Framing is both a physical and an intellectual idea. The physical act of putting a frame around something operates as if it cuts whatever is framed away from the rest of the world. But it is not quite as simple as that.
Each type of physical framing changes the way we think about what is framed.
How to window mount
The window mount
Image of an Edward Hopper painting taken from a framing service website
This is why when you go to a framing service website they will often have images showing you how the artwork will look framed alongside other items of furniture. However, sometimes within the frame, we have a second frame, or a third or even a fourth.
This frame within a frame, is a device to make it appear as if you are entering into the image. It is meant to make you feel like you are walking down a corridor towards a window that is directly in front of you. You are in effect walking into the image and in doing so you are stepping from one world into another, rather like stepping into the mirror in Alice through the looking glass. This is a very powerful effect, but one that takes you away from reality, so only use this framing method if that is the effect you want.
A frame within a frame
The card cutout we often call a window mount is called in the framing business a passe-partout, and is put between the picture and actual frame, which is the physical surround that holds everything together.
A collection of passe-partout window mounts
'French matting' uses gold lines to separate the image even further, to enhance the 'aura' of the image. The frame in many ways 'celebrates' the image as a possession. In cutting it out from the world, it can also be a way of making it easier to possess. If you look back at the framed image of a bird in a landscape above, you will also notice that the framing cuts into the edges of the image, (in this case the printing process has cut the edges away to leave a white border, but it is often the window mount that hides the edges of images) a small amount of the image will therefore never be seen and this is another issue artists have to think about when deciding whether or not to have work framed and window mounted. Compare the French matted landscape above with the image below by the Connor Brothers.
Image 'floated' within a window mount.
The Connor Brothers' presentation fits two ideas together. On the one hand they are trying to reassert the 'objectness' of the image by showing us the edges of the paper by 'floating' the image within a window mount, which itself operates to separate the image out from the world and enhance its 'aura'. The wooden frame, operates to establish both an overall physicality or 'furniture', as well as establishing a degree of separateness from the world, which is furthered by the large expanse of white card between the image and the surrounding wooden frame. We are again looking at frames within frames and the corridor effect is still in play.
Art Museum framing of a Vermeer
It's interesting to look at how as an object's worth increases, both as financial and cultural capital, its framing becomes more elaborate. In this case it is a complex double framing because the older frame that sits around the painting, is itself now an object of cultural capital, the black surrounding frame having the simplicity of a more 'Modernist' aesthetic. We still in effect walk down that invisible corridor into the image, but it is a corridor decorated in both modern and classical styles.
Allan McCollum: Forty Plaster Surrogates
Back in the late 1970s Allan McCollum began making his plaster surrogates. What was interesting to me was the fact that they made you very aware of the framing process of art and of how this process was making new objects that were themselves part of the art idea. Take away the artist's work from inside the frame and you still have a powerful signifier, which is the frame itself. In McCollum's case his casts also make you very aware of the objectness of the frame. The paradox being that what began as surrogates were now very definitely art objects in their own right.
Artists, myself included, sometimes want to reinforce the 'objectness' of their drawing or painting by floating the work within a larger box frame, in order to avoid the entrapment or suggestion of a window on the world which comes with a window mount. But in floating an image within a frame, there is an in-built contradiction. Looking back at Allan McCollum's Plaster Surrogates, you can see that the frame never goes away, it still operates as a separator between to put it very crudely, 'art and life'.
So you may say, "Why not simply hang the painting or drawing directly on the wall?" The issue here is though that walls in the art world are also frames.
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If you look at the 'salon hang' from the late 19th century above, the first thing you become aware of is that there is no wall space. The heavy frames do all the work separating each image one from each other. The owner has bought the lot, and is showing off his or her purchase power.
In the spotlit image above it is the lighting that frames the work, in fact it is the lighting that reinforces the idea of the 'aura' of the work of art. The gallery has literally given each art-piece its own individual auratic glow. Turn the lights on and we are left with a white cube space.
The white cube, as written about by O’Doherty is not as a gallery space a neutral container. It is a historical construct that operates to 'frame' the artwork within it in a particular way. It is an aesthetic object itself, with a particular aesthetic history, which we can trace back to sanitarium design and the need for hygiene. O’Doherty would go on to argue that this aesthetic actually overpowers the work that resides within it. Those white walls are not context free, the apparent neutrality of the gallery walls is just that, apparent, and the gallery's attempts to attain an aura of timelessness by either spotlighting the art or giving it lots of surrounding white space is a sort of salesperson's trick or slight of hand.
