With the never-ending work on the Underground it's a random choice and chance to get to your destination. The normal route over the Millennium Bridge was scotched by a closure and the walk over London Bridge took me by Vinopolis. The standard range of familiar labels was pretty much unrelieved but I did learn about Theatre of Wine at Greenwich. Something to research when I next go to the Maritime Museum. In the excavation of the South Bank amphorae were discovered, part of Roman civilisation's contribution, introducing grape cultivation and wine culture to these lands. The earliest known image of wine drinking is from Mesopotamia 2750BC. The Egyptians cultivated grapes and produced wines in the times of the Pharoahs shipping their wines from the vineyards to the consumers along the River Nile. Yet there is a claim by Georgia to have been the cradle of wine and winemaking with archaeological evidence from 6000BC.

Bankside lawn and pavement, oh that it could be 'Tate Beach', was cluttered by a touring event http://www.houseoffairytales.org/

It was part of Tate Arte Povera Long Weekend with Do It Yourself activities to record in a passport. It had certainly drawn the crowds the majority of which were neatly scattered across the grass facing a live music stage. At the opposite end there was Judo Académie de Paris avec Monsieur Yves Klein.

Well it takes all sorts to explore visual arts through performance; cyclists with weird decorative canopies, bamboo poles with plastic bottles housing medicinal plants, paper plates pressed from full colour newspapers. And then inside the turbine hall of Tate Modern itself long queues for those prepared to take on the interactive 'Bodyspacemotionthings' by Robert Morris and 'Newspaper Sphere' by Michaelangelo Pistoletto. Something like snowball rolling without the mud and salt grit of a London park. Tight-rope walking for all, and chimney climbing for the stubborn and determined.

Then to the 'Energy and Process' galleries representing Arte Povera and Anti-Form. Of course there has to be a wooden assemblage by Pablo Picasso. Remind me to sweep the foreshore when the Thames is out and pick up a million quids worth of flotsam and jetsam. There is something to be discovered in the lowliest of resources.

An artist born in Finland in 1892 who worked in Russia and was associated with Malevich and the Suprematist Manifesto of 1916 was Iwan Puni. He also worked in France as Jean Pougny and was influenced by cubism. His birthplace was in Finland at Kuokkala but so close to St. Petersburg that by the time he had studied in Paris and returned to Finland the revolutionary art movements with which he aligned himself didn't match his later interests. Rather than work in Soviet Russia he headed for Berlin and Paris. (Research required.) His birthplace was renamed Repino and is now a suburb of St. Petersburg.

Then a panel mounted with books, pages painted with different colours though displayed predominantly with one colour. The work is entitled 'Film Star' as it was used in film making in 1960 by the artist John Latham. It has a strange appeal. One moment it looks like all the little shells in a rocky pool, then moths or butterflies, but of course it could be a school library with dog-eared books. For me it speaks artistically about the fate of art itself being inundated by critics, historians, archivists, and curators. And it attacks the politics of writing and art theory itself. Remind me to find a better use for all the books I have been brainwashed with. I saw a lost book on the platform on the Underground, picked it up to see what it was about and a breathless lass reclaimed it from me and leapt onto the train just as the doors were closing. Clearly we should have real books and real art on the trains instead of free newspapers and graffiti tags. Who needs more than a dictionary and a telephone directory? What with the computer who needs books at all! I can hear the anger, send him to the stocks at the village green, throw books at him.

Next, a couple of artists named Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden in 1965 attached a mirror full and flush onto a canvas. You are obliged to glance at your own self-portrait as you peep at the mirror, then as you continue scurrying along someone else is portrayed reflectively. Such realism, what perspective. No cubism in sight.

Niki de Saint Phalle engaged in using a gun to shoot colours concealed in her paintings. Each bullet broke through the painting surface and released liquid paint. Yet she moved on from this method after she became addicted to shooting. This gives too many ideas such as burning books like John Latham, shooting curators with paintball guns. Turner Prize 2010, "Paintball Art", contest to exhaustion, Artists versus Curators, venue Tate Britain.

Michelangelo Pistoletto's 'Venus of the Rags' of 1967 should be installed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Oh that all the fashion victims in Oxford Street could look as proportioned as this, we wouldn't need clothes and the rag trade and the rag and bone man would be cut down to size.

Dennis Oppenheim in 1969 photographed his 'Directed Seeding ­ Cancelled Crop' in Finsterwolde, north-east Holland. I prefer the terraced rice paddies in contoured hillsides of the Far East. The deluge of full-colour aerial photography in Yann Arthus-Bertrand's 2001 volume 'The Earth from the Air 365 days' just shows that man's impact on the surface of spaceship Earth is far richer than the imagination of an artist with a combine-harvester.

