Frame
With the same spirit of conviction as a five year old who, upon finding an interesting specimen in the dirt, holds it pinned between first finger and thumb and raises it, proudly, to sunlight in order to get a better sense of what the thing is - let's take our long lost fictional friend, F, and place him in some situations - hold him up to the light and plumb the depths of his description - and see if the specimen is worthy of the glass case or not. Frame. Frames. Framed. Framing. These are our words. F, by the miracle of transitive relation, will be our guide and with our without his animation and cooperation a fitting envelope might be made to place the contents of these words into for safe keeping to be used now or never.
1.
F knows, like most bright chaps, that a frame is a thing which a picture is hung in. Paintings are put in frames so that they can hang from a wall. Photographs receive this same tribute. F can recite a list of frames he has in his own collection: wooden, aluminum, steel, glass, and plastic. F knows that only the best paintings and photos are worthy of a frame and this is where his first small impulse lies, as it always does, with a metaphor: Hierarchy.
The crippling effects of making art is exhausting enough without having to worry about whether or not that art will be hung properly, behind mat and glass. F remembers this feeling on a much, much smaller scale when he was a child playing with watercolor paints in grade school. The teacher would beam at the children, as teachers often do, that if the paintings turned out particularly good then perhaps the parents might exhibit it on a wall or refrigerator door. Furious F, sweating with frustration, sees his pathetic slice of paper not as his own, as something for him to make, but as something burdensome, something so heavy and pressing with its weight that he cannot slink out from underneath it, not even enough so to scratch a single mark from his fingernail along the middle of the blank expanse of paper. He dips his brush into the water and watches the color expand and dissolve. He touches the tip of this brush to the page and watches that color expand and dissolve yet again against the white opaque background and he imagines that he's dissolving too. For all his faith, he lacks the self-directed kind, and because of this F cannot remove the weight of the impending decision that will soon take place at home. Will it be suitable for framing? It is a question he will ask himself in several different languages over the course of several different decades and if one wants to, one can easily see both a glimmer of hope and a shadow-slice of its opposite in this question: Is it suitable for framing? F can ask that as much of his own life as he can of the photograph he just developed. He can ask it of himself, he can ask it of others, and its always the same - a way of dividing the newborn world into either expressly good (frameable) and expressly bad (not). And when he makes the decision, he makes it by himself on behalf of his aesthetic world. This makes it existential, as Sartre would say that by choosing for himself he is also always choosing on behalf of man - only with framing, F is more specific: he is always choosing on behalf of man who follow his own aesthetic rules.
2.
The crippling effects of making art is exhausting enough without having to worry about whether or not that art will be hung properly, behind mat and glass. F remembers this feeling on a much, much smaller scale when he was a child playing with watercolor paints in grade school. The teacher would beam at the children, as teachers often do, that if the paintings turned out particularly good then perhaps the parents might exhibit it on a wall or refrigerator door. Furious F, sweating with frustration, sees his pathetic slice of paper not as his own, as something for him to make, but as something burdensome, something so heavy and pressing with its weight that he cannot slink out from underneath it, not even enough so to scratch a single mark from his fingernail along the middle of the blank expanse of paper. He dips his brush into the water and watches the color expand and dissolve. He touches the tip of this brush to the page and watches that color expand and dissolve yet again against the white opaque background and he imagines that he's dissolving too. For all his faith, he lacks the self-directed kind, and because of this F cannot remove the weight of the impending decision that will soon take place at home. Will it be suitable for framing? It is a question he will ask himself in several different languages over the course of several different decades and if one wants to, one can easily see both a glimmer of hope and a shadow-slice of its opposite in this question: Is it suitable for framing? F can ask that as much of his own life as he can of the photograph he just developed. He can ask it of himself, he can ask it of others, and its always the same - a way of dividing the newborn world into either expressly good (frameable) and expressly bad (not). And when he makes the decision, he makes it by himself on behalf of his aesthetic world. This makes it existential, as Sartre would say that by choosing for himself he is also always choosing on behalf of man - only with framing, F is more specific: he is always choosing on behalf of man who follow his own aesthetic rules.
2.
