S1E18: Frames Essay
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp (1917, replica 1964), image from Tate Modern
Imagine a painting hanging on a wall. The painting has a frame. It is likely wood or metal. It might be quite ornate, with gold leaf and carved scrollwork, or it might be modern and austere. It might have glass over the front.
Why is it there? What purpose does the frame around a painting serve?
You might say things like:
The frame is a device used for hanging the painting in a gallery
The frame protects the painting
The frame helps showcase, complement, and highlight the work
These answers are correct on many levels.
But perhaps most fundamentally, the frame is a box around the work, and it says “the work is inside this box, and everything outside is not the work”.
The frame tells you where the world stops and the art starts.
If you have been to art school, you are familiar with this and related ideas. Frames set expectations.
Art galleries and museums themselves are a kind of frame. When you step into them, your expectations are being set that what you are seeing in the space, on the walls is noteworthy or important or interesting. The exhibits are designed to corral groups of work together. The spaces in between are blank and empty, so you do not get confused.
It is the same with music. When you walk into a concert hall to see a symphony play, you are entering a kind of frame. Your expectations are set the moment you enter the building, and everything about the experience is reinforcing those expectations. You learn the music has not started until the conductor picks up his baton and starts waving it, and the music will end after the conductor puts his baton down, and turns around.
Even going to a club to see a rock band play is a frame. Bands may dick around and tune up, but there is usually some kind of clear signifier the performance is about to begin: “Hey everybody, we’re a band and this is our new song. 1234!”
Many artists, particularly contemporary ones, use the frame to subvert or challenge audience expectations. Perhaps the best example is John Cage, who composed a piece called 4’33” in 1952. In the original performance, a piano player walked out on stage in a conference hall, sat down in front of a piano, lifted the lid to reveal the keys...and then did not play. For 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
Many people miss the point of this work, and frequently say it is a silent piece. Part of Cage’s intent here was to show there is no silence, and the “piece” consisted of all of the sounds people heard inside the frame of the piano lid being raised and lowered.
Cage is highlighting the power of the frame: the music is what happens between two designated moments. Audiences expected the piano to be played somewhat. But there are rests and noises along with the piano notes. Cage simply removed the piano notes, leaving only the rests and noises.
Cage was a big admirer and eventual friend of an artist named Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was one of the big 20th century artists who grasped the importance of frames, and how everyone took them for granted.
One of Duchamp’s most notorious works is called “Fountain”. Created in 1917, it is considered one of the most important and influential artworks of the 20th century. “Fountain” is a urinal, which Duchamp had picked up from a plumbing store, signed, and placed on a pedestal.
This is about as pure an expression of the power and concept of frames as I can think of. Duchamp is saying this arbitrary, banal, low mass-produced object is art precisely because he simply put it in a frame.
Many people think this is a joke, that Duchamp is taking the piss, as it were. But he had been exploring these ideas for years prior, with his readymades, and would continue to explore them through the rest of his career.
Ultimately, Duchamp is highlighting the frame, and pointing out how it is just as important as the actual artwork. In fact, it might even be more important than the actual artwork. Duchamp said as long as you have the frame, you can put anything in it. But if you do not have a frame, you have nothing. You just have a urinal, like you might find in a men’s room.
Understanding frames is an important part of being an artist in the 21st century. For musicians, the frame -- or backstory, to use the vernacular of the times, or context -- has become extremely important. Read contemporary pop music reviews, and you are likely to find the majority of the words devoted to the frame. The reviewer will tell you about themselves, and then plenty of facts or stories about the artist, before they get to any writing about the music -- if they get to it at all.
Brian Eno wrote an essay in 1995 called “On Being An Artist”, in which he asks artists if they work inside or outside the frame. He references Madonna, as an example of someone who spent artistic effort on the outside of the frame -- her clothing, visual presentation, and other non-musical choices were just as significant (or more significant) than her musical choices.
Go watch the 1991 documentary “Truth or Dare”, about Madonna, the musician. At no time in its 2 hour runtime does she talk about music or with other musicians. You will get to know her dancers, however, and learn a lot about everything else she does.
The frame is all the stuff around the music. The album cover. The liner notes. The press campaign. The videos. The look the artist has. The production choices on the recordings or in the live shows.
For some artists and genres, we expect attention to be paid to the frame. For others, like country and folk, the reverse is true, and any acknowledgement or emphasis of the frame threatens the authenticity of the work and the artist.
Personae are a kind of frame. When The Beatles tell you they are actually “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, not The Beatles, they are trying to create a new frame. When David Bowie says he is Ziggy Stardust or The Thin White Duke or Aladdin Sane or just one of the guys in Tin Machine, he is creating a frame for his music.
Even the absence of typical frame elements can be a frame -- the mystery or uncertain identity around artists like Burial, Banksy, or iamamiwhoami was a part of what propelled them to notoriety and success.
Eno talks about how he could just show you a bent piece of wire, and it is unremarkable. But if he tells an interesting enough story about the bent wire, you will see it in a different way or in a different frame, and have a different art experience. Eno concludes by asking if any part of the work is not part of the frame.
Some artists really do not care about this stuff, and just focus on the music. Other artists prioritize the frame, and make the frame an essential part of the work.
Either way, it is a choice you make. Where do you work? And if a frame is just a way of saying “the art starts here”, what if we carry a frame around with us everywhere, constantly looking through it. Can we make the entire world, or our entire lives full of art? Can we make our lives art?
Why not?
[this essay owes quite a bit to Brian Eno’s essay “On Being An Artist” from his book A Year With Swollen Appendices.]