The Withering Away of the State of the Art by Hollis Frampton

Remarks on the writing of Hollis Frampton

The following is the introduction to On the Camera Arts and Sequent Matters : The Writings of Hollis Frampton, edited past Bruce Jenkins (MIT Press).

A quarter-century ago, a selection of Hollis Frampton's major writings was published under the title Circles of Defoliation.^ane That volume, now long out of impress, capped a meaning catamenia in Frampton's work equally both an artist and what he came to telephone call a "metahistorian" of the camera arts. The dozen essays contained in the book, written over as many years, chronicled his concerted efforts to develop an engaged, intellectually resonant, and distinctly modernist form of critical soapbox for the fields of photography, movie, and video—a discourse for which he sought equivalence not only with critical thinking in literature and the visual arts just, audaciously, in the philosophies of history and scientific discipline as well. And notwithstanding every bit Frampton acknowledged in the preface to the book, there was much more work to exist done regarding what he termed "new options and responsibilities for speculative writing." His untimely death in 1984, a year after the volume'southward publication, concluded his ain direct function in completing such tasks. Nonetheless, and despite difficulties in accessing them over the years, these critical interventions and metahistorical inquiries have proved exceedingly resonant and enduring, gradually leveraging merely such a critical enterprise amidst a small but influential contingent of contemporary artists and scholars.

The republication of these 12 essays, together with a range of additional writings, including introductory remarks and lectures, production notes and proposals, correspondence and interviews, is intended to broaden that continuing enterprise and introduce the work to new audiences. They have been gathered together here, forth with their lesser-known only no less provocative siblings, in a format that focuses thematically on Frampton'southward explorations in several related areas of enquiry. An attempt was made to compare the essays as they were published in 1983 in Circles of Defoliation with their original publications and, where possible, with the author's manuscripts, restoring when necessary (pregnant, when channeling the distinctive timbre of Hollis's voice) phrases, passages, or emphases that had been excised, correcting minor errors, and applying a consequent stylistic and grammatical schema to the whole. On occasion, editorial notes (marked B.J.) have been added where farther caption seems useful.

The impetus for Hollis Frampton's writing stemmed in office from what he accounted the paucity and poverty of then-contemporary disquisitional soapbox on the camera arts. These theoretical undertakings were an enterprise he could further deploy to anchor his ain piece of work equally an creative person: first in photography, a practice he largely abandoned past the late 1960s, and then in his body of films, for which he gained international recognition. In many senses, the writing and the do were inseparable: ii aspects of the same aesthetic aspiration, each of which informed the other. He was, from the starting time, a writer, and he continually sought in his fine art a system as responsive in its cognitive and perceptual reach as that of tongue.

The model may have been established with one of his get-go pieces of published critical writing, in which he attempted to fend off the misguided appraisals of a newspaper critic reviewing an early on exhibition of his colleague Frank Stella'due south paintings. Composed as a letter to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune in 1959 and ghostwritten under Stella's name, the brief manifesto addressed a meaning misreading at the material level of the work.² Rarely were the intentions of Stella'south painting misinterpreted in this manner again, and the artist'due south career was launched. In many means, this impulse past an artist to critically arbitrate can be traced back to the French painter Eugène Delacroix, who in 1857 challenged the critical judgments of the "many semi-erudite men [who] take treated the philosophy of art." In a passage that served as an epigraph to Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's beginning book of writings on flick, Delacroix captured the fundamental absurdity of a critical arrangement that seemed to value a "profound ignorance of technical matters," effectively "render[ing] professional person artists rather unfit to rising to the heights which are forbidden to the people outside aesthetics and pure speculation."ⁱⁱⁱ

Frampton himself would frequently take refuge in the confines of the art review, where his critical assignments could become the springboard for more substantive reflections. Writing in the pages of Artforum and October, he was able to piece of work through problems that impinged on the reception of his own piece of work and that of colleagues. These reviews served collectively equally a cosmetic lens through which to view disquisitional lapses of the past—still photography's continued reverence for the f/64 schoolhouse (Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White), the myopic reception of the mail-Brakhagean generation of experimental filmmakers (including, of course, himself)—and as a guide to a more rigorous theoretical footing for addressing the emerging arena of the media arts. Within the context of reviews and historical analyses, Frampton embedded his ain manifestos: deft rereadings that provide a coherent analytical framework for photographic theory and practice; and, for moving picture, the missing link that connects advanced theories that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s with the discontinuous advances in radical cinematic aspirations of the tardily 1960s and 1970s and, rather presciently, with the arena he began to glimpse in the tardily 1970s that we now call digital media.

