I never knew I was looking for love until I found myself chained to this radiator
After meeting zenith and janinazew for drinks, then gin and sympathy with C., Saturday dawned cold and vicious. For all sorts of reasons, it was a difficult day - the black dog licking me awake and curling between feet, knocking over crockery, delaying and destroying. I'm not sure if Archilochus is the recommended source for dealing with depression these days, but perhaps I'm set in my ways.

Still, though. Eventually the escape was made, and I made it to the Tate too late for the joy of Beuys, but in time at least to see, or more precisely hear, Nauman's installation at the Turbine Hall. I'd been waiting for the right time for this, and obviously the day of incipient madness was the perfect time to be bombarded by disembodied voices.

It's an interesting piece - not least because it fills the Turbine Hall - the great challenge of every installation - without taking up any meaningful space at all. You look at the vastness of the space, and your head tells you that the space is full. The fact that all the voices come from existing work (coming across Good Boy Bad Boy felt like meeting an old friend) except the overarching, monastic hum created by the hall itself makes it feel almost like a Greek Orthodox retrospective of Nauman rather than a new piece of work.

I feel immediate sympathy with Nauman - in part, I think, because the grasp of modern art that friends of mine have rather shames me, and it's reassuring just to get someone. Also, the way Nauman fixates on process, and on the body - walking until he passes out, running fears and loves through the machines of grammar - hits me like a tuning fork. There's a quote from Ann Veronica Janssens about her interest being in the way the body starts to process information differently when its boundaries are being pushed to the limits - frustratingly, if appropriately, I think it was on my laptop, and thus now lost. At times, Nauman catches the sense of the separated body, where the physical source of the voice, the matter that expels the matter, becomes something other.

I see, hear, I don't speak, make no other sounds. You can't hear my heart, my footsteps. No expression, no communication of any kind. An observer, a consumer, a user only. My body absorbs all communications, emotions, sucks up heat and cold, superreptilian, soaking up all knowledge, compactor of all information, not growing. I feel, don't touch. I have no control over the kinds and qualities of thoughts. I collect. I can't process. I can't react to or act on sensation. No emotional response to situations. There is no reaction of instinct to physical or mental threats. You can't reach me. You can't hurt me. I can suck you dry. You can't hurt me. You can't help me. Shuffle the pages. Find me a line.

Whereas the Weather Project immobilised people, sent them onto their backs to gaze at themselves in the sky, Nauman caused a confused wandering.

Over the South Bank, past Gabriel's Wharf and over to the RFH for coffee with Da. While I was there, I took the opportunity to renew my membership of the Poetry Library, which, infuriatingly, is closing due to the renovations to the South Bank Centre. This is incredibly frustrating, if onyl because it throws into sharp relief how little I've done with it lately. Still, I grabbed a couple of earyl Simon Armitage pamphlets, from one of which I took the poem posted last night, and Tickets from a Blank Window. I shall miss it. The pamphlets are beautiful. Pre-computer printing, so typed. It's strange to think how many things were typed, photocopied, letrasetted... all now turned into a smooth smush of Times New Roman. Most of the Armitage poems, apart from the very early stuff, I have in other formats, but I think I want to scan them in anyway at some point. It's strange that there already feels like there's something antediluvian or perhaps revolutionary about typesetting.