Fortunately for F, he's capable of seeing things a little less shrouded in symbolism than his hapless biographer is, and he can tell you that a frame is a rectangular (or sometimes oval shaped) border, generally made of wood or metal, that holds in place a piece of glass and backing with an image sandwiched between, meant for the specific purpose of hanging that image on a wall in a protective and attractive fashion. Borders break an object out of its world and in a way, isolate it from its surroundings in order to give it an individual appeal. A frame works much in the same way: photographs can be thumbtacked into a wall or they can be carefully preserved in a coffin of wonderful materials to be hung from a nail by a taught wire - the former will never look bad and the latter will almost always look more impressive.
3.
The word itself, Frame, has certain other connotations, too: for a criminal to frame an innocent person, or for a photographic or cinematic "shot" to be "framed" pleasantly, or, even thinner: the frame of a body. Our F has stumbled on the last thought several times during his meanderings through the dusty crevices of his own sacred existence, and each time he's been struck by the same blind burst of epiphany.
A traditional frame is made of two main components: glass and wood. The glass provides a clear protection while the wood provides support. On a human body, the legs and arms (and sometimes torso) can be considered the wood, or what is commonly referred to as the "frame" itself. F has felt his own limbs splinter from exhaustion, he's felt his knees both creak and moan, he's even had the odd sense of lifelessness wash over an arm or half a leg from sitting in an uncomfortable position for too long and each time its happened he's joked to himself, always to himself, that the thing has turned into a heavy log, or an immobile stump. Ribs, he thinks, frame the heart, and the skull frames the brain. Yes, F likens bones to the wooden moulding and it is not a stretch of the imagination to guess what he likens to the glass of a frame.
The glass of a frame is the invisible heart of the thing and the reason for the wood, and in way this makes the glass the main part of the frame and not the sturdy border as he had originally assumed. Reversed to further enhance the point: a frame without glass would offer no protection whatsoever to the precious thing framed. This glass, then, is the soul and for F it takes on a see through shine that he praises infinitely in his gestures.
4.
4.
Perhaps he is in a museum walking with a friend, and the exhibit is of black and white photographs so there are sure to be plenty of frames, and perhaps he and this friend are stopping in a lopsided gallery viewing the photos framed on one wall. The friend's eye will read the thing from outside in, first stopping at the visually arresting image of a pristine white wall dotted with the photographs. Closer: the friend's eye leaps logically to the first border of the frame and the friend admires the right angles, the precision with which the frame is joined together at the corners so that there is no visual gap to hint to the eye that things are not as solid as originally thought, and eventually to the decorations that flank the face of the frame (Yes, like F, frames do have a face.) Closer still: the friend ignores the glass completely and stares straight through to the image held just a single small breath beneath.
A model of backwardishness, we have our F who smiles as he funnels the thing into view in reverse. As is his habit, F first walks up to the wall as close as he can while still being able to take in each framed photograph on its own. He positions his eye, as best as he can, in the very middle of the whole thing and he focuses, sharp and close and needle thin, until he blurs out the entire boundary outside of the image; banishing the wall, banishing the mat, banishing the frame all in a nice, soft, unfocused haze. He views the photograph, sips it, drinks it, gulps it, and steps a half step backwards. Can you see? Is his mouth moving yet? He has a tendency to talk to himself while doing this. F is a director of his own movie and he is constantly giving directions to every piece of the set that surrounds him whether they are animated actors or a dumb and deaf prop; he mumbles to himself backwards. This is how he looks at art: from the closest and most centered pinpoint and then radiating outward in ever growing concentric rings of concentration. Details, first, he whispers. (Its a digression worth pinning down a bit more properly: He does this in the way a child learns his hometown. First by picturing his room, then by picturing his home, then by picturing his street, then by picturing his block, and zooming out increasingly ala Powers of Ten, which he, and you, and me, and all of us loved as kids.) With the step backwards he is able to now take in the "whole picture" within the frame and can see it from the god's eye view that it was meant to be seen with. Only after learning the side streets and alleys of the photograph can he actually enjoy the plane ride-view of its city, all at once. F marvels at the glass. F always marvels at the glass. In his own private world of details, the glass forms the castle that tops the whole entire kingdom and though it is invisible and visible at the same time he can smile at seeing it and smile at imagining it at the exact same time. This glass, the very glass held between frame and backing that is protecting this photograph like an invisible sheet of careful care, it is special because of its space and the way in which it mirrors it back at him. F can see an outline vaguely traced on the translucent surface of the glass, the smoothness almost always begs him to leave a finger smudge, and the outline shapes itself into him and his image! Moving further away from the wall and the photograph he sees that the reflection was wrong, it was not him at all, and this makes him even happier for making such a silly and self centered mistake. F sees the glass over the photograph now, and it is bordered with its wooden moulding. He pays no attention to the corners and does not let his eyes lag or droop over the embellishments done to the frame's face (much in the same way that he would not look at the scars of a person's face for any prolonged period of time.) The glass, for him, is the completion of the Frame (as an ethereal being) whereas the wooden border simply provides a way of blocking off the world outside of the single image framed within. It is the glass, the fragile and beautiful glass, that gives the protection and F is wide-eyed and standing in front of it imagining how it would only take a tiny pebble to ruin the entire perfection of the thing. The wood is an afterthought, and won't do a single thing to help.
