Jake came back home today - very pleased to see us all - lamb bones to celebrate. We went for a walk with him on the hill - there was a rainbow over North West London.- and we bumped into his spaniel friend Dylan.

I put some more material in the www.kwase-kwaza.org News section. Especially the finale to the Washington DC speech by the UN AIDS Envoy for Africa. Also some curious pieces about Ministerial statements in South Africa - one where there is a campaaign being mounted to get South Africans themselves to do more to help the poverty in their country arising from the pandemic

Still thinking about the WATCH event. The Durham Tapestry was still hanging in HT. I asked Hiliary Cotton where it came from- she said it was made by a group of people in Durham about 10 years ago and that it had been sitting in a suitcase in someone's garage. It is a grid of 9 by 8 cells - each one embroidered as a celebration or statement - some but not all are in a naive style - a fair amount of organic imagery. Its an impressive entity.

There is a sense in which I can still feel the performance in my body today - I think maybe it was the heavy physical involvement in the R&B and be-bop after the more contemplative pieces. There was about three or four moments towards the beginning where I called a piece slightly out of the bands' expectations and we played it with a very precise focus on the passing of time - that was quite extraordinary - to do with the specific temporal and ritual location of that performance - the effect on the people who witnessed it was very clear. Like when you are a dance band and you hit the groove - but in the opposite direction - down into the moment.

Last night, after the gig, I caught a fair amount of Steve Reich 's Music from Three Tales on Radio 3 - very appealing at first shot - something of a return to early to mid 70s work. Also some of a Berio String Quartet - inviting also.

As I write I listen to the minimalist sculptor of massive pieces -Richard Serra - talking about how he got to his particularly approach. Gloriously succinct, educated at Yale, Jaspar Johns amongst his teachers. Serra suggests artists need a practice, a community, a marginality, a provocative intent. He is talking about his common life with Reich and Glass and others in NYC in the early 1970s - the removal truck as the source of funds. You go to NYC (say from Iowa) because you want to meet people who have the same or similar ideas rather than talking to people who weren't quite sure what you were on about. Debbie Harry was talking about this scene last week on the radio - yes it was extraordinary especially when you look back on it but, she said, it was uncomfortable too - sometimes she was cold and hungry.

Serra gives the impression that it actually was as good as you imagine it must have been - trying out processes - say unfolding a sheet of lead and folding it back up - moving through processes until they became ends in themsleves. He gave the impression that art in this arena was the evolution of a way of working with selected materials - maybe slightly obsessively or childishly - out of which some core would emerge. Serra has come from the material into structure and concepts. Material imposes form on form - a truth which has become submerged. All sculpture - even his rolled steel works - are body extensions.

He explained that Minimalists tried to declare the Gestalt reading of a context in a different way . (How on earth was this read by the old guard as a betrayal of the essence of art into theatricality?) "As soon as you break with the tradition you are part of the tradition". You must always be innovative - like Matisse - inventing the cut line to replace the drawn line when he was 80. I suppose this makes Minimalism the last phase of Modernism.

One of Serra's work was dismantled by public request - the first time ever the US Govt dismantled a work it had commissioned. Serra feels that due process was not followed. Serra now no longer gets institutional commissions has no doubts about the rightness of his piece. Serra is now very radical in his reading the practices of US democracy.

Maybe Ricardo has a similar viewpoint to Serra when he says that the best way to understand say total serialism or the New York School would be to have been part of the network people who were working on the stuff. This might be a kind of hermeneutic viewpoint - that work comes out of a specific context and history and that if it appears ugly or unintelligible one should try to work oneself back into that situation. Or maybe one appreciates the work in context when one engages with it to contest or deform it?

Maybe when you are working in a tradition - or find oneself drawn to a tradition - or to transgress a tradition - you start to put yourself imaginatively in the situation of the people who last progressed that tradition. This active attempt to connect with the cultural/social situation elsewhere is itself an act of the imagination. I am not sure I would relish the process of making students aware of the range of recent possibilities that they might want to connect with - at some stage - its like preparing foundations which may or may not get used to construct something.