'Six Years' - 'Eight years'

Initial reaction received from the pieces of art are instantly directed to a parentally and chronological viewpoint.
This viewpoint ordered preconceptions to the viewers, causing the 'mystery game' to be played; when reading the pieces of art. Not only was it detrimental to the critique of the work but it also caused us to waste time, talking about all the semiotics and peoples reactions to them, which I thought was a given. This lead to overanalysing the pieces of work and attempts to read them as if 'clues from a puzzle' rather than accepting the pieces as solitary vehicles for the artists concepts.

The work seemed to be presented together to emphasise and 'back up' each others points, this ended up being negative to the pieces. By using two pieces of art to emphasise each other would not have been as successful as possible just 'six years' presented solely. But if they were placed in continuum to provoke a discussion between them; resulting in possibly the analogy of children fighting for attention from their mother then this was a great addition to the piece of art. However I am not sure if I believe that this is true and instead it was more connected to not having enough confidence in presenting a solo piece of work (especially with a critique trend of work being presented in multiples) because the work didn't have the type of conversation between each other that felt in sync. But rather it felt as if it they were contradictory to each other and I found 'eight years' to have confusing symbology, possibly because 'six years' was clear that it was an anchor being represented in a cake yet 'eight years' wasn't as equally clear. Was it a piñata or was it a piece of homework? Thus bringing attention back to focusing on 'six years', which was more successful because it seemed more refined. It held simplicity within itself, yet the simplicity was adulatory to the work.

One prominent question that arose in the critique was whether the art was catered to a specific audience. Said question; resulted in my personal conclusion that it was very similar to the Schrödinger's Cat conundrum, because there was not a definitive answer. But it brought about a discussion between the ideas that not every viewer will be a mother and in the same lifestyle situation as the artist. However every viewer will most likely have nostalgic childhood memories that relate to the pieces of art. Bringing this analogy to some sense, i this is a similar case with any piece of art, but it a question worth thinking about when presenting.

The most interesting discussion points stemmed back to the popular crit topic of presentation. The work was presented in a very archival and clinical fashion. Becoming a contradiction to what seemed to be the point of the art that was presented. This could be what the artist wanted, causing the viewers to take a controlled and macro view of parental art. But i think it was possibly a halfway attempt between setting it up as if it was inside a gallery and trying to be an installation involving the viewers into the artists memory.

The artists use of the skewed Duchampian ideals makes 'six years' successful and personally pleasing to my preferences and for me the piece could have been more successful with just 'six years' presented alone. More personal judgement needs to be made when presenting art; purely because the presentation was the most negative and contradictory element from this crit.