There was a poignant photograph in the Guardian last week of Robert Smithson�s Spiral Getty � possibly the most famous bit of landscape art - about to be submerged in the Great Salt Lake. I read somewhere that nowadays people have even forgotten where it was.

Richard Long is often bracketed with Smithson as a landscape artist. A long time ago I bought a taped interview with him � in fact the interview took place in 1984. I have been playing bits of it wondering whether they might not be some kind of source material � whether to make a digital recording of bits of the interview and then upload them into a wave editor. There�s a bit, for example, where he talks about how a line in the landscape easily becomes a column of words on the page � and then he recites the line of words. The tape is a bit decayed in places but that might not matter. There are common themes between Long and Tacita Dean � things like the transience and the natural world.

So I pulled out Tacita Dean�s book about the Teignmouth Electron � a boat which was used in a single-handed round-the-world sailing competition. The voyage went wrong � the boat wasn�t strong enough for the Roaring Forties - and the sailor drowned himself having deceived the world about his true location.

To draw a line, one might go from Barnett Newman�s all in one paintings with straight lines, through to new sculpture in the 60s, through to Long walking a line and then making the work out of traces or echoes of the walk to the examination of echoes of an insane journey.

Newman described the situation in 1940 as one where �some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope � to find that painting did not really exist.�

I haven�t mentioned that when we were in St Ives we all walked along the coast path from there to Zennor. Then we got the bus back � it was a double decker with an open top and of course we sat on the top. Then later Yvonne and I parked the car at Zennor and kept on going � we were defeated by the weather which was like Scotland although the rest of the country was having a heatwave. But a little gallery � a community project came out of the mist as a life saver � because it served coffee and cake. The path is extraordinarily dramatic and the worse the weather the more dramatic it gets. We formed the intention to walk from Penzance round Lands End to St Ives some time.

Apparently amongst the AbsEx in NYC there were two or three societies of artists � the bohemian one which included de Kooning Pollock and Kline who lived in Greenwich Village, earned their livelihood doing odd jobs and slept in their studios. The intellectuals lived uptown and included Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman, Still and Reinhardt. Some of the intellectuals wrote to the New York Times in June 1943 saying things like:

�Art is an adventure into an unknown world which can only be explored by those willing to take risks. The world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. The only subject matter is valid is that which is timeless and tragic.

We favour the simple expression of complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane�

Of course after a while people wanted to undercut this heroic position. But its interesting that it was adopted so far in advance of the paintings emerging which actually demonstrated this approach. I like the piano music John Cage was writing at this point.

In 1945 Newman said that he was concerned �not only with his feelings or the mystery of my own personalty but with the penetration into the world mystery � metaphysical secrets.� Artists ought to �bring from the nonreal, from the chaos of ecstacy something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experienced moment of total reality.�

Louise James and I opened the vodka that I had been sent by James� hosts in Moscow. We poured ourselves 30-40ml neat and then toasted and drank it down in one. Even I could see what everyone was getting at in terms of the premium quality of the spirit.

This is a gestural way to drink, I suppose. I have no idea if that�s how the AbsEx got drunk.