O’Doherty looks at the gallery as a sacred space that is like an archeological tomb, undisturbed by time and containing cultural riches. The gallery is thus constructed to give the artworks lasting value; it is a space designed to immortalise the cultural values of our elite i. e. very rich people. Reminding us that galleries are also shops and like most shops they are designed to get you forget the worries of the outside world, the white cube establishing a crucial distance between that which is to be kept outside (the social and the political) and that which is inside (the everlasting value of art). In this case the artwork is framed to ensure that it is separate from the rest of the world, so that the buyer can clearly purchase its aura. In the case of this sort of art the buyer is also buying into the elite world of art and in doing so, establishing a certain set of credentials.
Of course once you understand the game you can enter into it. You can play with the conventions and subvert them to your own ends. Framing and presenting can be a political decision as well as an aesthetic one. But it is important to remember that as the number of paintings are removed from the old collection that we see in the 19th century stereoscopic image above, more and more wall space is revealed, and this wall space operates as a frame. It might not be the golden, florid, decorative thing of the late 19th century, but it is just as much a frame, but this time it is masquerading as a neutral space.
As you can see from this argument, the frame operates in the real world. It operates as a way of giving the observer a cut off or separate space within which to contemplate the artwork, but this operation is a complex one. The space of the frame oscillating between the 'real' world and an ideal space, a space within which art's spiritual or aesthetic values may be cultivated. As the world outside meets the world inside there is a complicated arena within which a certain duality comes into play. Deridda is fascinated by this and he calls it the parergon.
It was Kant that linked the idea of the parergon to that of a painting's frame. On the one hand the frame is seen as an addition or ornament. It embellishes the artwork, but suggests Kant, it doesn't add anything to it. On the other hand Kant sees the frame as an example of something that is neither one thing or another, it is something detached or separate; detached not only from the thing it enframes but also from its surroundings, (the wall where a painting is hung). According to Kant, the parergon is like the gold leafed frame for a painting, a mere attachment added to gain superficial charm or grace, and which could in reality detract from the genuine beauty of the art. The frame belongs neither to the artwork nor does it operate as an article of useful furniture, you can't sit on it, eat from it or keep yourself warm, but in sitting between the two it operates as a permeable boundary, a space between the domain of the artwork and the environment of the room the work is hanging in.
These 'liminal' or 'threshold' moments are essential to an understanding of animism and other forms of web-of-life spirituality that encompass both human and non human understandings of the world and I personally have thought of them as being similar to what Lewis-Davis in his book 'The Mind in the Cave' calls the membrane, or how neolithic peoples perhaps regarded cave walls that were used to support paintings. On the one hand they were just that, walls of caves that you could paint or draw on, but they also served as permeable barriers that allowed people to imagine a space beyond the depictions, one that included the world of spirits and a space in which negotiations between different animals and environments could be performed, often with a spirit guide or shaman.
My understanding of Derrida in relation to this comes via Hegel. Hegel wrote extensively about the master/slave dialectic. The idea being that in a relationship where there is an imbalance of power what can happen is that gradually the one begins to depend on the other and as this dependency deepens the power begins to move from one to the other. I'm not sure how much this happens in reality, but it is a very interesting idea.
Derrida is interested in dualities, he is always looking for openings that allow him to point out that what you think is happening is one thing but in reality it is something else. So in the case of the frame he suggests that what was thought of as an addition is in fact more important than the actual artwork. In doing this he spends a lot of time discussing the position of the frame as both in and out of the world and this is where I would like to bring the screen into the discussion. Like the frame, the screen also sits between one thing and another. It frames the images that appear within it and operates as a physical object in the 'real' world, you can hold it and touch it and treat it like a piece of furniture, but you can also forget it exists and fall into the world it contains.
The formal issue that has always intrigued me is the relationship between the circle and the rectangle that happens between the lens and the sensor. The cartoon above epitomises the problem, the lens has a circular focus that cuts away the rest of the world, thus whatever that part of the world is linked to and shaped by is cut away, but then this cutaway is further re-framed within a rectangle. This action often totally changing the meaning of the event. Framing part of a wider complex event can even reverse its meaning; in the drawing's case, the left hand now threatening the right hand half of the image.
The Edinburgh camera obscura
If you go to see a working camera obscura, such as the one in Edinburgh, the first thing you become aware of is the nature of the curved image. This is what it is like inside the camera, but imagine a frame that is then placed over this circular image, and this is where the film or other photosensitive area is positioned.
