Article

T h e P r a x i s of th e T r a c t r i x

Luke A. Fidler
Department of Art History, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Abstract This essay analyzes Zorns Lemma (1962–1970), a film made by American
artist Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). Noting Frampton’s use of Robert Grosseteste’s
thirteenth-century treatise De luce [‘On Light’] as a key aspect of the film’s soundtrack, the
essay argues that Grosseteste’s investigations of light as a medium played a key role in
Frampton’s theorization of cinema. As such, his interest in medieval light theories spurred
him to develop a powerful, idiosyncratic response to prevailing discourses of media and
medium specificity during the 1960s. When examined in light of contemporaneous pro-
jects by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) and Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Zorns
Lemma points up the significance of medieval thought in the period’s conceptions of art
and time.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 96–114.

doi:10.1057/pmed.2015.44

Not now is a dynasty

Time stacks up then rises, steaming not-love
Eat it and love it
– Emily Kendal Frey, ‘I Cried So Hard I Cried Rice’

Two figures and a dog pick their way across a snowy field, the picture plane
marred by light flares, tail flashes and other filmic artifacts (Figure 1). As they
trudge through the drifting white, six voices reverberate in a metrical reading,
their words coming at the measured rate of one per second. They read an
idiosyncratic, heavily edited translation of Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-
century treatise on light, De luce [‘On Light’]. ‘Form is light itself or the doer of

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www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/
 The Praxis of the Tractrix

Figure 1: Hollis Frampton.

Source: Still from Zorns Lemma, 1962–1970. 16-mm film.

its work,’ they chant as the driving snow, inseparable from the image’s ground,
dissolves the outlines of the figures. Light: both form and its antithesis, the matter
of visibility.
The film, Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1962–1970), pioneered the defining
characteristics of experimental structural filmmaking (Sitney, 1979, 394–397). It
now looms large in most accounts of American experimental art. Fascinated by
the film’s structural logic and mathematical puzzles, scholars have long noted its
studied self-referentiality and concern with the very conditions of cinema
(Jenkins, 1984, 54–81). They have, however, given the work’s medieval refer-
ences short shrift, often misdating and misrepresenting De luce.1 Consequen- 1 Examples include
tially, the literature on Zorns Lemma generally investigates the film’s structuralist MacDonald
(1995), Segal
strategies and lengthy central section (composed of a long series of silent shots
(1971), Zyrd
built around the alphabet) at the expense of the final (Grosseteste-inspired) part, (2004) and
with its thorny issues of time and translation. Peterson (1994).
Revisiting Zorns Lemma, I contend that the film represents a rigorous, if Peterson curiously
calls De luce a
oblique, exploration of Grosseteste’s thought. Taking up a pre-modern notion of
‘mystical text’
medium, Zorns Lemma intervened in contentious debates about the status of art (Peterson, 1994,
and time in the late 1960s, discernible in the writings of figures like Robert Morris 114).
as well as the practice of artists and filmmakers ranging from Stan Brakhage to

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 Fidler

Stanley Kubrick. If the art and culture of the sixties betrayed an anxious
preoccupation with certain shapes of futurity – ‘a vision of the future ever
quickening and repeating,’ as Pamela Lee pithily puts it (Lee, 2004, 259) – then
Zorns Lemma describes a deployment of the past that more fully fleshes out art’s
possibilities for temporal investigation. Turning to Grosseteste, Frampton refash-
ioned the chronological circuits of cinema.
Writing shortly after the completion of Zorns Lemma, Barthes savored ‘the
sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text
out of the subsequent one’ (Barthes, 1975, 36). His language recalls Frampton’s
predilection for diagrams and formulae, as well as his preoccupation with the
erotics of matter and time (Frampton, 2009). It also models the means by which a
thirteenth-century bishop came to authorize a visionary account of film’s long
history. As recent scholarship has begun to show, the medieval world haunted a
set of avant-garde art practices during the long 1960s (Nagel, 2012, 116–132,
155–195). Frampton’s sharp-eyed account of Grosseteste’s significance demon-
strates just how embedded medieval thought was in the period’s critical stance.

