Is combining text with photographs enough to make an artist an interdisciplinarian? No more than combining words and melodies as a songwriter does, or music and movement as choreographers usually do, or action, image, and script the way filmmakers do. And I guess that’s my point: there are many art forms that are thought of as “single discipline,” in which lone artists or groups of collaborators actually use the synthesis of forms, with their contrasting modalities of thought and expressive power, to create works that are potently communicative. Interdisciplinary? All of the above.

Text and photos are especially on my mind these days because I am teaching another round of my Works and Pictures course at Glen Echo Photoworks. I’m rediscovering the truth that I always encounter when I immerse myself at this intersection: When combining text with images there’s no one sure formula or simple set of protocols that makes it work. Many different successful approaches can produce vastly varied outcomes, as is demonstrated by the five artists I asked my students to consider emulating for their assignment last week:  

Lalla Essaydi (see image at top of post) is a Moroccan artist who stages images in which Arabic script covers every visible surface: walls, clothing, human skin . The medium is henna, and the message is about the transgressions of male and female domains into one another in a gender-compartmentalized society.

Duane Michals challenged, then altered, the standards of photography in the 60’s and 70’s, reintroducing staging, narrative, and beyond-the-frame speculation into the form. He often writes titles, poetry, and stories directly onto the borders of his prints, always with more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts results.

Martin Wilson painstakingly shoots film to build sequential texts that add up to image/language poetry.

Clarissa Sligh spans time, form, and memory in work that often draws on family or historic photographs. Photo, book, installation, sourced texts, original writing, artist, audience: all the borders are blurred.

Tony Mendoza puts stories under photos. Each could stand alone, but the effect is compounded in work that is cocky, humorous, and poignant.

Two recent visits I’ve made to university campuses, and the conversations with friends and colleagues that have followed, have had me thinking a lot about the nature of undergraduate arts education. How do we prepare students in creative fields for arts-infused futures, particularly as change – technological, environmental, cultural – seems to be accelerating every day? If we really don’t know what the world will be like in ten years, how do we ready people to function and contribute as artists in that world?

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I believe that some of the answer lies in interdisciplinary practice, that interdisciplinary thinking provides the key for the adaptability, usefulness, and capacity for self-education that art-identified people will need for mid-21st Century lives and careers. I believe that this applies both to single-discipline artists and to those who identify more broadly as inter-, cross-, multi-, or post-disciplinary. Everyone will benefit from a curriculum that cultivates a grasp of the ideas that unite all arts disciplines and the skills and habits of mind that enable practitioners to thrive at intersections and move across platforms.

I am still formulating some of these ideas. But I’ll modestly jump in with a grandiose proposal for a core curriculum of required subjects for all arts majors, in classroom studios where students and teaching teams representing a range of different artistic disciplines would come together. Whether each of these categories represents a separate course I am not sure; perhaps they are principles that cut across a curriculum organized more holistically. But here goes:

 ·      Cultivating Practice. Traditional arts education puts a high premium on technique, but may offer very little in terms of helping students develop and maintain a practice, which is actually the core of artistry and the source of its motivation. Practice addresses this question: between the traditions and proven procedures of a given discipline, how do I sustain my own play-of-work and hold its center? Practice encompasses habits of self-application, management of vision, reflection, receptivity to the world that allows new ideas to enter, and the relationships between these elements that compound their value. Artistic practice must possess structure to keep it strong, complemented by variation to keep it vital. No strict program for practice can be imposed, but many strategies can be nurtured as components of a practice, for ultimately such a discipline must be self-designed and self-generated by each artist. Students are used to moving from assignment to assignment, requirement to requirement; they must also develop a core that will continue to hold when those structure cease at graduation.

·      Meaning, Representation, and Audience. In addition to imparting technique, cultivating artistry often entails empowering and emboldening the individual voice and a strong sense of the self in the interest of originality and particularity of vision. But art grows from and reaches toward context, which suggests that a grasp of meaning, representation, and the experience of the audience must be cultivated to equal strength on the other side of this equation. But often an arts education leaves students with very little experience in actually grappling with any meaning that happens outside their own intent. At some point in the 20th Century, at least in some styles and genres, artistic purity became synonymous with obliviousness to the audience, and I have friends who made it through graduate level conservatory educations without ever being enjoined to consider their audience’s experience. Artists in the 21st Century will need to reach for more.

