There aren't many icons around these days. It sometimes feels like there are no James Deans or Jimi Hendrixes or Sylvia Plaths left. Yet artist Dash Snow, who has died at the age of 27, perhaps deserves the title. Snow died from a drug overdose at the Lafayette Hotel in Manhattan on Monday night. He was one of the most promising young artists on New York's Lower East Side art scene, the so-called Bowery School, and in many ways was their mythical figurehead. Short, tattooed, with long blond hair and a shaggy beard, Dash was more rock star than artist.
Dash Snow's work fed on his extreme living. He captured images of mayhem. His work was visceral, bodily, often disgusting. He had few boundaries. He and his friends – Dan Colen, Ryan McGinley, Terence Koh and Dash's ex-wife Agathe Snow – injected the New York art scene with an energy that hadn't been there for years.
Snow's background often raised eyebrows. He came from the De Menil family, one of America's richest and most prominent art collecting dynasties. Yet he rebelled against them, growing up on the streets of New York from the age of 15, after spending two years in juvenile detention. Dash started creating graffiti as a member of the notorious and inventive Irak crew. He stumbled into art after friends Colen and McGinley encouraged him, initially creating Polaroid images filled with sex and hard drugs. The Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine went on to sing his praises. He was featured in the Whitney Biennial. His work was snapped up by major collectors like Dakis Joannou and Anita Zabludowicz.
In London, he is perhaps best known for his work in USA Today, Charles Saatchi's 2006 exhibition at the Royal Academy. Snow showed typically confrontational art: 45 newspaper cuttings about American police corruption hung on the walls like a giant collage. The clippings were covered in Snow's own semen and entitled Fuck the Police. The following year he spent a week ripping up phone books and covering a room in urine, semen and alcohol for the wildly criticised Nest installation at Deitch Projects. Snow's installations and films contained penises, semen, nudity and a violent sort of freedom. He taunted the audience, daring them to accept sex and drug binges as fine art.
His death has shocked anyone who had any contact with him or knew his work. The drugs were all there in the artwork (and the rumours), but so was a sense of real beauty and honesty. It wasn't necessarily the aesthetic of his work, but its independence that made it so influential. He simply didn't give a shit.
A statement by Peres Projects says it all: "Dash was the gentlest of souls and one of the most sensitive artists of his time. He found beauty where most would not know to look. We will treasure his life always."