Hollis Frampton`s (nostalgia) Kurt Ralske SVA MFA Art Criticism and

Transcription

Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia)
Kurt Ralske
SVA MFA Art Criticism and Writing
Spring 2012
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In Artforum October 1974, Hollis Frampton wrote:
Under certain conditions, we feel the measured passage of historic time to be altered, or to stop
entirely. In the extremes of terror or rage, in erotic rapture and its analogues, in suicidal despair, in
sleep, and under the influence of certain drugs, consciousness seems to enter a separate temporal
domain, one of whose chief characteristics is its apparent imperviousness to language.
As I sit writing this text, on one of the days of the only life I shall live, a fine April afternoon is
passing outside my window. Like a novelist, or a painter, I have walled myself into a room, away
from the passage of time. Photography, uniquely among the visual arts, allows us to have our cake
and eat it too: if I were making images today, I would be outside, within that day, converting its
appearances to the requirements of ecstacy. Instead, I am enmeshed in these very words. But I
can’t find words to tell you what it is like to be writing them.
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1
Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce
Jenkins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 42
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1. Introduction
This whole business of words - the whole sense of tense and complicated problems about
knowledge, about making things in relation to all the things that were already made with words seems to have fallen into film.2 — Hollis Frampton, 1971
In March 1966, Hollis Frampton bought himself a Bolex movie camera for his thirtieth birthday.
The gift signaled a reinvention of himself. It was a commitment to new self-identity as a
filmmaker, and a withdrawal from his former (a)vocation as a semi-professional photographer.
A young Frampton had arrived in Manhattan eight years earlier, fresh from almost-completing
college. He had initially aspired to be a poet, but then abandoned poetry; next, he pursued
Abstract Expressionist painting, but gave up on this, too: “I finally did not enjoy smearing goo
on flat surfaces: it was not enchanting.”3 His artistic focus next turned to photography. Walker
Evans was an early inspiration, a photographer who boldly and plainly stated that his goal to
make images that were “literate, authoritative, transcendent.”4 Frampton initially worked for
similar aims, but it was not a good fit: he was too critical and too self-conscious to let “authority”
and “transcendence” go unquestioned. One of his first photo series was entitled The Way to
Purity (1959). The title would seem to imply a document of art-as-spiritual-discipline; in fact,
these were deadpan views shot while walking to the local Purity Diner. The joke suggests
Frampton’s refusal of an uncritical belief in the power of art—the kind of belief most 22-year2
Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce
Jenkins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 67
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“Hollis Frampton Biography,” accessed April 10, 2012, http://hollisframpton.org.uk/bio.htm
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James Crump, Walker Evans: Decade by Decade (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 27
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old artists would likely have had in 1958 (or indeed, in any year). Barry Goldensohn, a college
friend, described young Frampton’s struggles in this way: “As a very bright and very cerebral
young man, his critical standards were far too advanced for his abilities as an artist, and the
effect must have been paralyzing.”5 Frampton’s photographic output did not receive much
attention at the time. He supported himself working as a darkroom lab technician. A few portraits
he took of artist friends were used for publication. In his own words, “Nothing much came of
it.”6
But within a few years of the purchase of the movie camera, the acclaim that Frampton the
photographer desired—but had not attained—fell to Frampton the experimental filmmaker. His
films, along with those of Michael Snow, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and others associated with
Jonas Mekas’ Film-makers’ Cooperative, were hailed as a new genre: Structural film, a style
based on radical simplicity and rigid formal constraints. Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970)
premiered that year at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center—the first-ever full-length
experimental film to do so. Two years later, the Museum of Modern Art screened a retrospective
of his films.
In 1971, Frampton completed (nostalgia), his most well-known film. (nostalgia) is a complex
work which allows for many interpretations, but most obviously, it documents a former
photographer’s destruction of his archive of photographs.
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Barry Goldensohn, “Memoir of Hollis Frampton”, October Volume 32 (1985), 12
“Hollis Frampton Biography,” accessed April 10, 2012, http://hollisframpton.org.uk/bio.htm
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At the film’s start, we see a black-and white photograph, depicting a darkroom set-up: enlargers,
a timer, chemical trays, film spools. A man begins to speak, describing the events that led to the
creation of a photograph. (The voice belongs to artist/filmmaker Michael Snow, reading a text
written by Frampton.)
These are recollections of a dozen still photographs I made several years ago. This is the first
photograph I made with the direct intention of making art. I had bought myself a camera for
Christmas in 1958. One day in early January of 1959, I photographed several drawings by Carl
Andre, with whom I shared a cheap apartment on Mulberry St. One frame of film was left over,
and I suggested to Carl that he sit, or rather, squat for a portrait. He insisted that the photograph
must incorporate a handsome small picture frame that had been given him a year or so before by a
girl named North. How the metronome entered the scheme I don’t recall, but it must have been
deliberately.7
At first, we assume the narrator must be describing the image we see before us—but then, it’s
clear that he isn’t. The details do not match. Carl Andre is not visible, nor is any other person;
nor a picture frame, nor a metronome. It is confusing. We notice that the picture of the darkroom
is beginning to darken, and that a strange pattern is appearing slowly near its center. Its edges
curl, then smoke emerges from it. The photo is sitting on an electric hot plate. The narrator stops
his description, and in uncomfortable silence we watch the photograph’s dying moments. It
consumes itself slowly in small flames, smoldering and writhing, until only a mass of black ash
remains.
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Frampton, Camera Arts, 203
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At three minutes into the film, a new image appears. The voice resumes, again describing a
photo which can’t be the one that is visible. Then, an a-ha moment: the image we do see, the
second one shown, is in fact the first one that the narrator described, three minutes earlier. He
had mentioned Carl Andre; this must be young Carl Andre’s face on view now. This must be the
handsome picture frame, and this, the metronome. And now, it too is disintegrating: the black
brand of the stove’s coils frame Andre’s face. With a motion like an animal waking from sleep,
the paper gently curls and rises with flame, falling into itself. The still image comes to life, and
in doing so loses its material form and its status as image. Meanwhile, the narrator continues to
relate an anecdote about the creation of some other photograph: it will be the next one we see.
An image is described, then it burns. The narrator tells us the story of a photograph; three
minutes later, we get to see that image. There’s a relentless regularity in the rhythm of
(nostalgia): first text and image, then ash and silence. In this rigidly structured process, each
cycle becomes predictable, inevitable. In total, twelve photographs are decribed and destroyed.
The duration of the film is 36 minutes: each image-murder was shot on its own three-minute reel
of film. Portraits of artists Frank Stella and James Rosenquist (Frampton’s personal friends) burn
and smolder at the same speed as street scenes and documents of Frampton’s art experiments.8
The viewer experiences (nostalgia) as a phenomenological labyrinth. She examines an image
and must think to the past to retrieve what was said about it, three minutes earlier.
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The negatives of these images were retained (“against unpredictable future needs”), but the impact of the
destruction of these prints is not lessened. In a world where 350 billion digital photos are taken every year
(according to http://1000memories.com/blog/94-number-of-photos-ever-taken-digital-and-analog-in-shoebox,
accessed March 24, 2012), it’s easy to underestimate the long work required to shoot, process, and print even a few
high-quality film photographs. These carefully crafted 8”-by-10” silver gelatin prints must have represented an
important part of Frampton’s photographic output: no small sacrifice.
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Simultaneously she must listen to what is said right now, in hopes of being able to make sense of
the future. Knowing these images are mortal, there’s a sense of urgency to make meaning before
it’s too late. For the last minute of each cycle, she is left with only empty ash. Instead of urgency,
there’s duration without event, with little to do or see except to contemplate the vacant abyss.
But not exactly vacant: the destroyed image still shudders as if alive, its immanence at once a
mystery, a tragedy, and a transfiguration. It’s a strange kind of nostalgia that pulls both forward
and backward, while leaving one firmly rooted in the present, alone with only the cold comfort
of dead images.