The reframing is for a technical reason, the quality of the circular image worsens as we move farther from the lens' point of convergence. As we move towards the edge of the circle, images are dimmer, blurred and smudged. This is due to the lens, not the sensor. The lens converges light towards its centre, which means as you approach its edges you get less and more diffused light, hence the image edge's fuzzy-ness. This can be compensated for by the camera's sensor. A camera sensor compensates for a circular lens that distorts towards its edges in various ways, and because of a range of distortions, including aspherical elements, chromatic aberration, coma, low dispersion, and a high refractive index, has a lot of work to do. Sometimes it is worth looking at technical issues just to highlight how much the nature of a specific medium is shaping communication, so in this case because we are looking at how framing in photography effects meaning and the fact that framing is also a way of minimising but not eliminating lens distortion, I'm going to try and non-scientifically pass on some information.
At the centre of the problem with a lens in relation to focus is field curvature. Curvature of field, is a natural aberration of all lenses, due to their curved structure and how light moves through them and onto a flat plane. The edges of an image can therefore appear soft or distorted compared to the sharper central area. One of the most difficult things to resolve is chromatic aberration, which is when a lens can't focus the different colour wavelengths all at the same point. Wavelengths of light enter a lens and disperse as they pass through it, in order to get all the different wavelengths to come back together at the point of the sensor, these wavelengths need reorganising in order to become focused. Some very high quality lenses can do that, but there is always some difference in diffraction, the problem is technically called colour fringing. A drawing will as always clarify the issue, so let's look at a few technical drawings of the issues involved.
O’Doherty looks at the gallery as a sacred space that is like an archeological tomb, undisturbed by time and containing cultural riches. The gallery is thus constructed to give the artworks lasting value; it is a space designed to immortalise the cultural values of our elite i. e. very rich people. Reminding us that galleries are also shops and like most shops they are designed to get you forget the worries of the outside world, the white cube establishing a crucial distance between that which is to be kept outside (the social and the political) and that which is inside (the everlasting value of art). In this case the artwork is framed to ensure that it is separate from the rest of the world, so that the buyer can clearly purchase its aura. In the case of this sort of art the buyer is also buying into the elite world of art and in doing so, establishing a certain set of credentials.
Of course once you understand the game you can enter into it. You can play with the conventions and subvert them to your own ends. Framing and presenting can be a political decision as well as an aesthetic one. But it is important to remember that as the number of paintings are removed from the old collection that we see in the 19th century stereoscopic image above, more and more wall space is revealed, and this wall space operates as a frame. It might not be the golden, florid, decorative thing of the late 19th century, but it is just as much a frame, but this time it is masquerading as a neutral space.
As you can see from this argument, the frame operates in the real world. It operates as a way of giving the observer a cut off or separate space within which to contemplate the artwork, but this operation is a complex one. The space of the frame oscillating between the 'real' world and an ideal space, a space within which art's spiritual or aesthetic values may be cultivated. As the world outside meets the world inside there is a complicated arena within which a certain duality comes into play. Deridda is fascinated by this and he calls it the parergon.
It was Kant that linked the idea of the parergon to that of a painting's frame. On the one hand the frame is seen as an addition or ornament. It embellishes the artwork, but suggests Kant, it doesn't add anything to it. On the other hand Kant sees the frame as an example of something that is neither one thing or another, it is something detached or separate; detached not only from the thing it enframes but also from its surroundings, (the wall where a painting is hung). According to Kant, the parergon is like the gold leafed frame for a painting, a mere attachment added to gain superficial charm or grace, and which could in reality detract from the genuine beauty of the art. The frame belongs neither to the artwork nor does it operate as an article of useful furniture, you can't sit on it, eat from it or keep yourself warm, but in sitting between the two it operates as a permeable boundary, a space between the domain of the artwork and the environment of the room the work is hanging in.
These 'liminal' or 'threshold' moments are essential to an understanding of animism and other forms of web-of-life spirituality that encompass both human and non human understandings of the world and I personally have thought of them as being similar to what Lewis-Davis in his book 'The Mind in the Cave' calls the membrane, or how neolithic peoples perhaps regarded cave walls that were used to support paintings. On the one hand they were just that, walls of caves that you could paint or draw on, but they also served as permeable barriers that allowed people to imagine a space beyond the depictions, one that included the world of spirits and a space in which negotiations between different animals and environments could be performed, often with a spirit guide or shaman.
