This 'n' That: Thinking about disciplines

To conclude the Southern Graphics Council's annual conference, a panel consisting of Arcadia University Art Gallery's Richard Torchia, Philagrafika's Jose Roca, and Gretchen Wagner of MoMA (under the moderation of Print Center Curator John Caperton) convened to talk about whether or not it was time to go beyond disciplinary labels like 'printmaking' when what people really want to know about is contemporary art.

The value of discipline-specificity (or its limitations) was a major theme of the discussion. John Caperton began the discussion witha  brief history of the Print Center, ending by saying that in its current phase they were seriously engaged in an investigation of what a print is. That this might seem an absurd question to ask at a conference of printmakers and scholars occurred to no one. Caperton entertaining noted that, in the free-for-all that is contemporary art, the Print Center is "an organization that is trying to figure out why we're still around".

The value of labels themselves came into sharper focus when Gretchen Wagner spoke next. The importance of taxonomy was a subtext for her remarks, which described the Museum of Modern Art's curatorial bureaucracy and the challenges posed by a recent acquisition, the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. Fluxus work merrily crossed any and all boundaries of art orthodoxy in its day, and one can only hope that at least some boundaries will be crossed in the name of collaboration at MoMA now that this material has come to rest there. Merriment may follow (but don't hold your breath).

Jose Roca spoke about his thoughts on printmaking in general, making several interesting remarks about how the medium (which he claimed to find less interesting than art overall) was a tool with intrinsic qualities that made it especially useful in certain situations. Answering Carperton's earlier existential question, Roca provisionally defined printmaking as a process with three constituent elements: 1) a matrix that stores information to reproduce, 2) a transfer medium, and 3) a receiving surface. Such a definition no doubt strikes some as laughably broad, but I believe that it has value as a way of opening an investigation.

Richard Torchia's role in the proceedings appeared to be that of respondent, but perhaps things had run a little long, as his response was very brief. Rumor had it that Torchia was going to mix it up. But alas, his remarks, illustrated by a single image from the Graphic Unconscious show at Moore College, hinted at a frustration with the catholicism of Philagrafika's definition of the medium that quickly got swallowed by the Q& A that followed.

Which is too bad. The conversation seemed to want to be about the perils of medium-specificity (breathlessly ask yourself: does it lead to ghetto-ization? Does it water down a medium's real meanings to open it up so wide?) and the uncritically embraced merits of interdisciplinarity.

Can no one say a bad word about interdisciplinarity these days? Perhaps not, but leave it to Louis Menand to at least try to forcefully examine the problem. In his recent book, The Market Place of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, Menand writes in detail about the phenomenon of the interdisciplinarity. He's talking about higher education, btu might as well be talking about the arts (as the conference was wall-to-wall institutions and academics). One carelessly chosen snippet form Menand's book that would have been good to chew on at the panel goes like this:

In the humanities, where talk of interdisciplinarity is most common, these practices tend to reinforce the Balkanized structure of knowledge production that universities inherited from the nineteenth century. This is the structure that divides literature by nationality and the arts by medium. It is a retrograde way to teach the humanities, but it is hard to see how interdisciplinarity per se can more than mildly ameliorate it. Professors are still trained in one national literature or artistic medium or another. In an interdisciplinary encounter, they shout at each other form the mountain tops of their own disciplines.  For, as we have already seen, the key to professional transformation is not at the knowledge production. It is at the level of professional reproduction. Until professors are produced in a different way, the structure of academic knowledge production and dissemination is unlikely to change significantly.

Add to that the budgetary fights and administrative complexity of disciplinary entrenchment and any suggestion about interdisciplinarity runs the risk of becoming a kind of masquerade, a power grab in which stake holders appear to surrender territory to gain control of adjacent parties.

I hate to feel like there has to be an elephant in every room, but I kept marveling at how differently artists talk about these things from other constituencies. At the end of the day, audiences will be confused by interdisciplinarity, funders will struggle to come up with ways to support artists but will have to rely on disciplines as guidelines, and ideas that don't fit into clear departmental niches will fall between the cracks after a short period of time.

I often think about a remark that professed non-painter Ellen Harvey made to explain why she made paintings. Tell someone at a party you make art and they'll ask you what kind of paintings you do, she said. Put that in your interdisciplinary pipe and smoke it.