On The Importance of Framing Things

The frame in art is a fantastic innovation. Presumably before the frame there was just stuff. People before the frame took things (I speculate freely) just for what they were.

The frame is a magnifying glass, a punctuation mark, an augmentive. It is a technology for sharing attention, sharing ideas. It invites viewers to linger carefully on something very particular. Anything deliberately (or, indeed, randomly) framed becomes imbued with more meaning than it had before framing. A framed leaf is not like a leaf fallen on the ground. The frame invites the viewer to consider the leaf, the worlds of all leaves, the universe of things leaves might make us think of, to meditate on all this, to understand the leaf as something more than just organic trash on the ground.

Framing anything augments that thing and makes its better, by reminding us to augment that thing and make it better.


[Image by Spanish artist Lorenzo Durán ]