So Just What Is an Art Journal, Anyway? And Why I Think We Should Call Ours Something Else.

And don’t you know you can count on me to have an opinion? I remind myself periodically that I do NOT have to have an opinion about everything. For much of my life, I thought it was like my Job or something, having opinions. And voicing them. Oh, yeah. At some point, I realized I didn’t have to do that. I can just Not Have an Opinion, and that’s very liberating.
But lots of times I still have them, anyway. This idea about what an art journal is is a continuation of some conversations I’ve had recently, about the stuff I said in the interview from last week. I’m not an expert on journals or art or art journals, but that doesn’t stop me from having something to say about them, obviously.
Feel free to disagree, OK? Just don’t gripe at me about it.
First of all, we have to decide what a journal is. As you might expect from An English Person, I fall back on the actual definition, so let’s use that. First, of course, the etymology:
c.1355, "book of church services," from Anglo-Fr. journal "a day," from O.Fr. journal, originally "daily" (adj.), from L.L. diurnalis "daily" (see diurnal). Sense of "daily record of transactions" first recorded 1565; that of "personal diary" is 1610, from a sense found in French. Journalism is 1833 in Eng., likewise from Fr. (where it is attested from 1781).
OK. And the definition, from Webster’s:

jour·nal

Pronunciation:

\ˈjər-n^əl\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Middle English, service book containing the day hours, from Anglo-French jurnal, from jurnal, adjective, daily, from Latin diurnalis, from diurnus of the day, from dies day — more at deity

Date:

15th century

1 a: a record of current transactions ; especially : a book of original entry in double-entry bookkeeping b: an account of day-to-day events c: a record of experiences, ideas, or reflections kept regularly for private use d: a record of transactions kept by a deliberative or legislative body e: log 3 f: log 42 a: a daily newspaper b: a periodical dealing especially with matters of current interest3: the part of a rotating shaft, axle, roll, or spindle that turns in a bearing
Now, you can argue that a journal is anything you say it is. Go ahead and argue that. For the purposes of trying to figure out what an art journal is, though, we’re going to use this and argue that anything else, anything that isn’t a daily (more or less) record of what happens in someone’s life is not, by definition, a journal and should, therefore, be called something else.
The first art journals I saw were those of Teesha Moore, and I would posit that she is the one who started the whole thang. Her work is fabulous, always has been. When I interviewed her for Rubberstampmadness, lo! these many years ago, she sent me a box full of her early handbound books. These were nothing like the journals of hers you’ll see on her website; they were mostly books of things she’d cut out and pasted in for various projects—books of ideas.  But they were still just about the coolest things I’d ever seen. In the years since, art journals have taken off, many of them modeled on what Teesha does now but diverging from hers: hers usually have actual journaling (writing about her daily life) on the pages. First the diverging art journals were mostly illustrated quotes—that’s still really popular. Now you see a lot that’s mostly just collage in a book form.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Those are fine. Fun to look at, if that’s what you like. But there’s really nothing about most of them that has anything to do with a journal:  no writing about daily life, no recording of events.
In short, there’s nothing personal in there at all. Nothing of the artist. No recording of anything that happened.
I think these should be called something else. Art books. Collage books. It doesn’t matter, but calling them art journals is claiming that they’re something they’re not. Those of us who love journals—you know, who read every published journal we can find and can still remember how pissed off we were to find that Anais Nin made up much of what she wrote in hers—are disappointed when we look at something that purports to be a journal but isn’t at all.
It reminds me of when I was teaching and got a set of journals from my classes. I read every single entry of every single one, no matter how boring and uninspired they were, no matter than many of my students resorted to copying song lyrics and notes in their effort to avoid anything like examining their life as a freshman in college. In this particular set, I came across a journal that seemed oddly familiar. Had I already read it? But there were no comments in the margins, no, “Good observation!” or “What was that like?” I became just the tiniest bit obsessed with this, as it seemed so familiar. I started going back and re-reading some of the other journals. What I discovered:  two students, in two different classes, had shared the assignment. Student A wrote entries 1-20, and Student B wrote 21-40 (or however many it was). But they switched them, so one had A-B, and the other had B-A—same entries, same order, but switched between them.
I was pissed, sure—I hate it when someone tries to trick me, for whatever reason in whatever situation. But I was also disappointed:  this was supposed to be a journal, an assignment suggested by the department that would encourage students to write but also be of some aid in helping fresh-out-of-high-school kids have somewhere to think on paper about all the things they were having to deal with, from homesickness to grades to romance to drinking way, way more than their bodies could tolerate. It was supposed to be a journal—a record of their days. Instead, it was just one more bit of tedium, one more chance to work a scam to get a grade.
It was like someone had spit on the whole concept of the journal, on what it means to those who love it as a concept:  the idea of recording our lives.
[In case this seems unfair, my requiring students to keep a journal that I would then read, I will note:  it was also a requirement for first-year instructors to keep a journal and turn it in to our instructor, so I was doing the same thing they were, only in much more detail and with much, much more enthusiasm—this was back when I was really involved with the journal, and I got permission to use my own personal journal and then xerox relevant pages to turn in, leaving out the other stuff. Even omitting pages, I turned in a LOT of stuff.]
Roz uses the term “visual journal” for what she does—at least I think that’s what she uses. It makes sense to me, and I think that’s what I’ll start calling the kind of journal I love most to look at:  it’s a journal, first and foremost. Those of us who love journals know that and recognize it right off. It’s not a collection of quotes (and I’d be happy if people would start calling those “commonplace books,” thank you very much), and it’s not a book of collages. There’s visual stuff. It’s not all frou-frou and polished, maybe; maybe it’s just stuff pasted in, or maybe doodles, or maybe photographs:  it’s visual. It doesn’t claim to be art, so it can be as raw as it is. All that is required of a visual journal is that it have some visual aspect to it.  I like this term for that reason:  it doesn’t demand anything. “Sketchbook” seems to guilt you out for not sketching, doesn’t it? Visual journal is so much more laidback:  all it asks is that you put something in there to look at. Even really nice handwriting or maybe some illuminated letters would do—it doesn’t ask that much.
Yes:  visual journal is what I like. It’s what I like to look at, and it’s what I might call mine, sometimes, to differentiate it from something that’s purely writing, that’s all journal.
Sometimes forcing words to mean what they’re supposed to mean solves all kinds of wiggly confusion.