On Sunday I drove myself up to Hyde Park to see the Cindy Sherman exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery � it took less than an hour to get their and luckily I was able to park right outside. I wanted to see her work because it appears in practically every overview of US art in the last thirty years. She takes photographs of herself and is able, using all kinds of props and make-up to radically alter her appearance and take on very different disguises. She easily exemplifies key themes � gender, representation, identity as a construction. Monday was the last day of the exhibition and her work isn�t shown in this country very much

Seeing a lot of her work in a gallery is very different from seeing one of two reproductions of her photography in a book. Since around 1980 her work has got larger and more sumptuous and so the reproductions have become less and less true to the originals.

In her early work � when she was discovering the area she would make her own � the photos were much smaller but they tended to come in sets. When she was at college in the late 1970s she did a work which was made up of four smallish black and white photographs which look a bit like different members of a family. A little later she produced set of around fifteen photographs which are the characters in a classic murder mystery play � the maid, the vicar etc. These works have the look and feel contemporary art movements especially conceptual. I liked this stuff a lot � but glancing through some old reviews I see that I am not the only one.

I discovered that Gian Carlo Feleppa has even written some music to be listened to while looking through the murder mystery set in book form � the CD comes with the book.

Sherman moved on to do more smallish black and white shots of herself as various characters in imaginary film stills. The films don�t exist but the shots look so convincing that people tend to assume that they do. Few losses when these works are reproduced in art books.

Sherman tends to pick up a certain amount of flak these days, I suspect, because her project is quite easy to �get� and therefore she is a good subject for a student essay assignment. I think she may have also prospered in the 1980s art boom which could make her unfashionable just now.

I don�t find either point a problem myself � in particular I don�t think you have to read her work as an exploration of one specific agenda or set of issues. Ageing is as important as gender in her work currently. Mythology and art-history have also been important themes.

I found the latest issue of The Wire at the Serpentine - having missed it at the Warwick Arts Centre. There�s an article about Ron Geeson who used to appear as a mad Glaswegian dada boogie-woogie pianist at the local jazz club when I was a teenager. I also learned that the new Robert Wyatt album has a song about Miles Davis and Juliette Greco in Paris in 1949.

The Wire play David Byrne Marquee Moon on the Invisible Juke Box. He comments that in NYC in the mid 70s audiences were prepared to tolerate bands trying something radically different even if it wasn�t a great success - and regrets the passing of this general sympathy to experiment.

So there in a nutshell are a few extra Wire fragments supporting the mythology of the past/NYC that I like. You could play Marquee Moon or Talking Heads while looking at early Cindy Sherman � you don�t need specially composed music.

In the Serpentine I discovered that two French authors � both called Vezin have written a book about the 20th Century Muse � published this Spring. Its much cheaper from amazon.com than it is in the Serpentine bookshop. Even so the Sepentine is a great collection of stuff � it reminded me that I ought to work through some of the things I bought this time last year when I visited.

One is called Repetition and Difference and is French. I am hoping it might provide some inspiration or some new angles on Min.

I am still bouncing around in the conceptual basis of that phenomenon. Fried wrote an influential article claiming that Min was merely theatrical � compared with classic modernist painting where the internal relations of the elements have the power to grab the attention and hold it through their formal powers. Min is theatrical because you have to walk through the space to stop it being very boring. Mere �theatrical� meaning is supposed to be an inferior aesthetic experience � which was why the simple Min sculptures were meant to be much less important.

Of course Cindy Sherman is very �theatrical� with all that dressing up � and so were Gilbert and George�s living sculptures � and so were �happenings�. So there are lots of ways of being �theatrical� and lots of ways of being �minimal� or �abstract�. But it probably is true that for 10 to 15 years after 1965 the classic accounts of why abstraction was good came to be the target for the younger generation.

I asked James to teach me how to drink vodka Russian style. Anything less like an alcopop is hard to imagine.