First, consider a stain: “Ektachome photograph, 11x14 inches. Probable spaghetti sauce stains on verso.” This is at once an incongruous thing to read in an exhibition checklist and a fitting footnote to the life of the artist to whose work it is appended, the pioneering photographer and video artist Hollis Frampton. It appears in the checklist for the first-ever retrospective of his photographs at Buffalo, New York’s CEPA gallery, a three-floor exhibition of some 76 works co-organized by the nonprofit with the dealer Dean Brownrout (through September 5). A mercurial figure, Frampton is something of an odd duck of New York’s ’60s and ’70s scene, today lauded for his film work and exploration of new media by scholars and specialists and largely ignored by the market-inflected mainstream.At CEPA, and in related programming at other spaces throughout Buffalo, most notably at the Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Arts Center (a linked performance is slated for September 5), Frampton receives something of a corrective to this reception. Though it is a selling exhibition, with average prices in the low thousands, this aspect of commerce is less interesting than the fact that such a comprehensive look at the artist’s photographic output has never taken place before. Frampton’s film work, including his monumental “Magellan” cycle, has been widely celebrated — even packaged into a 2012 Criterion Collection release — his photography, and xerography (as in the Xerox machine), remains relatively obscure. (CEPA’s show does, however, include a number of stills from his films, including “Poetic Justice” and “Ordinary Matter,” both 1972.)In his writings and lectures on art and its problems, Frampton emerged as an astute, prescient, and sometimes cryptic observer. “The supreme ritual of our time… is the ritual of possession, the creation of possessable things, the conservation of the possible, the ritual process by which the things of the world and then their reproductions or representations are validated so that they can become ownable,” he said in a 1979 lecture at the Whitney republished in the 2004 issue of the October journal (to which he had also contributed during his life, along with Artforum). This is not the attitude of an artist who is willing to play ball with the systems by which art becomes validated, at least not by the usual channels. In fact, he went on to link the Whitney, the site of his lecture, to this process of commodification. An earlier message from Frampton, in the form of an acerbic 1973 letter demanding payment from MoMA for his appearance in an exhibition, is a perennial online hit, and, accounting for total eyeballs, perhaps his most-seen work.Frampton was hardly a willfully marginal figure. His photographs of artist friends in New York, many of whom would go on to great renown — Larry Poons, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain, and James Rosenquist, for example — appear in the ground floor exhibition space at CEPA and offer an immediate, and literal, counterclaim to marginality. (This was a New York milieu he came to through his schoolmates Carl Andre and Stella, both of whom he befriended before dropping out at Andover.) But it is in his more formally and conceptually adventurous work that Frampton’s sui generis character and exploration of art’s possibilities takes root.The spaghetti disclaimer appears in a 1964 photographic series, titled “Spaghetti,” of hued close-ups of the dish, and his preoccupation with food, and the aesthetics of consumption, recur throughout: in xerigraphs (essentially color photocopies) of canned food labels; in “Apple Advancing,” 1975, perhaps one of his best known photographs, part of a Muybridge-influenced series of perspectival studies of fruits in motion; in “Industrialization of the Chicken,” 1980-81, the exhibition’s largest and most complex work, a multi-medium piece fabricated posthumously in 1984; and in photographs of dried seafood procured from a Chinatown market.Frampton died in Buffalo in 1984, two and a half weeks after his 48th birthday, but his art remains prescient in its attentiveness to film as a medium and singularly captivating in its focus on the quotidian as a means of understanding art’s foundational connections to life. And his writing, some of which is archived at the nearby Burchfield Penney Art Center and the University of Buffalo — where Frampton taught and co-founded the Center for Media Studies — continues to generate interest. In focusing on his photographic work, CEPA’s exhibition offers an important contribution to the ongoing study of an artist whose cult status belies a greater relevance.
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