1In the first chapter of For Space, a manifesto for critical geography, Doreen Massey formulates several opening propositions, among which the notion that space must be recognised “as the product of interrelations” and the necessity “that we recognise space as always under construction” (Massey 9). This issue of Polysèmes broaches both politics and aesthetics in a back-and-forth movement implying the consideration, association or conflict of various artforms to interrogate space, its production, and even sometimes its negation through the fundamental gestures of framing and unframing space. The role of space is of prime importance both in visual and performance arts, and also in other fields such as geography, or even sociology (Lefebvre): space is relational; it expresses and is shaped by power dynamics; it is constantly in the process of being defined, contested and negotiated. Framing space and unframing space are among the most potent strategies by which such constant fashioning of space is operated.

3The contributions in this issue of Polysèmes focus on a wide range of art forms: painting, photography, conceptual art, performance art, gardening, landscaping, sculpture, writing etc. They tackle them in their political dimension, either because they are explicitly concerned with politics (Amilhat Szary, Zumello, Mariné), or because they show how personal identities are harmed (Penet, Iliescu) and / or fashioned (Iliescu, Laburthe-Tolra). Several of them identify the erasure of frames as the cause and / or the result of trauma (Penet, Ilescu), while the last two contributions locate a wish to abolish frames (especially the frames of paintings) in nineteenth-century aesthetics. The questioning of political and institutional frames (Amilhat Szary, Zumello), or of social and cultural ones (Penet, Laburthe-Tolra) often paradoxically starts from a re-assertion of a frame that had been naturalised, a frame whose existence had been forgotten. Interestingly, “the tendency of the frame to invisibility with respect to the artwork” (Duro 1) also applies to the social and political realms. Conversely, the dissolution of frames, which often has to do with the power of affects (Iliescu, Desset), involves either the use of other frames (Desset), or a new way of envisaging framing altogether (Mariné). It seems one never escapes frames: they are needed for cognition, and no knowledge is possible without them.

The political value of framing and unframing

4At the beginning of her work on The Friction of the Frame, Simone Heller-Andrist alludes to “frames as being active, as being processes that take place in the border region of the written text” (15). In her opening contribution, Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary lays the bases for the consideration of the complexity and ambiguities of framing in her cross-disciplinary reading of border art. After numerous publications on borders in the field of geography, she is also interested in investigating the visual arts both as a case study and as an extension of her previous work, taking into account her own experiences of both borders and border art, and bearing testimony to the fact that forms are not just literary or artistic: they are also social and political (Levine). Her interrogation starts from the way political borders are framed by the simultaneous effects of institutions, practices and representations. Far from being stable, they are elusive and “processual”. They can be material or immaterial, are multidimensional, and rely on “multiple regimes of visuality”. The line, a spontaneous (but largely erroneous) figuration of borders, reveals them, but also hides what may happen in their shadow. Borders also include a temporal dimension, they materialise norms at specific moments in specific spaces. In Western art history, the author reminds us, the separation between the inside and the outside is a crucial operation. Border art partakes in the performance of such an operation. Though it might (rather ironically) be difficult to circumscribe, it has a strong political dimension, and exemplifies the “complex spatialities” of framing. Amilhat Szary reminds us of the 17^th-century establishment of the border as a technology of power emerging from power relationships and war. In the early modern and modern periods, Nation-States were born out of an inside/outside dialectic often determined by remote centres of decision, while scientific categories strengthened a mode of thought based on differentiation between categories—modes of border-building soon appropriated by colonial endeavours. This historically European process of imposing limits from the centre still applies today, exemplifying the persistence of both borders as delineations and of bordering as a thought process—however ineffective those might be.

5Works of border art investigate the line, providing reminders of its existence, revealing the discrepancy between the line on the map and “its spatiality on the field”, complexifying this seemingly simple mode of border enactment and representation. Artists might even use their body to test the border and the way it is implemented—which confronts them in turn to the “violence of globalization” resisted, for instance, by Mbembe’s “bodies-borders”. The artworks stimulate the crossing of the borderline, or document it, subverting the enclosing process. Amilhat Szary then focuses on the shapes of frames in border art. Artists like Dörflinger or Matta-Clark see borders as fences by enhancing their verticality, or by replicating their materiality in other media, thereby relocating the imprint of borders. Conceptual artists tend to work with letters and semiology, which also have a potential for spatial and temporal translation, and at the same time evoke the space-time of the locations from which they originate. Representations of the border still very much rely on a perception of them as natural, which erases their formation-process—and this is precisely what much border art challenges, sometimes by triggering audience interaction, sometimes by mending borders seen as torn places. As a whole, border thinking acts as a reminder of “the violence of framing operations within societies” and their exclusionary logics, to then become a powerful critical tool that allows us to understand the frame from the outside rather than from the inside.

