When I had not long joined my present organisation I went to a conference in Manchester - Salford to be exact, by the canal . To avoid the notorious nasty M6 I went up the M1 and then over the Pennines. From a work point of view the conference was a good investment. It has helped me to help position the organisation's new direction in a way that seems to go down well with my colleagues. In fact, my role in this area was endorsed just at the beginning of this week. I find this reassuring - having been there about a year.

There was a downside to the trip in that on the Manchester side of the Pennines I managed to dent my boot pretty badly � less than two months after getting the car. There was some extra upside in that I managed to fit in a visit to the Salford Gallery bookshop � which had a sale on. But then I didn�t get round to reading the stuff I�d bought for months and I thought maybe I�d been over-impulsive.

Just lately some of that content has come into focus � for example a collection of essays by Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and critic in New York entitled �Signifying Art�. She is interested in how certain artistic elements or features from the first half of the twentieth century became issues or agendas which got explored progressively in the second half. Examples include a raw brushstroke on the one hand and order in the other. As she puts it: �By the 1950s, kinds of distributed order ranging from scatter to series � whether improvised or totally predetermined � carried the burden of meaning in music, dance, poetry and visual art.�

The book of essays concentrates on the reactions to the New York school of painters. To point to just one example, Lichenstein did a few paintings that were large cartoon style brush strokes using the simplified visual coding that he first developed in his famous pop-art cartoon based paintings with titles like �Wham!�.

The article which I started on this morning examnes the minimal analytic conditions under which sculpture exists. How little can you do for it still to exist as a sculpture and what is it about it that makes it so? This kind of a strategy represents a combination of extremity and neutrality in her view.

She links this agenda up with the work of Barnet Newman - who I mention quite often here, I think: �Newman�s importance may be measured in the turf wars his art and polemics inspired � his uncompromising example continues to chasten art-making decades after his death in 1970�.

This sent me off to an interview with an artist from the 60s that Welish thinks built on Newman�s radical approach. Asked why his pieces are anti-rationalist the artist claims that it is the absence of relations between the parts. The piece is meant to exist as a whole and the parts shouldn�t threaten to divert attention from its unitary identity . Concentration on relations at the expense of the wholes is what happened in European art and these people want to be contemporary and American.

�Anything that is not absolutely plain begins to have parts in some way. The thing is to be able to work and do different things and yet not break up the wholeness that a piece has.�

One of his contemporaries says elsewhere that a piece of sculpture must be �autonomous in the sense of being a self-contained unit for the formation of the indivisble and undissolvable whole.�

We can appreciate entities like this in their wholeness at a glance � that�s the way our minds work. The aesthetic moment may reflect peculiarities of placement in the gallery and the lighting conditions and in this way the sculpture is brought into the temporal transitory world. This is exactly the opposite of what the Cubists tried to do as they rendered the three dimensionality of objects in a set of harmonious relations in two dimensions. Doing this opposite thing � juxtaposing the wholeness that our minds naturally perceive when the form is sufficiently fundamental with the specifics of the momentary perception of the work � is the essence of sculpture at this point in its evolution as far as these artists are concerned.

I find it fascinating that creative people can work back to an approach which is provocatively simple out of these abstractions and complexities of theory and I wish I could do the same in my medium. As I said earlier the person who is really able to do this seems to be Cage. Maybe if I read more Steve Reich I could hear him doing it too.

The way I feel its only by coming down into the process of creation from that kind of lofty metaphysics that it seems possible to overcome the threat of futility in the endeavour.

One of the things about Patrick Heron that interested me a lot was how he reacted to the New York School being exhibited en masse in London in 1956. He started to do vertical stripe paintings of pure abstraction - which looked to me as if they'd been influenced by Newman. But he got a lot of grief for this - for example he was dropped by his gallery. Even sohe found the step into pure abstraction very exhilirating - especially the new opportunity to use the whole canvas. But he kept on thinking in terms of the relations between the areas of colour which constituted the painting.