Eileen Foti pulls a proof of
my print from the lithographic
press at Rutgers

Jeff Koons in his studio

Bill Viola
The Greeting 1995
Video installation

Chuck Close
Fanny/Fingerpainting 1985
102 x 84"
Oil-based ink on canvas

Justine Wheeler in Jeff
Koons' painting studio

Jeff Koons
Playdoh maquette
for a sculpture

Full-scale version of
Playdoh maquette being
prepared for casting

Sue Williamson's
Journal from New York

March 2: Arrive at the Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Fine Art in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a 40-minute train ride from Manhattan. I have a double mission: I am on the Visiting Artists programme, and will be collaborating on a print. Head of the school's printmaking department is Tamarind master printer Eileen Foti, who was in Johannesburg for the second Biennale, working with artists from the Artists' Proof Studio. (This May, two artists from Artists' Proof will visit Rutgers to be trained by Foti in the skills of collaborative printmaking for the benefit of Johannesburg artists.) Coincidentally, the last artist to make a collaborative work before me was Puerto Rican artist Pepon Osorio - who also showed on the second Johannesburg Biennale.

March 3: My print will be the first in a new series I am making on cases coming up before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I have brought a pile of newspaper cuttings and pictures with me, and want to make a print linked to my interactive pieces on the Houston Fotofest show. It is wonderful working with Foti, who is enthusiastic and professional and knowledgeable to the nth degree.

March 4: Today is the Visiting Artist part: I give a double lecture, firstly about my own work, then about contemporary art in South Africa. Of course, the work is completely new to a young American audience, but everyone seems interested.

March 5: An extra bonus of being here is that my daughter, Amanda, who is doing her master's degree in fine art at Rutgers, is part of a group of students whose final show opens tonight. I am the proud parent, admiring her strong work. It is interesting for me to compare work being done by students here with that being done in South Africa. My conclusion: young women artists everywhere are using personal experience and language related to their own bodies to make their statements.

March 6: Back to Manhattan for the weekend. I accompany Amanda to a party being given by a friend of hers in the upstairs room of a bar. A pleasant-faced man speaks to me at the bar, introducing himself as Jeff. We chat, I ask him what he does, he replies that he's an artist. Like half of Manhattan, I think. "So what projects are you working on?" I inquire casually. "I'm trying to get my stuff organised for a retrospective at the Guggenheim," he says. Retrospective? Guggenheim? Rapid file-scanning in the brain produces the answer that I must be talking to Jeff Koons. I wonder if he notices a sort of fast flickering around the eyes as I adjust to this piece of information. I now remember that Amanda's friend Justine Wheeler (ex Wits), whose party this is, is head of Koons' sculpture studio. He tells me of his joy at learning a few days earlier that he has won custody of his son from his marriage with Italian porn star Cicciolina, and that the boy will be coming to live with him in Manhattan later in the year. Most readers will remember that one of Koons' most famous series of work involved sculptures of himself and Cicciolina in bedroom action, but all that is now in the past. Fatherhood has brought a new perspective into Koons' life, and his work in progress is a series called 'Celebration', about the colours and pleasures of childhood. But more about that later.

March 7: Amanda's husband is also an artist, William Scarborough. The day is spent sorting out tax slips - tax returns are due. Same old universal experience: money received from work sold does not look impressive set against money spent on materials.

March 8: Off to J&R Camera World in Park Row, Manhattan, to buy a digital camera, the justification being that I need it for this column! I buy one! A Sony Malvica. Just slip a stiffy disk into the camera, close the side, and you can shoot 32 JPEG files per disc. No more film, no more scanning. But the real excitement is being able to instantly view the image you just took. A sort of digital Polaroid. Examples of images taken for this issue include the pix of Steven Cohen, Diane Victor's work and the Swedish coffee pot on the contents page. The price? $499. For an extra $200 I could have got a zoom and wide-angle lens, but I'm thrilled with mine. You can check out J&R's website at www.jandr.com.

March 9-11: Back to Rutgers to finish my print with Eileen Foti. What a pleasure working with such an expert. We get to final proof stage; 20 prints will be editioned later in the year. Rutgers will keep half the edition, sending it with other prints from their programme to shows all over the States, and I will get half.

March 12: Linda Givon is in New York. It's Thursday night - free entrance to the Whitney, and the Bill Viola retrospective is on, so what better place to meet? The Viola show is mind-blowing, his videos installed in a series of interleading darkened chambers which occupy the top two floors of the Whitney. Too much and too intense to take in on one visit, but we manage the top floor. "Although Viola's installations employ highly sophisticated video and computer equipment, the themes he explores are ancient and uiniversal. The simple beauty, visceral impact, and timeless spirituality of his work affect us profoundly," says Whitney director David Ross in the catalogue.

