Strong and Weak Interdisciplinarianism

Saws, 2005, photo courtesy Joel Murphy's website. See, the reciprocating saws inside the granny carts talk electrically to the chainsaws mounted on the wall... check out video of it working to see what I mean.

Joel and I were talking the other night about his work, and he said some things about working between disciplines that made me rethink the conversation about interdisciplinary work (specifically Oda Projesi) that is happening over on Leisurearts. So let me tangentialize the discussion even further away from Claire Bishop and Grant Kester, and just talk about interdisciplinary approaches to artmaking.

Lately Joel has been inspired by NASA's Centennial Challenge problem-solving contests, in which you design something for space. The chances of him singlehandedly designing something that works in space are slim, because he's not an engineer. But his goal is not to make something that goes into space. His goal is to make a sculpture that is informed by this problem-solving process. Because he is not an engineer and the thing doesn't actually have to go to Mars, he can fall in love with representing specific parts of the process. More importantly, because he is making art and not space stuff, he can pry specific aspects of the problem-solving process off their utilitarian moorings. He can do whatever he wants with them: fetishize, absurdize, romanticize. You can't do that when the shit has actually got to get to Mars.

What's interesting about Joel is that he is not looking at interdisciplinary work in terms of boundarylessness. Rather, he is leveraging one boundary against another for maximum creative effect.

This kind of interdisciplinary work--which actively uses the notion of discrete disciplines and leverages one against another--strikes me as more interesting and useful than the kind of interdisciplinary work that relies upon the absence of boundaries between disciplines. Shane Hope is more interesting than Eduardo Kac. Eleanor Antin is more interesting than Tamy Ben-Tor. Biospheria is more interesting than Oda Projesi.

Oda Projesi is doing art education and applied sociology and calling it art because it can. Steve Ausbury and Anthony Burr, on the other hand, used the rigor and logic of opera to transform the UCSD campus and leveraged a whole community of volunteers who were expected to do rigorous things, like attend rehearsal and be in the right place at the right time and learn dance steps. This was not declaring UCSD's campus life "art" by intellectual fiat. Every volunteer actor and dancer and technician (including myself) was there to assist in creating this transformation, and we understood that our role was crucial because the scale and the desired effect was so large.

Boundarylessness is flaccid. It wastes what artists are good at and makes that Duchampian gesture of declaring it art into a tired cliche. Because these boundaries are concepts, they can come and go as we please. Just because we, the art people, have been wandering through a relatavist wasteland doesn't mean that we can't pick up these boundary-tools and describe real relationships between intellectual disciplines. And just because we think the boundaries are irreversably eroded doesn't mean any other discipline thinks with this kind of finality. Designers, welders, riggers and doctors still embrace the specific skills they learned and practice daily, and still admit that this skill-set and daily practice filters and colors the way they see and think.

Strong interdisciplinary work pushes disciplines against one another. Work that defines itself in terms of an absence of discrete disciplines is not only not strong, it's not even interdisciplinary. And I am genuinely curious about what use that absence serves.