My understanding of Derrida in relation to this comes via Hegel. Hegel wrote extensively about the master/slave dialectic. The idea being that in a relationship where there is an imbalance of power what can happen is that gradually the one begins to depend on the other and as this dependency deepens the power begins to move from one to the other. I'm not sure how much this happens in reality, but it is a very interesting idea.
Derrida is interested in dualities, he is always looking for openings that allow him to point out that what you think is happening is one thing but in reality it is something else. So in the case of the frame he suggests that what was thought of as an addition is in fact more important than the actual artwork. In doing this he spends a lot of time discussing the position of the frame as both in and out of the world and this is where I would like to bring the screen into the discussion. Like the frame, the screen also sits between one thing and another. It frames the images that appear within it and operates as a physical object in the 'real' world, you can hold it and touch it and treat it like a piece of furniture, but you can also forget it exists and fall into the world it contains.
The selective frame and the circular lens
The formal issue that has always intrigued me is the relationship between the circle and the rectangle that happens between the lens and the sensor. The cartoon above epitomises the problem, the lens has a circular focus that cuts away the rest of the world, thus whatever that part of the world is linked to and shaped by is cut away, but then this cutaway is further re-framed within a rectangle. This action often totally changing the meaning of the event. Framing part of a wider complex event can even reverse its meaning; in the drawing's case, the left hand now threatening the right hand half of the image.
If you go to see a working camera obscura, such as the one in Edinburgh, the first thing you become aware of is the nature of the curved image. This is what it is like inside the camera, but imagine a frame that is then placed over this circular image, and this is where the film or other photosensitive area is positioned.
The reframing is for a technical reason, the quality of the circular image worsens as we move farther from the lens' point of convergence. As we move towards the edge of the circle, images are dimmer, blurred and smudged. This is due to the lens, not the sensor. The lens converges light towards its centre, which means as you approach its edges you get less and more diffused light, hence the image edge's fuzzy-ness. This can be compensated for by the camera's sensor. A camera sensor compensates for a circular lens that distorts towards its edges in various ways, and because of a range of distortions, including aspherical elements, chromatic aberration, coma, low dispersion, and a high refractive index, has a lot of work to do. Sometimes it is worth looking at technical issues just to highlight how much the nature of a specific medium is shaping communication, so in this case because we are looking at how framing in photography effects meaning and the fact that framing is also a way of minimising but not eliminating lens distortion, I'm going to try and non-scientifically pass on some information.
At the centre of the problem with a lens in relation to focus is field curvature. Curvature of field, is a natural aberration of all lenses, due to their curved structure and how light moves through them and onto a flat plane. The edges of an image can therefore appear soft or distorted compared to the sharper central area. One of the most difficult things to resolve is chromatic aberration, which is when a lens can't focus the different colour wavelengths all at the same point. Wavelengths of light enter a lens and disperse as they pass through it, in order to get all the different wavelengths to come back together at the point of the sensor, these wavelengths need reorganising in order to become focused. Some very high quality lenses can do that, but there is always some difference in diffraction, the problem is technically called colour fringing. A drawing will as always clarify the issue, so let's look at a few technical drawings of the issues involved.
Colour fringing due to the different diffraction rates of light wavelengths
Lateral Chromatic Aberration is what occurs when different wavelengths of light are focused on the same plane, but at different positions, this being due to the angle of light entering the lens and is visible at the edges of the frame, rather than near the centre, which is why post-production or in-camera solutions are needed to alleviate this.
Spherical Aberration is caused by light rays entering the lens and not converging at the same point. This impacts on image clarity, sharpness, and resolution and is more likely to be seen further away from the centre of the image.
Spherical Aberration is caused by light rays entering the lens and not converging at the same point. This impacts on image clarity, sharpness, and resolution and is more likely to be seen further away from the centre of the image.
Light entering at different parts of the lens is not refracted accurately
Coma or comatic aberration occurs when light rays pass through a lens at an angle, as opposed to straight on. When a lens design cannot focus these angular light rays at the same point, the point light source will be depicted as a teardrop highlight, rather than a circular highlight. This can be minimised by stopping down your lens.
Light coming at the lens from an angle
We still haven't quite squared the circle, which is why we still rectangularly frame photographs, when the lens is circular and the resultant image is circular too. The corners of a rectangle are further away from the centre than the middle of edges to the left, right, top or bottom, therefore if there is going to be distortion it will be still be revealed in those corners. In fact early cameras often had circular plates such as Thompson’s Revolver Camera from 1862 and 'button' cameras, designed to make small images button sized and shape that could be actually worn like a button. So it wasn't as if the circular format hadn't been considered. The frame as a rectangle, is a powerful concept and somehow it feels right to slice out recorded segments from life with a hard straight edge rather than a circular one. The telescope and the microscope both retain the circular form that reflects the shape of a lens, but as soon as we wanted to record directly what was seen through these optical devices, it was the picture within a rectangular frame that was the right format.
