Out of Frame: How the Removal of Societal Boundaries Erased the Picture Frame

[00:00:00]This is Julia James Davis and welcome to the war on beauty. One of the most interesting yet subtle differences you'll notice between old and new art is that almost everything everything really used to be framed. And nowadays so much art is unframed. And if it is in a frame it's usually very minimal unnoticeable frames. I was recently at the Getty Center and I was actually stopped in my tracks by the frame that was on Winter Halter's portrait of Princess Leonilla.

[00:00:36]It was so huge and ornate with these intricate varied carved flowers positioned differently on each side.

[00:00:45]Amazing. And then in the next room was Turner's painting of Rome. And the wall text really specifically pointed out that the frame on this painting was the original chosen by the artist. So frames were really important. Historically, frames could be and often were the finishing touches completing a work of art or they could even be works of art in their own right. Frames serve the function beyond the utilitarian work of protecting an artwork and allowing it to be easily moved and taken from one wall or one house to another.

[00:01:27]Of delineating and demarcating a painting as a significant thing that is set apart from the rest of the world.

[00:01:36]that the painting at its highest is not a window onto some manufactured reality, but it's a self-contained semi-sacred creation. And the frame signals, okay, this object is important and so are its contents. So, please look with reverence and care. In that view, the stripping of frames in modern and contemporary art reveals the changing function of art and our attitude towards it. Art went from something truth and beautybearing that was protected by this boundary to something that can be trampled, abused, and eventually made pedestrian. And it's not just paintings that have been stripped of their sacred air by the removal of frames, but also sculpture which has been toppled from the pedestal and set on the ground. So let me just give a brief history of frames because it's actually such a complex history. So although there are examples of framing all in all of Western art history back to ancient times, framing as a practice really began in medieval Europe, especially as private collecting blossomed outside of a church setting.

[00:02:57]So paintings needed to be movable. They weren't just stuck to walls or built into altar pieces. So framing became a whole industry with wonderful hand carving and gilding. Amazing. And back then, even when frames were made of really simple wood and were not over-the-top guilt frames, they were always clearly there as a marked boundary and container for the art. Not as in the instances today when things do happen to be framed, something meant to be invisible and not noticed when looking at the art. And pedestals for sculpture serve the exact same purpose.

[00:03:38]They elevated the work above the realm of the everyday and signaled its specialness as a piece of art.

[00:03:48]But this again was a time of respect and sincerity and seriousness for the most part in art when art was seen as a real tangible thing that mattered in the world not just as a concept, a joke or a subversion. But as our society became increasingly diseased and broken with declining faith, the world wars, moral relativism amongst many other ails, it became increasingly boundaryless. People became increasingly boundaryless and the frame little by little was removed and the function of art like I said fundamentally changed alongside that.

[00:04:31]The change around frames seems to have begun in the mid to late 19th century.

[00:04:38]According to the frame blog, which if you're interested in this subject, it is an incredibly incredibly rich resource all about the history of framing. This blog says that frames quote had become mired in convention and repetition. The use of molded ornament had increased.

[00:04:56]Mechanical tools for joinery had been invented. And laborintensive handcarved frames were soon replaced by machine turned wooden moldings covered with cast decoration. So, not only had frames become increasingly mass- prodduced with the rise of industrialism, but themies and the salons that showed art, the quote unquote good art, were really really strict about what frames could and could not look like. So, the typical guilt frame became associated with a sort of old conventionalism.

[00:05:35]Really interestingly, the pre- raffleite brotherhood were some of the first to start custom making and designing their own frames that were not just artistically really innovative but even expanded the meaning of their paintings.

[00:05:52]But the pre- raffleite frames back in the mid 19th century were gorgeous even in all their innovation. They were stunning and really were a reaction against the mass production of frames at the time. But the real framing revolution happened just right after that in the 1880s when the impressionists namely Pizarro and Dega in their concern for light and color chose simple white frames instead of gilded ones. A Christy's article on the subject quoted a journal journalist contemporaneous to the impressionist who said that in 1881 the most original aspect of these revolutionaries is the surrounds of their works which are white gold frames are left to old painters tobacco chewing dobbers opponents of light paintings.

