A downtown legend leaves a trail of semen, sleaze, and speculation.
SAMUEL HYLAND
In September of 2007, the ill-fated photographer Dash Snow took a long flight to Los Angeles, where dozens of his grimy portraits—cumshots, smut collages, toilet bowls—lined the walls of Peres Projects, a fledgling West-Coast gallery. It was the dawn of indie sleaze, and he had far more “sleaze” to show for it than “indie.” In 1981, he was born Dashiell A. Snow to the wealthy de Menil family, a mega-rich powerhouse among America’s art-world elite. (A 2021 New York Post report alleged that the de Manils’ combined net worth was above $100 million.) As an adolescent, he displayed a disdain—or, maybe, an apathy—for the fancy-schmancy Upper West Side of his parents. But where Brigid Berlin and Jim Carroll channeled similar notions into “cock books” and basketball diaries, Snow seemed intent on being a fuck-up, staying out late and taking photos to remember where he’d been, what he’d seen, what he’d done. By 1994, his parents had tossed a small chunk of their inheritance towards Hidden Lake Academy, a therapy-based boarding school for defiant children. It didn’t work: soon enough, he was lurking on the druggy Lower East Side, making a name for himself and scrawling it in spray-paint. “It’s funny to me that Dash has become like a rock star, but he’s so paranoid,” Ryan McGinley, a friend of Snow’s, told New York in 2007. “That comes from graffiti culture—like, you want everybody to know who you are and you’re going to write your name all over the city, but you can’t let anyone know who you really are. It’s, like, this idea of being notorious.”
“Dash’s influence affected everyone around him. It was a whirlwind.”
This notoriety, by the mid-aughts, was attainable by particularly mischievous means—especially given how marketable mischief had become. In the years that followed the September 11 attacks, old hesitance gave way to hopeful hedonism; Life is fleeting, the people seemed to be saying, so let’s do everything. For a well-documented half-decade, New York’s iteration of this “everything” proved largely referential. Downtown, young bands like the Strokes and Interpol ripped aesthetics from the ‘60s and ‘70s, answering a city-wide what’s next with a shrugging what once was: Velvets, Television, CBGB. And in the art world, attention shifted south of the Empire State Building, where a young legion of bad-boys, spearheaded by Snow, mirrored ghosts of backstreets past—the street-smarts of the Neo-Expressionists, the frattiness of the Beats, the publicity of the punks. They weren’t necessarily fine artists, nor were they doing much particularly new. Their draw, then and now, was simply that they saw crazy shit and whipped out their cameras. By 2024, the scene’s collective footprint feels like Tumblr fodder, the stuff fans of Tao Lin and Snow Strippers might post to Instagram with comments turned off: bloody noses, shoot-up scars, silhouetted smokers, vagabonds. In one of McGinley’s most poignant shots, a lonely reveler is wading through a beer-littered ballroom, eerily distanced from a crowd of his peers. It’s hard to look him in the eye.
Snow was a master of this voyeurism, which feels funny to type, because it’s tough to say whether he mastered anything at all. He certainly didn’t have to. He had all the makings of an upwards failure: the name, the money, the proximity. For him not to have wound up mega-rich, moderately famous, and with at least one solo exhibition to his name would have been impressive, maybe even more than the myth he did stumble upon. Speculatively speaking, he might have been loved for his God’s-eye view behind closed doors—coveted currency in a city so defined, so haunted, by hierarchy. But even then, the “stolen glimpse” effect falls flat when you’re already invited to the party. “Dash’s influence affected everyone around him,” Snow’s friend, the photographer Jack Walls, once wrote; “it was a whirlwind.” True as this may be of his inner-circle, his photos forge room for speculation: his “influence” could well have been the fact that he had a camera, that people knew he had a camera, and that they wanted to be in front of said camera. A few weeks ago, I was leafing through a friend’s copy of Slime the Boogie, Snow’s highly grotesque—and highly expensive—2007 photobook. Issued alongside the aforementioned LA exhibition (God Spoiled a Perfect Asshole When He Put Teeth in Yer Mouth), its contents unearth a strange, somewhat outdated definition of community: people you love enough to get libidinal with, especially—maybe exclusively—if those libidinous deeds are documented. Part of me wanted to believe in this. A bigger part of me wondered who Snow was when he didn’t have the camera, the cash, or the clout to validate his presence.
