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

2013-10-16

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.

In the Lithuanian art scene since 1993, probably the most debated aspect has been interdisciplinarity. The term was introduced to the discourse of art practice and theory by artists and art theorists (Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas, Saulius Grigoravičius) who founded Jutempus TMP (or IAP, Interdisciplinary Art Projects). Eventually, interdisciplinarity as a term has become a useful tool to distinguish new artistic practices in Lithuania that transcended the boundaries of any one art discipline and could no longer be fitted into the framework of the modernist tradition. It served to legitimize the spread of new artistic practices and made a transition to the institutional sphere (1998 saw the founding of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association, LIAA). As a consequence, however, the term interdisciplinarity has expanded its scope and lost its original meaning. The sphere of art theory and practice borrowed the term from sciences. Interdisciplinarity, which is much more common in scientific discourse, denotes the practice of adopting and synthesizing methodologies from various scientific disciplines. It comes in handy during collaborative encounters between several disciplines that have not, however, coalesced into one new discipline. Interdisciplinarity is most often used in university syllabi to indicate a multidirectional course, study of methodologies or approaches beyond those specific to one particular subject of choice. International conferences [1] usually discuss interdisciplinarity in today’s theoretical field within scientific rather than artistic paradigm. Alongside “interdisciplinary,” we get terms like trans-, multi-, meta-disciplinarity, whose subtle differences are discussed primarily within the paradigm of scientific research and meth- odological particularities of various disciplines. Disciplinary research isolates its subject and object from the wider context. Whereas meta-, inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinarity strives to break such insularity and offers new and wider possibilities for scientific research. The term “interdisciplinary/interdisciplinarity” entered the field of artistic practice and theory at roughly the same time it emerged in scientific discourse – in the early 1960s, responding to a need to articulate changing artistic initiatives and practices since the DADA movement in theoretical discourse. In the 1990s, theory revisited the meaning of interdisciplinarity in both arts and natural or human sciences. Etymologically, the term is a compound of two words: inter (between) and disciplinarity. Inter refers to a conjunction, a being in between one thing and another, with an emphasis on the moment of transgression. Transgression refers to an action that breaks accepted codes or rules. Various dictionaries [2] give rather similar definition of interdisciplinarity in the wider sense – a field of study, research, or other practice that combines or includes knowledge of different academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines [3]. In art theory, discipline is traditionally defined as a branch of art (or medium). The notion of discipline in art is close to the way Clement Greenberg, advocate of the formalist theory, explains “pure art,” seeing the purity as an agreement to make art within the legitimate and conventional boundaries of one or another medium [4]. What makes a piece art is a form that is accepted as art. Modernist disciplinarity determines a close and conventional structure for art, one that approaches the notion of “pure art”: each artistic medium remains pure as long as it stays within its proper boundaries and does not correlate with other artistic media [5]. However, Greenberg himself notes, the more a discipline is defined, the less freedom it has [6] and freedom is one of conditions for creativity. On the other hand, writes Jablonskienė quoting Jacques Derrida, he “has demonstrated that a pure discipline, pure generic specificity does not exist in any area, every purity is inevitably affected by external contexts.” [7] However, distancing oneself from one artistic discipline or medium and employing several media in creative processes does not necessarily make artistic practice interdisciplinary. A more apt description would be postmedium art as expounded by Rosalind Krauss [8]. Julia Kristeva sees interdisciplinarity as a model [mode] of thinking, one where knowledge of various areas intersect – interdisciplinarity happens when one works several disciplines in parallel [9]. In the 1960s, French theorists employed the term polyvalence, which Kristeva calls the initial phase of interdisciplinarity [10]. The term denoted various practices that did not rely on one discipline alone. The so-called practices of “interdisciplinary kind” were soon problematized, their interdisciplinarity questioned. Kristeva claimed that practitioners in sciences or arts often simply abused interdisciplinarity by showing intent to work across different disciplines but essentially privileging just one. According to Kristeva, it is a mistake to assume that one person can specialize in interdisciplinarity as such – it would only result in limited knowledge of various fields and fragmented competence [11]. It should be taken as a hint that interdisciplinarity is more likely to result from collaboration between specific fields rather than one person amateurishly manipulating knowledge from various areas. One can therefore conclude that interdisciplinarity in art is a rather narrow concept that encompasses but a very small fraction of contemporary art or artistic practices whose essential feature is collaboration among specialists of distinct fields; the process of collaboration – and, if it is successful, its result – can be called interdisciplinary, with the term denoting the method of art making. American art theorist Hal Foster thinks along these lines, too. Looking from today’s perspective, Foster notes problems in the status of interdisciplinarity that have emerged over the last few decades simply because there no longer are clear-cut disciplinary boundaries. “To be interdisciplinary you need to be disciplinary first – to be grounded in one discipline, preferably two, to know the historicity of these discourses before you test them against each other,” [12] says Foster. According to him, today’s practitioners rush into interdisciplinary practices without proper mastery of any discipline, with results being eclectic – something which is entropic more than it is transgressive. Foster sees transgression as the key feature of interdisciplinary practices. According to Foster’s logic, transgression can be inferred in discursive artistic practices that summon and skillfully employ knowledge of different spheres. Such art creates an interactive/critical/reflexive relation to a cultural, social, political environment, i.e., unfolds in the intersection of horizontality and verticality. It is worth noting, however, that Foster does not claim that a discursive art practice is interdisciplinary; it can merely contain manifestations of interdisciplinarity. In the ever-changing field of artistic practices, Foster points to the general drift of the change: he claims that the essential shift in contemporary art practices is a transition from medium-specific art [13] to discourse-specific practices. Foster introduces and highlights the discourse of ethnographic turn in art, some- thing that Lithuanian critic Birutė Pankūnaitė thinks has the axiomatic quality of interdisciplinarity. Its emergence in contemporary art is linked to transformations in art history since the 1960s: from minimalism, pop art, conceptualism, performance and body art to site-specific art work [14]. Changes in