·      Collaboration. Most artists will eventually be called upon to collaborate, whether it takes the form of co-creation, functioning in a discipline-defined role within a collective united for a particular outcome, or reaching to colleagues across domains to forage new paths at the intersections. But collaboration as its own discipline – with its components of conversation, listening, critique, exchange, assertion, negotiation, compromise, delegation, leadership/followership, framing bigger/framing smaller – is rarely taught or treated as teachable. People who believe in the role of athletics in a well-rounded education often emphasize the importance of learning teamwork, grasping the potential of united effort, and understanding the individual’s position in the strategy of the whole. And judging from the testimony that business leaders often give to the role of sports in their development, athletics is good at imparting these lessons. As part of an interdisciplinary, function-focused curriculum, immersion into the dynamics of collaboration would explore similar grounding for artists.

·      Critique, Dialogue and the Arts of Articulating Art. Much as we might like to rhapsodize about the ineffable in art and the power of such forms as music, dance, and imagery to transcend the limits of language, at some point – be it critical dialogue, self-promotion, public discourse – art inevitably passes through a stage of linguistic articulation. The spoken and written words are media for communication with skills that can be mastered, and the thinking processes that harness words provide tools for artists for which there are no substitutes. Structured critique, constructively managed, offers the incubator for these skills.

Recently at my photography home base, Photoworks Glen Echo, I curated an exhibit titled “Self & Subject: Ideas in Contemporary Photography” featuring the work of eight artists who use photography (including Interdisciplinaryness collaborator Catherine Mueller). Curating was a pretty new experience for me. I’ve been the instigator or co-organizer of small shows before, but this is the first time I’ve had sole responsibility for conceiving the theme, identifying the artists, and determining an interpretive holder for it all.

Though the opportunity came up suddenly and organizing was a scramble, I found the experience very satisfying. At the opening I felt energized, excited about the work on the walls, eager give my short curator’s talk about what I discovered in assembling it, and thrilled to see the artists present engaged in lively conversations. This is a marked contrast to the anti-climactic or deer-in-the-headlights feeling I often get at an opening when my own art is on display.

Given the encompassing way that I define my artistic practice, curating is something that falls within the scope of what it means to be an artist for me. By contrast, I know of curators who like to emphasize the fact that they are not artists, thus making a claim for their objectivity and scholarship, and for curation as discipline more allied with the humanities (being the study, interpretation, and contextualization of art) than with the making of art itself. This is a very valid position, I believe, but not the one I occupy.

What makes curating a part of artistry for me, I think, is related to the tenets of interdisciplinaryiness that Catherine and I articulated in this blog about 18 months ago. Three of the seven qualities particularly stand out:

1.     RISK/MESS: “We place ourselves in the space between form, inclined towards newness, mixing, mash-ups, discovery and experimentation.” In describing this quality of interdisciplinaryness we’ve emphasized the central quest for discovery that anchors an interdisciplinary approach; in particular, Catherine has named the essential “What would happen if…?” question. I found that the outlook applies equally to curating; I was reminded of the advice given me by one of my Grad School Advisors, Devora Neumark, when I was preparing a response for an open call for curatorial concepts. I don’t remember her exact words but the message I took away was something like this: Think of curating the same way you do an artistic process. What are you curious about? What do you want to learn? How can organizing an exhibit help you advance your understanding of the topic? If you think of it as research on a subject about which you are passionate, the discovery is likely to accrue not only to you, but to the participating artists, and the public. I was motivated to assemble the show because I am teaching a course on the same topic in the Summer, and thought I might drum up interest for the course, and learn things that would inform my teaching. I definitely achieved the latter (read on). Risk and mess are the stuff or research. Research is central.

2.     RELATIONSHIPS/CONTEXT. Here’s how we described it: “InterD people are often preoccupied with relationship and context. We look for links, pathways, similarities and differences, flashpoints and counterpoints, influences, escape hatches, doorways, reasons and surprises.” This feels like a pretty straight-on description of what curating, at least in this experience, entails. At the outset I wanted to make a series of connections among the various artists in terms of themes that are important to the understanding I wanted to convey about contemporary portraiture, including ancestry, masquerade, the fragmented body, and possessions as proxies for persons.  With the context created by combining the works and the stories behind them, additional relationships were revealed that I hadn’t anticipated. These included installation as strategy, subtractive process (i.e., what is revealed by removing elements), and most important to me, the very personal nature of the impulse that can underlie even the most conceptual work. Examples of this last point include loss of identity upon assuming the name of a new spouse, a feeling of being treated very differently after a significant weight loss, death of a parent. The formats may appear to be “conceptual” but the experiences are the stuff of down-to-earth human narrative.

