The Journal: A Eulogy
Jennifer New
Anyone who keeps a journal understands the intensely personal nature of it. In the age of Friendster profiles, live journals, blogs and the generally increased ability to live in public via technology, the space opened by this two-dimensional surface becomes increasingly sacred. But as its value as a personal document increases, so too does our desire for revelation. Here we encounter a rather contradictory phenomenon: the journal as a public document and specifically, the journal as an art object carrying with it all the incidental issues of finality, completion and display.
While the intention is arguably the insertion of process and production sans audience into artistic discourse, the bringing of the personal into public, the opposite is a more likely result. Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art is evidence of this unfortunate reversal–the solidifying of a dynamic and personal interpretation of surroundings into a genre. The "art journal" as a paradigm of artistic production is less a revelation of subjective experience than an invasion of private space and the elevation of a fleeting moment to some fabricated ideal of artistic permanence. It would be naive to believe that the issue of audience is ever completely effaced but it is still worth asking whether or not a journal can remain as such when this audience is so specifically articulated.
"Journals are unsung heroes," New writes. "They live in the pockets and shoulder bags of all sorts of people." Her book, with its rounded corners and heavy stock, opening first to a page on which graph paper has been neatly framed by a border of white, seeks to "celebrate these seemingly humble tools, beautiful objects in and of themselves." But the journal is not an "object in and of itself." Even more so than art produced for an audience, the journal is tied to experience–it exists not as itself but as a record of interpreted surroundings–to rescue it from obscurity is also to subvert the very reason for their existence. I for one do not want people going through my pockets and shoulder bag.
While it is incongruous and frustrating at times to see these pages edited and reprinted on flawless paper, the documents compiled in the book are truly wonderful even if the quality of completeness discourages you from taking a pen to the graph paper that is, at first glance, so appealing and blank. Frequented by airplanes and other forms of transportation, caricatures and writing, the pages selected do seem to tell a certain unnamable story of waiting and displacement–the ways in which we fill time and space in an effort to make ourselves comfortable, situate ourselves, articulate future memories or, at the very least. avoid boredom.
While one can argue that such a project indicates progress, in that it makes available artistic productions that would otherwise remain hidden in the underwear drawers of their respective owners, it should also be considered that anthologizing them complete with explanations for each of the sections results in a leveling of difference absolutely essential to the definition of journal as we know it. According to New, there are three "types" of journal and while the categories are uncommitted in their generality, the works have nonetheless been placed under the headings of observation, exploration and creation. Even if they avoid defining their contents too strictly, they function as categories nonetheless and accomplish a segregation of one type from another, thus reducing their creators to the agents of a general activity.
These journals, the collections of fertile pages that generated thoughts and images during time that might be otherwise wasted, are sterilized by their publication. The appeal of journals to "outside viewers," writes New, is that they allow us to "see how a person operates." But even this questionable voyeuristic urge is undermined: we are not curious as readers, the satisfaction of happening upon something, the process of looking as searching has been usurped.
The impersonal nature of this experience is mirrored by the book itself. At a whopping $25.00 for a paperback we wonder if the artists included could even afford it and we know that we will not be toting it around, letting the corners grow ragged, risking coffee stains and rainstorms with it. More than likely it will not even sit by our beds but neatly on top of a coffee table, quietly waiting to be carefully opened when we have nothing to record ourselves.