A cco un ting f o r Tim e

Although it is possible (and valuable) to describe in great detail the debt of

Frampton and his peers to medieval objects and texts, I aim only in part to
historicize Frampton’s practice. Rather, I find myself responding to a solicitation
posed by the work, an invitation to speculate on temporal flux and the broader
stakes of imagined intimacy. A new dimension of Zorns Lemma emerges
precisely in the shuttling back and forth between the heady media-saturated,
tendentiously secular and unabashedly capitalist world of the late 1960s, and the
quite different world of the thirteenth century.
2 It is important to This, I think, has important political ramifications. In the words of Negri, the
distinguish this imagination offers ‘the most concrete of temporal powers’ (Negri, 2003, 22).
project from the
Marxist criticism, for example, has tended to reduce time to the category of
neoliberal sense
of history’s measure (and hence a privileged barometer of exploitation). As Negri points out,
paradoxical this figures time as the homogenous medium of labor. If, for Marx, we are beings
availability and constituted in and through time (in Negri’s paraphrase, time becomes ‘the
insignificance, as
exclusive material of the construction of life’; Negri, 2003, 35), it stands to
exemplified in
Fukuyama reason that the disruption of hegemonic schemas of time and medium should
(1992). For a animate any project of politicized scholarship. To imagine new futures we must
valuable critique imagine new pasts.2
of the re-framing To that end, I have selected my title with a certain form of praxis in mind;
of time under late
capitalism, see namely, the praxis of thought repeatedly claimed by Marx.3 This praxis is rarely
Crary (2013). explicated, but rather invoked through elliptical statements. Agamben has
convincingly argued that Marx’s notion of being-as-praxis secularizes earlier

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 The Praxis of the Tractrix

ontologies of being-as-divine-operation (Agamben, 2011, 91). Recognizing the 3 Examples abound,

intimacies of art and life, time and thought, Frampton’s encounter with notably Marx
(1947). For more
Grosseteste discloses a form of praxis that disavows reductive narratives of
on Marx and
technological determinism upon which both Greenbergian criteria of specificity praxis, see Axelos
and more recent art historical investigations of time in the 1960s are often (1976, 123–142).
founded. Frampton’s praxis exemplifies a more radical form of temporal
thinking, one that attends seriously to medieval resources (so unlike the common
negative deployment of ‘the medieval’ in the arena of electoral politics; Holsinger,
2007), that might help us craft a different, more promising means to unravel the
ideological dream of late capitalism.

G r o s s e t e s t e o n Li g h t

Over the course of some thirty-five years, Robert Grosseteste produced a series
of sophisticated texts on light among his other pastoral, theological and proto-
scientific works.4 He drew on the profusion of light metaphors in the Bible, as 4 For a recent
well as the writing of theologians such as John of Damascus and the light- chronology of his
scientific works
inflected language of Neoplatonic sources.5 In exegetical writings, homilies and
(not including his
treatises on phenomena from comets to rainbows, he figured light as a locus of Hexaëmeron), see
scientific and metaphysical concern. It keyed his attempt to reconcile the matter of Panti (2013a,
the world with the immateriality of God. His writings on light cast a long 185). For a
concise overview
shadow, becoming talismanic for the Wycliffites and Roger Bacon alike
of Grosseteste’s
(Southern, 1986, 13–19; Hudson, 2009). life and work, see
Probably written around 1225, De luce comprises Grosseteste’s best-known McEvoy (2000).
discussion of the nature of light.6 It plots his understanding of cosmic order, 5 Notable scriptural
theorizing light as the ‘first corporeal form’ [‘formam primam corporalem’] passages include
(Grosseteste, 2013, 239). At once a cosmological and an ontological claim, Genesis 1:4,
Ecclesiastes 11:7,
Grosseteste’s thesis makes light the bearer of both mass and meaning. Light John 8:12,
shapes and structures the world, ‘multiplying itself and spreading itself Ephesians 5:13,
instantaneously in every direction,’ extending matter in three dimensions John 1:5 and
(Grossteste, 2013, 239). It subtends the very conditions of being for, as Revelations 21:23.
For Neo-
Grosseteste continues, ‘corporeity is … either light itself or else … introduces Platonism, the
dimensions into matter insofar as it is participating in light itself and through works of
the power of light itself’ (Grossteste, 2013, 240). De luce would serve as the Augustine and
metaphysical background against which Grosseteste’s later explorations of Plotinus are of
special relevance.
color and vision developed. Finally, see
In both De luce and his later writings, he yoked light to a set of epistemological Marrone (2001).
and creative procedures associated with the coming-into-being of form. (It is 6 The chronology of
telling that the physicists who conceived the Big Bang theory at the beginning Grosseteste’s
of the twentieth century read Grosseteste with great interest; Gieben, 2003, works has been
heavily debated.
228–229.) This, in turn, had implications for the ways light could be put to

