Politics of Interdisciplinarity?

Skaidra Trilupaitytė

Published in the “In the Graveyards of Interdisciplinarity (?)” catalog, Vilnius, 2013. Republished from cultural weekly “7 meno dienos” No. 15 (937), 15-04-2011

Laima Kreivytė’s manual of interdisciplinary art, published on 1 April (7md, No. 13), as well as Kęstutis Šapoka’s 2010 essay “A Few Notes on Interdisciplinary Art,” reproduced on the website of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association attest to what seems to be the usual crystallizing trends in contemporary art. The two art critics have comprehensively described the field of the new genre (or sub-genre), discussed characteristics of interdisciplinary art (Šapoka in a more historic- empirical manner, Kreivytė more theoretically) and there seems hardly anything left to add on the subject. However, the question of interdisciplinary art (IA), which has resurfaced in the public discourse lately, is gripping for reasons other than polished definitions. Both authors state clearly that the need for a new definition grows in proportion to the number of funding applications to the Culture Support Fund for interdisciplinary art projects. Some projects that try to pass for IA in order to secure funding clearly do not belong there, which points to the problem of a “watered-down concept.” According to Šapoka, today “we are talking about this kind of art (field) like an autonomous phenomenon which requires separate funding, even though its very name once meant, at least for a short while, a striving for freedom.”