Hollis Frampton: SOLARIUMAGELANI
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 9, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 6pm | Frampton scholar Bruce Jenkins in person!
- Image: Hollis Frampton filming Winter Solstice. Image courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
Filmmaker, photographer, and theorist Hollis Frampton (1936–84) is a major figure in the American avant-garde. Ambitious in scope, his films wittily engage with philosophy, mathematics, and science. CATE presents a rare screening of three exquisite yet lesser-known works from 1974: Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice. Part of Magellan, Frampton’s unfinished epic film cycle intended to screen over 369 days, these works take on the primordial rhythms and energies of life and death within a pasture, slaughterhouse, and steel mill. Introduced by SAIC professor and Frampton scholar Bruce Jenkins and preceded by a book signing of Jenkins’s On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009) and wine and cheese reception from 5:00-6:00pm. This program is part of “Critical Mass: Re-Viewing Hollis Frampton,” a multi-institutional retrospective through January 2010. 1974, USA, 16mm, ca. 95 min.
HOLLIS FRAMPTON (1936-84, USA) was an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer and theoretician, and pioneer of digital art. He produced some 60 films in his short career and contributed to numerous journals and magazines. “Frampton is generally understood, in his words, as an artist ‘of the modernist persuasion,’ not only for his aesthetics, but for his close personal association with such figures as Ezra Pound, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, and Stan Brakhage… Much of Frampton’s artistic practice was committed to the modernist quest to define a medium’s limits and possibilities. But Frampton was devoted to those he saw as modernism’s “heresiarchs” – figures like Duchamp, Cage, and Joyce – who sought to reinvigorate modernism with “that thing . . . which goes by the ancient name of wit.”(Michael Zryd, York University, Toronto)
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Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
