Rachel Moore,
Hollis Frampton (nostalgia).
London: Afterall Books, 2006.
ISBN: 978 1 84638 001 3
US$16.00 (pb)
88pp
(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)

Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia), or, ‘Lower case, with parentheses’

Rachel Moore’s eloquent and insightful close-reading of Frampton’s most well-known 1971 film, (nostalgia), is timely given the current status of this seminal American artist and writer who has, during the last thirty years, become virtually obscure today. Since his death in 1984, Frampton’s importance in our pervasive culture of institutionalised amnesia has slowly been recognised in academic enquiry and contemporary cinephilia.

Thanks to certain dedicated scholars like Bruce Jenkins, Annette Michelson and her October colleagues, Scott MacDonald, and Peter Lunenfield, amongst others, Frampton’s art and life have been rescued from neglect. Frampton’s significance as a photographer, filmmaker and as a theorist of the dialectical tensions between cinema, literature and the visual arts, is becoming increasingly significant given our emerging culture of ‘inbetween’ creativity and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Frampton’s importance as an artist and as someone whose oeuvre is integral to the unfolding, intertextual adventure of the movie image in the twentieth and present centuries should not be underestimated. Whether we are speaking about cinema, photography, digital art, or the poetics of (post)modernist literature and criticism, Frampton’s multifaceted contribution is of crucial relevance.

After all, let us not forget that Frampton as a precocious teenager used to visit the incarcerated Ezra Pound (in the wake of earlier such visits between Pound, Marshall McLuhan and the late Hugh Kenner). Thus, arguably, Frampton’s prescient ‘nostalgic’ aesthetics, and his unmistakably archaic turn of phrase in his momentous writings, are directly connected to the Eliot-Joyce-Pound tradition of modernism. He stood on the cusp of modernism and postmodernism. His art and writings were harbingers of a new dawn in the camera-based arts and contemporary art practice.

Before I proceed with reviewing Moore’s acutely suggestive philological reading of Frampton’s film (a film which was initially part of a larger series called Hapax Legomena (1971-73), another example of the playful and perceptive wit of Frampton’s film titles that indicate his biting ‘neo-Dadaist’ self-reflexive humour and forensic intelligence) I wish to say a few words about the One Work series which Moore’s monograph belongs to.

This series of books is quite unique in its overall publishing charter because it emphasises looking at particular works of art in close aesthetic, cultural and textual detail and placing them in their overall larger historical contexts. The series is also concerned with evaluating how these particular singular works of art have transformatively influenced the making and understanding of other works of art. In this dual sense, this series is a much welcome addition to art history, cultural and visual studies. It is my sincere hope that the series will continue emphasising its empirical, formal description of a given work and its changing reception in the broader context of art, culture and society.

The monograph itself is cleverly designed as a visual and textual object. Besides its emblematic iconic cover of a combusting photograph placed on a hotplate – the archetypal set-up of Frampton’s film – we encounter at the bottom right-hand corner of Moore’s commentary a ‘flicker-book’ presentation of successive images of(nostalgia), plus at the back of the book, several large close-ups of these particular images, and the text of Frampton’s unique, partly autobiographically inflected and reflexive, soundtrack read by his friend Michael Snow. Thus, the book’s design features, in their respective ways, vividly reflect Frampton’s keen interest in examining the role of the verbal and the aural in visual culture.

Moore’s searching commentary on (nostalgia) is incisive, informative, perceptive and well-researched. It is written in a lucid and accessible prose style, devoid of the more congested formal complexities of academic jargon. It is writing that would have, if I may say so, pleased the late Edward Said. It is a valuable commentary that nimbly unpacks some of the more seminal aesthetic, cultural and formal aspects of the film’s representation of memory, nostalgia, time and photographic imagery.

It was quite pleasurable to read Moore’s book as she located Frampton’s film in the fruitful hermeneutic context of the Adorno-Benjamin–Kracauer tradition of the Frankfurt project of redemptive aesthetics and cultural pessimism. Moore adds to our understanding of Frampton’s film through her sustained investigation of its visual and aural possibilities of nostalgia. By looking at the complex relationships between image, sound and word in(nostalgia), Moore links her many rigorous observations to Frampton’s art and life and his far-reaching playful pictorial representation of the concept of nostalgia. Frampton’s biography and art are a testament to the artist’s fecund and poetic ability to critique the dialectic between image and word, silence and sound. But Frampton’s film undoubtedly reflects his subtle investigative grasp of art history, the role of art in society and the complex dynamic between the various visual art forms (cinema, painting, sculpture, dance, performance). He also has that rare Dadaist-Surreal capacity to self-reflexively question the institutional mode of filmic and photographic representation.

For example, witness how Frampton took exception to P.Adams Sitney’s popular use of the adjective ‘structural’ as applied to his film work and to his peers. Once, at a dinner party, in his inimitable playful and telling way, he informed Sitney of how he found Structuralists to be living in England and how the term “Structuralism is a term that should have been left in France, to confound all Gaul for another generation.” (21) (ouch).

Frampton’s piercing wit showed his formidable erudition and his philosophical understanding (along with Benjamin) of taking images out of ‘historic time’ and regarding this important action as an awakening. (More of this later).

