V22 ASHWINSTREET

Caragh ThuringPat O'Connor

Reading Painting Through Camera Lucida

During a visit to Caragh Thuring’s studio I was fascinated by an object she asked me to hold as she manoeuvred a large painting into position for my appraisal. It was a piece of paper about five feet long and one foot wide on which had been stuck, in rows resembling hieroglyphs, numerous photographic oddments culled from various sources and annotated with pencil, paint etc. Not quite a study for a painting and not quite a sketchbook, but nevertheless an object in its own right, this ongoing visual almanac betrayed the strange sense of conquest entailed in the consumption of photographic imagery, and its regurgitation as painted imagery.

Of all visual artists, painters are by far the most prolific processors of visual data. This is due to the fact that not all imagery yields to painterly conquest; large quantities must therefore be consumed. In my experience, painters are more articulate about the individual elements that comprise a painting (i.e., where they have come from, how they have been altered, what else was considered and rejected) than about its overall effect, which appears to resist the painter’s verbal appraisal as a necessary condition of its completion. So it follows that one has a better chance of understanding the work if one approaches it from the specific rather than the general. Consider this anecdote from Nigel Cooke’s article, ‘George Condo’s Elite Pathology’ (Turps Banana, Issue 2, June 2006):

On discussing a work of mine in progress, [Condo] insisted that a finished area was in fact far from it – it needed something extra. For Condo it would never really work without the addition of another object, and he returned to the subject now and then as the evening drew on, making suggestions one after another, hoping to offer me the right image. Later, as we parted company, he announced that he had exactly the right thing for me. The painting needed an owl in it – with an arrow piercing its eyeball.

Of course, not every painter’s compulsions are as perverse as George Condo’s. Hence, ‘Whilst the owl made it into the finished painting, the arrow didn’t’: the painting could accommodate a nocturnal raptor, but not the recommended ocular violence.

This notion of a painting’s timbre being thrown off-key by the addition of a single element is one that painters are constantly wrestling with: a painting may begin as a set menu of compositional elements, only to substitute many items for others as an unforeseen pictorial substrate emerges during the painting process. There are painters who suppress this shift and there are painters who candidly draw attention to it. In Caragh Thuring’s work, the set menu of elements with which she begins appears to create a timbre that is off-key from the outset, or harmonious as much by accident as by design – as though musicality were being sought rather than asserted. The liminal compositions seem laid down in anticipation of an imminent pictorial shift, which is underwritten by the ‘elemental’ – i.e., volcanic, seismic, geological and magnetic – imagery that recurs in several paintings. These signifiers of structural transition often operate in tandem with signifiers of structural permanence: ancient architecture, industrial buildings. And between these poles is strewn a range of less determinate imagery, and other elements that sometimes annotate the compositional dynamism in literal fashion (dashes, dots, ‘laser beams’). The elements that comprise each painting seem to belong in it to varying degrees, as though provisionally testing out a pictorial habitat rather than complacently taking up permanent residence. Granted, it is a truism to say that all painters have to decide what kind of pictorial habitat has been created in a given work before assessing whether subsequent additions are appropriate; but the habitat proposed in Thuring’s paintings seems hospitable to some elements and incommodious to others: the compositional approach is so empirical that, initially, there appears no verifiable substrate against which may be measured degrees of appropriateness.

While, in general, that word ‘substrate’ may be defined differently according to the painting under consideration – for example, as a typological criterion in Lisa Milroy’s paintings of shoes, as a semiotic principle in Magritte, or as maximally heterogeneous in Salle or Kippenberger – the relation of parts to whole in most representational paintings can, I suggest, be contained within an adaptation of Roland Barthes’ notion of the studium and punctum. To summarise Barthes, with regard to the photographic image, the studium (‘eagerness’, ‘zeal’) is what an image ‘says’ overall, or, more specifically, what it ostensibly intends to say; while the punctum (‘point’, or ‘puncture’) is a detail that appears alongside but does not necessarily uphold this ‘message’ (the nuns that ‘“happened to be there” in the background, when Wessing photographed the Nicaraguan soldiers’ is the specific example supplied in Camera Lucida). In fact, for Barthes, this detail more often runs counter to the intended message: the punctum ‘punctures’ the image’s ‘keenness’ to attain a univocal condition. We must add, however, perhaps citing the same ‘touching’ photograph of children by William Klein that Barthes cites (and in which he felt unable to observe anything but ‘one child’s bad teeth’), that the punctum also indirectly affirms this putative univocal condition through its very subversion of it.

Though Camera Lucida focuses on photography rather than painting, the fact that so much current representational painting uses photographic imagery as source material should perhaps allow a variation of Barthes’ model to play a role in its interpretation. One of the main distinctions between the photographic and the painted image is that, with the former, the relationship between the punctum and studium is established instantly at the moment of the shutter’s release (and is only consolidated through subsequent interpretation), whereas with the latter it is both cumulative and mutable (indeed, photo-realism’s painstaking transcription of the ‘fast’ image subsists entirely on this distinction). Another distinction is that, with photography, the detail that constitutes the punctum is invariably of the same representational order as the studium (which is what gives it its subversive power), whereas, with painting, divergent representational orders can be sustained in a single image. In painting – and this is exemplified in Caragh Thuring’s paintings – the reverse scenario therefore holds: we do not find a single punctum operating antagonistically against a substrate of univocal pictoriality (i.e., a studium); rather, we find a plethora of puncta vying for position, and the way in which we as viewers ‘sort’ them constitutes the studium. In other words, in painting, it is the studium rather than the punctum that is deviant, for the reason that it is always truant rather than present. Photography, on the other hand (especially photojournalism), always seems to posit, in advance of the shutter’s release, some docile, already-present notion of the subject. For Barthes, an effective photograph seems to be one that legislates against the medium’s rhetorical objectivity, against its presupposition of the subject. Photography is a passive, docile, constipated medium that must be ‘induced’ by the laxative of an foreseen subject, and Barthes’ punctum, the detail that legislates against the studium’s univocal objectivity, is akin to a sort of involuntary pictorial bowel movement.

Although many have emphasised its scatological aspects, painting’s pictorial constitution is far less incontinent than photography’s presuppositional approach. In painting, there is no already-present notion of the subject against which involuntary meaning may be posited, because the studium – the pictorial substrate – is accrued rather than presupposed. And without such presupposition there can be no subversion. Given the subversiveness of the punctum, the question of whether there can actually be puncta in painting seems uncertain – though the question is surely more complex, and more interesting, when considering painting’s consumption of photographic imagery.

Sean Ashton
6th October 2006