these artistic practices prompted research into the medium and its spatial perception, also triggering shifts in the the notion of art institution and the viewer/observer. Art institution has been dissociated from physical space, undefinable in spatial terms alone (like study, gallery, museum, etc.); it has come to be perceived as a discursive network of various practices, institutions, and communities [15]. Art observer has come to mean a social subject determined by linguistic, economic, ethnic, gender, etc. difference. In the wake of different social movements (civil right, various feminisms, queer politics, multiculturalism) and theoretical developments (confluence of feminism, psychoanalysis, and film theory; the rise of cultural studies, theories by Lacan and Foucault, postcolonialist discourse, etc.), strict definitions of art and artist, identity and community began to wane. All these changes, Foster argues, resulted in art spreading in the expanded cultural field, studied by anthropology. The ethnographic turn brings change to the siting of art: the artist’s gaze moves from the medium surface to the museum space, from institutional framework [i.e., modernist discipline – D. T.] to discursive network, to the conditions of desire or disease as the siting of art. Foster claims that artists have come to “work horizontally, in a synchronic movement from social issue to issue, from political debate to debate, more than vertically, in a dia- chronic engagement with the disciplinary forms of a given genre or medium.” [16] I believe that in the paradigm of discursive art practice we should discuss several more keyword terms that might help grasp the ever-changing trends – those that, roughly speaking, have come to the fore over the last decade – of contemporary art. One of the first attempts to theorize current art (since 1990) was a collection of essays by French curator and art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics [17], and Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Bourrioaud uses the terms “relational aesthetics” and “relational art” to flesh out a concept that could serve as a tool to analyze and critique current art – and gets critiqued himself for doing so. French and English artists and theorists engage in a heated debate whether or not the late 20-century art history will contain one more art movement, one more -ism: relationism. Bourriaud believes we should not look at con- temporary art from the “shelter” of the 1960s art history and values, i.e., contemporary art has its own tactics and strategies that must be approached without the prejudice of previous art. Bourriaud proposes the term postproduction to describe processes in contemporary art practice and culture in general, saying it refers to a “zone of activity”: seizing all the codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them function. Art today has less to do with elaborating form from scratch and more with objects that already circulate on the culture market [18], whereby artists operates like a DJ. Bourriaud defines art as “an activity consisting in producing relation- ships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects.” [19] All formally heterogenous artistic practices have in common the use of already existing/produced forms: the question of art is not “what new can we make?” but “what can we make of what we have already got?” [20] Under such practice, the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point of the “creative process” (a “finished product” to be contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities. In this new form of culture, which one might call a culture of use or a culture of activity, according to Burriaud, the status of the artwork undergoes a transformation: traditionally, the artwork was a container of the artist’s vision, but now it functions as an active agent, a musical score, an unfolding scenario, a framework, as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives. Art makes culture objects and forms of our everyday life function [21]. Burriaud’s principle of postproduction is essentially related to Foster’s discursive art practice, as the modernist significance of the medium is replaced by the practice of idea, research, action in the horizontal cultural field. The theory of relational aesthetics and art will most probably be considered the only theory of the 1990s that explains the shift in art practices of the time. What is particular to relational artworks is their striving to create a space of actually or potentially intersubjective relations, links, a space where the artwork’s meaning is produced collectively rather than through individual consumption of the art product – the opposite of what we were used to in the Greenbergian modernism [22]. Bourriaud expounds: In the 1990s, “we have seen a growing number of stands offering a range of services, works proposing a precise contract to viewers, and more or less tangible models of sociability. Spectator ‘participation’, theorised by Fluxus happenings and performances, has become a constant feature of artistic practice. […] After the area of relations between Humankind and deity, and then between Humankind and the object, artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of inter-human relations, as illustrated by artistic activities that have been in progress since the early 1990s. So the artist sets his sights more and more clearly on the relations that his work will create among his public, and on the invention of models of sociability. […] over and above the relational character intrinsic to the artwork, the figures of reference of the sphere of human relations have now become fully-fledged artistic ‘forms’. Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all manner of encounter and relational invention thus represent, today, aesthetic objects likely to be looked at as such, with pictures and sculptures regarded here merely as specific cases of a production of forms with something other than a simple aesthetic consumption in mind.” [23] According to Bourriaud, “art is a state of encounter” and it is art like this that provides space which encourages sociability. By focusing on human relations and the social context instead of asserting the individual and his/her private symbolic space, relational art points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art [24]. Contemporary artwork can no longer be seen as merely a space to be walked through. Contemporary piece of art is presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion. According to Bourriaud, contemporary art is definitely developing a political project when it endeavours to move into the relational realm by turning it into an issue (what is at stake here is art’s function to bring together and strike connections between distant individuals in the society of the image, to create a sense of commonality). On the other hand, one would be rather hard-pressed to determine the value of such art (and what kind of value is it?) which should be in the relation provoked by the artwork. Bourriaud does not propose a method to measure value (it might be more complicated than one would like to think). Artistic processes in Lithuania differ only slightly from those in Europe, therefore theoretical keywords for contemporary art should be tested by critical analysis of motions in the local processes as well. It is noteworthy that interdisciplinarity – usually conceived as the starting point in the strategies of today’s artistic processes in the practices of both artists and curators – often becomes a synonym for progressiveness and experimentation in the art field. However, it tells us little about how this art should be understood. Therefore, Bourriaud’s tools for grasping and critiquing contemporary art might offer a starting point for discussions on how to experience the ecstasy of contemporary art.

