The Visual Component, Root 2

Now I want to see what happens if I start a strand that doesn't lead off from Jody's original one...

I've been interested for a long time in category-making (and category-playing-and revising): I'm curious about the usefulness and limitations of the various "boxes" we create to discriminate, position ourselves, create insides and outsides, make sense of the world...and it just occurred to me that all the work we've been doing here re: categories of responding (currently: clarifying, supporting, complexifying, weaving, challenging, unspecified) is really...um...vexed. The other night, my husband and I were discussing a work of art that hangs in our dining room, Ava Blitz's manipulated photograph, "Drunken Oak," and he said that it was a simplification, not a complexification, of the oak itself. Below find (turned sideways, Ann--still a puzzle?) an oak in the woods behind our farm house, Ava's rendition of an oak, and the oak itself close up. Which is the simplification, which the complexification?  And if we vote differently, what has happened to this distinction that we are offering?

Also, just saying: as a further--um, complexification? simplification?--all of them, as photographs, are themselves second-order representations...