Sorry if the last entry which is a bit too chaotic. More attention to grammar would help. Whats the excuse?

On Saturday we took James to Cambridge and then sloped off to see Rob and Wendy in nearby Melbourne a few miles down the A10. Their son Laurence has just started studying production at the Guildford Academy of Contemporary Music. I bought from them a CD with some more recordings by his band, �Fellthru�, plus two other local punk-ska bands. The genre seems to be moving forward � Fellthru�s songs have contrasting sections and lots of light and shade, tightly arranged and very sharply played. Reminded me of some elements of progrock.

I was pretty knackered the next day what with all that driving and carrying boxes. I managed to prune the pear tree a little but then dozed off on the couch. Another trip to London and back Monday/Tuesday night has intensified the sensation today, My teeth ache too.

I have borrowed a book from Lawrence about 20th century art movements � written from an Italian perspective. When you see them all laid end to end like that you can�t help thinking how similar many of them are and how certain clusters seem to represent a super-movement which might last 30 years or so. For example after the Second World War there seem to have been a series of movements concerned with using non-art elements. Art Brut, Art Informel, CoBrA, Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus, neo-Dada all look like attempts to get away from sophistication and move towards a downbeat zone where there is a little overt finish and materials might include everyday artefacts and entities.

James says the girl in the room opposite is studying theology.

I have at last found my copy of Cage�s 16 Dances which is the last major piece composed before the radical period containing Music of Changes and then 4 mins 33 secs. I played it in the car on the way to work listening hard to the construction of the pieces. Each piece is composed from a limited set of sounds sometimes called a �gamut�. Each piece is defined by its gamut and the composer sequences the elements using whatever rules or patterns seem to make sense to arrange the elements.

Knowing that this is how the music is made, and having an interest in the technique encourages a particular kind of listening. I used to think the 16 Dances were influenced by Webern but that�s not how I hear them now. Surprisingly this is the point at which Cage and the leaders of the European avant garde believe they are working to a common agenda � one which involves a grand system specifying almost everything that happens in the work. The apparent agreement only lasted a few years.

Cage never shrunk from trying to explain what he was doing and why � which is a useful habit if you want to exert influence even after you have gone. It meant that his ideas could stream into other creative communities � like the one which Danto calls �the art world�.

I like the way that Matthew Collings has taken up the �art world� concept and applied it. It took me a while to realise what he was doing. He describes from his own experience what it is like to be in that world, what the episodes and conversations are like. I used to think this was just gossip � but I can see now that its gossip for a good theoretical reason � a kind of experiment to test the validity of Danto�s conclusions � a kind of natural history of the process which forms the climate of opinion shaping what can count as contemporary art.

If Collings had been around in New York in the early 50s he might have done the same thing and Cage would have loomed large in his observations. Cage introduced the painter Philip Guston to Morton Feldman and the two became very close friends. Cage was great at bringing people together � I suppose he must have been strongly extrovert. Feldman felt that Guston�s paintings could teach him lessons to apply in his compositions and he writes with great sophistication about Guston�s later �cartoon� paintings locating these works in a contrast between the compositional approach of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Here�s Guston on himself:

"So when the 1960's came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am 1, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. [..] I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid.... Wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt."

I looked at some reporoductions of Guston on Friday - both his earlier Absex material and his later cartoon paintings - and I thought I saw a textural continuity. But at the same time there is a major change of stance - a change in how the self is placed in the work and what kind of offering of self is made to the spectator. It has to be crazy to think that you can pull the individual subjectivity out of the work rather than simply changing the terms on which subjectivity is offered.