In this respect, one can sense these writings were destined for a future—the future, in fact, in which nosotros now reside. At that place is a time-release attribute to the discourse that, while attempting to historically ground the paradigm-shifting practices of his ain times, in many ways prefigures those of our electric current era. Writing well in advance of the moment when such practice would need its own ontology and taxonomy, Frampton could merely sense, but non name, the art for which his writings would take the greatest touch. "Find a word or phrase for 'photo-media' imagery," he writes in a ready of lecture notes and tin can offer only the hyphenated term photo-picture show- video- computer. Frampton was an early on adopter of the new media sensibility in an era when there was no notion of convergence and barely a sense of the myriad forms the digital arts would generate. All he knew (but he knew it with full surety) was that this unnamed form of media would have enormous impact ("at least every bit far-reaching every bit . . . circulate television") and that it would be based on the ubiquity of fast and cheap calculating power.

All of this is not to propose for a moment that the reading of these essays and lectures, reviews and introductions, artist statements and working notes will experience equally if they are of our times. They are figuratively and literally out of time, and equally such they represent a multivalent dialogue with spirits past and present, figures arcane and familiar, specialists engaged in the difficult sciences and those laboring in arenas more abstract and abstract. Frampton may strike contemporary readers every bit being a flake like the protagonist of the Dali and Buñuel film United nations chien Andalou: a figure whose quest is freighted with cultural baggage from the past, symbolized in his backbreaking attempts to elevate a pair of grand pianos, laden with dead donkeys, and two bound Catholic priests across the parlor that separates him from the object of his desire.

Part of the calculus for Frampton's theorizing of the camera arts was situated in the by: Aristotle and Dante, Descartes and Darwin, Herodotus and Hermann von Helmholtz all make appearances, simply so practice Joyce and Beckett (especially Joyce and Beckett). It is situated in detail in the poetics of Ezra Pound, who advocated for a "hard poetry," in the ideologically engaged cinematic practices of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, and even in the 12-tone compositions of Schoenberg, to say nada of the growing discourse that accumulated around the work of his peers, the minimalist, conceptual, and operation artists, a portion of which he helped to formulate.

No less a cistron was the need to be taken seriously, which led Frampton at times to cloak his writing with a certain density of allusion and latitude of reference that oscillated betwixt the arcana of the classics (Greek drama, Roman apologue, Sanskrit poetry) and the argot of scientific discovery, with occasional doses of continental philosophy, visual anthropology, and structural linguistics thrown in for proficient measure out.⁴ The result is writing marked with a sense of high seriousness and rigorous literateness, aided, at times, by a pungent humor that could turn slapstick—that plays seemingly all at one time to the mind, the center, and the ear.

Frampton's vocalization—a resonant basso—is a factor as well, specially for readers who may be fortunate enough to recall it from encountering the writer on one of his frequent lecture-screening tours ("medicine shows," equally he called them). Having come of age within a generation that still aspired to the vocation of the poet (the next, as we at present know, yearned to exist filmmakers) and having as a young man sat literally at Pound's anxiety, Frampton mastered a continental manner of verbal felicity and the necessary wit and erudition that the mode demanded. Behind the workman'due south attire that was his uniform of choice throughout his adult life, there resonated locutions worthy of an Oxbridge don.⁵

Despite his remarkable speaking abilities, Frampton acknowledged on at to the lowest degree one occasion the challenges posed for him by writing. In the class of an interview with the cultural affairs director of the university at which he taught, he was complimented on his extraordinary verbal and literary skills. Frampton countered by comparing the onetime to cutting with a knife through butter, and the latter, for him, to using that same knife on marble.^six He labored over his writings much every bit he labored over his films. Both were integral parts of his creative practice; in fact, the two were inextricably spring.

