Abstract
This thesis examines my response to family photographs through their restaging in seventeen paintings of which fifteen were exhibited in Almost no memory in March 2020. The starting point of my research, both in practice and in theory, is the nature of the punctum in a photograph as uncanny and unnameable. I explore how my intensely personal response to photographs both corresponds to, and veers from, an indexical reading of the photograph as a visceral emanation from the past. More specifically, my research is an investigation of the disturbance and discomfort I experience in the face of a photograph; an anxiety that is only partially explained by the ‘catastrophe of death’ inherent in every photograph.
Rereading Barthes’ (1993) notion of the punctum by way of Jacques Derrida’s (1994) hauntology provides a means to engage, visually and in writing, fresh ways with which mourning and loss, and the ambivalence of a childhood rooted in apartheid South Africa, might be imagined and/or figured. My argument foregrounds, in theory and in practice, how the punctum, redefined in terms of a ‘duration’ (a time constitutively out of joint), opens up possibilities for restaging the unlocatable and uncanny site that gives rise to the spectral as constitutive not merely of an absent present, but of disappearance and death (and mourning) as the very condition of its production and structure. At stake is what remains beyond representation, beyond what can be brought into language. To investigate the complex relations of referencing that this entails, I draw on selected works by South African artists Penny Siopis, Minnette Vári, Kate Gottgens, as well as Israeli-born artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger. I look at their work specifically insofar as they register or tap into the spectral, and how, and to what end, the punctum is ‘made visible’ in their work by means of disturbances in the visual field; the way these make visible the invisibility at the heart of the visible and, in so doing, disrupt binaries of past/present, absence/presence, light/dark, studium/punctum, so that the one exists because of and as part of the other.
The theoretical investigation takes practical shape in my paintings on Almost no memory as a visual means to register the uncanny, unnameable and unknowable site of mourning and loss as it emerges for me in photographic source material. What remains is not so much the paintings as new objects, but as catalysts for new ways in which memory and forgetting might be imagined and/or figured, revealing what Derrida would call the blindness and aporia at the heart of the photographic present. Here, the process of mediation in which the photographic trace returns to the viewer something of the piercing disturbance of the spectral
iii
makes ‘seeing how we see’ an integral part of the encounter with the painting, less as an indexical emanation from the past than as a drive to give voice to the uncanny experience of what remains.
Keywords: Family photographs; punctum; spectrality; hauntology; the uncanny; mourning; trace; unclaimed experience; whiteness; painting; practice-led research.