And so back to Heron and back to Barbara Hepworth.

At Ikon the other day, I bought a copy of Modern Painters which has Matthew Collings� regular diary piece in which he tells us that he is trying to get everyone to understand that painting is about colour and form. He explains various activities that have reinforced that belief. He has been working with his wife on some paintings that are about colour and form and he has been to the Bridget Reilly exhibition where similar themes are evident. He has been making a TV programme about Old Masters and also one about the history of the Turner Prize.

I get the impression that he is fed up with the faddiness of the art world, especially the people in it who aren�t painters but just produce art discourse especially where the discourse brings in all kinds of non-standard artwork. I think he is also reacting to the apparent flippancy of some of his earlier writing leading some people to think he wasn�t serious. In fact he wants people to know that he is serious about colour and form and that his flippancy is for art discourse which confuses people and diverts them from the fundamentals.

So he ends up in a rather elitist position � very few people can actually �see� what the colour and form stuff is all about. This is how I see the core of Patrick Heron�s approach � not especially elitist � but obsessed with these issues and getting flack from people eg by writing about them too much or following the creative logic into challenging areas.

Collings has a soft spot for Greenberg I think � and he has hacked off with about thirty five years of far-outness.

Some while back I quoted some of Heron�s assessment of Barbara Hepworth and MP has a a review of her current exhibition in St Ives. It looks as if everyone is still quietly puzzled by her � there is a secretiveness at least as far as the possibility of getting some discourse going. People can�t make satisfactory links between her biography, what she said about her work, the work itself and the emotions that are implicit in each of the other three. They are convinced she is a major 20th century figure but are uncertain why.

More news from MP � Radiohead are working with Merce Cunningham and a Turner nominee and someone else I can�t remember. The thing that made the biggest impression on me is the way that Merce insists on not co-ordinating the music, the design and the dance. It will just happen the way it happens on the night. As far as I can tell this was always the way it worked � with Cage, with Rauschenberg, Johns, Lamonte Young. Merce believes that his movements are abstract and so there is no meaning or narrative that the collaborators can code into. When you look at that coldly � say 50 years after the first happening at Black Mountain � it still has the power to shock and it still feels new. The fact that this bunch are working on these terms just reinforces the punch. Merce could get away with it now just in terms of his current reputation but the fact he has always done it this way raises his authority exponentially.

And there is this extraordinary chain of �influence� � you keep finding people who say I was doing X and then I heard about Cage and so I tried Y. Fred Frith is just one that I happen to have met. But it includes Stockhausen and Viola (via Tudor) just to name two more.

Maybe a piece has started � I hesitate to say how it came about. Or maybe I should have the courage of my convictions. Often form is about proportion and the most influential proportion is mathematically irrational. You have to start with the square root of 5 � take away one and halve the result. But you can approach this proportion by an algorithm using whole numbers � the algorithm is a set of operations. Take something � do something to it � and then put it together with something else that stands in a specific relation to that first thing. That way you have made a new thing with parts � something that has a mix of repetition and difference. Now iterate. Anyway I worked some bit of stuff on this basis until it lasted about a minute and then I started to trim and embellish. I could easily have kept going but I had to be somewhere else which chafed rather.

In fact there are a set of things I really ought to do that I am experiencing as a bit of a constraint.

I have started on the second David Cunningham CD which is called Voiceworks and also dates from around 1992. The point about Prof Eno is a fair one. For example Wednesday Afternoon is one of his mid 80s pieces that he believes is the first piece ever to be written in the light of some possibilities of a CD.

Just confronting the single digital work by David Cunningham � the one about sentences - highlights a fundamental truth about the new media. That approaching them as art � with an art-expectation � is so very different from how you approach them as just things. But and this really seems a big one, you are not used to approaching those media in that way.

Alan Cummings used to be part of a Scottish alternative comedy duo but now he�s a big star in New York. I have just read his views about the current video art scene in NYC. To say that he�s excited by it is an understatement � but I think he may be prone to hyperbole.

Meanwhile in the real world, DTI launched a Strategy last week. This means I have to revise my standard presentation and discourse on the three key Government Departments. I have written up the thing that took me to Ikon � the official reason I was in that part of town and I think I have mapped some of the links between what I learned and what we are trying to do here. Also some new material from the national skills strategy arrived this morning.

Robin�s latest posting is even more interesting than usual.

By the way there is a DC evening of films at the Electric Cinema Station Road on 23 October. Includes Steve Dwoskin�s 1971 Jesus� Blood Never Failed Me Yet