This was the example in applied matters, where, for example, his travel to review photographic exhibitions in England for Artforum provided him the risk to develop important contacts for screenings and for the disquisitional reception of his films. More than significant was the indelible nature of his polysemic appointment with language, which would keep nigh direct in his writings only remain a ascendant motif in his visual art as well. At least ii of his about celebrated films, Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia), allegorize his journey from beau of letters to practitioner of the camera arts. And one of the striking features of the short picture show Gloria! that marked the conclusion of his massive film cycle Magellan was its emulation of a figurer-based flow of linguistic communication. Frampton sought in the moving paradigm a system of communication equally precise and agile every bit language. And he sought that organisation in his theoretical musings as much equally in his creative do. Writing was Frampton's lifelong métier, and this volume is in large mensurate every bit significant an act of preservation as the parallel work being undertaken to conserve and restore his cinematic oeuvre.

This expanded version of Frampton's collected writings embraces the diverse forms of his discursive efforts while attempting to situate them in a fashion consonant with the set of registers conceived for the title (but not the organization) of his earlier book: film, photography, and video. Making use of his overall label of these writings as "texts," a quaternary category has been added to capture what emerged as his more distinctly literary efforts. And because his writings oftentimes crossed the detached boundaries between the arts to comment on sculpture, painting, and various intermedial forms, it was useful to situate a selection of his disquisitional remarks on "The Other Arts."

The earliest body of sustained critical commentary appears in the Photography section of this volume and includes essays that chart non simply the direction of Frampton'due south critical thought but the evolution of his ain photographic practice. It is chockablock with musings on large ideas similar Time and History, the relation of images to their referents in the real world, and the impact of the medium on consciousness itself; it as well embraces anecdote and storytelling, and poetic musings on fellow practitioners of the medium.

The previously unpublished "Some Propositions on Photography" offers an intervention into the field—a manifesto—by insisting on opening upward the frame of inquiry to embrace the other arts. Several of the longer essays take the grade of exhibition reviews and reflect Frampton's complicated relationship to the medium, which, as the critic Christopher Phillips defined it, involved his being "simultaneously drawn to and repelled past his subject."⁷ The key text in this regard is "Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place," an extended essay in which Frampton carried out what he would telephone call in an interview with Adele Friedman "the ritual murder of the father." The other meaning patriarch who emerges here is Eadweard Muybridge, a key figure in the development of the moving picture, a gene Frampton brilliantly reads back onto the artist's no less seminal landscape photography.^viii In his deliberations on the work of Paul Strand, he posits one of his near resonant analogies for describing the disquisitional quandary facing the photographic image, which is denied "the very richness of implication that for the accultured intellect is the only way at all nosotros have left usa to sympathize (for instance) paintings." Frampton the fabulist makes an appearance in a tale near the photo-obsessed lost continent of Atlantis that launches his review of two early photography exhibitions in "Digressions on the Photographic Desperation." The department concludes with a serial of more contemporary appraisals of artists with both aesthetic and personal ties to Frampton and the text and images from his ain remarkable photographic series a d s five thousand v s a b south v chiliad 5 s.

The script for Frampton'due south sole performance piece, "A Lecture," a piece of work for projector and sound recorder, opens the Film section. No theoretical exegesis could more than succinctly (or deliciously) embody the precision of his thoughts on the cinematic appliance. Frampton's virtually widely cited critical essay, "For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses," was his first major treatise on the medium, and it clustered an impressive battalion of scientific, artistic, and philosophical registers in lodge to announce the emergence of movie house as "the Last Machine" and to conductor in its cultural caretaker, "the metahistorian," who was charged with inventing for it a coherent tradition. More than three and a one-half decades afterwards its writing, the essay remains a potent challenge to artists engaged with the moving image and a valuable nil for the direction that Frampton'due south own expanding practice would take, including the articulation of a conceptual framework for what would become his Magellan bike, a "Tour of Tours."