As heard in the narration, Frampton’s text is both forthright and highly mannered. Frampton
(1936-1984), who wrote for Artforum and October magazines in the 1970s and 1980s, describes
the genesis of each photo and his motivations for creating it. Employing dense, thoughtful
sentences, he reminisces in the manner of an Oxford don after a drink or two—his locutions
erudite, opaque, playful, candid. Certain verbal stylizations—odd flourishes and long, slyly
indirect clauses—would not be out of place in a nineteenth-century novel. Sometimes there’s a
hint of the cosmic pranks of Thomas Pynchon or Donald Barthelme. This mildly wry tone serves
to give cover for unexpectedly direct expressions of emotion. He declares his admiration and
affection for his artist friends: about James Rosenquist he observes, “I cannot recall one moment
spent in his company that I didn’t completely enjoy,”9 and of Carl Andre, “I see less of him
nowadays than I should like.” Frampton also spins a revealing, courageously vulnerable account
of himself. Several anecdotes poke fun at his younger self: his vanity, his romantic and artistic
failures, his misplaced optimism. “I never heard from her again.” “I regret to say he was right.
But it was too late, there was nothing to do about it.” “I wish I could apologize to him.” “I
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decided to stop doing this sort of thing.” “We became estranged on account of an obscure mutual
embarrassment that involved a third party and three dozen eggs.” Despite the mannerisms, the
viewer never doubts the integrity and depth of these confessions.
The frank autobiographical text, together with the repeated ritual-like burnings, suggest that
(nostalgia) is the document of a moment of personal reckoning. The artist is drawing a line in the
sand, saying farewell to photography, and to his identity as a photographer. There is a sense of
necessity and preparation, akin to a suicidal person’s final getting-things-in-order before
departing. The text conveys a burning compulsion to tell the truth fully, for once. The images are
destroyed meticulously, thoroughly. Yet unlike a suicide, the film is a productive occasion. The
accomplished photographs are destroyed, releasing another, unexpected kind of accomplishment;
the funeral pyre of Frampton-the-photographer becomes the site of his rebirth as the auteur of the
one of the most subtle and complex of experimental films.
As noted, the cyclical, precisely timed form of (nostalgia) is rigidly determined. The film’s
process is derived from a carefully premeditated concept, instead of from some sudden aesthetic
whim: more like a Sol LeWitt list of guidelines, and less like a Jackson Pollack flick of the wrist.
If (nostalgia) were stripped down to its bare formal structure, one could re-imagine it as a very
different kind of work—say, an “event score” by Fluxus-era Yoko Ono, an out-take from
Grapefruit (1964). This skeletal version of (nostalgia)-as-process would be:
“Burn twelve photos, one at a time.
While each burns, describe the photo you will burn next.”
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Yet, this just-add-water version would not resemble Frampton’s (nostalgia) at all. Frampton fills
the guidelines of his structure with material that is highly idiosyncratic. There are complexities to
(nostalgia) that are in no way the product of its formal rigor: the emotional tenor of the text, or
the viewer’s peculiar experience of confusion plus engagement plus urgency plus boredom.
I suggest that (nostalgia) has been interpreted primarily as an experiment in form, at the expense
of discounting the complexity of its content. There are two causes for this.
Structural film’s defining characteristic is the clarity and simplicity of concept and form, a kind
of obsessive exploration of one and only one element. P. Adams Sitney (the first to use the term
“Structural film”) defined it as “a cinema...in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined
and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film.”10 Tony Conrad’s
Flicker (1966) cuts rapidly between entirely black and entirely white frames, creating varying
strobe rhythms, for 30 minutes. Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) is a continuous slow-motion
zoom shot across a room, lasting 45 minutes. Frampton’s own Lemon (1969) is an uninterrupted,
fixed, seven-minute close-up shot of a lemon, illuminated by one unseen light source whose
position moves nearly imperceptibly throughout the film’s duration. Lacking narrative, camera
movement, and conventional rhythm, these works originate at “film degree zero”; they are a
response to the question: “Given nothing—the absence of a film—what would be the minimum
sufficient requirements for a film to exist?” Each work exhaustively investigates a single isolated
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P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1979), 369
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formal element of cinematic technique: the cut, the frame, lighting. In this way, they are films
about film.11
Frampton’s association with newly anointed genre of Structural film brought critical attention to
his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is historical fact; however, the tendency to flatly
regard all of Frampton’s films as Structural has caused certain qualities of his work to go underrecognized. (The artist himself commented, “Personally, I believe Structuralism is a term that
should have been left in France, to confound all of Gaul for another generation.”12) (nostalgia) is
in no way a film about film. Its formal strategy relies on the interplay between photography,
language, and cinema, and the resulting multilayered temporal destabilization creates an
ineffable effect on the viewer. Undeniably, (nostalgia) exists as a work of experimental cinema,
but it can also be productively regarded as a conceptual art piece, a philosophic inquiry, a
performance, an instance of art-as-art-criticism/art-criticism-as-art, a thought experiment, or a
psychologically-charged personal ritual.
Second, in the past there has been a tendency for experimental film to receive short shrift in
terms of critical regard, simply because of the nature of the medium and its distribution. These
films are screened in cinemas only infrequently.13 They do not function well in a gallery setting,
where viewers enter and depart on their own schedule: the films demand sustained attention and
have clearly defined beginnings and ends. Some films are familiar to many as capsule
11
In a private email exchange with P. Adams Sitney (dated July 2012), I asked, “Was the term ‘Structural film’
coined with the intent of suggesting a link between Structuralist theory (de Saussure, Levi-Strauss) and the films of
Snow, Sharits, Frampton, etc?” to which Adams replied, in boldface, “NO, emphatically NO!!”
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Peter Gidal (ed.), Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1978), 77
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Anthology Film Archives, which programs experimental and avant-garde films exclusively, owns a print of
(nostalgia). It is one of the very few cinemas in New York City that would be likely to screen the film, but did so
only twice during the period 2006-2012.
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descriptions, rather than as lived cinematic experiences (eg., Andy Warhol’s Empire
(1964)—many know it is eight hours long, but few have seen it from beginning to end in one
sitting), leading to a flattening of the discussion around them. For these reasons, works of
experimental cinema have tended to remain on the periphery of art discourse, while painting,
sculpture, and installation occupy the center.14
(nostalgia) was initially connected with Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits, but it is only a type of
ghettoization that prevented connections being made with other artists of the era. Why would it
not be productive to consider Frampton’s (nostalgia) in relation to the work of (for example)
Bruce Nauman, another artist whose strategy of self-inquiry spilled over into explorations of
language, philosophy, and metaphysics? Nauman’s 1973 installation Flayed Earth / Flayed Self
(Skin / Sink) incorporates a text equally as autobiographical, self-critical, and revelatory as
Frampton’s (nostalgia) text, and similarly moves beyond mere self-regard into an expansive field
of meaning—one difficult to define only because of its size, and not because it lacks clarity.
A comparison of these two artists might not be as strange as expected. In (nostalgia), Frampton
comments that his 1965 photo of Frank Stella blowing a smoke ring reminds him of “a
photograph of another artist squirting water out of his mouth,”15—surely a reference to
Nauman’s Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966). Frampton himself noted parallels.
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The advent of digital distribution has raised the profile of the genre. A selection of Stan Brakhage’s films were
released on DVD in 2003. Frampton’s works were released in April, 2012. The work of Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad,
Peter Kubelka, Scott Bartlett, and many other significant film artists remains almost entirely unavailable in digital
form.
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My aim in this essay is to focus on the qualities of (nostalgia) that are most likely to be lost when
it is interpreted strictly as a Structural film. In Section 2, “A Polyphony of Temporalities,” the
film is considered as an inquiry into linear and non-linear time. (nostalgia) pits the specificity of
photographic images against the abstract qualities of language, and derails both techniques of
retaining meaning: the images are destroyed, and text is ripped free from what it refers to,
displaced in time by 100 feet of film. Within the multi-layered non-linear temporal space of
(nostalgia), language and image lose their normal functioning, but assume new and highly
ambiguous capabilities.
Section 3, “An Archaeology of Myself,” examines the autobiographical aspects of (nostalgia), as
the work of an artist at a decisive moment in his personal development. The film has the qualities
of a psychological ritual. The artist creates a new perspective on his personal history: a liberation
from the past, and a conjuring of a freer future. It also demonstrates the activity of conscience:
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through new perspectives on itself (obtained via painful “wounds of returning”), the subject is
able to stretch beyond the current linits of its subjectivity.
In Section 4, “Art / Criticism / Art,” (nostalgia) is considered in relation to Frampton’s work as a
critic. Is (nostalgia) a particularly good example of the potential for criticism to become art, and
for art to embody critical perspectives?