6Christine Zumello’s contribution also reflects on the frames imposed by institutions in a transdisciplinary perspective that confronts the history of money with contemporary art, focusing on the emergence of the Fed, of the dollar, and on artistic interventions that address the naturalising effect of those frames. The author demonstrates how the unified political control over the circulation of money first established in 1791 in the US with the creation of the Bank of the United States gave way to a more fragmented system in which multiple banks could produce banknotes for much of the 19^th century—leading to much disorder and an unstandardized monetary system. The Fed was born in 1913 out of the need to reorganize that system. The codification of the monetary system led to a distribution of decision centres across the national space. Rather than multiple frames, there was therefore just one ruling institution that was materially located in twelve separate centres. The dollar emerged in the second half of the 19^th century, when the “greenbacks” were needed to finance the Civil War, while framing a new sense of national unity.

7The seeming stability and permanence of the above-mentioned monetary institutions is belied by history, but also by artistic approaches such as those of Stacey Lee Webber, Jenny Holzer, and Cildo Meireles. Webber embroiders frames around banknotes to turn them into works of art that act as reminders or revelations of more or less forgotten historical episodes, or even as all-out attacks on national symbols. Holzer’s truisms, words projected in public spaces both act as pictures and text. Their successive relocations build different meanings according to context, with a frequent revelatory dimension as well. The truisms denounce the effects of money, revealing its artificiality and power. Finally, Cildo Meireles’s “insertions” stamp new words on banknotes, a social infiltration of the State’s ideological apparatus as well as of the international networks controlled by capitalism. Cildo also forged a dollar bill changing all of its codes, by crudely representing symbols of American power and contesting their value. Zumello’s work demonstrates how essentially unstable institutional monetary frames tend to erase their own history and to naturalize their inscription in power structures, until artistic intervention reveals both history and power—providing a useful reminder that money is a relationship rather than an artefact (Graeber 21-41). Significantly, two of the three artists under consideration do intervene on an artefact, the dollar bill, re-framing it so as to reveal its forgotten frame, unframing it in the sense that the naturalness of its frame is undermined.

8Helen Penet adopts a different approach to the frame, in this case the photographic frame, but is also concerned with erasure and history. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay’s theory of photography, she explains how photographic frames decide what can be turned into narrative and what cannot. Azoulay shows how the rape of German women by allied troops at the end of World War II has been silenced, notably through the absence of photographic representations. A similar silencing of women’s suffering is part and parcel of Irish history, and recent literary works have strived to lift the veil, from Dermot Bolger’s 1993 A Second Life onwards. Penet chooses to focus on the works of German-Irish author Hugo Hamilton, some of which thematise photography. National identity is at stake here as well, as the narrator’s father decides what can or cannot be represented on photographs, what can or cannot belong to the national frame of the new Irish Republic. Similarly, the narrator’s mother’s rape in post-World War 2 Germany remains undocumented, an attempt to erase the past. Photographs play a major role in memory formation and processes of identity formation, from the individual to the national level through the level of the family. More specifically Irish is the “exclusion from public record of the unmarried mother”, recently—but not very satisfactorily—acknowledged by the Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2021), but already reported in Hamilton’s 2010 novel Hand in the Fire. The three different points of view on the drowning of an unmarried pregnant young woman correspond to three different ways of framing the same story. The narrator investigates the case but can only discover the lack of public records. In his works, Hamilton displays his determination to include the members of society that have been kept out of the picture, and incidentally to compensate for the lack of photographs. In Hamilton’s work, therefore, the narrative acts as a substitute for the photographs that were never made or displayed—it provides a “narrative space” that fills in the blanks of history, going against the shortcomings of visual representation and its correlate, the impression of unmediated, accurate perception. Though Penet’s reflection is primarily ethical and/or political, it raises the question of the epistemological role of frames in shaping the viewer’s reality, or perception thereof—a question which is at the core of the second section. In this contribution as well as others in this issue of Polysèmes, frames are challenged by the irruption of affect.