But Frampton was not but engaged in the realm of history and theory; he was very much focused on the issues of his times. His letter of the alphabet to Donald Richie, so the manager of the pic program at the Museum of Modern Art, documents, in arch Framptonian form, his participation in the broader assertion of artists' rights that was taking place in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Frampton employs a logician'due south scalpel—and the worker's political passion—in dissecting the particular dilemmas faced past a film artist being "honored" past such an institution. (This theme is taken up once again seven years later in his dialogue with Bill Simon, where we larn about the prohibitive costs of his prints for Magellan.) Another aspect of Frampton's contemporary focus is evidenced in the selection of his writings on the work of peers. These range from his impassioned reading of a major new piece of work by Stan Brakhage (in a letter to the creative person) to his lucid, singular cess of the films of Michael Snowfall, the cumulative historical impact of which is "like knowing the proper name and address of the man who carved the Sphinx."

The remaining components of this section incorporate an array of scripts, textual material, and scores, as well equally product notes for a pair of Frampton'south most critically acclaimed films, Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia), and an unpublished proposal for Magellan. Putting that final leviathan work into perspective is Beak Simon's substantive interview with Frampton. The concluding essay, "Mental Notes," originally authored for a picture show briefing on autobiography, suggests that even in films that conduct few overt marks of the personal, "everything in a filmmaker'due south life forces its manner into his work." Proving this point, the figure of Frampton's maternal grandmother makes a cursory appearance in the essay, as she does so memorably in the stirring autobiographical closure to Magellan that is Gloria!

The prehistory of the digital arts emerges with both technical specificity and disquisitional ambition in the three pieces of the Video and the Digital Arts section. His major essay on the subject is "The Withering Abroad of the State of the Art," written when the medium of video was still very much in its infancy. Frampton, the metahistorian of film, emerges to assistance this new form, unique in having virtually no past, in envisioning its future. Parallel to such tasks are Frampton's own artistic ambitions in this new arena, which ready him on a collaborative journeying working with colleagues and a talented group of students to create both the machines and methods that would allow him to turn the computational power of the personal computer into a sophisticated tool for artistic production.

In improver to his commentary on the camera arts—from the primeval forms of nonetheless photography to the cutting edges of the new media of his era—peculiarities of space and time frequently conspired to bring him into the company of artists engaged in more traditional media, and consequently led to a trunk of disquisitional writing on The Other Arts. Among his primeval compatriots were two other scholarship students at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Carl Andre and Frank Stella, who would play defining roles in the shifts in sculpture and painting that took place in the 1960s. Frampton participated in their journeying, documenting his friends' work, challenging their ideas, and shaping the critical context in which their art would gain recognition. Ample evidence of this emerges in the relate that Frampton provides the Dutch curator Enno Develing for the itemize to an of import early exhibition of Carl Andre's work. His year-long set up of dialogues with Andre revealed the shrewdness of his analytical style, and in the slice reproduced here, he specifies what he feels is the proper link between theory and practise: "I believe that there are no ideas except in execution." Evidence of such a belief tin can be found in his scores for such idea-driven objects as Comic Relief and Two Left Feet. This department concludes with writings devoted to the work of two other artists within his circle and a cursory gloss on his own early experiments with an adjacent camera art: xerography.

Finally one encounters Frampton the fabulist, equally a tendency i feels coursing through much of his ostensibly critical soapbox emerges full diddled in a pair of writings in the Texts section. Originally included in Circles of Confusion as a disquisitional essay, "A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi" is a striking piece of pseudo- anthropology predicated on a vividly imagined observe of "caches of proto-American artifacts." It presents Frampton the enticing opportunity to construct a civilization in which the projected image functioned as a principal conveyor of beliefs, cognition, myth, and history. "Mind Over Affair" was described in its original publication in October as Frampton's "outset piece of work of fiction." A sprawling set up of allegories, information technology by turns delights and perplexes, conjoining as it does a complex system of mathematical formulas to a set of Borgesian tales that plough on cabalistic allusions and surrealist wordplay—and not infrequently, acrid commentary on the cultural condition: a corpse is discovered to contain thousands of precious objects hidden in its body, leading to the decision that the "nameless deceased was, in a word, a walking museum."