Section 5, “Funeral Photography” interprets an essay Frampton wrote on photographer Edward
Weston as a manifesto-like declaration of the intent of his own artistic project. In defining what
he sees as problematic in Weston, Frampton reveals what he hoped to achieve in (nostalgia) and
his other works.
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2. A Polyphony of Temporalities
It is obvious that historic time, though quite well suited to the needs of matter, is a terrain too
sparse to afford the mind any lasting amusement or sustenance. So we must clear out, stand aside
and enter, if we can, the alternate and authentic temporality of ecstacy. I assume everybody knows
what that is. 16— Hollis Frampton
The photographs destroyed in (nostalgia) were taken during the years 1959-1966. Work was
begun on (nostalgia) in the summer of 1970. Frampton first wrote the text, then shot a version
using his own voice for the narration. This attempt was abandoned for two reasons: the film
stock was scratched during processing, and Frampton was not satisfied with the sound of his
recorded voice. The second, final version, with Michael Snow’s voice, was re-shot and
completed before the end of November, 1970.
The narrated text and images of (nostalgia) refer to events that occurred over a period of eleven
years. The film lacks the type of conventional chronological ordering that narrative provides.
Most films (including those with fractured narratives) correlate cinematic time and the viewer’s
lived time in a one-to-one mapping. Instead, (nostalgia) offers layers of temporality. The
viewer’s focus is directed forwards and backwards in time simultaneously. Bill Simon described
this quality of (nostalgia) as being “pulled between anticipation and memory.”17 The disjunction
of sound and image causes the question of “when is now?” to become almost unanswerable.
With no clear reference points, the viewer cannot orient himself in a linear flow of time, and
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Bill Simon, Notes on Hollis Frampton (Brussels: The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, 1975), 9
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instead is pushed and pulled by the contradictory temporalities presented by the narration, the
photographs, and the cinematic action of the burnings. Rachel Moore observes, “While the film
parodies chronology, makes rubbish of history, burns it to ashes, it offers the experience of
temporality in return.”18 The viewer’s experience of feeling unmoored in time is not a weakness
of the film, but rather, one of its aims. Linearity is replaced by Frampton’s temporality of ecstacy
(whatever that may be).
Text, image, and sound are the “characters” of (nostalgia), each acting within the boundaries of
its own temporal space. All that occurs in the film is the interaction between these five timeframes:
A. The temporality of the text: the diegetic moment of the narrative, or alternately, the moment
the text was written.
B. The temporality of the photograph: the moment of the shutter-fall, or alternately, the moment
of the photograph’s creation in the darkroom as a print.
C. The temporality of the cinematic action: the moment of the filming of the burning images.
D. The temporality of the sound: the moment of the recording of Michael Snow’s spoken
narration.
E. The temporality of experience: the viewer’s moment of viewing.
The multilayered interplay and shifting of these temporal elements is the “dramatic action” of
(nostalgia). As the film progresses, competing temporalities advance and recede, taking turns
occupying the position of central focus.
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Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia), (London: Afterall Books, 2006), 52
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In a musical fugue, a melodic gesture is repeated offset in time, layered onto itself. At each
reappearance, the material is modulated, transformed. While J.S.Bach might delay the return of a
gesture by ten seconds, Frampton waits three minutes to bring his material back. His modulation
is, of course, not between musical keys, but rather between the divergent signifying capacities of
language and image.
The film begins with a solo for (D), the moment of sound recording, in 1970. Michael Snow and
Frampton (off-mike) are heard testing the sound recording: “Does it sound alright? Yes, yes,
perfectly, it’s fine.” No image is present.
Then there’s complications. Temporalities are layered in duos, trios, or less definable ensembles.
At the beginning of each of the twelve cycles, a photograph appears, intact for the moment. It
draws the viewer to (B), the moment of the photograph’s creation: the instant that the shutter
opened, when reflected light hit the silver surface of the film. The photograph functions as what
Charles Sanders Peirce terms an index: the image has a factual connection to the moment it
represents. It is not merely a likeness, it bears a genuine trace of what is “captured” in the photo.
The viewer, in examining the photograph, establishes a link with this captured moment.
But simultaneously, the narrator resumes speaking, his text pointing to (A), the past moments he
describes, the time of the events around the creation of the photograph—a time already six or ten
years prior to the writing of the text. “This photograph was made in September of 1960.”
Towards the end of each description, the text sometimes shifts modes and places itself in a
different (A), the moment of writing. Frampton the writer steps back from the events he
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describes, and locates himself in 1970, the moment he confronts the blank page: “James
Rosenquist and I live far apart now.”
In the last minute of each three-minute cycle, the narrator stops speaking, as the image is
destroyed by flame. (A), (B), and (D), the temporalities of the text, the photograph, and the
sound, are no longer present to the senses. (C), the moment of the shooting of the film, assumes
central focus. It is a strange shift. At first, the photograph’s presentation of its indexicality is key;
then, significance shifts to the act of its burning. The photograph’s easy normal functioning is
disrupted first by an incorrect caption, then by fire. No longer linked to the site of its origins, the
image becomes an ex-photograph, a material form which refers only to itself. “It is only, and
exclusively, a piece of paper.”19 What is the meaning of the quivering, oddly organic motions of
the consumed image? It is as ambiguous as the whole of (nostalgia). The workings of indexical
reference are made thoroughly problematic.
Yet this small spectacle of ash, lasting 60 silent seconds, may not wholly engross the viewer: if
not, then (E), the moment of the viewing, takes the lead. The interval is experienced by the
viewer as a challenge—a boring duration to be endured—or as a considerate gift: a blank page
for taking mental notes. In either case, the viewer’s attention returns to herself, and to her present
experience as one observing a slow film, seated in a room before a screen. This quality of
(nostalgia) resembles how the 1960s Minimalists (Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and
others) theorized their work: its function was to make the spectator’s attention shift from the art
object back onto herself. As Robert Morris wrote in 1966, “The object is but one term of the
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newer esthetic.…One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as
he apprehends the object.…”20
The intricate temporal interweaving becomes particularly dense during the second image of the
film. When the photo of Carl Andre appears, the narrator comments, “I made this photograph on
March 11, 1959.” Three minutes earlier, the narrator had mentioned that the Carl Andre photo,
now visible, was actually shot in January, 1959. “As you see...,” he says, pulling the viewer into
her 21st-century moment of viewing. He continues, “The face is my own, or rather, it was my
own.” The text moves from the writer’s present, 1970, back to March, 1959. The face of the 34year-old filmmaker is indeed not that of the 23-year-old photographer: “I take some comfort in
realizing that my entire physical body has been replaced more than once since it made this
portrait of its face,” a reference to the biological process of cell replacement. But it is not only
eleven years that have created distance between Frampton and this image. There are two
strategies of indirection at work in (nostalgia): the image described will be withheld for another
three minutes; and, the autobiographical text is filtered through a narrator whose “I” is not
identical to the “I” of the text. What one actually hears is Michael Snow expressing relief that he
is no longer the Hollis Frampton seen in the image—which, in fact, depicts Carl Andre! In nonlinear time, subjectivity cannot retain its familiar forms.
The “switcheroo”21 of an image and its description leads to a chain of confusing and humorous
disjunctions: an image of Hollis Frampton is described as a shop window, a shop window is
described as a sculpture, a sculpture as Frank Stella, Frank Stella as James Rosenquist.
20
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1996), 50
21
During the last minute of each cycle, the viewer, left with ashes and silence, wonders: at what
point did the image truly cease to exist? As the photograph burns, odd echoes of the image’s lost
indexicality linger. As the magic rushes out of the dying photograph, the question arises of how
it got there in the first place. Was it really only a pattern of silver halide crystals that made this
sheet of paper appear to be a window into time and space? Was the magic really so shabby, was
its existence actually so tenuous? If its destruction is accomplished so trivially, was its creation
any different? The tendency to correlate the moment of death with the moment of birth seems
almost a requirement (the most salient fact about any historical figure is the birth-year / deathyear pair).
I suspect this was the origin of Frampton’s concept for (nostalgia). Perhaps the ritual of imagecremation devised by Frampton—90 deadly seconds on the hotplate—was inspired by the way
an analog photographic print is created. In the darkroom, an exposed sheet of photographic
paper, placed in a tray of developing fluid, appears blank. Seen under the red safelight, the
surface of the paper slowly begins to reveal the image, darkening to define and clarify the details
of the photographic scene. It’s the inverse of the slow destruction of the photos seen in
(nostalgia). The darkroom developing tray was the fade-in, the hotplate provides the fade-out.
