I went back to a CD of music written for the piano in the 1950s played by David Tudor � mainly because towards the end of the 1960s he had changed direction and teamed up with the likes of Bill Viola and made electronic music with synths. I listened to it driving back from Leamington on Friday night.

The music that especially appealed was Cage�s Music for Pianos nos 52-56. Apparently this piece works by the performer adding dynamics, tempos and durations to a set of given notes. I had forgotten that this was how the piece was organised and when I listened , it appealed to me because of the lack of obvious formal connection between the sound events. They were spaced in a way and sufficiently varied in themselves to make (as far as I was concerned for good listening At its simplest you could say that Tudor really does let the sounds be themselves � a phrase from Cage.

The essay with the CD by Art Lange comments:

�The only relevant way of recognising time is from the perspective of transformation. Without change, time is an irrelevant concept. Light and darkness are two conditions of being by way of individual perception and as such inhabit these scores in active ways � evocative as silences which beam out from the holes in the music interrupting its process and progress � and visual as reflections of white in the open spaces of the unconventional notation. The space of time sometimes needs to be filled up at the performer�s discretion and we measure light as it infiltrates the darker shades of the sound which energises line and texture � most immediate in Music for Piano where all the notes are individual and separate.�

This made me think of the only bit I have got from Deleuze�s Repetition and Difference, . I managed to get some idea about cruelty in the relationship between form and ground. Form distinguishes itself from ground. But the ground does not distinguish itself � it eventually extinguishes form. This core set of relations is cruel. Deleuze also suggests that indifference can be white as well as dark background. When it is white in the background which separates disparate elements with no clear relationship.

I have some material illustrating the evolution of Cage�s methods in the 1950s � Sixteen Dances which is just before the famous 4 mins 33 secs, Then Music for Changes in which the relationship between the events is constantly changing � there is no guiding sense of continuity of line. As Lange explains �Cage went to enormous lengths to ensure that his work was divorced from habits of convention and taste.� Then the Music for Piano that I mentioned earlier.

I think that the method which Cage used for 16 Dances is structurally linked to I Ching method in Changes � not least by an eight by eight grid. Changes is linked to both 4-33 and the later Music for Piano by the rather intense focus on silence which emerges as one of the most immediately recognisable elements of the unconventional MfC. 16 Dances uses repetition whereas the other two use difference.

I am curious whether so.me of the video pioneers were thinking along similar lines to that Deleuze was writing at the end of the 60s. For example yesterday I read a piece by Dan Graham written at about this point on how he perceives an �anti-form� piece by Serra. The piece exists in Graham�s perception as a residue of a forming act on a rather formless bit of stuff � an echo of an interaction between form and formlessness. Another piece that grabbed me was Bill Viola thinking about the different ways that we experience being in a desert.

All of these artists are undertaking something I would call expressive metaphysics of their chosen medium. The video artists are especially taken with the flux and dematerialisation that confronts them as they dig deeper. I think their response could be a lesson for us we confront all the possibilities of digital media. We face a plethora of content which can stop us making progress � how to chose what to work on? The selection of content might reflect the metaphysical opportunities which we believe are deepest in the new medium. This choice comes before we think about formal development or development strategies.

The other toehold that I am tryin to get on Deleuze is a triple categorisation of the metaphysics of repetition. In a repetition � the same thing repeated � besides the primary instance of two distinct episodes there is a secret subject � the real subject of the repetition. � that which repeats itself through the repetition. The third aspect is �difference�. �All entities are expressed through difference and the thing which is repeated is different from all the other things which might be repeated.

I have unearthed the Matthew Collings� book about art in New York � the first of his that I read. It is now fashionable to dismiss him but rereading it I can see how much it has influenced me. He has quite a good paragraph developing Danto�s ideas on the art discourse which surrounds and constitutes works of art as art. This discourse �is incredibly tortured and unreal and you have to get to know it over many years. At first you can�t believe the phoniness and unreality��Innovations in art often seem to be about calling the bluff of the discourse. The new seems satirical. This discourse reels and adapts. The new seems solemn.�

He gives an example of this happening. First specific objects keep meaning out by not having any meaning. These non-meanings were quietly powerful and activated the space around the objects. Then with post Minimalisn quirky human meanings get activated again by even more powerful objects (This is what Graham is doing with the Serra piece I mentioned above). The specific objects then started to activate strange performances, videos and earthworks. (Bruce Nauman and his square on the ground.)

And perversely (I think) this is in tune with Spinoza who believed that substance had expressive power � but this is my weak point because I completely skipped Spinoza in my finals. (I have just found an article showing how much Degreuze is in tune with Spinoza.)

Collings is frankly unreverential about these changing meanings and I think this may have got him into trouble. Also because it is quite easy to ape his style. He ends the book with Rauschenberg anxiously worrying that maybe nothing has any meaning Nauman has turned into a rich mid-Western horse breeder who also happens to do art and video.

The way the art discourse has evolved since Danto explained the idea � the rapidity of the changes and the impact of fashion and money, also the power of curators, - all seem to have made Collings sceptical about whether there is enough meaning there.

Back home I see there are some more photos of James Russian trip here. James himself is still off on his travels. There are some panoramic shots of the Volga at evening time. It looks like a large lake � that just the distance from one bank to the other.