[1] Rethinking Interdisciplinarity, virtual conference-seminar, [accessed 10 February 2005]. Available online: http://www.interdisciplines.org/interdisciplinarity/papers/5/24 Virtual conference-seminar Rethinking Interdisciplinarity, moderated by Christopher Heintz, Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber, was opened for discussion online on 9 February 2004.
[2] I could only find definitions of interdisciplinarity in electronic dictionaries. The term is yet
to be entered into art dictionaries, judging by recently-published art dictionaries available in Lithuania.
[3]Merriam-Webster Online. Available online: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary%20 ?book=Dictionary&va=interdisciplinary; electronic Oxfordo dictionaries. Available online: http://www.ask oxford.com/ concise_oed/interdisciplinary?view=uk; The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000, available online: [accessed 22 August 2004].
[4] C. Greenberg, Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), Art in Theory, 1900 – 2000: an anthology of changing ideas, Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 566.
[5] Greenberg uses painting as an example; purity of the medium is determined by its defining features: two-dimensionality, flatness, absence of figurative narrativity, rejection of any illusion (disinterested aesthetics), and colour.
[6] C. Greenberg, Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), Art in Theory, 1900 – 2000: an anthology of changing ideas, Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2003,, p. 777.
[7] L. Jablonskienė, Paribių problema šiuolaikinėje dailėje, Menotyra, Nr. 2. (31), 2003, p. 95.
[8] Ref.: R. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea. Art in the Age of Post-Medium Condition, London, 1999.
[9] J. Kristeva, Institutional Interdisciplinarity on Theory and in Practice (an interview), The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity: De-, dis-, ex-, London, 1998, vol. 2., p. 4.
[10] Ibid., p. 5.
[11] Ibid, p. 6.
[12] H. Foster, Trauma Studies and the Interdisciplinary (an interview), The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity: De-, dis-, ex-, London, 1998, vol. 2, p.162.
[13] The Lithuanian rendering of the term “medium-specific” is closer to “discipline-specific,” even though the two terms would be considered synonyms within Greenberg’s theory of pure art, where a discipline – or art branch – is determined by art production within a specific medium.
[14] Site-specific art work is defined as a piece of contemporary visual art (sculpture, object, installation) intended for a particular natural or artificial environment – as specific natural, urban, or interior place. Unlike traditional monumental art works, it does not serve a decorative or commemorative function. Site-specific art work, in its form and content, relates directly to
the singularity of its display site: the piece and the environment complement each other. Such works are usually not permanent and, much like gallery pieces, are displayed for a limited stretch of time. The notion of site-specific art work was developed within Earth art of the 1960s. Ref.: Dailės žodynas, Vilnius: VDA, 1999, p. 396.
[15]R. Foster, The Return of the Real, London, 1996, p. 184.
[16] Ibid, p. 199.
[17] We should consider a more apt Lithuanian translation for “Relational Aesthetics”: “relation- al” (“reliacinis”) is not a widely-used word in Lithuanian and in this case it should refer to the expression of relations, connections, links, between things, processes, and people rather than to relations themselves. A more comprehensible, if not more accurate, translation could be “sąsajų estetika”.
[18] N. Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Lukas&Sternberg, 2000, p. 7.
[19] N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Reel, Dijon, France, 2002. Available on- line: http://www.iade.pt/cumulus/%20abstracts_pdf/abstract_05_019_Cumulus%202005.pdf [20] N. Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Lukas&Sternberg, 2000, p. 10.
[21] Ibid., pp. 13-14.
[22] C. Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, in: October, No.: 110, Fall 2004, p. 54. [23] N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon, 2002 (1998), pp. 28-29.
[24] Ibid., p. 14.