3.     CORE CONCEPTS “The questions that help us distinguish the relationships/contexts mentioned above are central to our work, as opposed to centralizing the disciplines in which these questions manifest.” If I have been asking one primary question in my artistic work, one that has either central or tangential relationship to everything I make, it’s this: Who owns the body? This question was not particularly on my mind as I considered and chose work for the show, but in retrospect I see it emerging in almost every piece, whether it was a contemplation of female ancestors and the dimensions they displayed or concealed to the camera when period-style portraits were made of them, an examination of loss of agency in the experience being hospitalized and medicated, or the question of who controls the definition of racial identity and its markers. The discipline I was exercising may have changed from making to curating, but the core question remained the same – even when I wasn’t thinking about it.

Curating had been an unfulfilled curiosity of mine for a few years, and this opportunity more or less fell into my lap. Now that it’s over, I find that multiple opportunities to curate are suddenly presenting themselves. I feel like I’m discovering new capacity. But in the realm of interdisciplinaryness, it turns out the be the same capacities I’ve been using all along.

This post is number 5 in a series in which Catherine and John take turns reflecting and expanding on the attributes of Interdisciplinaryness practitioners, originally outlined in “A Very Big Idea: Interdisciplinaryness People, What Makes Us So?” 

3. RELATIONSHIP/CONTEXT

InterD people are often preoccupied with relationship and context. We look for links, pathways, similarities and differences, flashpoints and counterpoints, influences, escape hatches, doorways, reasons and surprises. Our desire to declare an even momentary understanding of an overall relationship or context regarding our process is potentially as strong as our desire to make the things that our processes produce. We also simultaneously explore Big Picture/Little Picture applications of our work, in that we focus on the task at hand with an eye to that task’s placement in the world and vice versa.

One of the more influential advisors I had during graduate school is an artist named Pam Hall.  Pam works across a myriad of media, including still image, film and installation. During the intensive residencies that precede each term, advisors and their students are given daily work sessions intended to supplement the independent research proposed by each student. Each advising group makes determinations as to how to use this time as best suits its needs.

On our first day, Pam gathered us together and asked us to each write down three big questions that were really driving our artistic inquiry. These questions related to the ethics of being an artist, the challenging intersection of art-making and capitalism, and how we each function across a spectrum of artistic practice and idea. Pam then distilled our questions into four large, open-ended ones that encompassed our individual concerns. In each group session, we began to parse open these questions in a shared dialogue that she lightly guided, while taking notes on large pieces of white paper.

My experience with Pam’s leadership was invigorating. I have always been a dialogic processor, and Pam exemplified an unassuming capacity for context and synthesis that I deeply admired. She is firmly rooted in knowledge, fierce and funny. She quietly listened to our comments, selected key words or ideas from them and made connections between past and future iterations of concepts. She did not shy away from scope or complication. She validated personal concerns such as artist sustainability by granting them space to be heard and she buoyed proposals with references to other artist/thinkers. She listened with compassion, holding firm to her own perspective while also making room for ours. It was a balanced, vibrant room and our week of meetings concluded with the walls covered with a living document that recorded our humanity, artistry and serious inquiry.

Somewhere along the way in my life, a well-meaning person advised me to stop asking why?, stating that this was a useless question because one can often never arrive at a single, indisputable answer. In my hazy memory, I believe this person was speaking specifically about the intricacies of human relationships, so complicatedly submerged in multiple perspectives, experiences and interpretations. What I found enlightening about Pam’s guided discourse is that she did not shy away from why. She prefaced our inquiries with an awareness of their complexity and open-endedness, but these qualities deterred neither her nor us from pursuing them. What is art but a means to understand what seems incomprehensible? Pam also asked a lot of how and what if.  She gently gave our ideas value, affirmed our perspectives as we were actively creative new ones, and was deep in the thinking and feeling trenches with us. By doing this she also genuinely created space for us to do this for each other, neutralizing any sort of set hierarchy that might be perceived to exist in a traditional model of curation or leadership.

