Eichmann testifying to war crimes
Francis Bacon
I was going to put up a post about framing large drawings today but before going into the technical details of how to build frames, perhaps it’s more important for me to open up some issues about meaning.
Every decision made when making and presenting
an artwork means something, so if you end up framing something what is the
purpose?
There are of course some very
obvious reasons for framing; protection being the most basic and then perhaps
using the frame as a form of isolation from surrounding bric-a-brac, so that
you can see the work without visual interference. However there are more subtle ones, such as
the need we have to give ‘museum status’ to art objects, in this case framing
can be a sign that the work has been ‘accepted’ into a world of similar
objects. However in a domestic environment framing can be a way of making the
work, ‘part of the furniture’, the frame operating as a way to unify an artwork
into the overall scheme of decoration, in this case the frame could be seen as
a device to in effect ‘neuter’ the effect of the artwork. I have though already opened up this issue in
an earlier post, see Saturday, 8 November 2014: Edges, so will
instead focus on my own reasons for framing.
Back
in 1996 Alfred Gell had a paper published in the Journal of Material Culture called ‘Vogel’s Net’. It was an
article about why and how we make distinctions between works of art and
artefacts. Gell set out to explain how any culturally significant product from
any other culture, could be exhibited and read as an artwork within our
contemporary art world culture. Within this essay however he also set out to
explain how an exhibition of ‘hunter’s traps’ could work as a contemporary art
exhibition, in doing so he inadvertently also explained how artworks in general
can be made to have significant meaning.
Gell
cites Arthur C Danto the eminent writer on aesthetics as stating that, “looking
at a work of art is like encountering a person”. So immediately Gell reminds us
that looking at art is a socially mediated event, one not dissimilar to meeting
another human being for the first time. We respond initially to the outward
form of a person, and assume that this form represents in some way some sort of
embodied thought. We read the way people stand, move, dress, wear adornment,
use make-up, emphasize one aspect of their appearance over another etc.
This fish trap could also be read as a 3D drawing, and lies on a metaphorical edge between those moments when the flat grid becomes a net and the net becomes a trap and the trap itself a drawing of a fish.
Gell writes about a proposed exhibition whereby a series of traps
are shown alongside contemporary pieces of artwork. As an anthropologist he
goes into detail as to how each trap could be seen to hold significant meaning,
both for the initial maker and for its new context within a contemporary art
exhibition. As someone who has been for sometime concerned with making visual
allegories, Gell’s piece fascinated me.
Gell
starts with a description of an ‘arrow trap’. He presumes that although not
made in our culture the ‘arrow trap’ could still be seen as a representation of a ‘human being in the world’. It writes Gell, shows ‘being in the world as
unthinking, poised violence’. A trap he writes, signals a ‘deadly absence’ and
he goes on to state that the trap ‘signifies far more intensely than most signs
intended as such’. (Gell, 1996, p.26) We read into the trap an implied dualism
of minds, the trap setter and the intended victim. The key issue here is of course
‘interpretation’.
If we
look at a few illustrations of traps (see below) it is easy to see what Gell is
getting at. All of the illustrations below come from 'Camp Life in the Woods' a book designed for Boy Scouts, but which is ripe for re-using as a metaphor for our propensity for violence at a distance.
Compare this with High Noon by Rebecca Horn below.
Rebecca Horn
A shelter can easily become a trap.
The image above could be read as a condition of being male. The hunter is trapped within the role of the hunter, just as the animal is in the role of the victim.
We have an ability to ‘interpret’ signs, (see post Friday, 28 March 2014,Resemblance, mimesis and communication)
which has helped us predict the future in order to survive, but we often go
beyond simple predictions and open out the information into interpretations, we
are fascinated by meaning and are hard wired to build meaning from small clues.
Gell
writes beautifully about traps, they mean a lot to him, he states that, each
different trap ‘operates as a model of its creator’, a type of substitute
automation not only this but that each trap is also a model of the intended victim.
