Hollis Frampton. Untitled [Frank Stella]. 1960

Hollis Frampton. Untitled [Frank Stella]. 1960. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (930100). Courtesy Barbara Rose. © Estate of Hollis Frampton. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.94 by guest on 30 September 2021 “Frank Stella is a Constructivist”* MARIA GOUGH No matter what we say, we are always talking about ourselves. —Carl Andre (2005) I begin with a photograph taken in 1960 by the photographer and soon-to- be filmmaker Hollis Frampton in the West Broadway studio of his friend Frank Stella.1 The painter’s upturned head rests against the window sill, almost decapi- tated. Defamiliarizing his physiognomy, the camera relocates his ears below his chin, trunking his neck with its foreshortening. Arrested, his eyes appear nervous, jumpy. On the sill sits a sculpture by Frampton and Stella’s mutual friend Carl Andre, Timber Spool Exercise (1959), a weathered stump of painted lumber, its midriff cut away on all four sides. This giant spool was one of dozens of such exer- cises that Andre produced in summer 1959 with the help of a radial-arm saw in his father’s toolshed in Quincy, Massachusetts, a few examples of which he brought back to New York. Propped atop it is a small mirror, angled to reflect the jog of Union Pacific (1960), a twelve-foot-long aluminum oil painting that leans against the opposite wall of the studio, its two lower corners and upper middle cut away, itself a mirror-image duplication of the square-format Kingsbury Run (1960) of the same series. Stella later described the particular character of his notched Aluminum series as stemming from the “traveling” of its bands: “[a] band moves along, jogs to the * An earlier version of this essay, which benefited immeasurably from the generous reading and critical judgment of Jodi Hauptman, was first presented at “Stella from the Start,” a symposium held at the Harvard University Art Museums in April 2006 in conjunction with the exhibition Frank Stella 1958; in revising the text for publication, I have not attempted to disguise its origins as a talk. Warm thanks to the exhibition’s curators Harry Cooper and Megan Luke for inviting me to contribute to the symposium, and to all its participants, as well as to the graduate students and faculty at Yale University. In writ- ing this essay I have learned much from many scholars, but I should especially like to acknowledge the work of Yve-Alain Bois on noncomposition and of James Meyer on Minimalism and Carl Andre. At different times, Jamie Nisbet, Alexandra Schwartz, and Pan Wendt provided invaluable research assistance, while Rachel Churner contributed indispensable editorial expertise, for which I am most grateful. 1. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections and Visual Resources, Barbara Rose Papers, inv. no. 9300100, box 8, folder 1. OCTOBER 119, Winter 2007, pp. 94–120. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.94 by guest on 30 September 2021 96 OCTOBER Frank Stella. Union Pacific. 1960. © 2007 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. side, and turns again to resume its original direction. That makes up a given unit: a band with a jog in it.” In contrast to the stripes of the Black paintings, these units were intended to be “more individual,” he added, “put together to make some- thing like a ‘force field’ (to use the term . Andre was fond of).”2 As reflected in the mirror, Stella’s jogged aluminum band rhymes with the lower-left contour of Andre’s cut: each rises vertically, moves to the right, then continues its ascent. Conjoining two different kinds of opacity—the one obdurate wood, the other repellent metallic pigment—the mirror binds together the respective enterprises of sculptor and painter. But even Frampton’s photographic enterprise is thema- tized here, by a visual field given over almost entirely to a vast expanse of pure window—that traditional figure of transparency—as it slips in and out of its own silvery opacity, like the ghost image of a daguerreotype. Only barely does one notice the almost imperceptible jog in the rooflines of the two adjacent buildings facing the studio. Three friends together in New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s, making their first incursions into the world of industrial modernity: aluminum pigment, standardized lumber, photographic apparatus; the repetitive gesture, the mecha- nized cut, the photographic reproduction. In each case, these incursions were produced in series; while by no means exclusive to art produced since the industrial revolution, the increasing recourse to the series as a primary mode of aesthetic production from the later nineteenth century onward partakes in the general basis and principle of modern manufacture, if only, ultimately, to con- found it. Consider, for example, Frampton’s famous series of fifty-two staged 2. Frank Stella, interview by William Rubin, New York, June and September 1969, quoted in William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), p. 47. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.94 by guest on 30 September 2021 “Frank Stella is a Constructivist” 97 photographs of Stella, shot between 1958 and 1962, and collectively entitled The Secret World of Frank Stella. The best-known image in the series is Stella painting Getty Tomb in 1959, coating an unprimed canvas with two-and-a-half-inch wide bands of black enamel. To the photographic convention of the creative artist-at- work, Frampton brings great conceptual wit, delivering the repetitive labor of Stella’s monochromatic brushstroke as laconic, literalist gesture: “There is not one shot [in The Secret World] that hasn’t been made before by a photographer of reputation,” Frampton wrote in January 1963. “My intention was a massive sottisier, the prize-picture on the point of becoming cliché. The series has . a critical atti- tude towards [photographic] tradition. The photographs, to encompass my aim, had to be ‘bad.’”3 3. Hollis Frampton, in Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, “On Forty Photographs and Consecutive Matters: Part I: January 26, 1963,” in 12 Dialogues, 1962–1963, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1981), p. 57. Bruce Jenkins notes that The Secret World began as a parody of a just recently published album of over three hundred photographs of the seventy-five-year-old Picasso at home and at work in his studio, by the professional photographer David Douglas Duncan (The Private World of Pablo Picasso [New York: Harper, 1958]); see Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane, Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 46. Frampton. Untitled, from The Secret World of Frank Stella (1958–62). 1959. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. © Estate of Hollis Frampton. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.94 by guest on 30 September 2021 98 OCTOBER Since the Secret World has never been published in its entirety, I cannot say whether our battered photograph officially belongs to it or not. Certainly, the extraordinary formalism of this portrait of one of the most fecund triangulations within the history of postwar art is doused with a good measure of the same wit. Hitherto unpublished as far as I know, the photograph is today found out of place, stashed together with sixteen later photographs of Stella by the legendary Italian photographer Ugo Mulas, from which it could not be more removed in sensibility. Mulas, an exceptional portraitist of celebrity artists, captured a whole generation in the mid-1960s in New York. The numerous pages devoted to Stella in his 1967 book New York: The Art Scene narrate the course of a typical day in the painter’s studio as he works upon the Notched V series (1964–65).4 Not only does Mulas doc- ument an altogether different moment in Stella’s trajectory, one in which the latter’s status and reputation had already been largely consolidated, but he also deploys the very convention of the creative artist-at-work that Frampton had paro- died just a few years earlier. During the critical years contemporaneous with the production of that parody, Stella himself developed an altogether different sensibility, a literalist sensibility wherein the work of art was supposed to reveal nothing other than its constitutive unaltered materials and explicit mode of construction: “What you see is what you see.” He would later disavow this literalism, in order to become—or perhaps return to being—the artist of his own painterly, even optical, desire. But not without having first exerted enormous influence on Andre, who would go on to become a major protagonist of Minimalism, of which literalism was, as Hal Foster reminds us, but one important thread.5 The present essay revisits the development of literalism in the early work of Stella and Andre. The first section covers familiar ground, attempting to put into a readily accessible format the basic chronology of their mutual exploration of ser- ial, modular, and deductive procedures between, roughly, 1958 and 1962; readers already familiar with this production should simply skip ahead. In section two, I endeavor to shed new light upon an old problem: on the one hand, Andre’s invo- cation of Constructivism in order to give a name to this newly emergent modular economy, and, on the other, the total absence on his part of any reference at the time to their most significant precursor in this regard, the Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko.

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