Richard Williams praises Ian Macdonald�s work in today�s Guardian.

I have been wondering a bit more about how ideas and works of art relate. Yesterday�s I wrote about the �intellectual� wing of the AbsEx describing the kind of painting they wanted to develop in response to contemporary circumstances. This happened before they produced good examples of that approach. (I came across another reference to this manifesto in a current art-mag.)

Patrick Heron would have said that that was the wrong way round, I think even though he was another practitioner who tried hard to explain his approach .In his case the explanation came after the work rather than before it. For him, some French painters in the first half of the century had found some ways of making paintings hang together which demonstrated the fundamentals that he wanted to work within.

(I went to an art class in St Ives once with Vita where we were taught how Heron went about making paintings at a certain stage � maybe the late 1940s � and then we were encouraged to experiment with that approach and see what we made of it. The lesson didn�t involve those aspects of painting which Heron himself thought to be most important.)

Nowadays we tend to think that a particular item or object can be conceptualised in a number of different ways � and that the different ways of thinking about it needn�t fit together all that well at all. We tend not to think that there is some one best way of conceptualising any object � or at least that�s what we tell ourselves. We think that the ability to see something from a different perspective makes us more creative.

There has been an axiom of criticism for some years (especially in literature) that you should approach the work as it is on the page (or in the gallery) and react to it directly without bothering with the artist�s expressed intentions which may well be fallacious. The artist may have one set of pre-occupations which causes him to make a work but it may speak to us in different terms and that�s what we ought to concentrate on.

I am not too sympathetic to this approach myself � I think its interesting and revealing to find out how the artist was educated, who he/she was friends with and all the other circumstances which help explain why they produced the work that they did..

Conceptual art comes about because the art that the pioneers were reacting to had already been heavily conceptualised. Also because all the fuss about art as an object made people want to try art without objects.

Yesterday I was reading through my Barnet Newman catalogue and I came across a reference to an article written in the mid 50s by a critic who looked at the intended or privileged meanings of the abstract paintings of the time. He compared the relationship of meaning to object in painting with what was happening in the mass communication channels of the time. Of course abstract painting looked difficult because it didn�t wear its meaning on its face in the same way that a popular song of the 1950s did. I suppose that kind of thinking leads quite quickly towards pop art.

I have often wondered whether or how the initial audience for the great composers in the classical tradition understood structures like sonata form. Mastering sonata form probably must make it easier to go about the business of composition � one can access a tradition and develop aspects of it with one owns small-scale innovations. One of the early atonal composers said that he didn�t want the audience to think about how the music was made but to concentrate on how it was played. Is that how tonal composers felt about form � a hidden means that produced an intelligible result?

I have started to look at what people have been saying about John Cage since he died. I have never really liked many of the things that he said � although I like his music more as time goes by and I am fascinated by the network that he gathered round him. One article points out that despite his overt commitment to �chance� this didn�t mean that he just took what chance threw up regardless. For example the genesis of some pieces involved deciding on an approach which had a chance element, then disliking the result and going off in a different direction containing a chance element of a different kind which led to more pleasing results for him..

In the 1940s Cage believed that composers who were still using harmony as the structural or organisational principle in their works were following a blind alley. Later he said that harmony represented a barrier between the audience and the work. If a piece is written on a harmonic basis then to appreciate what is meant you first have to master the pattern of harmonic expectation that the composer is using in making his selection. That is an unnecessary constraint on the audience � it makes their listening too selective.

One of the underlying issues in all of this is about the relationship between the constituents of the work. Moving in one direction, pioneering sculptors of the 60s wanted to make works where the work was whole and the scope for relationship had been eliminated. In th e other direction, about a decade earlier Cage seems to have wanted the audience to listen to pieces so that they were open to a variety of possible relationships between the elements of the work. Thinking/listening only in terms of harmonic relationships was too narrow. In fact at one point Cage wanted the maximum spatial separation between parts to prevent simultaneous sounds merging into one.

One current critic has concluded that to properly understand a Cage piece it really helps to understand the process that Cage used to create it � what questions he was asking � how the piece was made.

Interesting to read Ricardo�s account of exposing students to some of these issues.