“There’s diversity to be found in friendship, similitude in the isolation of the studio. Put it all in a gallery and watch all that exchange play out.”
Others wondered about this, too. Before his death of a drug overdose in 2009, he left a spotty trail of semen and speculation, seldom offering statements beyond his curated photographic mythos. In the rare moments where he did speak candidly, holes in his character glared—like his wealth, which made his urbanity seem contrived, or his whiteness, which made it seem appropriative. (“To be honest, I’m not racist at all,” he once said of being detained. “But I’m white and it helps.”) None of this seemed to matter, nor does it matter today, because his imagery was strong enough to overwrite his identity: an old Warholian trick, re-hashed for a digital world where photos, if cool enough, could invent Truths. There were coke parties in Warhol’s day, though now, the parties weren’t about the paintings; they were the paintings. You were inextricable from who you hung out with, inextricable from the things you documented yourselves doing. And if you knew how to exploit the tools, this changed the way “scenes” worked—by ceaselessly self-publishing, you could photograph your way into proximity, edit your social standing in real time. Selling an image was as simple as uploading one; Buying an image was as simple as falling for it. Wealthy as art had made him, Snow’s most pivotal checks were cashed in social capital.
By New York’s nostalgia-ridden aughts, the mint of clout-currency had been the CBGB, a sacred shithole that once birthed the punk movement. Before it succumbed to sky-high rent, it was something of a battlefield museum, where the carnage of a bygone avant-garde—graffiti, torn-up posters, dilapidated roofing—gave fodder to a fledgling one. Fast-forward to 2024, and you’ll find that 313 Bowery isn’t quite as brazen anymore: it’s a fairly new gallery called AMANITA, all white walls, shiny floors, and hush-speak. Not that it’s lost any of its social baggage. These days, it’s taking it quite literally: about a week after I skimmed Slime the Boogie, I took a 6 Train to see Social Practice, a group exhibition by eight artists who’d worked in close quarters for around a decade. The thesis of this show, per a laminated press release at the front desk, was that proximity, or scene-adjacence, didn’t always translate into a uniform aesthetic—entropy made for eclecticism, and the eclecticism was allowed to be taken at face value. “There’s no hard line of influence amongst these artists, just the flower of fertile exchange,” its closing sentences read. “There’s diversity to be found in friendship, similitude in the isolation of the studio. Put it all in a gallery and watch all that exchange play out.”
“To be able to stumble into a career suggests a degree of economic and social privilege, the same privilege that enables one to trash a hotel room and exit not just unscathed but buoyed.”
It was an appealing idea, maybe because it was so sheepishly candid: We fuck with each other, the works seemed to whisper from the walls, and that’s enough. I didn’t have a good reason for it not to be. My mini-obsession with Snow squared, somewhat, with feelings I’d developed towards scenes at-large: not necessarily cynicism, but slight confusion, specifically about where proximity crossed into participation. Again, by 2024, a lot of this labor is visual; you wear Docs to the goth show, black to the Opium tour, the complete opposite to Charli XCX or Chappell Roan. Musically speaking, a scene might also marry these visual signifiers to sonic ones—like how today’s downtown pulses with sex and synth strobes, or yesterday’s buried its problems in guitar feedback. For a term that so explicitly invokes geography and space, “scene” is weirdly complicated by the internet era, a performative age where participating in something largely comes down to looking like you do. Having the “right” mutuals, being seen with the “right” people, engaging with the “right” things: the subcultures we enjoy are algorithmic, and by extension, the ways we enjoy them are often algorithmic, too.