Framing / Unframing the self

9Stefania Iliescu’s contribution also discusses trauma, not as recounted, but as experienced. In Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001), Stefania Iliescu argues, trauma unhinges spatial, temporal, and perceptual frames of experience. The main character, Lauren Hartke, fails to make sense of her husband’s suicide, and the reader is made to feel this through a dislocated narrative using “shifts of perspective, ellipse, incomplete syntactical constructions and indirection”. While Lauren’s understanding falls short, the reader also remains unable to comprehend her state of trauma. The narrative construction of the novella dramatises time, suspending it, as trauma distorts the sense of its flow, while language cannot grasp the full extent of the narrator’s experience. The absence of a clear plot does not allow the reader to put the storyline together until the very end of the work. Only two passages working respectively as analepsis (the husband’s obituary) and prolepsis (a review of Lauren’s performance) stand outside from Lauren’s point of view, helping the reader build the meaning of the whole. Lauren’s mind drifts away, then comes back to the “here and now”, producing the recognition of otherness in the process. The notions of irreversibility and becoming are questioned, suggesting that time is a construction of the mind. But it is mainly the (imaginary) character of Mr. Tuttle that embodies Lauren’s “distorted relationship to time”, which on several occasions echoes quantum physics, a field that questions our spontaneous perceptions and what we perceive as possible or impossible. While Mr. Tuttle is entrapped in an eternal present, however, Lauren manages to escape stasis and to renew her relationship to time. Technology is used as a conceptual frame that leads to a reinstatement of the immediacy of the present, and a return to the flow of time, as opposed to the repetitive time of trauma. In that context, creativity springs from the body, the point at which multiple layers of reality can be experienced, the sense of individual vulnerability is heightened, and contact with otherness intensified. The novella destabilises common frames of perception to interrogate what we can or cannot know.

10Clémence Laburthe-Tolra focuses on Elizabeth von Arnim’s and Vita Sackville-West’s interest in gardens and gardening, respectively in their gardens of Nassenheide and Sissinghurst, investigating not just the gardens themselves but also how they were committed to paper. Von Arnim and Sackville-West frame their gardens, and in so doing, they also frame their selves, in a dialectic between opening and closing, delineation and the transgression of boundaries: while von Arnim encloses her garden, Sackville-West opens it to both readers and visitors. Von Arnim envisages her garden as a shelter set apart from the house, a protective locus amoenus where the gendered model of the “Angel of the house” does not hold sway. While she does not garden herself, she designs the garden and participates in the female tradition of the garden book, a genre that was in full bloom in the 1880s. She writes her self into the garden, a place of love and solace associated with affects. The garden is a place to write about, but also a place in which to read. For her, the garden is a place of isolation, conceived by her but tended by others. For all her intervention in designing the garden, her framing of herself is confined to her writing and depends upon the work of others. Sackville-West, by contrast, directly engages with the materiality of the garden. For her, the house and the garden form a whole inspired from Arts and Crafts aesthetics, and the garden is accordingly divided into rooms. She thereby challenges the contemporary notion of gardening as a predominantly male activity. She tends a much larger area of the garden than her husband, and includes in it allusions to her former lovers. Tellingly, the two women’s relationships to their gardens work in contrary ways: while Sackville-West opened her garden physically by allowing in visitors and intellectually by holding a gardening column in The Observer from 1946 to 1961, von Arnim’s garden remained private, and even her writing is hedged by rows of flowers that cryptically encode the presence of her self. By framing their gardens, they both framed their personal identities, but they seem to have relied on two opposite conceptions of the edge of the frame, which works as a point of exchange in Sackville-West’s case, and as a wall in von Arnim’s—mirroring the latter’s stronger engagement with materiality, and the former’s confinement to paper or to a less active role in the garden.