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 Fidler

In dating De luce purpose. In De iride, his treatise on rainbows, he describes the principles of
to ca. 1225, I refraction. From his observations, he calculates how ‘by means of a transparent
follow McEvoy
medium of known size and shape placed at a known distance from the eye, a thing
(1983) and the
comments in of known distance and size will appear according to place, size, and position’
Dinkova-Bruun (Dales, 1961, 400). Light, when manipulated by an engaged viewer, could scale
et al. (2013, 6). and mediate distance. It could serve, essentially, as an investigative medium.
Thus, in his analyses of comets, clouds and acoustics, Grosseteste’s understanding
of light informs his confidence in the world’s intelligibility.
Grosseteste’s words about form, matter and light evoke a discourse of art. His
comments can be productively read alongside the medieval theory and practice of
art after the first quarter of the twelfth century (and, as I will discuss later, they
resonate proleptically with arguments that suffused modernist thinking about the
notion of medium). A century before De luce, Abbot Suger’s stained-glass
windows at the Abbey Church of St-Denis thematized the interaction of light
and form. I am less interested in the heady ‘light mysticism’ famously ascribed to
Suger’s patronage by Erwin Panofsky than the way the window plotted sensory
and semiotic appeal, what Rudolph aptly calls ‘the unaccustomed light, color,
and immateriality of it all’ (Rudolph, 2011, 417). Above all, Grosseteste aimed to
affirm ‘the hermeneutic power of visible things in a divinely created world’
(Kumler and Lakey, 2012, 5). In both De luce and the windows at St-Denis,
manipulated light assumed the privileged status of medium par excellence.

Medieval Cinema

Grosseteste’s discussions of light afforded Frampton a way to think about his artistic
practice. A protean figure before his untimely death in 1984, Frampton was an
active member in a fluctuating set of artists, filmmakers and intellectuals centered
7 The most around New York and, later, Buffalo.7 Together with the artists Frank Stella and
comprehensive Carl Andre, he moved to New York in 1958 where he began experiments in film,
survey of
photography and forms of critical writing. Like other artists during this period,
Frampton’s film
work remains notably Allan Kaprow, he read widely in medieval art and history (Nagel, 2012,
Jenkins (1984). 180–185). Indeed, he sprinkled his early writing with references to John Lackland
For a succinct and Guillaume de Machaut (cf. Andre and Frampton, 1980, 40).
overview of
Although Frampton would not film the final section of Zorns Lemma until
his life, see
Goldensohn much later, he began compiling the material for Zorns Lemma in 1962. At that
(1985). time he was already familiar with Grosseteste’s work. In October 1962, as part of
a written dialogue with Andre about Duchamp, Brancusi, and the stakes of
sculpture, he wrote of Rodin’s drawings: ‘Those drawings are Rodin’s “specula-
tions.” They are his Lincolnian treatise on light, and end at the boundaries of his
sheet’ (Andre and Frampton, 1980, 28). Here, he references Grosseteste’s position
as bishop of Lincoln. Arguing that Rodin’s drawings realized their promise

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 The Praxis of the Tractrix

neither in the artist’s bronzes nor marble sculptures, but rather in Brancusi’s
disarticulation of naturalist form, Frampton posits both the drawings and De luce
as visionary documents, missives to a time beyond their conception.
Frampton’s use of the word ‘speculation’ is significant here. The speculative
disordering of time increasingly characterized avant-garde reformulations of
medium during the 1960s and 1970s. The word also has medieval resonances
that he was surely aware of; speculatio generally signified the pursuit of
philosophy to medieval readers, and it came to acquire the meaning of the pursuit
of truth by thought (as opposed to practical modes of reasoning that tilted at the 8 He contributed to
good) (Marrone, 1983, 3; Haines and DeWitt, 2008, 49). ‘Speculation’ encom- a conversation
taking place
passes questions of knowledge, vision and the mediation of thought. Its
among artists and
appearance in the dialogue with Andre betokens Frampton’s drive to hotwire critics during
the niceties of chronology. the rise of
It is therefore noteworthy that Frampton turned to De luce in the midst of the communications
technologies –
charged debates about media that convulsed the 1960s and 1970s. Together with
such as the Sony
his peers, he was forced to confront pointed questions about what it meant to work Portapak – and
in, or against, a medium. Robert Morris’ writings in Artforum, which were fre- shifts in visual
quently invoked in early critical responses to Zorns Lemma (Bershen, 1971; Segal, culture
occasioned, in
1971, for example), help elucidate the problem. In a series of provocative essays and
part, by coverage
artworks, Morris argued that the blurring of process, product and viewing of the Vietnam
experience shifted the stakes of media.8 As he put it in an essay published in 1970: War.

