Full Critique Group Presentation, Question, Feedback and Response can be found here.
THANK YOU! Although I phrased the question in a way to make it appear a quick and easy task, I was aware asking you to look through 116 images and chose just one to talk about was not quick or easy. Claire wrote, and O’Neill, Lindey and Gabriel echoed this sentiment “Only one?...this is proving to be an impossible task!”
The reason behind the question was to test a hypothesis I have about the pages and their role as part of a whole within other pieces rather than individual pieces. My hypothesis is, when viewed together it becomes difficult to separate out the individual, not just because of the sheer volume of images, but because as one looks closer at the pieces the realization that there are connections, maybe not always clear and obvious, but nonetheless an apparent connectedness, between the pages creates an inseparable whole. You wouldn’t abridge “War and Peace” to a single page, would you? Still, when asked to select one to talk about, you were able to do this. And yes, it would be possible for me to break the journal apart, it isn’t “War and Peace”. It is a formal possibility, but contextually it is not, and you proved this to me with your comments. Although Mark and KJ did not directly address the difficulty, Mark began his feedback mentioning both sides of a page before focusing his feedback on one side, and KJ chose to talk about two pieces- which do not share the same page, but are next to each other in their placement on the website, both showed the difficulty of the task.
Interestingly no one chose the same piece. Claire mentioned this, and I agree, it is very important to what I am trying to do with the pages and how they will continue to work within the Self-Portraits: “i love that we have all picked out different pieces - it shows that there is, in fact, not any one particular piece that universally stands out - but that the work allows an individual resonance in its relationship to the viewer.” I am sure there are those who would argue that because of the ratio, 116:6, it was highly favorable that a page would not be chosen by more than one person. However I like to believe that our response to art is not something that can be explained by statistics, so I am gladly willing to follow a more psychological explanation that the viewer can find amongst the masses those images which resonate with her or him on an individual level while remaining a part of a larger work. It is possible to find resonance with a single sentence, phrase or word in “War and Peace”, yet “War and Peace” is still the whole novel.
Finally, I want to mention how each of your responses to the pieces you wrote about have helped me understand the many ways they might speak to the individual. Getting to know each of you the past five months and reading the “why” you chose to talk about a certain piece I felt that whether the response was emotional or aesthetic in origin, it was in all cases a reflection of what I have learned through your posts and our conversations what you are thinking about within your work. This has helped shed some light onto the possible answers within my own work to one of the questions I proposed addressing in question 10c. of my project proposal, How are they able to dissolve borders between what they are depicting [subject] and the viewer [object], so that the roles reverse and the experience of the once subject and now object becomes experienced by the viewer? Thank you! Now I am really excited to hear your response to the work in person in NYC!-Robyn [BTW, I’ve never read “War and Peace”.]