Aesthetic frames: from one medium to the next

11The first contribution in this section addresses competing artistic media: painting, photography, and landscape architecture. In his study of Frederick Law Olmsted’s conception of landscape, Nicolás Mariné gives us an instance of the rejection of the frame. While English landscape architecture was based on the model of painting, Olmsted adopted the new 19th-century notion of a pure culturally unmediated vision. Mariné hypothesises that “Olmsted’s work is the spatialization of the perceptual concerns of his time”, opposing representation (as “the substitution of an image for reality”) and valuing experience instead. The author first reminds us that Olmsted’s intellectual construction occurred in Antebellum America, in which he gained notoriety both as farmer-scientist and as the author of several books, especially travel-books in the 1850s. He developed connections in the book industry, and in both scientific and literary circles. His vision was a “transitional republicanism between transcendentalism and pragmatism”, with a strong social dimension. The intellectual circles in which Olmsted was included had a particular concern for sight, with the wish to replace limited vision with a new, culturally unmediated eye suiting their country, one free from any interference. Painting logically became the whipping boy of those who thought to promote such a notion, and its consequence was a move away from representation. It was felt that painting froze what was, by essence, movement, and that it prevented any “genuine contact with reality”. Olmsted’s forerunners sometimes gestured towards a vision similar to his. Humphrey Humpton came up with the notion of “scene” in nature, as opposed to the picture on canvas, the scene implying a larger field of vision and movement. But for him, landscape still had to be representable in a painting, which was somewhat contradictory. In the US, Andrew Jackson Downing continued to see landscapes as needing to be “framable”, as if in a painting. The real change came with Wilson Flagg, a transcendentalist who claimed the moral superiority of American landscape architecture over superficial and elitist European landscaping. To him, the purpose of US landscape architecture, a truly democratic endeavour, was to show “evidences of freedom” by working on raw material. Olmsted took the term “scenery” over from Uvedale Price. He valued vision as part of an immersion in a landscape. He did not reject the notion of painting altogether, but saw himself as writing, painting, or orchestrating the landscape as raw material. The landscape architect was to develop a “blurred look”, a democratic look which “equalized because it eliminated the indispensable”, fusing people together with landscape. This “look”, which also appears in the works of American landscape painters Albert Pinkham Ryder and Robert Loftin Newman, based on relatively simple designs, sprang from the recognition of an impossibility to see nature in its complexity. For Olmsted, the park itself then becomes the frame, celebrating—like Walt Whitman—coexistence between human beings, all on the same level, within nature.

12In his contribution to this issue of Polysèmes, Fabien Desset tackles Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ekphrases, or descriptions of works of art, in this case two sculpted groups and two paintings. Refusing to adhere to existing interpretations, Shelley’s transaesthetic writings are nevertheless framed not just by the works on which he writes, but also by previous interpretations of them. Shelley seeks to “unframe things”, but still relies on “series of frames”, especially when they work as (natural) portals into nature. In that regard, Shelley’s writing is reminiscent of Gothic descriptions and of picturesque aesthetics—he prefers frames that make themselves forgotten and lead one in to the heart of nature. Shelley’s note on the Laocoön group in the Uffizi Gallery is a response both to the copy of the group that Shelley saw and to Winckelmann’s account of it in L’Histoire de l’art chez les anciens (1802-1803). Shelley’s interpretation is framed by Winckelmann’s text, but also by Byron’s description of it in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), and strikes a balance between Winckelmann’s classical ideal and Byron’s “Gothic pessimism”. Shelley’s interpretation might also have been determined by his personal life, and especially his relationships to his father and to his elder son; Shelley emphasises the emotional effect of the sculptures on the spectator, and his identification with the tragic subject. In his note on the Niobe group in the Uffizi Gallery, emotions, and especially sorrow, remain central. Shelley’s reading is framed, again, by Winckelmann’s account, but also by the comparison with the Apollo of the Vatican, which leads him to linger on the monumentality of the sculpture. Shelley successively focuses on different vantage points emphasising bodily strength and the will. But by moving around the statues, he also makes them become animate, looking for their “living energy”. Shelley’s approach to painting leads him to identify or sympathise with the figures inside them, somehow abolishing the frame. In his account of Guido’s Sansone Vittorioso, Shelley extracts the figure of Samson from the frame, insisting on relief, as if he were seeking to turn the painting into sculpture. Again, the main figure (that of Christ) is somehow expanded or dilated outside of the canvas, while the sky seems to dissolve the limits of the painting. Like Olmsted, Shelley seems to be aiming for a negation of the frame, although his art does not itself escape framing, or even multiple framings.