Both processes take about 90 seconds. It seems appropriate that the death of a photograph should
occur not through neglect or slow erosion, but through a mirrored re-enactment of its birth, its
life-story made palindromic.22
21
Ken Eisenstein, A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (DVD booklet), (New York: Criterion, 2012), 27
Frampton’s abstract film Palindrome (1969), a 22 minute assemblage of discarded film reel ends, is constructed
to appear the same when played forwards or backwards.
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Many photographers speak of their first experience in the darkroom—witnessing a print fade into
existence—as their greatest thrill: a defining moment that confirms their status as a
photographer. On a micro scale, each image of (nostalgia) inverts its creation into destruction.
On a macro scale, it seems Frampton chose to say farewell to the entirety of his photographic
career by replaying his entry into it, in reverse.
The end effect of this polyphony of temporalities is to make obvious the mechanisms of
language and image. Language, abstract and imprecise, fluidly shifts reference from past to
present to future. A photograph is tightly bound to the specific moment of its creation, but this is
dependent on the illusion that the image is more than an object. “Language and image, each
trespassing in the other’s house, secrete disquieting disjunctions, conundrums, circularities.”23
By breaking the caption-like connection between the image and its description, and breaking the
image’s status as window-in-time, Frampton leaves it as an exercise for the viewer to repair the
references—or instead, to appreciate what the disjunction reveals or implies.
Frampton described the consciousness of non-linear temporality as being “a separate
domain...impervious to language.”24 In (nostalgia), word and image enter ecstatic time and fail at
their normal tasks, instead assuming new indefinable forms and functions. (nostalgia) drifts nonlinearly through time as freely as thought, across disjuctions, circularities, and palindromes. Like
the vagaries of thought, what appears is autonomous and ambiguous. When we hear descriptions,
they are of things we can’t see. When we see images, we are pulled back to descriptions we can’t
23
24
23
recall. When we see ashes, we become aware of unanswerable questions and how we are bound
to them.
24
3. The Archaeology of Myself
My subject, hoping abjectly to be taken for a man of his time, had practiced rigorous selfeffacement for a decade or more. So I was forced into examining his leavings and middens like an
archaeologist sifting for ostracising potshards. Since he had once been myself, I knew exactly
where to look.25 —Hollis Frampton, 1971
The end of 1970, when Frampton worked on (nostalgia), was a period of great change in his life.
In September of that year, his Zorns Lemma premiered to wide critical acclaim. The previous
year, he had been appointed Assistant Professor at Hunter College, his first teaching job. The
following year, he also began to teach at the School of Visual Arts, and at Cooper Union. In May
1970, he purchased a 30-acre farm in upstate New York, over 200 miles from Manhattan, where,
three years later, he would relocate permanently. He parted with Marcia Steinbrecher, his wife of
four years, and began a relationship with Marion Faller, with whom he spent the rest of his life.
Frampton soon moved in with Faller and her three-year-old son, Will. A confluence of more
simultaneous gains and losses is hard to imagine. Very quickly, Frampton achieved a longdesired artistic success, undertook a new career, and became a father. The photographer became
a filmmaker; the darkroom technician, a professor; the Manhattanite, a farm dweller.
“The narrative art of most young men is autobiographical. Since I have had little narrative
experience, it seemed reasonable to accept biography as a convention, rather, however little
25
25
information was available to me,”26 wrote Frampton in Notes on (nostalgia). “One way or
another, everything in a filmmaker’s life forces its way into his work, finally...”27 Biography is
only one tool for critical interpretation, and often of limited utility. But since Frampton describes
his project as self-biography, it may be productive to consider how this period of transition is
visible in his work. Frampton’s expedition of self-archaeology unearthed the raw material from
which (nostalgia) is formed.
The twelve photos seen in (nostalgia) are presented chronologically, in the order of their date of
creation. As Rachel Moore notes, the narration of the film begins with the statement “This is the
first photograph I ever made with the direct intention of making art,” and ends with the assertion
“I think I shall never dare to make another photograph again.”28 Together, the statements
bookend the period 1959-1966, when photography was Frampton’s primary activity. The subject
of the text of (nostalgia), then, is Frampton’s life as a photographer, in the past tense. The twelve
images selected to be incinerated could stand in for the whole of his photographic career. “I
decided, humanely, to destroy [the photographs]...by burning. My biographical film would be a
document of this compassionate act!”29
Frampton ironically mouths the word “compassionate”, implying that the photographs were so
awful that it would be cruel not to destroy them, lest anyone have to endure seeing them. But the
act of destruction was compassionate in another sense: it can be considered a symbolic ritual of
purging a painful past, for the purpose of willing a kinder future. To burn the photographs was to
26
28
Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia) (London: Afterall Books, 2006), 1
29
27
26
sever the binds that held him to a life he described as unhappy. In writing about his younger self,
Frampton reevaluated the meaning and importance of what occurred, and in destroying the
photographs, the unpleasant associations attached to them were released.
A magical conception of the power of images—that images can act as a conduit of transmission
to the things they represent—forms the rationale for rituals practiced in many cultures and eras.
Rachel Moore compares (nostalgia) with a ritual practice of the Cuna tribe of Central America.30
When a member of the tribe is ill, he will burn photographs ripped from magazines and trade
catalogs. The belief is that the images enter the spirit world, where they will distract the evil
spirits that make him unwell.
Frampton had encountered similar concepts as a younger man. For six months in 1957, he lived
in Washington, DC, and would make daily visits to Ezra Pound, who was at the time
incarcerated in St. Elizabeths, a psychiatric hospital. During this period of informal study, Pound
requested that Frampton translate the work of ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius from
German to English. (Frampton did so, although his translation remains unpublished.) Frobenius’
Kulturgeschichte Afrikas (1933) proposed that prehistoric cave paintings of animals were created
for use in rituals of sympathetic magic. In Frobenius’ view, the paintings did not document a
hunt that already occurred; they pre-visualized or consecrated a hunt yet to happen. The image
was created as a tool for willing the future. Frampton made no mention of it, but it is intriguing
to consider the possibility that his handling of images in (nostalgia) bears traces of his
engagement with the ideas of Frobenius.
30
Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia) (London: Afterall Books, 2006), 19
27
A photographer gives up on photography; he decides to leave town; friendships terminate, either
through conflict or through withering away. ”You noticed that there are no triumphs described in
the film; it was by no means a time I look back to in the current pathetic sense of ‘nostalgia’ at
all. It was quite dreadful.”5 Frampton presents his photographs as symbols of failed ambitions
and difficult conditions. To incinerate them was a conscious act of willing a departure from these
things: a proof that they are no more. And to confirm that the conditions of the past are gone is to
confirm that the present and future will be different. (nostalgia) was created at a moment of both
personal advance and loss. To create closure with the past can serve to provide traction for
motion forward.
Susan Sontag theorized the relationship of photography and change in this way: “[Photography]
is a form of participation... like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of, at least tacitly, often explicitly,
encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in
things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged….”31 A photograph is created in
complicity with the conditions it was made under. To preserve a photograph is to sustain this
support. Frampton inverts Sontag’s formulation: to destroy a photograph is a vote for change. It
is to come down on the side of what could be, not what is or what was.
Ken Eisenstein describes (nostalgia) as an “ode to metamorphosis”32 and notes the motif of
tramsformation that recurs throughout the film. In the narration, Frampton expresses “some
comfort in realizing that my entire physical body has been replaced more than once since it made
this portrait of its face.” The eighth photograph contains the inscription “I Like My New Name,”
31
32
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1990), 12
Ken Eisenstein, A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (DVD booklet), (New York: Criterion, 2012), 27
28
written in dust. And, of course, twelve times the viewer witnesses documents of personal history
transform into ash.