Before I proceed with a few remarks about the film itself (nostalgia), I want to provide some biographical information about Frampton. Frampton moved from Massachusetts to New York in 1958 where he worked as a photographer. There he shared an apartment with minimalist sculptor Carl Andre and was friends with such modernists as Frank Stella, Larry Poons, Michael Snow and James Rosenquist. All of them appear in (nostalgia)including Stella, who we see blowing a circle of smoke as the photograph disintegrates, leaving a curled sheet of carbon stuck to the hotplate. Indeed, as Moore observes, Frampton’s treatment of his friends in the film amounts to a Dadaist assault and expresses his Duchampian concern with the intimate connections between art, language and perception. Furthermore, Frampton not only critiques all plastic artforms, leaving the unwritten ones unscathed, but he strenuously disapproved of how his artist friends like Carle Andre elevated art above one’s own life. Here we have the recurring spectre of Nietzsche’s profoundly important argument about whether art and knowledge should be in the service of life or the other way around.[1]

Frampton’s film, which is 36 minutes in length, documents aspects of New York’s artistic world circa the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the artist is virtually abandoning the city for the country and, at the same time, photography for cinema. Therefore, (nostalgia) presents a series of photographs burning up as curled carbon sheets clinging to a hotplate. As we are witnessing this Benjaminian spectacle of fire as abyss, we are told, by the film’s mismatching first-person voiceover, which is partly anecdotal, confessional and descriptive, not what pertains to the visible image but to its successive image. Thus, (nostalgia) in its intricate phenomenology of fire, memory and time is quite disjointed giving the spectator an overall feeling of disorientation. It is a work that, in its narrative, pictorial and intertextual configurations, suggests a highly poetic and comprehensive understanding of nostalgia as a painful return to home. It is nostalgia as a form of exilic and existential wounding. Hence, the film’s underlying utopian impulse.

When Sally Dixon questioned Frampton about his choice of the title of the film, in the early 1970s, he responded in his usual witty way: “That’s right. Lower case, with parentheses. A bottomless pit of maudlin sentiment, fossilised cleverness and asynchrony” (18). Moore’s extensive and far-rangng commentary on(nostalgia) involves a variety of appropriate critical and theoretical texts – Adorno, Bachelard, Bataille, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Kracauer and Pascal. It examines its complex representation of nostalgia, memory and temporality mostly (with commendable persuasion) with Benjamin’s central idea of the ‘dialectical image.’

Thus, Benjamin, like Adorno and Kracauer, shared a fundamental belief in ‘awakening’ historical consciousness. Nostalgia, for Frampton, like his Frankfurt predecessors, is not critically a form of representing history – the orthodox ‘once upon a time’ mode of classical historiography – but experiencing it as a dialectical encounter. Nostalgia as denaturalised history, as homesickness (Novalis). (nostalgia) redirects nostalgia away from existential hurt to examine the dialectical processes of history and the very limits of representation itself.

When Frampton shifted his attention from photography to film, he encountered the utopian impulse of cinema. Frampton, in this critical sense, shares with Benjamin and Adorno a critique of historical linearity and the short-circuiting of the image’s fetishisation. By burning the photographs in (nostalgia), Frampton explodes what’s in them, releasing in Benjamin’s vivid phrase “the time of truth” (53). Consequently, as in Joyce’s path-breaking attempt to awake from the notion of a linear, continuous history as nightmare, Frampton also shares a fundamental aim to find a way to images, shock moments, ideas, and in the words of Moore, “monads out of that time and hold them in an instant” (ibid).
(nostalgia) illustrates, in so many different and telling ways, the Adornian–Benjaminian necessity to see things decayed and splintered – life as allegorical ruins of an all-engulfing fire – rather than seeing things in a static and mono-dimensional form. Like Benjamin’s dialectical image, the images of the film suggests that a dialectical relationship between past and present is possible. Watching (nostalgia) is to psychically experience, as the Belgian critic-curator Philippe Dubois suggests, “the shrivelled fragments of a life that in the end is little more than ashes” (50).

But we should also observe that (nostalgia) is also a seminal documentary of a particular bygone era. It is a documentary of the critical styles of the 1960s. The film is riddled with subtle jokes and references to a particular era with its own local knowledge.

Finally, Moore’s acute deconstructive analysis of (nostalgia) as a key film of postwar American avant-garde cinema is evident in her multifaceted emphasis on its layered phenomenology of nostalgia and time. We shall leave the final words to Frampton himself, when he likened himself to an archaeologist examining “leavings and middens … sifting for ostracising postshards” (70). Seldom does one encounter an artist with such knowing, playful and honest self-knowledge as an explorer of the archaic, the autobiographical, the historical, the mythic and the utopian.

John Conomos,
Sydney College of the Arts, Australia.

Endnotes
[1] On the paramount importance of Nietzsche’s essay “On the Utility and Liability of History to Life “as a critique of the humanities and print culture see William Paulson, Literary Culture In a World Transformed, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001, passim. Moore fittingly refers to Nietzsche’s essay as a critique of how each released image from its fixed diegetic place in (nostalgia) calls into question the ‘plastic’ relationship to the past. (14)
Created on: Sunday, 9 December 2007