Hoped to have today off, but I have to come in to work to revise the copy for an article. I send off the revisons - it's another translation into a language that a different audience can understand.
I respond to some emails, then seek refuge in the Humanities 2 Reading Room to work on the copy for the exhibiition leaflet. It's a fold-out and on one side I have suggested that I do an exquisite corpse of definitions of the chief isms - expressionism, cubism, futurism, dada, constructivism and surrealism. The text will awkwardly abut and in different type-faces: gothic, caslon, futura etc. (I begin to think of making an artist's book with 'avant garde' in different type-faces...) I finish the draft, and decide we should drop names of individuals randomly into the text...Hope John in our Design Department likes this idea.
More emails: it's a bit like playing table tennis against a ball-firing robot. And I'm running out of memory so I have to purge my mail boxes.
I go off to Cassie's exhibition - it closes tomorrow and the District Line is out at the weekend, so this is effectively my last chance. From Mile End Tube I walk up to the Roman Road and find St Paul's Church on St Stephens Road. Cassie has painted 50 small pictures of memorial park benches, isolated in the white space of the paper. There's an intersting tension in her work between the well-madeness of the painting and its conceptual purpose, the exploration of loss and the subversion of memory.
I begin to think how the avant garde used old bottles for new wine - Joyce encoding his modernist novel in the Homeric epic; Malinowski's revolutionary social anthropology of Melanasia described in terms of the Ancient Greeks as in his title - 'The Argonauts of the Western Pacific' (1922). I remember talking to Colin St John Wilson about this when we did an exhibition to celebrate his 80th birthday at the British Library - he wanted to show books published in 1922, an annus mirabilis, of writing - but he kept wanting to include books published in 1921 or 1923. And then there are those who appear to be avant-garde but their works aren't - maybe the Sitwells. And the opposite: TS Eliot, epitome of the Anglo-Catholic bourgeois - but the early work is truly avant-garde. I'd like to explore more about his reading (or not - though this is unlikely given his acquaintance with modern French poetry) of Apollinaire and Cendrars.
