James comes back from Berlin tonight but he is flying via Munich and there seems to be some hassle with the connection. I wasn�t expecting to see him before I left for Leamington and now it�s not clear if he will get here at all today.

I have been thinking a lot some Danto I read last week. He wrote a famous article in the mid 60s called The Art World and about twelve years ago he went back to it. He are is an amalgamation of some of the propositions he offers in the later article:

�To interpret a work is to be committed to a historical explanation of the work.^To understand a piece requires recreation of the historical and critical perception which motivated it.^To be an artist in this art world � constituted by a discourse of reasons - is in effect to take a position on the past.^To be a member of the art world you have to learn what it means to take part in the discourse of reasons.^To call something art is to be ready to interpret it in terms of what and how it means.^The difference between an art object and something which is just a an ordinary thing is how it relates to the discourse of reasons which constitute the art world. Art is historical because the constitutive reasons within the art world relate to each other historically.�

In the article demonstrates this approach by looking a 1966 sculpture by Eva Hesse and assessing whether it makes better sense in relation to Pollock�s classic style or to recent Minimalist work. He manages to create a discourse of reasons out of both mintheory and gendered concepts.

I read this stuff � and really liked it � on Thursday morning, the day I stumbled into Video Acts. And,of course, part of the reason that I am so taken with the works on offer in that exhibition is that I am taken with the historical explanations that seem fall into place to cover the works came to be and their engagement with pre-existing discourse. Some of this is in what the artists have said, some of it is in how the works look and some of it is in the artists� careers.

For example, the Korean Nam June Park performed Lamont Young�s Composition # 10 for Bob Morris at the first ever Fluxus Festival in 1962. Having met John Cage he was motivated to move to New York in 1964 and 1965 bought one of the first ever portable Sony video kits. This is conventionally taken to be the start of art video.

Other young artists (featured in Video Acts) are thought to have been drawn to video because of its power to explore themes like time, memory, simultaneity, spontaiety and intimacy. Nauman in particular focused these potentialities on an exploration of artistic gesture � something that was well entrenched in the art world that he inherited. Part of his practice was to be catholic in his adoption of media and set no limits on what could be used to make art.

In the light of the influence of what Cage said about composition, I feel that the right step is to look at the available evidence on how he actually created certain pieces � particularly before he started to publish his reasons. I suspect the reasons he offered may not be the whole story and I want to see what scholars who have dug deeper have come up with.

I hadn�t realised until today that the Cage collaborator, David Tudor, gave up playing the piano and switch across to electronic music some time in the early 1970s � joining a group of musicians which included Bill Viola.

One of the things about Carl Cox reinterpreting earlier Detroit electronic pieces is the purity and placing of the sounds. Viola believes that video and the synthesizer are in a single technological trajectory.

Viola writes that he met Tudor in 1973 and became �part of his Rain forest project, which was performed in many concerts and installations throughout the 70s. One of the many things I learned from him was the understanding of sound as a mterial thing, as an entity. My ideas about the visual have been affected by this, in terms of something I call �field perception�, as opposed to the more common object perception. In many of my videotapes I have used the camera according to perceptual or cognitive models based on sound rather than light.� The first �installation� that the Church of England ever bought was by Viola � a work called �The Messenger� which was shown in Durham Cathedral.

Having found Bill V unapproachable, I know find that his writing is quite the opposite. He knows a lot about how video works � say in comparison with film � and this theory is a source of ideas about how his works mean � the new dimensions of meaning that emerge in his use of the medium. This way of thinking eventually leads him to a rather de-materialised view of the world � almost to what we normally think of as a �post-modern� view of the world. But Viola is more concerned with spiritual values than most post-modernists are.