Continuing my translation of Pierre Bourdieus lectures on Manet, here is an interesting passage in which he speaks about the frame and its implications: There is still a long study to be made about the frame, which is one of the things the Impressionists questioned. The frame was something you didnt think about, it was taken for granted, there was a frame. They tackled the frame, which was normal because they had a new way of framing, of cropping. Whilst it had been something that was added afterwards, that you could leave to an underling, the artist started to confront the frame directly. Mallarmé writes that Manet brings along something important, which is to show the links between the studio, the plein-air (i.e. What is outside the studio) and the ditching of the pre-constructed framing, of the theatrical composition, which goes together with the discovery of the plurality of viewpoints, itself linked to the discovery of light as that which wraps everything in differences of tones, of values and not in differences of shadow and light. The frame, by isolating the painting, separates it from the world and institutes it as a painting (Mallarmé: this is a painting), it is a representation cut off from the real, from the order of the real; it constitutes the work as autonomous, as well as the artist who is the final master of the cropping. A contemporary analogy is the final cut in films, the right to say the end. Through the frame, through the framing, the artist asserts his authority, his power to transform an initially imaginary framing into a real one which closes off the viewers look in the limits wanted by the painter. The world, closed off in that frame, becomes a self-sufficient world. The frame also consecrates what is framed: it makes it worth looking, it museifiesso to speak, it partakes of the act of consecration which is what any museum does (the consecration of the exhibition in a recognized space meant for that). Pierre Bourdieu, Manet a symbolic Revolution.
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 13:07:54 +0000
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