Separation from this construct made Social Practice refreshing, even if slightly frustrating. The last time I’d been to AMANITA, it was for a solo exhibition by Louis Osmosis, a thoughtful Brooklyn sculptor whose work melds hypebeast irony with heavy social critique. Compared to then, the floor looked empty—spatially, because there were, of course, no lofty sculptures, but also thematically, because there wasn’t any obvious connective tissue linking the paintings. The gallery is something of a flashy rectangle, too wide to be a hallway but too modest to be overwhelming. Stationed on opposing walls, the works were well-dressed partygoers, colorful and interesting in their own right, though still doomed to make awkward eye contact from their respective sides of the room. In one such pairing, Robert Nava’s Weekend Crunch (2020), which portrays an alligator attack in childlike impasto, sat directly across from Cristina BanBan’s Tres dones amb la roba estesa (2024), a portrait of three nude women à la GTA 5. Elsewhere, Christina de Miguel’s Lana (2024) foregrounded an androgynous body with an angry, amorphous face; some feet away, its partner in eye-contact was En Plein Air (2023), a Marco Pariani work that took its counterpart’s disfiguration, colored it black, and lugged it into the crude, unsettling universe of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Only one piece was left without a staring partner, and somewhat poetically, this “end” of the rectangle was a window—looking out, through crudely-painted panels, across Paul Cooley’s pinkish Bushwick neighborhood. It looked like something Kevin from Split might have in his bedroom.
“In the endless and official shit-storm of backlashes and counter-counter-cultural ascendancy, Snow’s recorded moments offer a perspective unfazed.”
Linguistically speaking, Social Practice reminded me a lot of Trivial Pursuit, a 2022 exhibition at the young Lower Manhattan gallery Theta. Each of these titles typified, even if cheekily, the constructs their contents addressed: scene politics for one, the fashion industry for the other. Taken as a critique, “Social Practice” seems like a counterpoint to Snow’s model, the networking-as-art that made his imagery so apt for the Tumblr era. His legacy, much like our internet, leaves a visual trail of lifestyles to be aspired to, figures to envy, sins to LARP—marketable mischief, all of which begs the question of what we want, or deserve, from art in the first place. Oftentimes, it seemed as if Snow and co. were punishing their hectic followings, feeding them feces and laughing while they licked it up. Among that scene’s most controversial episodes was Nest, a 2004 installation Snow did with the artist Dan Colen: for a week, the pair populated a room with ripped-up paper, semen, urine, and alcohol, simulating the “nests” they’d made by trashing hotel rooms. Look at it one way, and it’s a daunting glimpse into a New York netherworld. Look at it another way, and it’s reckless at best, spoiled at worst. “To be able to stumble into a career,” the scholar Grace Linden once wrote, “suggests a degree of economic and social privilege, the same privilege that enables one to trash a hotel room and exit not just unscathed but buoyed.” It’s worth asking what makes buoying bullshit so fun.
Not long after I stopped by Social Practice, I found an archived press release for God Spoiled a Perfect Asshole When He Put Teeth in Yer Mouth, the debut Los Angeles show that wound up being one of Snow’s final exhibitions ever. It felt like an autopsy, not so much because he’d passed, but more because the form was inherently clinical—maiming his work by scrounging for its meaning, like authorities ransacking the drawers of the deceased, searching for a will. I get the sense that Snow was simply doing things, documenting them first and thinking about them second: things like hard drugs, or other people, or time behind bars. Which isn’t to say he lacked a mind for highbrow art. The kicker, as with black-sheep forbears like Brigid Berlin, was that he’d hinged his art-world upbringing to self-taught street smarts, concocting an alien approach as approachable as forbidden. Generations of aloof New York troublemakers had made similar inroads. “When William S. Burroughs’ drug-soaked stream of consciousness first hit, its radical, inspired literary rhythms genuinely represented the counter-cultural mores of a vital new underground,” the press release states, at one point. “Best known for his insider photographic record, alternately poetic and gross, Dash Snow captures a crude reality of thriving lower east side subculture emblematic of such Burroughs-esque dissidence. Yet in the endless and official shit-storm of backlashes and counter-counter-cultural ascendancy, Snow’s recorded moments offer a perspective unfazed.”
“There would be times I’d be hanging out with everybody drinking and Dash would go off into the night and I would be so worried about him falling off a bridge. I would just stand there watching until he was out of sight, wondering if I’d ever see him again.”
