8.30 am. Updated the John Harvey: Blog site with reports on the first two of three reconstructions of Duchamp’s music. The final piece will be a rendering of his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Erratum Musical, which I’ll endeavour to complete before the end of the calendar year. These pieces are not by any stretch of the imagination significant outputs in terms of either my own work or a contribution to ‘Duchamp studies’. Nevertheless, they’ve presented themselves to me as a necessary undertaking — a self-education in musical interpretation and performance, and an opportunity to explore how an art historian (or an artist for that matter) can intervene in, interrogate, and interpret an artwork through its reconstruction (see Making Ready Duchamp: Sculpture Musicale):
11.40 am. Updated and posted my Personal Tutor invitation to my charge. The pastoral dimension of academic life absorbs a considerable amount of time and emotional energy. But it’s of the essence of one’s vocation — bit like being a plumber: you have the responsibility of keeping the pipes clean too, so that the water can have free course through them to the tap:
12.00 pm. Back to The Floating Bible visualization — finalising templates and developing an efficient and reasonably straightforward process for stretching and copying handwritten words. To begin, every diffrent word was written down:
From this list, individual words will be scanned at 1200 dpi and stretched vertically to the height to the of the text columns in the edition of the Gideon Bible which is likely to have featured in the original account of the ‘miracle’. It’s only as one engages the mechanics of the process that the full implications of the labour ahead — in terms of the investment of time, the demands that’ll be made on my patience and fortitude, and the irksomeness of the necessary routine — become apparent:
I need to complete one verse from beginning to end — from scan, through the parameter adjustments, and to the final artwork — in order to ascertain the viability and duration of the procedure.
5.45 pm. An evening with my fully-assembled family:
