Issue 4: Summer 2009
Hollis Frampton: Words & Pictures
Matt Packer
An extended review of 'On the Camera Arts & Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton' (1).
On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton is the most extensive collection of writings by the photographer and filmmaker to date. Frampton's previous collection of writings, Circles of Confusion, was published over 25 years ago and is now long out of print. Fortunately, those same texts are contained within this new book, which also features a wide variety of additional texts that reflect the breadth of Frampton's inquiries. These inquiries fall into sections on Photography, Film, Video and the Digital Arts, The Other Arts, and Texts - including previously unpublished writings, notes on Frampton's own work, as well as critical articles written for the pages of magazines such as Artforum and various long- since forgotten film journals. Among other insightful inclusions are narrations and scripts for films such as (nostalgia) and Zorn's Lemma, typescripts of hand-written letters, and a curious funding application to the National Endowment for the Arts for the development of computer software of Frampton's own design.
The book's breadth is testimony to the myriad ways in which writing had a place in Frampton's life and work; existing in the private and reflexive spaces of his practice, as well as in the public channels of art criticism and commentary.
In a recorded interview with Ester Harriott in 1978, Frampton spoke of writing as a ‘slow, unforgiving process... a kind of dread obligation'. Even this short quotation gives a suggestion to Frampton's commitments as a writer, both to the laboured precision of his language, and to the feeling of responsibility (obligation) in sustaining the discourses about art, and film most particularly. In that same interview with Harriott, Frampton identified his efforts as a writer as part of the ‘noble tradition' of other luminary filmmaker-writers such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein; each in their own generation setting forth the discursive territory that was both prescient and contributory to their own practice as filmmakers. As Bruce Jenkins writes in his introductory text: ‘The impetus for Hollis Frampton's writing stemmed in part from what he deemed the paucity and poverty of then-contemporary critical discourse on the camera arts'.
Arriving upon the New York art scene in late 1950s, Frampton's frustration with the photographic and filmic discourses he then encountered were perhaps stoked by his exposure to the rigour of other arts' discourses, especially those taking place in the expanded field of sculpture with the emergence of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Indeed, it was the sculptor Carl Andre that became one of Frampton's most recurrent - if itinerant - conversation partners; culminating in a series of typed dialogues between the two artists, published by the New York University Press as 12 Dialogues 1962-1963. Frampton's preface to 12 Dialogues is reprinted here, along with one of the more expansive examples of his collaboration with Andre - On Plasticity and Consecutive Matters. These dialogues give evidence of Frampton's familiarity and confidence in discussing other art forms beyond his own practice, and a broad range of topics besides. Frampton's dialogues with Andre are also exemplary of their shared interest in putting the capabilities of language to the full test of art's empirical and material existences; a test of language that was entrusted in their friendship and probably helped along with one abusive substance or another.
Carl Andre: ...I was caught by the thought that the poor crystals could extend themselves only by accretion. Not a single fuck in a pound of chrome alum. Even the slippery paramecium enjoys the pleasures of conjugation...
Hollis Frampton: ...Crystalline structure is a habit of matter arrested at the level of logic. Logic is an invention for winning arguments, and matter wins its argument with ionic dissolution by crystallizing. A logical argument cannot change; it can only extend itself into a set of tautological consequences...
In taking the above excerpt out of context, it might be impossible to deduce that Andre and Frampton were corresponding on the paintings of Frank Stella. This is however, a fairly typical example of their dialogical adventures: relating scientific abstractions and structural principles to the logic of art. It is important to consider that their use of scientific and academic vocabulary was not necessarily a strategic attempt to export art's value into other disciplines. Instead, theirs was a libratory exercise: ransacking other disciplinary vocabularies for words and phrasings that defied the stringencies of existing art discourse, while also appealing to their particular shared interests in sequence, structure, and materiality of the constructed world. The libratory aspect of Andre and Frampton's dialogue is further suggested in Frampton's text for the preface of 12 Dialogues, in which he urged that they be read ‘as anthropological evidence pertaining to a rite of passage and to the nature of friendship'.
Critically incisive or a play-upon-form: the language that Frampton employed in his writings was alternately one thing and another, and often had the strength to be both. In this sense, it confers what Melissa Gronlund has recently described of Frampton's writings as existing 'between stentorian intellect and impish game-playing' that became a hallmark of his filmmaking. The editorial approach of On the Camera Arts is appropriately generous in allowing the critical and playful aspects of Frampton's output as a writer to co-exist and intercede, without being bound to false binaries or expedient contradictions that would misrepresent his broader practice. However, it's a similar reckoning that disqualifies On the Camera Arts from being an accessible, first-port-of-call for anyone not already familiar with Frampton's work.
There are texts which are close to being essayist, such as Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract, that jump deftly between philosophical and literary reference, history, and biography of the 19th century photographer, through to the more oblique A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative: a study of narrative structure in the explication of a dream sequence, the authorial matrix of Samuel Beckett, and various algebraic equations of literary biography.
Joseph Conrad insisted that any man's biography could be reduced to a series of three terms: "He was born. He suffered. He died." It is the middle term that interests us here. Let us call it "x". Here are four different expansions of that term, or true accounts of the suffering of x, by as many storytellers.
