The Thing Has Been There: Memory, Forgetting, and “Punctum”

by Bea Huff-Hunter // Published in MEMENTO MORI (2021)

PUNCTUM

Essayist and critic Roland Barthes described the experience of looking with intellectual, “human interest” at a photograph—that, say, you have found in an archive of war scenes or staged family portraits. You appreciate the image as testimony to a historical or political moment with its culturally specific dress codes, postures, and props. In contrast to this satisfying observational flow, there are moments when a detail within a photograph provokes a sharp intake of breath. Your looking disrupted, your thoughts turn inward.

In his collection of reflections on photography, Camera Lucida, which are vulnerably subjective, Barthes names this stinging photographic characteristic “punctum” after the Latin for “puncture.” The detail may be a muddy, ridged fingernail or “a slender ribbon of braided gold,” the latter invoking a late aunt’s necklace. Reaching out from the image to demand emotional attention, punctum reels in intimate memory from forgetfulness. 

“A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”

CLUTTER, DETAIL

In her artist’s book The Problem of Reading, Moyra Davey lists her New York apartment’s clutter—“books in piles around the bed or faced down on a table; work prints of photographs, also with a faint covering of dust, taped to the walls of the studio; a pile of bills.” Later, she compares reading and looking at photographs. Quoting Barthes, Davey observes that when reading biographies, the “petty details of daily life: schedules, habits, meals,” grab the reader with their sustained relevance. She explains: “Recorded in an almost unconscious manner, these passages allow us to insert ourselves into the scene, to feel interpolated by the text, perhaps a little in the way we are hooked by the punctum of a photograph.” In doing so, she hints at the situating power of her own “petty” autobiographical details—the layers of bills, books, and dust that may haunt the reader-viewer’s mind. 

Davey thus extends punctum to literary experience. The exhibition enclosed within this publication, memento mori, further expands the field. Its artworks do not resemble traditional memento mori—those blunt medieval reminders of mortality, such as skulls and disheveled fruits. However, through explorations of memory and forgetting, they “prick” in somewhat similar ways.

GRIEF, TIME

Barthes wrote Camera Lucida while mourning his mother. Sorting her family photographs, a picture startled him. His mother is a child in the picture, and yet he recalled her stubborn expression that later (or earlier) had flashed across her elderly face. The photograph of his mother as a child pricked because it turned Barthes’ attention away from the image, and per Boris Groys, toward “the void that these photographs cover.” It produced a sharpened existential awareness of time and death, of the painfully impossible distance between adult Barthes and child mother. “Suddenly every photograph is for Barthes a memorial; the very essence of the medium is its spectral conjuring of death-in-life.”

MAKING FORGETTING VISIBLE
Ava Hassinger’s water-logged photographs materialize the void between past and present by disrupting the smooth, picture-perfect image surface. Each photograph’s function as a memory-holder is not annulled but intensified. Per Barthes: “Sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact . . . I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at.” You might feel this when looking at Hassinger’s images. Do you start to fill in your own blanks? The photographic pigment takes on a painterly dimension, dreamily pooling as it forgets the image whose shape it was made to preserve.

If Hassinger makes forgetting visible through erasure, through spoiling a surface image to reveal its emotional depth, Cindy Gosselin achieves something similar through accretion. Gosselin’s wrapped works—binding found, everyday and artistic objects such as car keys and paint brushes first with masking tape and then with colored twine—protect what is covered, while kindling a desire to understand, to retrieve, what lies beneath.

THE THING HAS BEEN THERE
Per Barthes, paintings can’t possess the sharp sting of punctum as they are nonreferential: “In Photography, I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past.” However, the works included in this exhibition suggest otherwise. Surely that which has been made holds the traces of a past act of making. Drawing or handwriting holds the trace of the pencil’s movement, painting the brush’s journey. You can see that the thing that made this mark has been here. 

Norman Dixon’s letter-like lists of personal names, memorable dates, domestic animals, and comfort foods hook the viewer with their glorious specificity: “French Fries” or “Homemade Lemonade.” His stacks of everyday objects and thoughts speak to Davey’s piles of bills and books, the pull of ordinary intimacy that laces biography. Lines of ink trace over bright painted layers; dots, smudges, and drips register Dixon’s changes of pace and pressure, for example lingering over the beginning and end of “Cold Soda” as you might when savoring the drink.  

In deeply layered works on paper, Garrol Gayden’s writing and sketches exist on ultra-thin planes that pin down fragmentary childhood memories of a visit to the Coney Island amusement park. He compresses once-linear spatial and temporal movement onto one picture plane, reorganizing and transforming memory under pressure like metamorphic rock. Mariel Capanna’s frescoes, painted on shaped pieces of plywood that have been built up with lime plaster, often operate in horizontal registers that feel sedimentary and associative (a peaked cap above a tree; a car above a pitcher and candlesticks) or in clusters of part-objects that, like Hassinger and Gosselin’s works, require the viewer to fill in the blanks and enter a vulnerable relationship with the work. 

PUNCTUM
Each of these works records, if imperfectly, the material decision-making that resulted in its presence. The making process is a memorialization of the movements that made the work—movements through time and space, of the ground of the artwork and of mental and physical worlds. The punctum, in this case, is perhaps seeing the life of the line, of the hand, of the disrupted surface, and attempting to grasp the huge distance between making and seeing; between seeing and knowing.  

1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 26.

2. Ibid, p. 27.

3. Ibid, p.53.

4. Ibid, p. 27.

5. Moyra Davey, The Problem of Reading (Documents, 2003), p. 5.

6. Ibid, p. 25.

7. Boris Groys, Punctum. Reflections on Photography (Salzburger Kunstverein and Fotohof Editions, 2014), p. 9.

8. Brian Dillon, “Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes,” March 25, 2011.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading

9. Barthes, p. 53.

10. Groys, p. 9.

11. Barthes, p. 76.

    Bea is a writer and researcher, who has served on the board of directors of Vox Populi in Philadelphia. Her recent reviews are in Artforum and frieze. She participated in the CUE Art Foundation Art Critic Mentoring Program, the Getty Foundation and Harvard metaLAB's "Beautiful Data" summer institute, and the Warhol Foundation Art Writers Workshop, a program of AICA-USA and Creative Capital. Bea is the recipient of grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Association of Art Historians, and The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. Holding a master's degree in modern art history (University of York, UK), she is currently a graduate student in Ancient Near East art and language at the University of Pennsylvania.