In retrospect, she was embodying this penchant for relationship/context as proposed in this particular Interdisciplinary aspect.  Personally meaningful for me, her example validated my own lifelong preoccupation with how things and people connect. As an adolescent, I was fascinated with how people came to discover that they loved each other and wanted to spend their lives together. I yearned for stories, for patterns, for guideposts, for assurance. I wrote letters to multiple pen pals in attempts to foster camaraderie across distance. I thought about the impact of the actions of characters on both the soap operas my mother preferred as well as in the musicals in which she performed. It wasn’t just about getting swept up in aesthetics for me as a viewer, I wanted to be submerged in the poetry but also delighted by how the poetry informed the beings it encompassed -- how it informed me, how it let me see and feel.

In many ways, I still am attached to this kind of inquiry and apply it across all matters of interest.  I still ask for stories of origin in terms of partnerships and families. I love to meet parents of friends and loved ones, as the intricacies of those moments often illuminate aspects of my friends or lovers in new ways. There is always more to learn. We are many-layered creatures. It makes sense that we operate in the world with a desire to peel layers back to understand what lies underneath them, what makes them so, knowing that another layer awaits us when we are ready, and that even as we peel one layer away a new one is forming somewhere else.

This post is number 4 in a series in which Catherine and John take turns reflecting and expanding on the attributes of Interdisciplinaryness practitioners, originally outlined in “A Very Big Idea: Interdisciplinaryness People, What Makes Us So?” 

2. FORAGING NEW TERRITORY

In keeping with making risky messes, InterD people are inclined to forage their own territory. It appears as if the containers laid out by others are appreciated, informative, referential guideposts, but ultimately too restrictive to our processes. At the same time, in filling (or emptying) multiple containers, often simultaneously, we feel an ease in adapting existing products and ideas, partly because we can informatively borrow from anywhere.

Before Chasen Gaver I’d never heard anyone describe himself as a performance poet. The first time I saw him perform, around 1979, Chasen claimed to know of only one other person who used the title, a man he had never met who went by the name of Nicky Butane. In fact, Chasen had a poem about his search for performance poet kinship in which he’d flick on a butane cigarette lighter, hold the flame at arm’s length as if seeking something in the dark, and call out, “Nicky Butane? Nicky Butane? Nicky Butane?”

Nicky Butane might have been a missing person, but in the 1980s in Washington, DC, Chasen Gaver was easy to find. You could encounter him performing in an art space, a nightclub, a community center, or a political rally, and he would definitely be anywhere that someone was attempting to organize a Lesbian/Gay arts event, which is how I made his acquaintance. Chasen was fresh. He had a poem based in someone’s mispronunciation of Kalorama Road as “Rama Rama Road,” one proposing that Washington be renamed Dance City to fit the initials DC, and one – maybe more than one – about his adoration for Diana Ross. And he had plenty of poems about current events and human rights. An activist to the core, Chasen was involved in numerous civic action groups and had even founded a local chapter of NOW during his college days in Ohio.

Chasen’s self-invented form of performance poetry used props, costume accessories, gestures, dance moves, a tambourine, and, for one poem, a shadow puppet stage. He was aware of his forbears in “serious” poetry, but he didn’t hesitate to reveal his inspirations in the disco scene and pop culture. Before I encountered him, I’d thought of public poetry reading as an innately tedious form in which self-serious poets, usually docked behind a podium, intoned their work in a droning style intended to get the words to hover with looming significance, but which usually landed on my ear as shapeless, inexpressive, and cloyingly self-conscious. By contrast, Chasen was kinetic, musical, heartfelt, righteous, funny, and, when the material called for it, unapologetically camp. “REVOLUTION rhymes with LIBERATION,” he declared in one of his poems, and for me, it was kind of a personal liberation to witness Chasen Gaver in performance.

Part of that sense of liberation emerged from the fact that Chasen, on stage, was so true to himself and all he believed in, and part of it resided in the constant evidence that he was unfettered by anyone’s expectations of what poetry or performance were supposed to be. He not only created poems and turned them into a show, he invented his entire form, and taking it even further, invented the ways that his art functioned in the world. I can’t claim that at the time, my 20s, I seized on the example and ran with it. It is more in retrospect that I recognize what Chasen was doing in terms of the essential role of foraging new territory in the context of interdisciplinaryness. Chasen’s creation led to re-invention which led to changing the rules about what a poet could be and where a poet belonged.