… as ends and means are more unified, as process becomes part of the 9 For the
work instead of prior to it, one is enabled to engage more directly with the relationship
between light and
world in art making because forming is moved further into the presenta-
cosmic order in
tion. (Morris, 1970, 92) Grosseteste’s
works, see
Eulogizing the ‘existential gap’ between the studio and the space of display, McEvoy (1982,
Morris framed a subtler notion of medium than that articulated by, say, Clement 149–205). An
Greenberg. Tangled in process and presentation, the work of art – its ‘making’ or updated critical
‘forming’ – transgressed its material support. edition of the
Latin text may be
An untitled Morris sculpture from 1966 shows how a work’s medium could
found in Panti
outgrow its matter (Figure 2). A ring of painted plywood activates its environ- (2013b). Although
ment via two sets of fluorescent lights. Critics have proposed many ways to Gieben argues for
understand the work of Morris and his minimalist peers; here, I simply want to a distinction
between the two,
observe that light, contrasting with the matte surface of the ring’s form, vexes
light constitutes a
easy circumscriptions of medium. The viewer becomes ensnared in the ground of universalizing
media much the same way that Grosseteste’s light makes the minor mundus of the discourse for
human body extensible with the maior mundus of the material world.9 The work Grosseteste
also directly challenged Greenberg’s well-known investment in areas of compe- (Gieben, 2003,
228). Compare
tence (Greenberg, 1940). Crombie (1961,
Other key players in the New York avant-garde drew on the Middle Ages to re- 131). See also
examine questions of medium. While I am unable to explore their work more related
fully here, Dan Flavin’s light sculpture dedicated to William of Ockham and developments in

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 Fidler

the performance
art of the 1960s
and 1970s
explored in Ward
(2012, 1–26).

Figure 2: Robert Morris. Untitled, 1965–1966. Fiberglass and fluorescent light. Overall: 60.96 cm×2 m
46.381 cm×2 m 46.381 cm. Dallas Museum of Art, general acquisitions fund and a matching grant
from the national endowment for the arts, 1974.145. © Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society, New
York.

McLuhan use of Grosseteste scholar A.C. Crombie in The Gutenberg Galaxy

(McLuhan, 1962) offer suggestive comparisons for Frampton’s work. More
importantly, other experimental filmmakers also drew on medieval theories.
Many of Frampton’s peers in the postwar period turned to alternative, paracine-
10 There is, of matic histories of light in attempts to describe genealogies for their work.10
course, a American filmmaker Stan Brakhage, for example, singled out Johannes Scotus
longstanding
Eriugena, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon and Grosseteste (Brakhage, 1975a, 7). In
interest among
filmmakers in works such as The Riddle of Lumen (1972b), The Stars are Beautiful (1974a) and
light. For a The Text of Light (1974b), Brakhage explored the range of light’s visual
perspicuous possibilities. He told interviewers that the pithy formulations of Bacon and Duns
scholarly
Scotus inspired his experiments, but his actual knowledge of medieval philosophy
investigation, see
Wees (1992). left much to be desired (Brakhage and Williams, 1973, 94). He seems to have
11 Brakhage learned what little he knew from Ezra Pound’s glosses of medieval thinkers in his
attributed the Cantos.11 For example, consider these lines from Pound’s seventy-fourth Canto:
genesis of his films ‘in the light of light is the virtù/“sunt lumina” said Erigena Scotus’ (Pound, 1996,
The Process 449). Here, Pound – whom, not coincidentally, Frampton visited almost daily
(1972a) and The
during the completion of the Cantos – conflates two very different medieval