[00:06:53]So stodgy old guys use guilt frames and the renegade pioneers don't. So that was the first instance of the declining importance and eventual breaking of the frame. And I'm not sure exactly who the first artist was who got rid of the frame entirely, but the first person who came to my mind was and probably must be one of the earliest examples is a Russian painter Casmir Malavic who in 1915 did his infamous black square painting. This work was completely frameless just a canvas. This painting was placed in the corner of a room, which I didn't know this and what the significance of that was, but according to the Guggenheim, they said this painting was placed in the upper corner of a room, the very space that would be reserved for a religious icon in a Russian home. So, it's not just that frames were issued, but also the way paintings were hung changed drastically.

[00:08:02]And of course, this means something. Art became something that inhabited the viewer's space and confronted them. I feel like that's a word people use all the time, but it broke out of its proper boundaries and usurped its proper role, too. It became something like a new religion. And in its worldliness and subjectivity, art became as it is now almost unquestionable. So while Maavich in 1915 made art an object, shortly thereafter in 1917, Marcel Duchamp made an object art, he reversed the whole thing that Maavich did and put a urinal on a pedestal. Duchamp ironically acknowledged that a pedestal or a frame greatly contributes to an artwork's power and his point was that as long as you frame something or put it on a pedestal then you look at it as art and that's what makes it art. But of course that is not true. But in that he succeeded in fundamentally changing art and the downward spiral began. And now we are in a frameless plinthless world where art reorients the viewer and inhabits space and democratizes experience and all those platitudes and buzzwords that really mean nothing. So, first Mavic and then Rothco's allabsorbing scenes and Carl Andre's walkable squares and graffiti brought into the gallery and then a pear on the floor, a bottle of Jack in the corner, a sculptural girl texting and a palazzo veio. Where does it all end? Nowhere. It will never end until boundaries are rebuilt. In an art journal article on Malayich, Branislav Yako, and I'm sorry, I'm totally butchering his name, Branoslav Yako Leavich says that the frame has the effect of quotation marks. It hints that the image does not fully belong to the place it occupies. The skilled hand of an artist and the mathematically precise laws of perspective have transported the image from elsewhere. And it is to that non-existent elsewhere that the image properly belongs. The image is floated by the frame. While this quote makes almost zero sense, I think I'm interpreting it to mean something actually positive. And I have to say, you can really never tell what these post-modern academic essays even mean.

[00:11:00]They're so obfuscated with their language. Obfuscating with their language. But I'm interpreting this quote to mean that yes, art does come from somewhere else. It's an inspiration from God who uses the artist as a scribe, so to speak, to faithfully record to the best of his ability the image, the scene, the story. And the frame acknowledges this complete idea.

[00:11:30]The frameless picture occupying more of our worldly space is not a good thing, but it shows that art has swapped the sacred for the profane. And I would say that the lack of frame in many of our contemporary works actually has become a new set of quotation marks allowing the artist to never fully commit that their works are even art. Because if you put 99% of this stuff in a frame or on a pedestal, it would become immediately evident that it does not pass the test.

[00:12:04]It does not cut the mustard. In fact, that could be a test that we use to tell if something is true art or not. And in that way, I think Duchamp was totally onto something. Put it on a pedestal, put it in a frame, and it becomes immediately clear, just like the toilet.

[00:12:24]While true art does not need a frame, false art certainly cannot have one. So in conclusion, art needs to be in its place with its properly defined boundaries. Not just so that we can make objective and good judgments about it, but so that art can function at its highest level. The same goes really for the rest of society, which is also elevated and made better by boundaries.

[00:12:55]And lastly, I think that there will not be any real boundary breaking, which by the way, I'm all for until boundaries are restored. It is not an accident at all that artistic revolution ended with the breaking of the frame and the plinth. And since then, everything has been derivative, stagnant, and ultimately regressive. This is such an endlessly interesting and detailed and rich topic that I barely scratched the surface of. I'm going to put all of my sources below so you can check out all of the links, especially to the frame blog, which is incredible. You could spend hours on that website. But I would love for you to notice this the next time you're at a museum or at a gallery.

[00:13:48]Notice what has a frame and what does not and how that makes you view the art differently. So, thank you so much for watching. I hope that you'll please like, comment, and subscribe and I will see you in the next video.