I don’t know if Chasen thought of himself as an interdisciplinary artist. I don’t know if he came to performance through poetry or poetry through performance. I’m sure that he was aware of the work of the Beats and the Nuyorican Poets to heighten the performative potential of poetry, but I doubt that he was following anybody’s example. I suspect that Chasen developed his particular combination of elements because he had to.

I wish I could interview him now about his impulses and vision in foraging new artistic territory, but alas, Chasen Gaver died in 1988, one of countless artists claimed by AIDS in the first decade of the epidemic. Since then, performance poetry has proliferated as a form, and any poetry slam might field someone with a fresh vision of how poetic words and performance can come together. But even poetry slams have their rules, and with so many practitioners it’s easy to encounter work that is more imitative than vitally original. Meanwhile, page-bound poets in conventional readings continue to drone on. Chasen’s work, on the other hand, stands vivid and unique in my memory 30 years after the fact, its combination of elements startlingly innovative and yet somehow also inevitable.

This post is number 2 in a series in which Catherine and John take turns reflecting and expanding on the attributes of Interdisciplinaryness practitioners, originally outlined in “A Very Big Idea: Interdisciplinaryness People, What Makes Us So?” 

1. RISK/MESS

Interdisciplinaryness asks for a strong relationship to risk and mess. We place ourselves in the space between form, inclined towards newness, mixing, mash-ups, discovery and experimentation. Therefore, we need a willingness to dance in the potential disaster of the unknown, to stand in the mess of uncertainty, in order to create.

I guess it can look like a mess when we do it. Dozens of photographs we’ve clipped from newspapers and magazines, strewn across a table or on the floor. Sometimes I’ll say something to highlight the randomness of it: “We live in a world where we are constantly barraged from all directions by photographs. You can think of it as a chaotic ocean of images. What’s in front of us is one small wave that has just washed in.”

It looks like even more of a mess when we add the sentences we’ve just authored in a five-minute continuous writing exercis, lettered in Sharpie on strips of paper. “I come from priests and nuns.” “I come from cats.” “I come from waiting for the light to change.” The pictures and texts have been sourced separately, so there’s been no design to make them fit together.

I call it an image scramble. It’s probably my favorite teaching tool, something I use whether I’m working with adults or teens, photographers or choreographers, whether we’re exploring the interplay between words and images or simply mining the possibilities of a creative prompt. The image scramble is chaotic, until you start to look for meaning – and it never fails to be there.

“What connections do you see?” I’ll ask.

The group will often start with obvious, literal choices that function as redundant captions. If there’s a picture of a nun on the table, someone will try pairing it with the “priests and nuns” statement. As we work at it, the group will start to see more nuanced possibilities, and “I come from priests and nuns” will get paired with the image of a fugitive escaping down an alley, “I come from cats” will be matched with a stiletto-heeled shoe, and “I come from waiting for the light to change” will go under the picture of a zoo animal staring through the bars of its cage.

At this point participants start to recognize how, by virtue of a juxtaposition, both an image and a text take on meanings they would not possess alone. Images never look so fragmentary as when they are gathered randomly and spread across a table.

The exercise suggests that once pulled from its context, the potential for an image to be recontextualized is almost infinite, that meaning is not an inherent quality of an image but something that can be added and subtracted based on its presentational, personal, and cultural context. It also suggests a stimulating point for interdisciplinary thinking, that images and words have different ways of functioning in the brain and that a frisson of recognition is sparked when we work them together.

The exercise also offers a paradigm for how we might arrange our environments, view the world as we pass through it, and manage our own thinking processes. We humans probably have a natural penchant for order; at least we generally believe that our systems function better when they are ruled by order. But mess has important merits. An environment that is a bit of a scramble of objects and images is more likely to push us to new ideas as the external stimuli bump up against each other and intersect with our stream of thought. While we naturally make distinctions and put things in categories, a mind that’s willing to mess with the columns and seek the unlikely connections between disparate things around us, is exercising the habit of inspiration. If we can treat our own thoughts in a way that doesn’t keep them entirely subject-limited and purpose-bound, if we can think about our travel plans as we check the grocery list or remember the words of a song as we try to fix a fence, we will solve more problems and live lighter lives.