Thompson’s Revolver Camera
As soon as an image is made it has to fit a 'rectangular' world. Walls are rectangles and so are tables and shelves. Its easier to make right angled frames and film on a roll or as a plate is easier to use with rectangular formats. So there are a lot of simple practical reasons for retaining a rectangle for the photograph, but they are all linked to our overall shaping of the world with geometry. Cave paintings were not in rectangles, it is only when geometry begins to impose itself on construction methods that the circular or more organic form becomes relegated to history.
Buildings have been built using geometric principles for thousands of years, but the idea of the frame in relation to a moveable image is quite recent. It is believed that Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits from around 2,000 years ago were made before the person died. They were then hung on a wall until they died and then the portrait was fixed onto the coffin. Whether or not this is true, and there are arguments about how they were used, these images were portable and they would have been placed around the painter's workshop and probably taken into various residences in order for the artists to catch a likeness of the person. There are traces of a surrounding frame on many of them, there frames may have been to fix them to the coffin or to display them on a wall or for both reasons, whichever reason is right, these were portable images that were at one point framed.
Fayum mummy portrait
Before the portable frame, there was the border and the border operated as a frame. I have been to see the mosaic of the stag hunt at Pella near Athens and you can look down on the floor from a balcony above, as well as walk up to the edges of it on the ground floor. The surrounds operate as a powerful set of symbolic forms, setting the scene of human /animal inter-action within an environment that signifies the wider 'cosmic' arena of nature. The frame in this case is a floor and the image an incident or moment to be picked out within a surrounding world of land and sea life.
Stag hunt: Pella
We can see the link between architecture and the frame in Classical Greek ceramics. Columns are often used to divide spaces up, the artists obviously linking the idea of an important three dimensional architectural space, often signified by tall columns outlining the entrance, with two dimensional scenes operating around the continuous surface of a ceramic vessel.
Although borders, or columns acting as frames in ancient art were used to divide scenes as well as provide space for ornamentation in both pottery and wallpaintings, the first wooden frames surrounding images as we know them today appeared on small panel paintings in twelfth and thirteenth century Europe. Often painted onto one solid piece of wood, the area to be painted was carved out, leaving a raised border around its edge. The outer edges were usually gessoed and gilded, before any painting was done, which was often the last part to be completed. Much of the meaning was embedded in the cost of the materials and records from this time emphasise the cost of various materials in craftsmen's contacts, the idea of worth being given to an image by artistic invention was something that would have to wait for the Renaissance.
The use of mitred moulding strips for making the edges of panels came later, and gradually replaced the simple wooden moulding strips that were attached to the outside edges, especially as larger pieces of wood became harder to get hold of, because more and more of Europe's forests had been cut down for fuel as well as for ships, furniture and housing.
Paolo di Giovanni Fei: 14th Century painting on wooden panel using an engaged frame
The image above has a frame built around it, (an engaged frame) the frame is deeply carved out, the golden space that the figures exist in being a religious space rather than an actual space, the frame being in effect a spiritual building or architecture to place the iconic image of Mary and Jesus within. The frame is used to give the effect that you are stepping from one world into another, an idea that artists in western Europe will return to many times.
As you can see a frame is a complex idea and one I shall probably return to again and again. It links newer forms of image presentation with older ones and has always been related to cutting something out of reality and making it special.
The TV when looked at historically has had a wide range of framing concepts engaged with it, and the particular time periods within which these surrounds were developed also have stylistic impacts on the situation. Because the TV was always associated with the idea of 'modern communications' it was also often placed in a containing surround that was designed to state that modernity.
The state of the art TV screen immediately above has a very thin black border and we are often sold an idea that suggests this border is so thin, it creates no separation between you and the reality the TV depicts. The ultra real 'high definition' screen, allowing you into a world that is as real as the one you are in. Although this frame is wafer thin, in some ways the belief in a new 'realistic' technology is not that dissimilar to the belief in a religion.
In both cases, the argument is that you can escape your messy, difficult reality by passing through the frame into another world. One is a world of sophisticated technology and imagined universes and the other is of sophisticated technology and imagined universes, we just think they are very different, but the panel painting was at the cutting edge of image technology during its time and the high-definition TV screen is too, but for how long?
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