circus in the 1960s.
"The light show, along with live music and audience participation in the form of dancing or freaking out or whatever, was probably psychedelic art at its peak. Pop art was supposedly breaking down the barriers between fine art and commercial art. Psychedelic light artists . . . wound up creating effects for discotheques . . . the spectator is supposed to exist in the show rather than just look at it... I mean if it weren’t for Don Snyder’s organic slides projected onto nude girls there might never have been Goldie Hawn go-going in body paint and bikini on “Laugh In.”
OTHER LIGHT EXPLORATIONS
Don Snyder's giant 8' x 5' photographic triad of panels comemorating the TV broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing were exhibited in Television's Influence on Contemporary Art at the Queens Museum in 1989.
A polarized lightbox created by Snyder produced a 3-D kaleidoscopic effect by using rotating holographic cellophane filters made of tiny slivers of scotch tape. The lightbox was among the artworks presented in the Magic Circle Exhibition at the Bronx Museum of Art in the 1980s.
Don worked with conceptual artist Joe Strand, on Strand's renegade project, Landmark illuminations, lighting up historical landmarks (such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Central Station) in a spectacular display of color.
"We may as well admit it - one of the biggest influences on art in the last 25 years has been television. Artists have always been quick to join what they can't lick. They appropriate and alter its ready-made imagery, get behind the camera to make it their own . . . . In short, they have met the medium, and it is theirs."
- New York Times, Sept 1989
"Artists in the show included Diane Arbus . . . Laurie Anderson . . .David Hockney . . . Nam June Paik . . . Robert Rauschenberg . . . Andy Warhol . . . Tom Wesselmann . . . and Don Snyder."