Searing memories.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON: (NOSTALGIA)

BY RACHEL MOORE 

LONDON: AFTERALL BOOKS, 2006

88 PP./$16.00 (SB)

Rachel Moore's continuous narrative, Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia), revives the life and work of an artist who slipped into obscurity following his death in 1984. Focusing on Frampton's most popular short film, (nostalgia) (1971), initially part of a larger series titled "Hapax Legomena" (1971-73), Moore investigates the visual possibilities of nostalgia within this particular work. Through an analysis of the tight but awkward relationship between sound, word, and image, Moore reveals the way Frampton defined this elusive concept. In the end the author connects her observations with known facts of Frampton's biography and gauges whether the notion of nostalgia is in fact a visual, photographic phenomenon.

Frampton moved from Massachusetts to New York City in 1958 and began working as a photographer before it evolved into a fashionable trend. He shared an apartment with minimalist sculptor Carl Andre and was colleagues with other modernists such as Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, and Frank Stella. Throughout those years, Frampton took casual photographs of his colleagues and developed them in his studio. Similar to those artists who sought creative freedom within the confines of the gallery setting, Frampton filmed these images as a means to investigate the aesthetics of pictorial structure as it is seen in the personal photograph.

Couched in grammatical parentheses, (nostalgia) was set up as a short; it lasts 36 minutes and seems much like an afterthought, documenting aspects of the artistic career in New York City that Frampton was gradually moving away from. According to Moore, the film begins with a brief narrative given by Michael Snow before introducing the first image of a dark room onto the surface of a hotplate. Frampton's memories surround what the viewer initially sees, as the photograph quickly melts on the hot surface before going up in smoke. This takes place shortly after the first image has disappeared so that the interpretation is confused with the image that follows, leaving the viewer suspended within Frampton's artistic method:

  The next photograph you see bears a resemblance to the description
  you've just heard, but you are hearing yet another story, so you
  forget all about the story that came before. It gradually becomes
  clear that the photographs are narrated not by their own story, but by
  the story of the photograph yet to come (2-3).

At this point, Moore believes Frampton reached the cinematic--filming the moving picture of an image that animates itself within a single frame. Proof of this is given in the lower right corner of each page, where the gradual degradation of a picture showing Stella behind a circle of smoke disintegrates rapidly into a dark abyss that ends as a sheet of carbon clinging onto the heated surface below.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With the linear relationship between word and image obscured, Moore conveys that Frampton removes the document from the photograph and reveals its construct as an image among images that no longer says or reveals anything in particular. Due to that, the author defines nostalgia as a painful return home and presents a detailed account of his biography, using it as an illuminating source upon this disjointed work. Released in 1971 as Frampton was preparing to leave the city for upstate New York (where he would live permanently after 1974), (nostalgia) serves as a personal farewell to the life he once lived in the early years of his career. He clearly looks back on this time rather cynically, since he describes the photograph of Andre, his former good friend and roommate, as one that he had despised for many years, labeling it as incriminating. Moore asserts that Frampton, who "disapproved of the elevation of art," eventually stated, "Carl Andre, old friend ... I here accuse you of believing that art, first and foremost, should be elevating. I suggest instead that we elevate ourselves" (37). Whether or not this was just another argument between artists, Frampton manages to make his memories universal under the scope of nostalgia since the process of destruction beyond linear interpretation left his work suspended in a longing for the past that could not be retrieved.

Moore writes much about the process of burning and explores its various symbolic meanings in the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Blaise Pascal, to name a few. Ranging from renewal to melancholia, Frampton's photographic destruction signifies a liberation to move forward. Moore further frames (nostalgia) within Benjamin's notion of the dialectical image and asserts that the burning process, "releases the image from its fixed place in history to metamorphose and fit a new temporal register, as well as a different signifying function" (14). Together, these theories convince the reader that a remote idea bordering on personal feeling can in fact be fashioned into a representation. The only caveat is that the depiction of nostalgia will never reach a universal, iconic status since the experience of embedded sentimentality is entirely subjective.

As the trove of art fairs and biennials have attested, there is no guarantee that every artist will be recognized during his or her career. Moore's analysis of Frampton and (nostalgia) attempts to revive the significance of an artist who was active within the New York art community from the early 1960s to early 1970s--when art was in the process of eliminating decorative form and embellishment while grappling with issues surrounding modes of interpretation. Upon reflection, Frampton stated:

  I didn't find it a picnic to be a photographer through the sixties,
  not because photography was disregarded ... but because my predicament
  was that of a committed illusionist in an environment that was
  officially dedicated to the eradication of illusion and, of course,
  utterly dominated by painting and sculpture. At that time I didn't
  understand how luxurious it was to find myself alienated in that
  way (19).

As Frampton's work points out, there is no way either language or image can fully capture all of the details that are felt, seen, and heard within a specific moment.

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in New York City.