Ultimately, Frampton's meanderings through the realms of literature, philosophy, mathematics, and science, were tools in his intellectual toolbox - called into being as a way of shaping his primary expression in the sequential possibilities of photography and film. As the example above demonstrates, Frampton's dexterity as a writer and thinker was, at times, suspiciously close to intellectual wayfaring. At worst, reading Frampton can feel like following a tour guide that equally basks in the glory of being so far from home.
While Frampton's writings often made testing demands upon the reader, it is important to consider these texts in the same ‘rite of passage' spirit that Frampton himself acknowledged in 12 Dialogues. Such a rite of passage might translate as a call upon readers to forgo all referential twists and turns as a process of working-through Frampton's scheme of ideas. There would be a similar call to viewers in films such as Zorn's Lemma or Gloria!
Before turning to the relationships of text and language in Frampton's film work, which undoubtedly provides On the Camera Arts its primary basis of contribution and insight, some consideration should be given to Frampton's previous occupations with poetry and still photography.
Frampton's poetry is referred to frequently in interviews, but neither does it appear in the pages of On the Camera Arts or is it ever discussed in detail. Frampton himself is quick to dismiss and downplay his contribution to the field: previously calling his own efforts as a poet "a disaster". Nevertheless, poetry makes a definite entry in the retrospection of Frampton's interests in language, starting with his acquaintance with Ezra Pound when Frampton was aged 21.
It was through still photography that Frampton found recognition, exhibiting his work and also writing texts on established figures in early-mid twentieth century modernist photography such as Edward Weston and Paul Strand, many of which appear in the book. Frampton's recognition that his own photography tended toward serialisation and time-regulated sequence caused him to seek a move into film.
If we allow Frampton's background in poetry and still photography to represent the alternations of language and image, then it was film that allowed these alternations to be compounded most effectively.
Zorn's Lemma (1970) is such a film. Consisting of three sections, the film begins with a blank screen. A woman's voice is heard, speaking a list of learning-rhymes from an antiquated grammar textbook for children. These are spoken alphabetically, according to noun:
Thy Life to mend,
God's Book attend.
The Cat doth play,
And after slay.
What follows these readings is an animated series of word-images in the form of photographs of street-signage or ‘found' texts, mostly collected from Frampton's wanderings in New York; "a phantasmagoria of environmental language" as Scott MacDonald has referred to it. After a while, we begin to recognise the alphabetical pattern in the sequencing of these word-image photographs. The photographs present signs for ‘Needle', ‘Office', ‘Pal', for example; appearing in alphabetical order. The pattern recognition of the sequence has the effect of pulling the expectancy of the next, so that each subsequent image-text photograph builds to a kind of alphabetical mantra.
The stability of this textual pattern begins to disintegrate through the gradual substitution of image-texts for images of a different kind. Where we might expect to read the ‘B' in street signs for Barber, Bar, or Bonanza, we're presented with a short film sequence of a frying egg. Further substitutions occur: ‘O' becomes a bouncing ball; ‘X' becomes fire; ‘L' becomes a child swinging, until the pattern losses its sense of textual coordination entirely. In this way, a film such as Zorn's Lemma can be understood as a test of reciprocity in the exchange of language and images; ultimately, a zero sum game that reveals nothing other than the structure of their interdependency.
Another film that gives example of Frampton's compounding of literary and photographic narratives is (nostalgia), produced in 1971 with the assistance of friend and fellow filmmaker Michael Snow, who provides the voiceover for the film. Featuring a sequence of black and white photographs taken by Frampton, placed upon a ring-burner until they shrivel and burn, (nostalgia) corresponds directly to Frampton's previous incarnation as a still photographer. Furthermore, a voiceover recalls stories and anecdotes that relate to the photographs, in the context of Frampton's experiences in New York City (scripted by Frampton, spoken by Snow).
It soon becomes obvious that the photograph that the voiceover describes is not the photograph presented, but the description of the image to follow. Not only does this cause a temporal disconnection between language and image, but the viewer comes to rely on expectations of the next image by way of a description that precedes it; meanwhile the present image burns. As Rachel Moore has written in her book dedicated to the film, "the burnt photograph spent by language that quivers in front of us, registers this fall precipitated by language."
Both Zorn's Lemma and (nostalgia) give example of how language was central to Frampton's filmmaking; not as a mere aspect, but as an integral and forming structure woven into the capabilities of photographic images and film. It is this that also provides the challenge to a book like On the Camera Arts, which may have otherwise taken the opportunity to establish an easy inroad to Frampton's work upon the 25th year anniversary of his death. Despite such warnings, the book succeeds in appropriately sustaining the torsion of Frampton's inquiries, while contributing greatly to contemporary and retrospective discourses on the development of film in the interceptive spaces of art.
Matt Packer is Curator of Exhibitions & Projects at Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork. He has also curated independent screening projects at Kunsthall Bergen and National Sculpture Factory, Cork, including the work of artists such as David Blandy, Duncan Campbell, and Ben Rivers.