By “official shit-storm,” Peres Projects likely meant the lengthy list of detractors, often in uniform, whose relentless censorship campaigns cast Snow as a tragic hero—born to document, doomed to die. Read it another way, and the “official” might also be the contemporary art world, a hulking entity he dramatically escaped as a kid, only to end up back within its ritzy confines. Snow’s trademark was in his sacrilege; close your eyes, and you can imagine him getting a laugh out of the optics: dicks, cumshots, and toilet bowls plastered all over a lavish gallery space, their headline a crude joke about the anus. But then again, he was here, and he contractually agreed to be here, which meant that he’d also somewhat aspired to be here. Long before he’d flown to Los Angeles for any opening, he was a young street-slicker with spray-paint in his pocket. “Ryan [McGinley] and Dan [Colen], I understand their success, but Dash, to me? As far as I was concerned, he was just a vandal,” Jack Walls told New York. Maybe, the art-world of his parents was the ultimate wall to tag. All the same, those art-world digs could simply have been another place Snow happened to wind up—a convenient landing pad on his fatal, upwards free-fall. “There would be times I’d be hanging out with everybody drinking and Dash would go off into the night and I would be so worried about him falling off a bridge,” Walls continued. “I would just stand there watching until he was out of sight, wondering if I’d ever see him again.”
When Snow died in 2009, his body was found in the East Village’s Lafayette House Hotel along with two beer cans, an empty rum bottle, thirteen powdery bags, and three used syringes. He was two weeks shy of his 28th birthday, which placed him in similarly-fated company—for a latecomer to the “27 Club,” his story squared with anti-heroes of eras past, whose reckless doctrines prophesied just-as-reckless demises. Though sudden, Snow’s own end wasn’t shocking: on his final day alive, friends had gathered to discuss his worsening addiction(s); upon hearing the news, McGinley told the Guardian that “It was one of those phone calls you always expected but hoped might never come.” For those who didn’t know him personally, the weight of Snow’s passing was felt via its city-wide implications: he’d foregrounded a new, hedonistic downtown era, and with him, maybe it was gone, too.
Retrospectively speaking, it’s canon that in his wake, a new class of cool-kid cosplayers has emerged, like clockwork, from LES’s petri dish—no different from Snow’s own ‘60s-obsessed sleazers, or Warhol’s Beat-obsessed superstars, or the Beats’ Whitman-obsessed philosophers. A common critique of “Dimes Square,” Canal Street’s post-pandemic enclave, was that its characters were vapidly parodying the aughts. Which is funny, given that those very aughts were vapidly parodying the 60s and 70s. While he was alive, Snow’s legacy was split along similar lines—you could have questioned his originality, of which there was little, or you could have relished in his myth, of which there was plenty. It’s an age-old question, whether art is about doing something first or doing something interesting. Polarizing as he may have been, Snow did the latter well enough to make it seem, ever so slightly, like he was inventing something entirely new. Even if the “new” in question was just a new level of muck.
“I feel there’s an inevitable apocalypse, and I just want to have a good time until it’s over.”
In one of Snow’s most enduring polaroids, there’s no trace of any of the hard drugs, bodily fluids, or sexual organs that made him famous: it’s night-time, and there’s a Shell gas station, glowing ominously in the hazy dusk. The “S” in “Shell” is blacked out, and the new word feels vaguely apt—gas stations have long been liminal fixtures, bolts of white, metallic light jutting out from the middle of nowhere. Long before I knew who Snow was, I saw the photo in a Supreme lookbook, plastered across a polo shirt. It felt vaguely voyeuristic, like watching the ghost of something, or someone, that doesn’t know you’re looking. It also felt extremely violent. Hell, in this universe, was a hollow, barren wasteland: a lonelier alternative to Dante’s, or your local Pastor’s. To be tormented by Satan meant someone still cared about you. To rot eternally, by yourself, at night—this was cruel. I remember wanting to buy the shirt, not having the money, and never really thinking about it until I saw Snow’s name again. Sometime that year, I’d revisited BLACK METAL 2, Dean Blunt’s slight 2015 LP of wispy guitar ballads. He’d named the second song after Snow, and it was sleepy, a somber melody that felt more haunting than soothing. “It’s gonna be alright,” he drawled, disingenuously; I didn’t believe him, because he sounded like he barely believed it himself. Snow and Blunt boast similar approaches—provoke, shrink back, provoke again, like thieves in the night. It’s unclear whether Dash Snow went to Hell, but there’s damnation in his silence, the fact that he’ll never speak any more than he ever did: if anyone’s in the underworld, it’s us, shivering beneath the gas station, rotting on our own. “I feel there’s an inevitable apocalypse,” Snow once said, “and I just want to have a good time until it’s over.” He sure did.
