User Manual: Interdisciplinary Arts

Laima Kreivytė

Published in the “In the Graveyards of Interdisciplinarity (?)” catalog, Vilnius, 2013. Republished from cultural weekly “7 meno dienos”, No. 13 (935), 01-04-2011

I must confess – this essay was inspired by a phone call. The caller suggested that there should be a clearer definition of interdisciplinary art. I was politely asked to give it some thought. I was given a week and assured that nothing would happen even if I did not come up with anything.

I usually avoid taking part in phone surveys. But the caller was not from a bank or a pizza house, it was an artist whom I respect and whose concern for interdisciplinary art was sparked not by personal ambition but a responsible approach to public duty. That is something rare indeed, almost an anomaly. I have always been impressed by this artist’s conceptuality and appreciation for complex phenomena and theories. Even in this case – the man could simply “follow his heart” or just shrug it off and waste no more time on it. But he takes interest. Because universal shrugging it off is what bears commercial, kitsch, pseudo-conceptual, official, and modern folk art monsters that get filed by culture bureaucrats in the pile of “interdisciplinary art” projects out of sheer inertia (or resignation). This pile has grown so big that it comes to resemble the Augean stables – and no white curtains can cover it up.

Keywords of the Current Art: Interdisciplinarity, Media, and Relational Aesthetics

Dovilė Tumpytė

Published in the “In the Graveyards of Interdisciplinarity (?)” catalog, Vilnius, 2013. Republished from interdisciplinary online magazine balsas.cc, 17-10-2005.

Art and theory develop through perpetual change. Some art theorists propose a multitude of terms in order to give an objective description of forms and strategies of contemporary artistic practices, criteria for reading art; others critique them. In the Lithuanian art theory discourse, shaped under specific circumstances of art policies, the most common refrain is a binary classification of art into traditional and contemporary, which usually means art pieces produced within the boundaries of a particular branch/discipline on the one hand interdisciplinary art on the other. Such commonly-accepted classification seems to be quite primitive. One needs a more diverse array of instruments to understand art. In order to grasp contemporary art – evolving in whichever direction, progressive or regressive, unable to contain itself in the traditional, linear modernist art history – I choose theoretical keywords that can feel the pulse of artistic practices at different angles: interdisciplinarity, discourse-specific art, postproduction, relational art.