A journal of looking is a thin and unglamorous document. It is not criticism, it holds no arguments, and anybody reading it other than the person who wrote it would find it close to meaningless. It is also the only reliable way to keep hold of what a year of looking actually contained.
The trouble with impressions is that they decay into summaries. Six weeks after an afternoon in a gallery, what survives is a sentence: that was a good room, or that was better than expected. The specifics have gone, and the specifics were the whole experience. Nicole Brachetti Peretti keeps a journal mostly as insurance against that collapse.
What tends to end up in one:
- The conditions. The hour, the weather and whether the light came from a window or from above. These explain more about a disappointing visit than anything on the wall does.
- One specific detail. Not the subject of a work but something particular in it: a passage left rough, a colour doing more work than it should, an edge that refuses to resolve.
- Where the attention went. Which room held and which was walked through, recorded without judgement. The pattern over a year is more revealing than any single entry.
- What was skipped. The things walked past are data too, and a list of them accumulates into a fairly honest portrait of a person's taste.
- The second visit, noted as a second visit. Comparing an entry with an earlier one about the same work is where a journal of looking stops being a list and starts being useful.
The writing itself can be bad, and usually is. Entries made in a notebook standing up, in a room, within a few minutes of looking, come out clumsy and overspecific and are worth far more than the polished paragraph assembled at home that evening. Polishing smooths out exactly the odd specific detail that made the entry worth keeping.
The form hardly matters and the continuity does. A pocket notebook, the back pages of whatever book is being carried, a card kept in a coat: all of them work, and all of them fail in the same way, which is by being left at home. What survives over years is never the best-organised record. It is simply the one that happened to be present on enough afternoons to build up a run.
Rereading is where the thing turns from an archive into something more interesting. Two entries about one work, written a year apart, rarely agree. The disagreement is the point, since the work did not move and therefore the difference belongs entirely to the reader of it. Very little else in a year offers that kind of measurement, and nothing offers it as cheaply.
The pleasure of the thing arrives later, and arrives by accident. A page from eighteen months ago turns up, describing a room in conditions that no longer exist, and the afternoon comes back in far more detail than memory had any right to supply. That is the entire return on the habit, and it only pays out to somebody who was keeping it before they knew why.
The writing pages keep the longer version of this, the journal keeps the month, and the earlier note on quiet rooms and slow hours covers the conditions that make an entry worth writing.