A Matter of Hanging

This Wednesday, I went to see the last two section of Jerusalem’s fourth drawing biennale: one in the more out of the way Jerusalem Print Workshop; and the other in one of my favorite hidden jewels, the Anna Ticho House--now shaken out of its magical calm by the roar of construction. Brief moment of mourning for a lost oasis.

One thing that struck me in the one room exhibit of photos at the Ticho house was the power of presentation-- the mode of hanging. The small, dimly lit temporary exhibition space is not the most conducive to highlighting a piece. But the two works that worked best for me where Gilad Ophir's digital prints, seen alongside.

Part of it was the size: other than Sharon Yaari's haunting picture of a ruined house (below), they were by far the largest.

But even more was their lack of frame. I realized that the scroll- like hanging gives them a presence that seems to expand outwards, spreading across the room, while the simple yet clearly defined frames delimit a constricted space. They seem to say: this is the picture, and it goes no further.

While I love the experience of framing a small work, and suddenly having it leap into focus as a finished piece, I suddenly realized how frames can help make a work eminently ignorable.

I'm not sure if it is the fact of the frame, or the frame's nondescript nature (see below).

Or perhaps it is the interaction of work and frame--photos of a limited tonal range with pale, plain frames.

This is an old question. I think of the way Eakins carved notes into the frame of his "Concert Singer," or how Seurat painted his late frames, creating a transition between painting and world.

Or of Puvis de Chevannes' painted internal frames that define the structure of his paintings.

A question to consider...