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 The Praxis of the Tractrix

philosophers. At the premiere of his The Text of Light, during a public Shores of Phos: A
conversation about Grosseteste at which Frampton was present, Brakhage Fable (1972c) to
his reading of the
repeated Pound’s (probably intentional) mistake and muddled Francis with Roger
Cantos, and his
Bacon. Tellingly, he quoted Eriugena while equating the (historically specious) realization that
thirteenth-century struggle to prove ‘that intellect was light – that thought ‘Pound’s poem
actually was electrical’ with the project of legitimating film as art (Brakhage, is at center a
light poem ….
1975b, 43). As experimental filmmakers parsed light with growing subtlety, they
Suddenly I saw
eagerly enlisted medieval thinkers. that light could be
the protagonist of
a film’ (Brakhage
and Williams,
F ra m p to n’s S pe cul at io ns 1973, 97). For
a discussion of
Pound’s interest
De luce has been read as a proxy in Frampton’s film for the achievements of in medieval
Christian rationalism. Critics see the use of Grosseteste as an example of philosophers
Frampton’s interest in the esoteric tradition and of his work’s omnivorous (including
sensibilities, a piece of pastiche rounding out the bricoleur’s material stock. In Grosseteste), see
Benn Michaels
short, the specifically medieval elements of his practice have been marginalized,
(1972).
leaving unanswered the question of what a medieval treatise on light might be
doing in a highly self-conscious meditation on the filmic condition. Not only do
such glosses ignore Frampton’s long-standing interest in Grosseteste’s thought,
they foreclose a critical aspect of Zorns Lemma’s intellectual apparatus.
Indeed, Frampton’s turn to Grosseteste during the slow dismantling of
Greenbergian medium specificity points to the significance of medieval thought
for his reimagining of art’s parameters. In particular, Grosseteste’s nuanced
framing of light helped form Frampton’s understanding of the critical possibilities
of film as he turned from photography to the moving image in the mid-1960s.
Although Frampton grappled with Grosseteste before then (probably using Claire
Riedl’s 1942 translation of De luce and Etienne Gilson’s analysis in La
philosophie au moyen âge, given Pound’s heavy reliance on both sources), it was
during this period that he began translating Grosseteste himself (Benn Michaels,
1972, 39). He most likely worked from Ludwig Bauer’s 1912 edition, and his
own rendering of De luce would feature in Zorns Lemma.
In contrast to Brakhage, Frampton worked through specific aspects of
Grosseteste’s thought in order to develop a comprehensive theory of film. In an
interview given some years after Zorns Lemma, Frampton described the treatise’s
import:
The text itself is, I think, apposite to film and to whatever my epistemolo-
gical views of film are. The key line in the text is a sentence that says,
‘In the beginning of time, light drew out matter along with itself into a mass
as great as the fabric of the world.’ Which I take to be a fairly apt
description of film, the total history of film, the total historical function
of film. (Gidal, 1985, 98)

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 Fidler

12 There is a long
tradition,
encompassing the
work of Sergei
Eisenstein and
André Bazin, of
theorizing cinema
as a conceptual
rather than
material
phenomenon.
For a critique of
Frampton’s
expansive
definition of
paracinematic
Figure 3: Hollis Frampton. From Protective Coloration, 1984.
practice, see
Source: Ektacolor photograph. Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Ponech (2006).
Although
Frampton does
not (to my The quote is significant for understanding how Frampton positioned himself and
knowledge) use his work. It posits a long history of cinema, one that encompasses paracinematic
the word phenomena.12 Frampton put this more succinctly later in the same interview,
‘paracinema’
himself, I follow
calling cinema ‘the oldest of the arts,’ and arguing that ‘the cinema of the eye is
the definition light ordered in time to perceptual ends’ (Gidal, 1985, 105). He drew on
framed in Walley Grosseteste’s suggestively architectonic language to ally the work of cinema with
(2003, 18). broader considerations of time and perception.
This longer genealogy of film made untenable technologically reductive notions
13 My analysis here of medium.13 As Hansen notes, Frampton’s work embodies a studied disregard
parts way with for the ‘artifactuality of [cinema’s] institutional apparatus’ (Hansen, 2011, 47).
the reading of
Stressing the work of light as a transhistorical medium both enabled him to
Frampton’s
paracinematic decouple the moving image from the camera (with its attendant questions of
riposte to medium expertise) and to unravel the fabric of linear time. He famously posited the
specificity found universe as a vast film archive, an updated version of Grosseteste’s universe
in Walley (2003).
structured by moving light. (He cites Grosseteste as the catalyst for this notion;
Gidal, 1985, 97–98.) As I have attempted to show, these hitherto-marginalized
medievalisms serve as the framing device underpinning the theses of form
rendered by Frampton’s camera.
I read Frampton’s expansion of medium in the flickers and flares that mark
the final sequence of Zorns Lemma. Produced by five separate camera rolls

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 The Praxis of the Tractrix

Figure 4: Cover of A Hollis Frampton Odyssey.