Bruno Latour’s What is Iconoclash? examines the motivation to destroy images in its various
forms. He defines five categories of iconoclast, each with their own reasons for committing
iconoclasm. Frampton is an unusual case, but he most resembles Latour’s second category: those
who “do not believe it possible nor necessary to get rid of images. What they fight is freezeframing, that is, extracting an image out of the flow, and becoming fascinated by it, as if it were
sufficient, as if all movement had stopped.”33 With (nostalgia), Frampton decreed that his images
were no longer sufficient—that it was necessary for them to burn, so as to overcome their stasis
and, by extension, the stasis of his personal history. As photographer became filmmaker, the
inertia of the freeze-frame was replaced with a constant refresh of images—24 of them per
second.34
Self-inquiry is only one thread of (nostalgia), running alongside its other, more-outwardly
focused lines of inquiry. Frampton was careful in his handling of the confessional quality of the
film. It seems calibrated to present enough personal truth to lend gravity to the work, but not so
much as to risk narcissistic self-regard. The second version of the film was undertaken, in part,
because the use of his own voice on the soundtrack was too direct, too uncomplicated. To have
33
Bruno Latour. and P. Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science,Religion and Art (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2002), 532
34
The characterization of (nostalgia) as a personal ritual is made here to underscore the quality of heightened selfinquiry which animates the film. I do not mean to suggest that magical thought was the primary motivating force for
Frampton, rather that the film grew from the nexus of the rational and the magical. Commenting on Frazer’s The
Golden Bough, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at
nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.”
(Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, p. 123) The person who performs magical rituals does not necessarily
subscribe to the logic of magical thinking. It can be only a symptom: the evidence or by-product of a realignment of
forces within the psyche.
29
Michael Snow read his text added a layer of indirection, a buffer against an unnecessary degree
of intimacy.
If Frampton had not separated the text from the image it describes, his persona would have taken
center stage: a raconteur and his slideshow. If, instead, he had dislocated texts and images from
some entirely impersonal source—news stories, or scientific texts—the film would be
conceptually interesting but emotionally uncompelling. It might resemble Joseph Kosuth’s One
and Three Chairs (1965): a cleanly-executed philosophical gesture, but not a work that anyone
would interpret as an expression of the artist’s life. The (nostalgia) that Frampton did make,
though, is an unusually balanced and moderate admixture of the cerebral and the affective. This
is his great accomplishment.
Explaining why he chose the title (nostalgia), Frampton noted, “In Greek, the word means ‘the
wounds of returning.’ Nostalgia is not an emotion that is entertained, it is sustained. When
Ulysses comes home, nostalgia is the lumps he takes, not the tremulous pleasure he derives from
being home again.”35 The word “nostalgia” was used less frequently in the 1970s than it is now,
and had darker meanings. Frampton makes it clear that he does not want “nostalgia” to carry the
associations of fond remembrance or sentimentality; he instead uses it to mean regret, remorse,
contrition.
“Nostalgia is the lumps he takes” may be interpreted in two ways. First, nostalgia is, by
definition, an exercise doomed to failure: it is impossible to return to the past. Any attempt will
35
Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia), (London: Afterall Books, 2006), 1
30
be incomplete. Nostalgic objects—the triggers of nostalgia—always deliver less than expected;
disappointment is guaranteed. They may promise an entry into the past, but in the end only serve
to confirm that it is gone forever. Novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard describes how familiar material
objects can reappear unchanged, but drained of the significance they formerly held:
You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings,
and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were standing, all of them. The sole difference,
which is the difference between a child reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden
with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything
when I held a pair in my hand now it was only a hangover of my childhood, nothing else, nothing
in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could
fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet
it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.
36
The phenomenon described by Knausgaard is experienced privately, as a result of the particular
associations accumulated in one’s memory. In (nostalgia), Frampton generalizes the experience:
all viewers taste the disappointment of nostalgia via the images which—displaced from their
explanations and set aflame—approach meaninglessness.
Secondly, nostalgia delivers wounds by recalling the past in such a way that the inadequacy of
the present becomes painfully obvious. The distance from past to present was formerly
composed only of vague hopes and fears, but now it is fixed as one’s unalterable personal
history. There is little point in arguing that things should have turned out differently.
The “wounds of returning” imply a journey and a destination. (nostalgia) is Frampton’s journey
into his past. The wounds and lumps are sustained there by acknowledging his personal failures:
36
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One (New York: Archipelago Books, 2012), 353
31
artistic under-achievement, loss of friends, romantic failures, missed opportunities. In another
sense, the destination of return is to a place of conscience, of undefensive self-assessment, free
from the self-justifications and delusions vanity employs to protect itself. Nostalgic objects
trigger self-audit. What-one-was becomes the metric used to measure what-one-is. The audit
calculates losses and gains, and ultimately produces a reckoning, a judgment of conscience: here
is where one stands, like it or not.
The dictates of conscience reveal the truth about the qualities of one’s actions and being, and in
doing so produce knowledge of oneself and one’s limits. In his 1974 feature article for Artforum
on Diane Arbus, Frampton concluded with this irruption of self-knowledge:
These images, then, which offer me everything but words, enclose or apostrophize the exquisite
stasis of a tableau vivant...tinted, to my disturbance and satisfaction, by my own lenses...divided
by an impenetrable membrane that is neither quite gauze nor caul nor screen not window nor yet
mirror, within which, or through which, or upon which, two personifications fix each other in
endless regard. In a posture of easy attention, image and word, Eros and Thanatos, eternity and
time, multitudes of partnerships at once open and secret, stare each other and themselves into
existence. Diane Arbus and I, more or less in focus, may even be among them: because she is
gone, but never, to my pleasure, quite entirely absent...and I am here, but never, to my pain, quite
entirely present.37
(nostalgia) was “biography” rather than autobiography, “however little information was
available to me.” Frampton’s “lack of information” on his subject was his perceived lack of selfknowledge. It is the mirror of the lack of “presence,” and that which causes pain. This is not
Frampton, Camera Arts, 50. In a maneuver typical of Frampton, the text shifts seamlessly from a discussion of
aesthetics to the topic of Frampton himself (“I am here”), and his lived experience of the pain of never being “quite
entirely present.”
37
32
ordinary pain, rather a Weltschmertz, caused by the realization that oneself and one’s world fall
short of one’s hopes and dreams. Frampton, a person of great artistic and intellectual ambition,
was surely no stranger to the feeling that, in honesty, what he truly was could never equal what
he wanted to be. The state of being entirely present is never possible; the awareness he must
settle for less causes pain.
However, coming to the awareness of the inadequacy of one’s self-knowledge is the very genesis
of new self-knowledge. Conscience has a dual aspect: it may brutally destroy comfortable selfillusions, but in doing so it bestows additional self-knowledge. Nietzsche famously suggested,
“If one trains one's conscience, it will kiss us as it bites.”38 Might not the film (nostalgia)—the
product of a bite endured—itself be the kiss bestowed by conscience?
“In the end, when I saw the film myself, I felt I had made an effigy, at least, of his opaque
young-man’s life, even if I had not wholly entrained its sadness.”39 Regardless of how well
(nostalgia) conveys the particular quality of young Frampton’s melancholy, it can still be
experienced as a profoundly sad film. The repetitious, punishingly predictable cremations of the
image have the aspect of a memento mori, or the Ash Wednesday exhortation to “Remember,
Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” Twelve long minutes—one-third of the
film’s duration—are spent in silence, confronted with what is lost. The mute ashes are blank. The
viewer compares their emptiness with that which has departed, and finds it lacking. Or, the
viewer can be present with them, accepting them as a static but sufficient actuality. Or, the
38
39
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Random House, 1966), 83
33
viewer interprets the aftermath of the transformation she has witnessed as an entry point, a
possibility, an occasion for a realignment of perception of time and self.
Frampton describes his film as the burning of an effigy of his younger self. Yet in one sense
(nostalgia) is not an archaeologist’s relic, but an oracle’s message: the film is not only
retrospective, but grimly predictive. Frampton was a heavy smoker. He died of lung cancer in
1984. He was 48 years old. As smoke consumed his photographs, ultimately it was smoke that
consumed his body. (nostalgia) was the burning of an effigy, Frampton’s chain-smoking a slowmotion auto-da-fé.
34
35
4. Art / Criticism / Art
Points define a periphery. Three points define a triangle; but it is well to remember that the same
three points may also define a unique circle. A collection of points, if sufficiently large, delimits
the boundary of a continent—provided only that we know where each point stands in relation to
every other one. Call each point a work of art: the task of criticism may be understood as the
location of points in relation to others. Normally, that task is facilitated by the emergence of axes
that gradually crystallize from a saturated solution in which the ingredients are unexpectedly
tedescan—inventory, Grundriss, synopsis, monograph, Festschrift—and the solvent, long
contemplation.
