9.00 am. The first of three MA Fine Art tutorials. For those students from a fine art only background, the first part of the degree is very demanding;  they’re hitting (for the first time) art theory like a car a wall in a destructive vehicle test. They’ll orientate; of that I’ve no doubt. However, the endeavour takes time away from their practice. As a consequence, some are prone to the jitters (understandably). In short, they have to grow another head in order to cope with the dual function of being (temporarily at least) a practitioner-theoretician. I would have it no other way.

11.00 am. Back at home, I worked on module admin, dealt with the morning’s emails, and tried to understand how Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Musical Erratum (1913) might be realised. This is the most complex and incomplete of the three musical compositions conceived by the artist and, along with Erratum Musical, a work that involves chance procedure:

I may need to commission our Computer Studies boffins to design an algorithm to mimic the action of the moving cars. The arrangement of the funnel and mobile open cars reminded me of the way in which trucks were filled with coal from a large hopper at  collieries in South Wales, before being pulled by steam engine to the nearest port.

2.00 pm. A further MA tutorial with a student who is turning a corner at speed, with all the attendant expectations of skidding and swerving in interesting and necessary ways. The chore of completing on-line registers; the task is made the more difficult because the register system is locked into an entirely bonkers timetable system that imposes an unnecessarily restrictive practice:

A man from IS came at 4.00 pm to (for the fourth time) to enable my laptop to communicate with the departmental ‘central’ printer. (Yet another unnecessarily restrictive practice.) Fourth-time lucky. At the end of the afternoon, I held a reassigned painting tutorial.

6.15 pm. Practise session 1 (sans nice amp). 7.30 pm. I began a review of an article dealing with a historical book that I’d been committed to in the past. 9.40 pm. Practise session 2. 10.40 pm. ‘The night watch’. Review complete, I commenced a blog on this week’s Sculpture Musicale event: