Art, Not Chance: Nine Artists' Diaries

ed Paul Allen

120pp, Gulbenkian Foundation, £8.50

Back in 1999, the Gulbenkian Foundation invited nine artists from different disciplines to keep diaries of their creative processes. In an age when, as the Gulbenkian's arts director, Sian Ede, writes in her foreword, art has been deformed by talk of "targets and outcomes", "quality assurance", "evaluation" and "exit strategies", the idea was not to produce a management manual prescribing creativity, but to explore how private and public pressures interact in the making of a work.

The broadcaster Paul Allen, who has lightly edited the results, concludes that these pages "show that the contemporary artist is rather good at living the life of the small-scale entrepreneur". But as the choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh notes, all too often that means "relying on unpaid time, unsocial hours, huge favours and goodwill strained to the limit". The moment of creativity remains elusive, but the diary form gets us closer to the reality of being a contemporary artist. These accounts were written to be read, yet we are allowed surprisingly intimate access to the agonies and ecstasies of creative minds.

The contributions have a common theme in their response to the creative uses of a diary in itself. Having no access to future events, every sentence is a hostage to fortune. Joanna MacGregor's account of the busy life of an international concert pianist, including a developing collaboration with a South African jazz improviser, Moses Taiwa Molelekwa, acquires a sudden, tragic shape when a postscript records her collaborator's suicide.

As people of the word, novelist Lawrence Norfolk and poet Jo Shapcott position themselves carefully in their opening entries. Norfolk constructs a cliff-hanger as he struggles to meet the deadline to complete his third novel, In the Shape of a Boar. Shapcott muses on the literary qualities of email while sharing work in progress on "responses" to Rilke. Her account of "the world's worst gig" at an unnamed European arts festival should be anthologised. True to his idiosyncratic form, the sculptor Richard Wentworth supplies a day's stream of consciousness instead of a longer narrative.

The most interesting struggle with the diary idea comes from the theatre director Tim Supple, who was plainly not having a good year, either at home or in Berlin to direct Much Ado About Nothing. He begins by denouncing diaries for recording experiences that should simply be felt. Four months later he is treating it like an intimate friend, and he ends in full confessional mode. Supple is the only one to admit neglecting his diary, a reminder that what isn't written is often the most revealing element, but only the diarist knows what is missing.

For the performance artist Bobby Baker and the playwright Shelagh Stephenson, the diary is a wonderful way of avoiding creativity. Baker introduces it as "the perfect displacement activity". Stephenson takes the dog for walks a lot, "anything to get out of the house and away from the script". Both stress the anxiety and depression that nag before a project gets started - and the sense of loss when it is over.

For Stephenson, as for the composer Errollyn Wallen, the diary sets up a kind of bargaining. Wallen has a joyous time in Cambridge as she ticks off her projects and compositions with the regularity of a metronome. For Stephenson, the maths are harder. "My new plan is to write a minimum of three pages a day... That's 21 pages a week, which means I should finish in, say, five weeks max..."

Such private struggles are matched by the public battles that have to be fought. Shobana Jeyasingh's account of what a choreographer has to go through to get a work on stage - "back injury, knee pain, contractual problems... all in a day's work" - records the emotional and practical processes. An illness means that she only gets the production right on the last night.

This book shows rather than tells. It won't make you creative, but it is a comfort to know that all artists suffer similar frustration and anxiety. My frustration was that I wanted to know more about what went wrong in Berlin, who was pressing on what deadline, and what sort of money they were all making. On the other hand, it made me want to read the novel, hear the music, see the show. I made a note in my diary.