For instance the bait is often the victim’s favorite food or the size and the
shape of a trap can echo the size and shape of the intended animal. You must read Gell’s original text here to
get the full impact of rich underlying layers of meaning that his
interpretations open out. However he then goes on to place some contemporary
artworks into the imagined exhibition and to read them in the same way. He
compares Damien Hirst’s shark to a Yolnngu bark painting, and suggests that the
similarities are not superficial and that both cultures use deep metaphors that
are accessible cross culturally, these may be highly transformed but still
readable.
My
personal favorite trap introduced by Gell was the ‘spring-hook fishing trap’
from Guyana. In Guyana it is known as ‘the trap that turns fish into fruit’.
One minute the fish is swimming and whoosh! The next minute it is hanging like
fruit from a tree. As a metaphor for life it is very powerful, just as easily
read by Western European art audiences as fishermen from Guyana.
The Crow Cone
The image above is from Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making, by William Hamilton Gibson. This is the accompanying text:
"But this simple device will often mislead the smartest and shrewdest crow, and make a perfect fool of him, for it is hard to imagine a more ridiculous sight than is furnished by the strange antics and evolutions of a crow thus embarrassed with his head imbedded in a cap which he finds impossible to remove, and which he in vain endeavors to shake off by all sorts of gymnastic performance. The secret of the little contrivance is easily told. The cap consists of a little cone of stiff paper, about three or four inches in diameter at the opening. This is imbedded in the ground, up to its edge, and a few grains of corn are dropped into it. The inside edge of the opening is then smeared with bird-lime, a viscid, sticky preparation, closely resembling a very thick and gummy varnish.
The crow, on endeavoring to reach the corn, sinks his bill so deep in the cone as to bring the gummy substance in contact with the feathers of his head and neck, to which it adheres in spite of all possible efforts on the part of the bird to throw it off."
Compare the crow cones to this image by Goya
Goya's images seek to give another type of embodiment to the human condition, that of often being on the edge of madness, prone to cruelty and being religious fanatics. The teacher that recommends use of the crow cone to young hunters, perhaps being their own self illustration of at least two of these tendencies.
So the point being that for someone seeking to build visual allegories, the frame itself is potentially meaningful and one
way for me to think of framing is as a sort of trap. I have my own personal associations with this of course, for people of my
generation Eichmann testifying to war crimes in his glass box was a deeply
ingrained image, one that I also think lies beneath Bacon’s decision to always have
his paintings under glass. But the glass goes further, it separates the art
from the world and yet at the same time reintroduces the world by holding its
reflection in the frame, thus 'trapping' the viewer within what is viewed. This being a type of metaphor for the way we are all trapped within our 'little inner worlds', we find it very hard to see from any other viewpoint. It can also be read as an ideas trap, and in some ways
like the traps already referred to, frames are images of their authors, holding
close to themselves their inert offspring, that they don’t really want to let
go into the world unprotected.
The
frame also suggests that a work is finished, and for a drawing the frame gives
added weight and makes what could be ephemeral, substantial. The frame giving
‘gravitas’ to sometimes insubstantial marks.
As
Gell develops his ideas he comes up with another interesting point, he points
to the fact that in many cultures symbolic images can do two jobs at once and
that our Western European tradition often sees the art object as being just
that and not capable of being something else. This he contrasts with the Anga
who’s eel traps operate both as functional traps and as images of ancestral
power. I have since reading Gell’s article often produced things designed to be
both utilitarian and symbolic, the frames for my drawings being a case in
point. Whether they work or not, well that’s up to the audience, but it definitely
isn’t a case of just getting things framed because they are finished. The final
framing adds one further layer of meaning, but to do this the paper has to be
presented behind the frame in a certain way. It could be hung within the frame as if ‘floating’
off the wall and not window mounted. This is to encourage a particular reading
of the drawing as object, whilst still being able to use the frame’s power to
isolate and give weight to the image, but it could be window mounted, a further remove. See
However
this now brings me back full circle to the issue of how to make frames. So the
next post will go into the practical details of how to make large frames for
big drawings.
See also:
See also:
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