Source: DVD collection published by The Criterion Collection, 2012.

spliced together to make the final shot (the color balance also shifts slightly with 14 In this way, Zorns
each roll), the interference indexes the physicality of film. While scholars have Lemma seems
to reprise
read the visual noise as a self-referential gesture pointing to the materiality of
Grosseteste’s
the camera – and thus a nod to Greenbergian specificity – Frampton’s deep- discussion in De
seated opposition to technological determinism suggests a more complex set of colore, in which
motivations. Much of his work toys with spectatorial expectations, disrupting he argues of the
person well
conventions of labeling and narrative. His ludic energy often centers on the act
versed in light’s
of perception. Rather than simply highlighting the ‘radical delimitation’ of workings that
cinema, these flares more probably signal Frampton’s investment in a perceptual ‘through skillful
spectrum shot through with sly impossibilities (Greenberg, 1940, 32). manipulation they
can show visibly,
They attest the manipulative processes intrinsic to picturing, the ars and
as they wish, all
artificium of the translucent media (Grosseteste’s perspicuum) in which light kinds of colors’
becomes embodied.14 [‘per artificium
Frampton returned to problems of perception time and time again, thematizing omnes modos
the optical apprehension of light in a photograph from the series Protective colorum quos
uoluerunt uilibisiter
Coloration (1984), where he wears a t-shirt depicting a cut-away diagram of an ostendunt’]
eyeball (Figure 3), and in the staged self-portrait Portrait of Hollis Frampton (Dinkova-Bruun
by Marion Faller, Directed by H. F., in which a band of light blasts his eyes et al., 2013, 18).

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 Fidler

Figure 5: Hiroshi Sugimoto. Arcadia, Milan, 1998. Gelatin silver print. 42.3×54.2 cm.
Source: Photograph courtesy the artist.

into blankness. This last photograph has increasingly served as the defining image
of Frampton’s creative legacy, and adorns the glossy boxed-set of his work
released by the Criterion Collection (Figure 4). It recalls the final sequence of
Zorns Lemma, in which overwhelming light flattens the depth of field into a
snowy expanse.
Further, the flickers of light recall Grosseteste’s tropic insistence that transpar-
ency is neither possible nor desirable. Invoking the figure of the cloud (following
15 The flares, the lead of a litany of medieval thinkers), he argues in his Super Psalterium that
resulting from the obfuscating cloud allows us to see the sun. Similarly, since we cannot behold
marks made on
the divine directly, we reckon God’s works in these very obstructions, through
the film’s surface,
are the objects, masses and forms of contrast that demarcate presence. Light flares hint at
culmination of film’s power to image the unseen, so that, rather than a privileged technical
earlier support, the camera becomes a kind of sensory prosthesis.15 Zorns Lemma thus
experiments by
bears comparison with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series of cinema photographs, in
Frampton
(compare Process which the photographer exposed his camera for the entire duration of a film.
Red, 1966). On Ostensibly transcribing the rapid sequences of filmic information, all the camera
the general captures is overwhelming light (Figure 5).

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 The Praxis of the Tractrix

The works of Sugimoto and Frampton trace out the imbrication of light and significance of
time. They suggest that the activity of beholding one implicates the practice of filmic artifacts, see
Prince (2004).
beholding the other. Despite Frampton’s transhistorical rhetoric, his figuring of
this isomorphism is redolent of pictorial strategies employed by other filmic
practitioners during the 1960s. As I have already noted, different forms of light
production throng Brakhage’s works, ranging from the refracted glass of an
ashtray in The Text of Light to words scratched onto the surface of the film itself.
‘By scratching them,’ he said, ‘I can at least make them more intrinsic to what film
is – they become carriers of light’ (Brakhage and Ganguly, 2008, 13). This work
would culminate in his Chartres Series (1994), a 16-mm film hand-painted in
homage to the stained-glass windows of the Gothic cathedral that explicitly
hearkens to medieval ekphrases of colored light (Meiss, 1945).
The lure of outer space, with its heady expansion of time’s scale, also marked
the visual culture of the 1960s. Where Grosseteste and Roger Bacon looked to the
light of the sun, moon and stars to understand the procedures of light and time,
the artists and filmmakers of Frampton’s age did so with similar enthusiasm. In a
telling parallel, Annette Michelson has compared the filmic experiments of
Michael Snow with the cinema of Kubrick and the televised mediation of the
Apollo Mission (Michelson, 1979, 121–122). Cult films such as The Time
Travelers (1964) and Journey to the Center of Time (1967) deploy similar kinds
of light-based visual effects to signal the rupture of time. Indeed, the overlap of
seeing and temporal estrangement is made explicit in the voice-over accompany-
ing the opening sequence of Journey to the Center of Time:
The cold vast reaches of the universe are a giant time keeper. Time has a
quality as hazy and distant as the perimeter of our own galaxy. The haze
occasionally clears for those minds which inquire into the very fabric of time
itself, and a glimpse of the true meaning of time is revealed. Time, from
creation to now, tugs to all yesterdays almost as strongly as the unborn
tomorrows which stretch towards all eternity.
Famously, the final sequence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey features an
extended, headlong ride through pulsing light produced by slit scan photography
(Kubrick, 1968). The recent appropriation of a 1966 light composition by
Thomas Wilfred (one that recalls his earlier Spacedrift [1960]) in Malick’s The
Tree of Life (2011) attests an enduring afterlife of that historical matrix of film,
light and slippery time.16 16 For details about
In sum, I want to argue that Frampton’s engagement with Grosseteste offers a the work, see Stein
(1971, 90–91).
nuanced entry point into the filmic imaginary of the late 1960s. Light, long a
For the Clavilux
constituent feature of cinema, became a charged subject. Frampton’s creative more generally,
untethering of moving light from camera technology thus served not only as a see Wees (2007).
riposte to critical debates about medium, but also triangulated a new set of
possibilities for thinking the historical freight of film.