The Greeting is a sequence involving three women in a darkened Italianate setting which looks almost like an operatic stage set. A soft wind blows the garments of the women. Initially two women are engaged in conversation, then they are interrupted by a third, who whispers a message into the ear of one of them. The extreme slow motion of the sequence, the interplay of emotional moods between the women, the puzzle of their relationships, the drifting of the intensely coloured fabrics, seem to work together to draw the viewer deeply into the piece.

March 13: Supper with African-American artist Emma Amos, who lives in Greenwich Village, and a tour of her studio. Amos is using colourful African cloths as collage material for her engaging 'Heroes' series. Two of her subjects are Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikiza-Mandela. "Winnie is a flawed hero, but she's still a hero," says Amos. Under Winnie's portrait are Amos's words: "Say it isn't so."

March 14-18: Amanda, Justine Wheeler, Candice Breitz and I go upstate New York for a few days skiing. Really fantastic. Didn't know if I could still ski - it's been years - but I can!

March 19: Meet my old friend, environmental painter Janet Culbertson, for a visit to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Chuck Close retrospective. When I lived in New York, the building I worked in was right opposite the MOMA, so I spent a lot of interesting and unhurried time there. The MOMA experience today is quite different. One feels like a lab rat going through an art museum experiment, shunted from one station to the next. Half an hour in line to check your coat. Fifteen minutes to get an admission ticket ( $11). Then it's keep moving, with nowhere to sit down, past all the Chuck Closes - far more impressive and hypnotic in full scale and at first-hand than they ever looked on the pages of art mags. Each portrait apparently takes Close four months to complete, so his output over the years has been quite small.

March 20: Holly Block at Art in General has invited me and Amanda to visit the gallery with our slides. Art in General is a non-profit gallery. There are exhibition windows on the street, two floors of gallery space upstairs, and when we go up in the elevator, a voice on a soundtrack is saying: "Of course, there is always the possibility that you could die, if the equipment is not working properly. Or if there is a human error ..." I imagine the track is intended to make elevator-riders nervous, and suddenly do feel a bit anxious, but I find out later that the gallery elevator always features an artist-made soundtrack, and in this case the speaker is talking about scaling up the side of buildings.

Later, I visit Frank Herremans at the Museum for African Art on Broadway. He is planning a show of South African art at the Museum for November this year, and will be visiting the country on a second curatorial foray in the second half of May.

Later still, Justine Wheeler gives Amanda, Candice Breitz and me a tour of Jeff Koons' studio. He's overseas now, so Justine shows us round. It's the entire floor of a building on the corner of Broadway and Houston - two sculpture studios, two painting studios, and a huge front office. Koons employs up to 70 people at a time to get his work into production, and Justine has been head of the sculpture studio for the past two and a half years. In essence, Koons has taken the theme of 'Celebration' as a kind of homage to his young son. Vast paintings of toys in toyshop bright colours are in process in the painting studios. In the sculpture studio, a small mound of blobs of coloured Playdoh is the maquette for a sculpture which is being modelled in fibreglass for casting into stainless steel, which in turn will be coloured in brilliant tones.

The pieces are perfect archetypes for "Celebration'. The final manufacture must be flawless and immaculate. Koons recently rejected a vast stainless steel piece returned with a slight undulation in the surface. Balloon dogs, balloon tulips, a valentine heart ... disposable childhood play objects turned into impenetrable and monumental museum pieces to be gazed up at, the deeply coloured and satin-smooth reflective surfaces attracting and engaging the viewers. It's an idolising of the cheap readymade, sentimental rather than cynical.

March 21: Lunch with Okwui Enwezor, director of the artistically successful but financially challenged second Johannesburg Biennale. "I would really love to come back to Johannesburg to be part of a discussion on how a new Biennale could go forward," says Enwezor, suggesting that there might be public forums arranged in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. We discuss the disgracefully autocratic and crippling behaviour of the Gauteng Metropolitan Council in suddenly announcing in early December that the run of the Biennale was to be cut short. "Nobody fought the bureaucrats. Nobody sought a court injunction," says Enwezor. "What the arts need is an advocacy which is not partisan but will consider a whole range of solutions - a pulpit for the arts - which will make it clear to everyone that art and culture cannot be abandoned."

Later that day, we go to Turner Prize finalist Cornelia Parker's opening at the Jeffey Deitch Project. Documenta X assistant Thomas Mulcaire is there; John Peffer, who spent time at UCT; Justine Wheeler, Candice Breitz · Could almost be Joeys.

March 22: It's Sunday, my last Sunday, and for the first time this winter it's snowing in New York. Instant beauty for the winter-drab city. This evening, I have supper and interesting conversation with curator Yu Yeon Kim and her husband Stephen Pusey, webmaster supreme of New York art site Plexus Inc. He tells me Plexus receives 450 to 500 000 hits a week, and we view some of the elegant and wacky sequences after dinner. Must admit, it's a few more hits than ArtThrob is getting right now, but who knows ...