While Frampton wrote for a decidedly post-Barthesian reader—a condition that necessitates active (indeed, rigorous) participation—these are nonetheless thoroughly writerly texts, artfully crafted, often elegant, and occasionally acerbic disquisitions crammed with historical reference, scientific taxonomies, classical allusion, and wellsprings of recondite knowledge: literary, artistic, and cultural. This complex weave of citation in plough gives phonation to the multiple narrators of Frampton'southward texts: the raconteur, the philologist, the cultural historian, the critic, the poet, and fifty-fifty the prophet. As a member of the younger generation of scholars of Frampton's critical piece of work has noted, "His highly playful approach, which embraces wit and irony, too as indirect allusion and intertextual intricacy, seems designed to address an impossibly learned reader."⁹ And even so, every bit with his films, the rewards of the effort are bang-up for the diligent or impassioned reader, and repeated immersion yields surprising clarity.

Frampton viewed these writings not only every bit the fruits of his own knowledge and labor, and a theoretical template for his personal artistic practise just equally as a telephone call to activeness for the next generation of artists, theorists, and writers, believing that such a challenge might exist a "non wholly unrewarded expectation." He has not been here to witness the continuation of these efforts. One can promise, however, that he is indeed enjoying that dreamed afterlife he envisioned awaiting him in some version of Dante'due south limbo: "I should promise to spend the balance of eternity in the visitor of virtuous pagans . . . engaged in million-year afternoon conversations with Aristotle or the Emperor Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, builder of the Dandy Wall of Prc, or with Hegel." He even deigned to devote a portion of his time in these precincts to standing his interrogation of the photographic camera arts: "One such afternoon I would propose to spend with Edward Weston, seeking satisfaction in the matter of the facts in this case." Undoubtedly, past at present, he has gotten the better of them all.

Notes

1. Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video; Texts 1968-1980, foreword by Annette Michelson (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983).

two. "An Artist Writes to Correct and Explain," New York Herald Tribune, Dec 27, 1959, sec. iv, p. 7. The incident is recounted in Harry Cooper and Megan R. Luke, Frank Stella: 1958, exhibition catalog (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Printing, 2006), p. 27.

3. From The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), quoted in Sergei Eisenstein, The Pic Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Caryatid and World, 1947), p. 11.

four. An Oxford English Dictionary and a gear up of the Encylopaedia Britannica are ofttimes handy when sleuthing for the sometimes arcane references in Frampton'south writing. The pregnant of the championship of his original preface to Circles of Defoliation in 1983—"Ox Business firm Camel Rivermouth"—eluded me for decades, until an accidental foray through an old encyclopedia revealed these to be the set of real-world correlative symbols for the first four letters of the Phoenician alphabet (A, B, C, D). The curious reader volition no doubt unearth many more such games, puzzles, and allusions in the grade of reading.

five. Every bit the artist Michael Snow noted for a memorial program post-obit Frampton's death in the leap of 1984, "He was the most extraordinary conversational and public speaker I've ever known." See "On Hollis Frampton," in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Academy Printing, 1994), p. 241.

half-dozen. "Conversations in the Arts: Hollis Frampton Interviewed past Esther Harriott," State University of New York at Buffalo, 1979.

vii. Christopher Phillips, "Word Pictures: Frampton and Photography," October 32 (Spring 1985): 63.

8. In her book-length study of the pioneering photographer, the writer and critic Rebecca Solnit hails this commodity by Frampton as "the best essay ever written on Muybridge." Come across Rebecca Solnit, Rivers of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 84.

9. Federico Windhausen, "Words Into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton's Theory and Practice," October 109 (Summer 2004): 95.

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Source: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/collecting-his-thoughts-20090421

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