On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (2009)

“As Hollis Frampton’s photographs and celebrated experimental films were testing the boundaries of the camera arts in the 1960s and 1970s, his provocative and highly literate writings were attempting to establish an intellectually resonant form of discourse for these critically underexplored fields. It was a time when artists working in diverse disciplines were beginning to pick up cameras and produce films and videotapes, well before these practices were understood or embraced by institutions of contemporary art. This collection of Frampton’s writings presents his critical essays (many written for Artforum and October) along with additional material, including lectures, correspondence, interviews, production notes, and scripts. It supersedes Circles of Confusion, published in 1983.

Frampton ranged widely over the visual arts in his writing, and the texts in this collection display his distinctive perspectives on photography, film, video, and the plastic and literary arts. They include critically acclaimed essays on Edward Weston and Eadweard Muybridge as well as appraisals of contemporary photographers; the influential essay “For a Metahistory of Film,” along with scripts, textual material, and scores for his films; writings on video that constitute a veritable prehistory of the digital arts; a dialogue with Carl Andre (his friend and former Phillips Andover classmate) from the early 1960s; and two inventive, almost unclassifiable pieces that draw on the writings of Borges, Joyce, and Beckett.”

Edited with an Introduction by Bruce Jenkins
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Writing Art series
ISBN 0262062763, 9780262062763
331 pages

Experimental film at Monoskop wiki

Review (Matt Packer, Experimental Conversations)
Review (Mike Leggett, Leonardo)
Review (Michael Zryd, Film Studies)
Review (David Sterritt, Film Quarterly)
Review (John Klacsmann, The Moving Image)
Review (Keith Sanborn, The Brooklyn Rail)
Review (Melissa Gronlund, Frieze)

Publisher

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Moles, Baudrillard, Boudon, van Lier, Wahl, Morin: Les objets (1969/71) [French, Spanish]

Communications is a biannual social sciences journal founded by Georges Friedmann, Roland Barthes, and Edgar Morin. Soon after its start in 1961 it became a reference publication for media studies and semiotics in France and internationally.

Its first 1969 issue was dedicated to the theory of objects, positioning it “at the confluence of sociology, political economy, social psychology, marketing, philosophy, design and aesthetics” (p 141). At the same time the journal argued for the relevance of the study of objects for governmental institutions such as “the Ministry of Industrial Production, the Ministry of Transport, the customs authorities, the courts, the counterfeits studies, or the National Industrial Property Institute” (p 141).

It can be read as a post-May 1968 attempt to use the concept of object as an agent linking social sciences in order to increase their impact on direct political change, and as well as an early echo of what more than a decade later came to be known as the actor-network theory.

Two years later the magazine appeared in its Spanish translation in book form.

Communications 13
Publisher Centre d’études des communications de masse, École pratique des hautes études, and Seuil, Paris, 1969
139 pages

Les objets (French, 1969), View online
Los objetos (Spanish, trans. Silvia Delpy, 1971/1974)

Heath Bunting: Artist’s Diary 2003

“Heath Bunting rarely puts his thoughts and feelings on screen with words. Usually, they were blazoned across networks in passionate expressive structures which he draws from the ever encroaching apparatus repressive. Today, his projects brighten network nodes and edges in Baku, Moscow, Paris, Rome, and London, as well as the personal memories of such celebrated thinkers as Rachel Baker, Jim Adlington and Mike Stubbs.

[H]is artist’s diary for 2003 provides provocative insight into his character and the evolution of his work.” (Source)

PDF (assembled from photographs on the author’s website)
JPGs
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