I suppose Hamish Fulton's 1976 Arkle Sutherland three-day walk in the Scottish highlands documented with a single huge black-and-white photograph captures the raw experience of wilderness landscape, which we are starved of in urban life.

In contrast Keith Arnott in 1969 was photographed in a series of poses through which he appears to sink into the circle of turned earth. 'Self Buried' (Television Interference Project) interestingly was broadcast as unexpected interruptions to normal programmes much as others use subliminal advertising and product placement.

Jannis Kounellis's 'Untitled, 1969' stone infill of a doorway is very neat. The gallery contains many other dissimilar pieces, this is the difference! Some artists find their formula and everything they do looks like another variation off the production line. Kounellis applies his mind and his media to a stimulating variety.

All of the above is a good preparation for the forthcoming exhibition of Richard Long's work at Tate Britain, 'Heaven and Earth'. The show opens on 3 June and runs until 6 September 2009. On 9 July John Haldane gives a lunchtime lecture; Richard Long: English Modernist or International Conceptualist?

I was quite late arriving. Geoff Routh at Long and Ryle in John Islip Street caught my eye with intensely textured canvases of plants. On the short cut through Chelsea College or Art the 'Dematerialised: Jack Wendler Gallery 1971-1974' was closed.

Chelsea College of Art

Across the cobbles and the light strips of the courtyard there was evidence of Urban Artists at work, though not today. Spray from stencils on the antique paving slabs, more traces up the walls like ghost frames. No respect for materials or architecture, what is happening in art education?

And so towards Tate Britain. The Tate Triennial 2009 has been cleared away. The lights have been switched on again and, as I thought, the walls are made of brown sugar cubes and the drips of coffee are melting them. Time to get the Polish builders in! In the meantime they are showing Polish films in the cellar.

The 'Tate Lightbox' films by Stefan & Franciszka Themerson are films from the 1930s and thereafter, but the language doesn't spoil the understanding. There is plenty of technical trickery and fun and seriousness. The film subject of Nazism in Poland is a chilling insight. Who has made the films for the next generation about Soviet Poland, and the Solidarnosc era? There is much to learn from the long history of Poland with its ever redrawn geographical and political boundaries. It reminds me of the Terror Museum in Budapest.

Upstairs again and even in a quite well lit gallery a number of William Blake's dark works were on display. It was an odd experience. I have just one image by which I fix his work; The Ancient of Days (God as an Architect.) but here was a show of extremely dark and tortured compositions. Then there were blank spaces representing room for works described in his original Catalogue, the catalogue description contrasting in its brevity with the modern-day waffle that competes loudly for attention at every exhibition these days. One composition rose above all this, the unusual spiral composition entitled Jacob's Ladder. Out at the head of the stairs the Tate had a form inviting visitors to write a title for a work they had identified. This challenge brought me to offer "Jacob's Ladder" with the new title of "Sir Ranulf Fiennes scales Mount Everest" since he had said that the top of Everest was as close as he could walk to the Moon. For Blake I suggested "Scene in his Visions."

There was a newspaper named The Examiner which reported on Blake's exhibition contemporaneously.

"The Examiner"

The poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation, and the whole 'blotted and blurred' and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.

Still, I think in these modern times William Blake's draughtsmanship would compete well enough applied to today's secular subject matter.

Nearly closing time. An arcing line catches my attention. Gary Woodley's 'Impingement No 53' draws attention to the finer details of the gallery corners.

The gallery staff herded us out, outnumbering the little trickle of stalwart visitors. The previous day the decanting of the modern art hordes at Tate Modern was more like a tsunami pouring out of the turbine hall, across the grass and over the Millennium Bridge, finally dispersed in the gutters of the foothill of St. Paul's on Ludgate Hill. When they demolish St. Paul's and build Tate Ludgate in the nave I hope they let the Urban Artists in with paintball guns to fight it out peacefully and colourfully!

Where next? The Photographer's Gallery in Ramillies Street? Or the White Cube in Mason's Yard, that's something opening on Friday with "Those Who Suffer Love". I'll search out the reviews for that in a modern day "Examiner". Remember to buy Tracey Emin some paper so she doesn't have to steal it? Now tell me about the Brit Art warehouse fire. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/may/27/thebritartfire.arts1

© Brian Marsh, 24 May 2009 email initiative.cafe@btinternet.com