40
— Hollis Frampton
From the early 1970s until his death in 1984, Frampton’s criticism appeared in Artforum and
October magazines, including long essays on photographers Eadweard Muybridge, William
Henry Fox Talbot, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus, and Edward Weston, as well as pieces on film,
video, and sculpture. He wrote catalogue essays for Carl Andre, Leslie Krims, and others.
Frampton, an autodidact and polymath, wrote in a highly individualistic style, described by
Bruce Jenkins as possessing
….a certain density of allusion and breadth of reference that oscillated between the arcana of the
classics (Greek drama, Roman allegory, Sanskrit poetry) and the argot of scientific discovery, with
occasional doses of continental philosophy, visual anthropology, and structural linguistics thrown
in for good measure. [.…] Having come of age within a generation that still aspired to the vocation
of the poet [….], Frampton mastered a continental manner of verbal felicity and the necessary wit
and erudition that the mode demanded.41
40
41
Frampton, Camera Arts, xii
36
Frampton commented that as a child, images interested him only in that they were a source from
which verbal descriptions might arise. As Barry Goldensohn noted, Frampton’s critical faculties
were in full evidence prior to undertaking his artistic practice.
The “long contemplation” required for criticism seems to have come naturally to Frampton;
critical distance was for him not a stance to be assumed, but rather a default modality.
Frampton’s writings and films imply a constant questioning: not only as an artistic strategy, but
as a mode of being. The self-regard of (nostalgia) had to be “biography” instead of
autobiography—the self viewed as other—because autobiography as a form implies a fixed
position and limited possibilities for analysis. His catalog essay for his wife Marion Faller is
noticeably cautious and cool in tone: “Marion Faller’s enterprise is, in the most welcome sense,
ambitious...the scope of that enterprise is still under construction.”42 This is hardly the language
of a puff-piece: perhaps Frampton did not wish to appear too partisan, or perhaps his allegiance
to the integrity of his aesthetic judgment trumped even familial bonds.
But neither would Frampton direct puffery at himself. (nostalgia) is suffused with a critic’s blunt
honesty, in both its form and content. The narration hands down repeated judgments on his work:
“I despised this photograph for several years,” “the negative was too flat,” “[this photo] pleases
me as much as anything I did,” “my eye for mystery is defective.” His self-archaeology
excavates “middens,” a word of Danish origin meaning, roughly, “shit-pile.” Of his self-portrait,
Frampton cuttingly remarks, “as you see, I was thoroughly pleased with myself at the time.” And
the very form of the film offers the harshest of all possible criticisms: Frampton’s photographs
are fed to the flames.
42
37
But the mode of criticism extending beyond mere evaluation—criticism as cultural and
philosophical insight—is also central to (nostalgia). The photographs of the film are personal,
but they are not merely personal: as tools for a demonstration of larger questions about the nature
of photography, they function as stand-ins for all images. While the narration’s confessional
quality suggests a Modernist’s inwardness, a Postmodern outwardness is evident in the film’s
larger concerns.
Is it possible for a work to exist as both criticism and work of art? Artworks can employ critical
perspectives, and criticism can take highly aesthetic forms. What is the greatest degree of
intersection possible? Can the careful discrimination of criticism coexist with the complex
ambiguity required of the work of art, or are these qualities mutually exclusive?
One exemplar of a near-complete intersection is Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma, a
266-minute video in eight parts that was created in 1988-1998 for French television. Godard
began his career as a critic, writing for Cahiers du Cinéma for eight years before making his first
feature film. Histoire(s) du Cinéma roams freely across the cinematic archive, subjecting it to a
rigorous interrogation: clips from hundreds of movies are slowed down, layered, reversed,
repeated, and frozen, while Godard adds commentary, spoken on the soundtrack. In dialogue
with the free-associative flow of filmic images, he analyzes, compares, interprets, inveighs,
enthuses, and serves up theories, polemics, and paeans. Images from movies of different genres,
eras, and cultures are layered with written text, spoken word, original dialogue and soundtracks,
and added music and sound effects. (The audio alone, without image, was released as a five CD
set on ECM Records—a testament to the ingenuity of Godard’s sound mix.) Interspersed
38
between the archival material are shots of Godard at home, pecking at an electric typewriter,
pulling books from the shelf and reading aloud, smoking, staring into space, ruminating: in short,
doing the activity of being a critic. Godard, mindful of Brecht and Marx, makes the means of
production of criticism visible in the final result. In lieu of a narrative, the action of Histoire(s)
du Cinéma is the progress of Godard’s ideas, seen arising from contemplation and analysis. As
much as it is an aesthetically complete cinematic experience, the film is also a document of
critical thought as process.
Frampton’s (nostalgia) similarly takes the activity of critical analysis as its focus. The visual
component of the film is entirely given over to the process of burning images (the ne plus ultra
point of aesthetic judgment), while the text interprets and analyses photographs and the
conditions of their production. Frampton, like Godard, makes the process of production visible,
beginning his film with a Brechtian reveal of the recording of the soundtrack (“Does it sound
alright?”). Both works use parenthesis in their titles: an implication of a provisional state, of
incompleteness and relatedness, of a position tentatively marked while further analysis is
forthcoming. Parentheses appear when a statement is connected to its surroundings, but
insufficient to stand on its own. For the critic, this is the condition of thought: positions are to be
adopted and passed through; no complete and free-standing statement is ever possible. (Can there
be criticism without parenthesis?)
39
5. Funereal Photography
In 1978, Frampton published a 21-page article in October magazine on the photographer Edward
Weston (1886-1958). It is among the most focused and far-reaching of his essays. As a young
photographer, Frampton had deeply admired Weston’s work for its formal clarity and technical
virtuosity. But after abandoning photography, his evaluation of Weston grew more critical and
complex. Frampton felt that Weston pointed a way forward for photography; yet, that way was
closed to others because Weston had already traversed it. Weston was like “one of those
humorless fathers who teaches his progeny his trade and then prevents them from practicing it by
blackballing them in the union.”43 He described the writing of the October piece, “Impromptus
on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place,” as an act of Oedipal revenge, a slaying of the
father. While Frampton does not spare praise for Weston (“the photographs...are of a
voluptuousness that rarely falls short of the exquisite”44), his main aim is to map the entirety of
Weston’s project, specifically to reveal its limitations. Aiming higher still, Frampton undertakes
to “strip the photographic code”45—not only as it exists within Weston’s work, but to extend his
questioning outwards, to map the ultimate limits of what photography can achieve.
“Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place,” dated 1977-1978, is a clear and
sustained critique of the project of photography by an artist who had moved beyond photography
twelve years earlier, and as such, presents a well-considered position. The article, in the voice of
the critic Frampton, summarizes the artist Frampton’s disaffection with the practice of
photography. Seven years earlier, (nostalgia) was, in part, a similarly disaffected statement on
43
45
44
40
photography. Both the article and the film are products of Frampton’s post-photographic
concepts. While “Everything in Its Place” verbalized Frampton’s stance, (nostalgia) enacted this
position: no theory, just burning. The way Frampton constructs his argument against Weston
suggests the outlines of the thinking that led to the creation of (nostalgia).
Frampton suggests that art should interrogate the mechanism whereby it retains its meaning: it
should “strip the code,” revealing the syntax or grammar upon which its significance is built.