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 Fidler

Figure 6: Sam Derbyshire. Catenary as Evolute of a Tractrix. Available at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Tractrix#/media/File:Evolute2.gif under a creative commons attribution 3.0.

L iqu id W r eck age

Frampton’s encounter with Grosseteste posited a radical reworking of the relation-

ship between past and present. Indeed, Hansen has argued that Frampton’s
‘seemingly outrageous claim for the radical temporal flexibility of cinema’ can
be read as ‘a shift in focus concerning the operation of movement and its relation
to time’ (Hansen, 2011, 47). By way of a coda, I will turn to two essays that
shed some light on his complicated understanding of history. Given the recent
attention to anachronistic approaches in art history, as well as other deli-
rious methodologies (cf. Didi-Huberman, 2003; Nagel, 2012; Powell, 2012),
Frampton’s thought seems ripe for revisiting.
In an essay published in October in 1978, Frampton obsesses over procedures
of decay and renewal. ‘The accumulated force of six decades of evasion cascades,
avalanches, cataracts, simultaneously destroys his body and replicates it,’ he
writes of the essay’s subject (Frampton, 1978, 82). Forms, structures and images
encode the past. Continuity is predicated on structural constraints. He follows
this passage with lengthy descriptions of bodies composed of treasures, bodies
entwined with mountain basalt, bodies as walking museums. Renaissance

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 The Praxis of the Tractrix

Figure 7: Piero Paolo Pasolini, dir.

Source: Still from The Decameron (Il Decameron) (1971).

daggers lurk between ribs. Jeremy Bentham’s spectacles straddle a renal vein. 17 Interest in these
Greek sculptures hide behind the eyes. problems is
signaled by the
Like Grosseteste, Frampton sought to marry scientific thought with other forms
title of Zorns
of intelligent production. As Ragona has argued, he deployed elements of Lemma, which
conceptual mathematics to blast open the strictures evolved by 1960s film refers to Ernst
semiotics (Ragona, 2004, 100). He wrote, for example, that mathematical Zermelo’s Axiom
of Choice and its
operations have ‘graphic consequences’ (Frampton, 1978, 84).17 Mobile struc-
equivalent
tures of pastness, such as the walking body museum, image the present in order to statements. This
reveal both the continuity of perceptual modes and the temporally disruptive will be treated in a
power of the visual. The essay concludes with a meditation on the geometric forthcoming
shape of the tractrix. Described in the seventeenth century by Leibniz and article, to be
published in
Huygens, the tractrix might be summarized as ‘the orthogonal trajectory of a set Leonardo, which I
of circles, of constant radius, whose centers lie on a straight line’ (Lockwood, am grateful to
1961, 123). Poignantly described as a ‘curve of pursuit,’ the tractrix is (in physics Clint Enns for
and applied mathematics) the curve along which an object moves, impelled by its sharing in
advance.
necessary and unbreakable relation to a second object (Figure 6).18 That second
18 For a readable
object, which is connected to the first by a line segment of consistent length, overview of the
produces the curve. (The line originated as an imaginative construct that helped tractrix, see Nahin
visualize a thought experiment of the tractrix as the product of tethered, (2012, 23–27).
co-dependent motion in the real world; Yates, 1947, 221; Steinhaus, 2011,
249–251.) The tractrix, for Frampton, describes a plunge, a predicament, a cargo
of unseen strangers, mutual desire uncomprehended, a woman transforming
imperceptibly into a man, a series of incessant trajectories in which we under-
stand the different lives we might have lived, unspeakable liquid wreckage.

