Hi class,
Thank you so much for your blog entries.
Many of you have, through research, gotten these 2 terms right.
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes is a classic book of his thoughts on the function of photography as a visual coding. Barthes is essentially, a French literary critic, who has developed studies on semiotics ( study of sign processes in this world—remember I told you on another occasion these 2 terms- the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’?) His theory centered around “punctum” and “studium” which are the 2 main parts of the photograph.
To put it simply,
The studium is the main message or point of the photograph and the punctum is the part that grabs your attention. He places more attention on the punctum which is subjective, private and can sometimes, be considered redundant. However, every photographer should be looking for the ‘punctum’ in the photographs that he takes, to create an individuality, albeit the signature of something that ‘disturbs and wounds’. In my opinion, the ‘punctum’ is what gives life to a piece of photograph, like how Barthes was reminded of the haunting past of his dead mother as he chanced upon an old photograph.
In this picture,
The punctum is obviously the disturbing fold at the top right of the ”wallpaper’- it is actually a floral piece of fabric which resembles a “wallpaper” as it is hung upright. It makes the work look imperfect and people question why that flap is so obvious, and if it was an incomplete work done in hanging up this work.
As the studium is the message of this work, the message of this work is a documentation of this piece of artwork. The labels flanking the sides serve to tell us this idea very aptly, and the space around this wallpaper makes it look exclusively in a space of an exhibition.
This is a work in a recent exhibition “Drawing as Form” in Sculpture Square. Done by Marienne Yang, the title is “Remember to Forget II” and the medium is floral fabric, red thread and wallpaper glue.
This is the synopsis:
Drawing- “What exactly defines a drawing? I caught myself asking when I was interested in participating in this show. Running my eyes over Wikipedia, the very technical answer would probably swim around ‘a visual expression’ and ‘a small amount of material on a 2-dimensional medium creating a mark on it’. Carrying on the later idea, I will present a floral fabric with embroidered text wallpapered onto the wall.
Texts- as they are embroidered onto the fabric stitch-by-stitch, denoting both spent time and bodily fluids. The diary-the source of the text-is one where an individual pens down the most intimate of thoughts. Through the process of penning it down via the repetitive embroidering, the artist seeks to forget a past.