“To determine the absolute, irreducible set of specifications for a code is a typically modernist
enterprise in the arts. Expunging item after item from the roster of cultural imperatives, we come,
eventually, to a moment when the work at hand is no longer recognizably a picture or a poem; in
this moment, we know that we have mapped at least a single point on the intellectual boundary
of what must constitute an image or a linguistic artifact.”46 This deconstructive strategy is seen in
all art forms: “During this century, music, painting and sculpture, dance and performance have
entered into this process of self-definition.”47 However, photography remains alone in resisting
self-definition and self-consciousness; it is “an enclave within modernism...an aesthetic
brute...doomed by its own inflexibility.”48 The difficulty with photography is that its referent is
“Nature (that is, everything on the other side of the lens)...alpha and omega, Oversign of
Signs....If we strip the photographic print, we run aground upon an emptied specification that is
no longer a photograph. It is only, and exclusively, a piece of paper.”49
46
48
49
47
41
However, “Edward Weston was virtually the first photographer to make an effort to define the
bare specifications for a still-photographic art.”50 He did so by “a strategy that is perfectly
familiar to us, proposing to identify the work of art with its own material rather than its
pretext.”51 In Weston, the significance of the nude body, or cabbage leaf, or chambered nautilus
in front of the lens is subsidiary to the tonal values of platinum on paper created by
photographing these things. Because the effect of these images is so powerfully retinal—they
point to their surfaces, and nowhere else—they would seem to offer a critique of the way images
normally signify. Frampton makes an apt comparison to the novels of Robbe-Grillet, whose flat
descriptions of objects, surfaces, and volumes are not really intended to be connected up with
actual objects in the world; rather, they are enjoyed as a flow of self-referential textuality.
Weston’s photos suffer from an excess of clarity and purity. “Typically they simply center a
recognizable, bounded, nameable icon...as though the hypertrophied single sign had invaded the
space of the text, like an isolated symbol ballooning to occupy a whole page.”52 They aim at a
universal quality, free from the specificity of a time and a place. “Weston is everywhere
concerned...with the annihilation of time. The image is to subsist not in time but in all of time,
taking for its duration the supreme temporal unity of eternity.”53 Any individual’s interpretation
is less important than the meaning that is agreed upon by all. “Thus the photograph is made to
resemble the word whose perpetuation is guaranteed by the mind of a whole culture, safe from
moth and rust; and the photographer’s art becomes the exercise of a logos, bringing into the
world, by fiat, things that can never escape. Is this what Weston means when he uses the
50
52
53
51
42
adjective ‘eternal’?”54 Thus the excessive legibility of Weston’s images implies a kind of
resolutely dogmatic position. His isolated single icons are presented with an authoritative
quality: a persuasiveness akin to the ideological force of propaganda. “[The print] is no mere
expendable sheet of paper that he marks, but an entity within the mind of another, which he
delineates or authorizes.”55
In the final pages of the article, Frampton abandons decorum and dispatches Weston with
this coup de grâce:
There is, in the spectacle of Weston’s accumulation of some sixty thousand 8-by-10 negatives,
something oddly funerary. It is as if one had entered the tomb of a Pharoah. The regal corpse,
immured in dignity and gilt, is surrounded on every side by icons of all he will need to take with
him into eternity: there must be food to eat, girls to fuck, friends to talk to, toys to play with; trivia
and oddities to lend homely verisimilitude to that empty place; earth to walk upon and water to
give the eye a place to rest; skies to put a lid on it all; other corpses to remind one that things have,
indeed, changed; junk and garbage and rubbish to supply a sense of history; animals living and
dead to admire, gawk at, or avoid; vistas to wander through when the spirit is weary.
Certain comic perils attend the assemblage of this riot of nouns. Failing the accomplishment of the
sorcerer, one is in danger of being innundated like his apprentice. Is Weston, a typical modernist
of the generation of the ‘80s, like T.S.Eliot, “shoring fragments against his ruin”?56
54
56
55
43
Images by Edward Weston
44
The project of photography, then, is accumulation: to convert the mysterious complexity of
experience into a quantifiable collection of noun-images, each removed from temporality into a
timeless state of embalmed perfection. Its premise is that it is indeed possible to “take it with
you,” forwards into eternity: to create images is to deny death and defy it, by acquiring all that’s
needed for an afterlife. However, this project is doomed. The denial of death returns as a denial
of life: nouns are hoarded at the expense of verbs, the actions of experience. In the funerary
regime, the only significant activity is the process of mummification. Ruin is inevitable, and
shoring fragments offers no protection against anything. In the end, death cares nothing for a riot
of nouns.
Two pages before Frampton mocks Weston’s project as “funerary,” he inserts into his text an
enigmatic comment in parenthesis, whose effect is that of a non-sequitur: “(The Greco-Roman
form of the capital letter ‘A’ recalls, in profile, the elevation of a pyramid, that is, the tomb of a
Pharoah, whose central chamber, when finally penetrated, is invariably found to be empty.)”57
When connected with the subsequent funerary comments, it may be that Frampton intends the
“tomb that is invariably found to be empty” to represent what he sees at the core of the project of
photography: a site that formerly held utility and significance, but which now retains neither.
Frampton concludes by quoting Weston, for the purpose of allowing him to incriminate himself:
“[The discriminating photographer] can reveal the essence of what lies before his lens in a closeup with such clear insight that the beholder will find the recreated image more real and
57
45
comprehensible than the actual object.” Frampton’s only response: “Ipse dixit!”58 (“He himself
has said it!”) Frampton does not explain further, but what is problematic in Weston’s statement is
the implication that a comprehensible image is an acceptable (or even, preferable) alternative to
an incomprehensible reality; that the work of the photographer is to create photographic realities
that supercede and supplant actual things; that the love of the image is, in fact, a turning-away
from reality.
Frampton’s negative critique of Weston has a specific form. Taking this form as a mold or cast,
its reversed impression would define a positive position: one which might serve as the
foundation of Frampton’s artistic decisions, and explicate his work. What does “Everything in Its
Place” tell us about (nostalgia) and Frampton’s other works?
The article suggests that an important function of art is to “strip its code,” or to interrogate its
own structure: its materiality, its mode of functioning, its underlying syntax. This was a common
enough position in the 1960s and 70s, and served as the raison d’etre for much Conceptual and
Minimal art of the era (as well as for Structural film, as defined by P. Adams Sitney). Frampton’s
film Gloria (1979) demonstrates this modus operandi. The film alternates between sections of
image, sound, and text onscreen, but each type of material is presented separately and
independently. Frampton examines, by comparing and contrasting, the differing flavor of each of
these three communicative strategies commonly used in cinema. Similarly, (nostalgia) takes as a
primary focus the materiality of the photograph. It is, essentially, the document of twelve
physical transformations, from normal state to ash, highlighting the material nature of an artifact
whose primary quality was previously its ability to signify. The dislocation of the photograph’s
58
46
captions serves as an additional investigation of the ways images obtain and retain meaning.
(nostalgia) is, in part, an experiment in meaning: an inquiry into how photographs function and
what conditions are necessary for their functioning.
Frampton saw Weston’s aim toward universality and lack of context as a failure of his project.
Frampton’s own work, despite its conceptual rigor and its designation as “Structural,” is firmly
grounded in the context of his experience and his subjectivity. Critical Mass (1971), which uses
as its raw material an improvised enactment of a domestic dispute, was completed during the
break-up of his first marriage. Gloria (1979) takes as its topic the death of his beloved
grandmother. (nostalgia) catalogs the personal experiences that led to his abandonment of
photography, and enacts the situation of his immanent permanent departure from New York
City. The narration of the film is exacting about dates and locations, placing emphasis on the
specific provisional conditions that led to the film’s creation. Autobiographical details are not
merely presented, but are confessed in Frampton’s resolutely quirky writer’s voice. (What other
avant-garde artist of the 1970s would pepper his texts with such anachronistic phrases as “I
daresay” or “she was monumentally fair”? What other critic could get away with using the word
“fuck” in the august pages of October?) The photographs of (nostalgia) are presented in a way
that exaggerates their status as unique objects: each burns to ash in its own distinctive way. Some
shrivel, some shift to the side, some curl, some break into fragment. When destroyed, they have
less in common than when intact.
Frampton cited the unambiguous quality of Weston’s work as another failure. (nostalgia), with
its confusing disjunction between image and caption, is a work of such ambiguity that it may
47
take the viewer several minutes (or even several viewings) to understand what they are
seeing/hearing, and why. Even after the structure and strategy of the film is understood, its dual
identity as coldly-formulated-Structural-exercise and warmly-personal-confessional-document
remains unresolved, and unresolvable.
While Weston photographed to accumulate nouns, (nostalgia) turns photographs back into verbs
or experiences. The narration describes the author’s experiences while creating the photographs,
rather than the images themselves. The photographs are presented not as eternal signs, but rather
as actors, who perform their destruction so that the viewer may have the experience of
witnessing an image become temporary. That which is frozen becomes animated in cinematic
motion. In time, we see images enter time.
