Navigation

Artist-filmmaker Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was born just over 80 years ago. This time-span means a generational fall into cultural memory must now take place for his work, in particular given his own admission that with photography "the imaginary culture is depicted as passing through time". As his work passes into art history, what remains of Frampton’s affront to the discipline—symbolised by his calendrical film cycle Magellan—as it is found in his ideas such as "metahistory". What endures in his project of "making film over as it should have been"?

This session brings new approaches to Frampton's work by anticipating the convergence of film and art histories. It is thematised by Frampton's unfinished film cycle, Magellan, and seeks to further research into the significance of his work for art history and media by placing it within the broader context of poetry, theories of experimentalism in music and the expanded arts, and conceptual avant-gardes in the 20th century.

Speakers include researchers from North America, Europe, and Australia, placing Frampton's work in a global context for film modernism, as opposed to Frampton's work as most often seen in its peripheral relation to the New York iteration of Structural Film in the 1960s.