5.
F could not explain to you how a frame is made. He could not cite the difference between an acid free archival mat and a standard one, and he couldn't even tell you that there are types of glass that eliminate the glare from reflected lights (why anyone would want that is a mystery!) as well as certain variations of plexi-glass that have to be employed for framing anything larger than 48 inches. He would not be able to explain to you how to pick up an entire sheet of glass, lifting with the heels of the hand and the grips of each fingertip curled over the top edge up onto the wall-mounted glass cutter and then situating the sheet along the tray and measuring the needed length, bumping the glass this way or that to get it perfect to the millimeter, and then with a single swipe lifting the released blade up and then, with a bite and a sandy sort of grinding sound, depressing the button and thus embedding the blade into the glass and letting the arm drop in a single droop quickly but not too brisk so that the blade runs a smooth and unhalted line perpendicularly down its face. Tap on either side, and the thing will break cleanly. F, sadly, has never felt this with his hands. He has not also felt the unfortunate sting of cutting the 48 inch piece of glass into a 36 inch piece of glass only to realize that he needed 37 instead, and has thus made one big beautiful piece of uselessness to be discarded (with a million perceptible shatters as it meets the metal bottom of the dumpster beside the frame shop.) F can't explain the way the mitre saw pounces downward on the length of moulding or the way in which the little pneumatic tool slides along the top of the holding area for the moulding to keep it steady and precisely measured to the proper length and width, or how the blade is actually two blades that form a right angle tilted on its side so that when cutting down into the moulding it makes for a perfect joinable corner. F has never used the machine that does the joining, this magic device that somehow holds the two ends of the frame together so tightly that there is no seam at all, and while holding the corner tightly, up shoots a staple with the press of a foot controlled button on the floor. Shooomp, shooomp, two staples driven in to the wood from below. F does not even know the math needed to create a proper mat. He cannot subtract the images size from the overall size, nor can he figure out how to center the image, nor can he even begin to comprehend how on earth that bevel is cut so perfectly or even how it could be a reversed bevel.
The sum total of all of this production equates to, for F, a feeling of wonderment. Like a person wearing shoes who cannot understand the means that went in to producing those shoes, and how maybe he should put himself in that person's shoes and if he did then maybe he might appreciate them a bit more --- instead his blind ignorance of these facts, this production, seems to somehow make the object appear even more cloaked and hidden and thus more amazing. F, in this regard, is like Kafka who praised a coworker for being so good with the typing machine because he himself could not use it and that somehow equated to the fact that he himself could not therefore live in a world that uses typing machines, and that this seemingly normal trait is elevated into the heavens while Kafka slinks along the ground so much smaller. He could just as easily learn for himself, but the increase in knowledge would decrease all of the natural sense of wonder.
6.
A frame and our F. There is plenty more where this all comes from.
Our F, in this way, could be seen as a frame. He's the mobile limbs of Anyone and the plain and see through glass of Everyone, and when constructed we can start to glimpse a complete picture. No picture is complete without its frame after all, at least none that are worthy of our eyes. We look at F a lot, I think, because of whats behind his glass but also because of what is around that glass. To know F, to really know F, we sometimes have to describe the wall, the slant of the floor, and the position of the lights overhead --- without these little ingredients, the frame floats invisibly and makes little sense. Other times, though, we can simply see the picture and imagine the frame around it, what it is made of and how its size and proportion seem to lend itself to the overall feeling of completeness within. A frame can be a person and a person can be a frame, and words can be both and not really either one at the same time. F sings a song in his head when he thinks of the glass: We all have to be seen / to be seen through.