In 1972, Frampton constructed a three hour and twenty minute cycle of seven films—the first of
which is (nostalgia)—entitled Hapax Legomena, Greek for “something said only once”. A hapax
legomenon is a word that is used only once within a context, be it a single text, an author’s
oeuvre, or the entirety of a language. Virginia Woolf (in her 1937 essay “Craftsmanship”) gives
the example of “the multitudinous seas incarnadine,” from Macbeth: the word “incarnadine”
occurs nowhere else in Shakespeare.
Varying levels of shared meaning exist on a continuum. At one extreme would be near-universal
linguistic concepts which would seem to be beyond dispute, such as “yes” / “no”, or the numeric
values of “one” or “two.” At the other extreme would be what Wittgenstein terms “private
language”—would-be linguistic structures so unsharable that they cease to qualify as language
48
entirely. On this continuum, the hapax legomenon would fall very near to private language. It is
an artifact that posseses shared meaning, but is shared only enough for it to satisfy the minimal
requirements to become language.
That Frampton would dub each of these seven films a hapax legomenon suggests his preference
for private meaning over shared, the specific over the universal, the provisional over the eternal,
subjectivity over objectivity. In 1973, after a screening of his films to a somewhat unreceptive
crowd, a woman asked Frampton if he thought his films communicated to an audience:
If you mean, do I think I communicated to those in the audience who tramped indignantly out of
my films, the answer is no, but I think there is a problem with your idea of communication. You
seem to work on the assumption that you have this hole and I have this thing, and you want me to
put my thing in your hole and that will be 'communication'. My idea of communication is very
different. It involves my trying to say something I think is important and into which I have put all
my thought and substantial labor. Necessarily, what I have to say will be difficult to apprehend, if
it is original enough to be worth saying at all. That is my half of the communicative process.
Yours must be to sensitize and educate yourself fully enough to be able to understand. It is only
when two people—filmmaker and viewer in this case—can meet as equals that true
communication can take place.59
Duchamp famously asserted, “The viewer completes the work of art.” Frampton’s position here
is similar in that he acknowledges Barthes’ “death of the author:” interpretation occurs within the
mind of the viewer, and there is nothing the creator of the work can do to change that. But while
Duchamp placed little importance on his labor (his readymades and Tu m’ flaunt a look-no-hands
strategy), Frampton is seen here insisting that his labor—his thought and will-to-vision—is
59
James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1994), 2
49
crucial for the success of the work. Duchamp challenged the notion of the originality, insisting
that the common manufactured objects he found could be works of art. Conversely, Frampton
asserted that only the most original thoughts—his thoughts—are “worth saying at all.”
There is a kind of aggressive championing of subjectivity in this stance. In creating his various
hapax legomena, Frampton welcomed that which is very nearly unparseable: “necessarily...
difficult to apprehend.” And yet, he insisted that his work was worthy of the audience’s strongest
efforts of interpretation. His demand for the right to make difficult work was matched by a
demand to be viewed with critical intelligence. That complex set of conditions was for Frampton
a requirement for the possibility of equality between artist and viewer. Equality meant struggle
on both sides, proceeding from undefined rules of engagement; it could never be a rote, overlyfamiliar, thing-in-hole transaction.
Frampton refuses the detemporalized images which are so authoritative they become an “entity
in the mind of another.” What he objects to is nothing other than the construction of the subject,
generally acomplished by the residue of mass media, education, and social norms. The value he
placed on his own subjectivity was not born of narcissism or solopsism. It is instead a principled
stance, one that is against the self-as-cultural-residue, and for the possibility of the self-as-selfcreation. The hapax legomena, the point of maximum heterodoxy of meaning, bears resemblence
to political project of the Surrealists. For them, the products of the unconscious were important
in that they challenged social and cultural orthodoxies; Surrealist practice was a “process of
50
disalienation.”60 For Frampton, disalienation meant insisting on motion, not stillness; verbs, not
nouns; ecstatic temporality, not the eternal.
60
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 67-68
51
Conclusion
With all his misgivings over Weston’s concept of the photograph, what would Frampton hope
for images to be, ideally? Images would not be mimetic, offering an alternative to life; they
would not be universal, eternal, contextless signifiers; they would not be so clear that there
would be no need for interpretation. Rather, images would be a document of a specific time,
place, and set of conditions. They would be mutable in both their form and their interpretation.
Because of their ambiguity, images would flatly demand inquiry and critique—a responsive
engagement of the viewer’s subjectivity, as opposed to the construction of it. This idealized state
approaches precisely how images do actually function within (nostalgia).
At a memorial service for Frampton in 1984, Michael Snow delivered a long eulogy to his friend,
which included this reminiscence:
During the Sixties we all took LSD at least once, including Hollis. His story concerned how he
and several other people who were somewhere in Ohio, I think, (Yellow Springs?), had taken LSD
and decided to go for a drive. They came to a street with a stop sign. The driver stopped, then
gradually he and his passengers lost the signification of the signifier which had stopped them.
Perhaps at first one of the driver’s thoughts was that STOP was a one-time order, then what could
you do? Anyway, according to Hollis, he and all the passengers got out of the car to discuss the
stop sign. What was it? A mystical symbol of some kind? The importance of the interpretation
became stronger and stronger, more and more cosmic, until another car’s horn snapped someone’s
memory back to the quotidian function of the image they were perplexed by and they rode on.61
61
Michael Snow and Louise Dompierre, The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1994), 246
52
Two elements here support an examination beyond that demanded by some ordinary comedic
stoner anecdote. The first is the figure of the stop sign that is so effective that it stops the cosmos,
permanently. It is the apotheosis of Weston’s excessively powerful photographs: Frampton
referred to it as the image-as-logos, the “entity within the mind of another.” “STOP” was
communicated with such force that the inference “...then after a few seconds, feel free to GO
again,” became invisible to Frampton and his companions. When images become too strong, too
unambiguous, their meanings become fixed, motionless. Their raw power supresses alternate
readings or auxiliary connotations. These rigid, immobile forms create, define, and limit
subjectivity, and inhibit its free flow. Their effect is “STOP.” (nostalgia), by animating the
ontological states of images, and by shifting images from the linear to the ecstatic mode of
temporality, is an experiement aimed at creating within the viewer the experience of this
movement.
The second is the figure of the urgent meeting at the side of the road: a special effort is required,
because there is a desperate need to make sense of what appears. The site where
“the importance of interpretation grows stronger and stronger” would be an apt description
of the locus of Frampton’s critical and artistic projects. An absolute resistance to “the quotodian
function of the image” is the cornerstone of his work. The vanishing photos and confusing
captions of (nostalgia) place the viewer at “the side of the road,” where rigorous analysis is
compulsory—because it offers the only hope of resolving troubling conditions. And as suggested
by Frampton’s biography, the creation of (nostalgia) was also a personal response to confusing
and troubling conditions: perhaps, a repair at the side of the road.
53
The error made by Frampton and his psychedelicized companions—interpreting the directive
“STOP” on a cosmic level—was a comically obvious one. Yet similar errors may be commited
everywhere every day, without notice. It is impossible to judge how far one has been led astray
by the directives of overly powerful images and overly fixed meanings. What appears as cosmic
may be in truth only pedestrian, and vice versa. The conversation at the side of the road may
amplify ambiguity, but it offers the only possibilities for movement and for subjectivity to extend
beyond its limits.
54
Bbliography
Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Crump, James. Walker Evans: Decade by Decade. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010.
Eisenstein, Ken. A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (DVD booklet). New York: Criterion, 2012.
Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1996.
Frampton, Hollis. On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis
Frampton. Edited by Bruce Jenkins. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009.
Gidal, Peter, ed. Structural Film Anthology. London: BFI, 1978.
Goldensohn, Barry. “Memoir of Hollis Frampton.” October 32 (1985): 7-17.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book One. New York: Archipelago Books, 2012.
Latour, Bruno and P. Weibel, eds. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science,Religion and
Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.
Moore, Rachel. Hollis Frampton (nostalgia). London: Afterall Books, 2006.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Random House, 1966.
Peterson, James. Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde
Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
Simon, Bill. Notes on Hollis Frampton. Brussels: The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, 1975.
Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979.
55
Snow, Michael and Louise Dompierre. The Collected Writings of Michael Snow. Waterloo:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1990.
56

Hollis Frampton`s (nostalgia) Kurt Ralske SVA MFA Art Criticism and

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