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 Fidler

The relationship between two points, one setting the other in motion, their span
co-dependent, might model the bond between Frampton and Grosseteste. In its
evocative disregard for the sureties of distance and death the tractrix forces us to
think, as Harris might put it, ‘contrapuntally’ (Harris, 2007).
This kind of methodology rhymes with other filmic projects that sought to
build connections with the past. In his Trilogy of Life films, Italian director Pier
Paolo Pasolini adapted three literary classics for cinema: The Decameron
(Il Decameron, 1971), The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury, 1972)
and Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una note, 1974). He modeled much of
the look of these films on historical images, going so far as to literally restage key
paintings. In a pivotal scene in The Decameron, a painter – played by Pasolini
himself – has a vision (Figure 7). The vision blends two paintings by Giotto; the
larger scheme is derived from Giotto’s Last Judgment (ca. 1304–1305) in the
Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In place of Christ, however, stands the Virgin Mary,
derived from Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna (ca. 1310).
Pasolini aimed not just to refer to past art objects, nor to arrogate a patina of
authenticity to his project. Rather, he aimed to contaminate the present with traces
19 My discussion of the past.19 He understood images as wormholes. They encoded historically
of Pasolini in specific forms of spectatorship, summing up kinds of cultural memory. Giotto’s
the following
cosmologies and visual strategies radiate through the film, impressing the stains of
paragraph closely
tracks that found the past onto the images of modernity. As he put it: ‘Now I prefer to move through
in Rumble (1996). the past, precisely because I believe that the past is the only force able to contest the
present: it is an aberrant form … capable of putting the present into crisis’ (Rumble,
1996, 58). Giotto – and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Bosch, Pontormo and Rosso
Fiorentino – held out the promise of a re-visioned present. Both medieval and post-
medieval images militated against the oppressive social conditions of postwar Italy.
Another piece of writing by Frampton, provocatively titled ‘Erotic Predica-
ments for Camera,’ similarly muddles the now and then. Arguing that erotic
photography lays bare the connective tissue between image and referent with
particular force, he inserts himself into four historical episodes. He becomes,
variously, F.J. Moulin, Charles Dodgson, a detective examining the tableaux of
Jack the Ripper and Leslie Krims. In the course of telling the history of eroticism,
he luxuriates in the eroticism of history, the seductive immersion in the images of
the past. Tellingly, Frampton referred to the first part of Zorns Lemma as ‘the
lesson,’ and the final, Grosseteste-inspired section as ‘the drift’ (Frampton, 2012).
In his invocation of Grosseteste, Dodgson and Moulin, he reprises Barthes’
discussion of pleasurable drifting, skimming and sinking in the liquid wreckage of
the past (Barthes, 1975, 18).
The projects of Grosseteste and Frampton – linked by the relationality of light as a
form – prompt us to reconsider the epistemological stakes of media. If Lee has shown
how conflicting notions of time subtended debates about media during the sixties,
and if Zorns Lemma beautifully stages what she calls ‘the phenomena of non-
contemporaneity,’ the particulars of Frampton’s engagement with his thirteenth-

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 The Praxis of the Tractrix

century interlocutor bespeak the multiplicity of historically suffused responses to

Greenberg and his ilk (Lee, 2004, 223). These particulars also urge us to recognize the
fruitful encounters between the modern and the medieval, which we must continue to
plumb, since art history tells the story of connectivity as much as it tells of rupture. It
repays the explosive – Barthes might say blissful – undoing of time and space. This is
where we might militate against the ideology of time-as-measure. Frampton’s
thought, still poorly understood, remains critical for this project, distinguished by
the peculiar rigor of his vision. Only by articulating these discursive formulations of
knowing and looking can we begin to construct an appropriately dynamic history of
moving light, recuperating imagination for the ends of art history.

A cknowledgem ents

Thanks to Faye Gleisser, Solveig Nelson, Victoria Salinger, the Research in Art
and Visual Evidence workshop at the University of Chicago, and (especially)
Jason D. LaFountain for their comments.

A b o ut th e A u th o r

Luke A. Fidler is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the

University of Chicago. His work primarily engages the visual culture of death in
the medieval west (E-mail: lfidler@uchicago.edu).

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