Ready-made

A seven thirty a.m. start, and I spent the whole morning attempting to write my essay on Williams, Duchamp and early Modernist aesthetics. I never really got started and gave up in the afternoon. There’s a huge amount of information to collate and order before I can begin to write, and in the evening I felt myself sliding once more into chaos and a hapless, disorganised frame of mind.

Desperation!

Lee did a bit of work for College, obliquely spraying pieces of plaster he’d cut from the ceiling of the abandoned pub down the road with aerosol paint, so that the indentations and relief features such as cracks, hairs, etc., were highlighted by the fall of the paint. These corresponded fairly exactly to the visual appearance of rubbed photogrammes and made the plaster surface look more three-dimensional. Barry and I criticised them as haphazard and unplanned and Lee leaped to their defence, saying he was just exploring another aspect of his interest in light on surfaces etc. . . .

Duchamp’s ready-mades spelled the death of Art. There’s nothing more to be said, just the eternal reiteration of the death of Art and the death of all Gods. There’s nothing to say apart from ‘There’s nothing to say,’ and all that has been gone over time and again by minds far worthier than mine.