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Many Things At Once
The Rise of Multidisciplinary Practice in Contemporary Art
by Johanna Burton
These days, it is not at all unusual to ask an artist what medium he or she works in and to get as an answer a heavy pause and then an explanation of how that artist’s practice is one that moves between mediums, incorporating elements from, say, painting and video, or architecture and performance. Many contemporary artists thrive on creating unexpected hybrids from more traditional mediums and appropriating materials from everyday life, including television, advertising, theatre, politics, and technology.
This comes as no surprise, given the super-fast pace of our culture, and the increasingly blurry lines between art and entertainment, work and leisure, even the real and the virtual. Universities have seen a boom in “interdisciplinary programs” that investigate these phenomena and focus on cultural and political topics in looser and more expansive ways than even twenty years ago. In fact, the last ten years have seen the creation of at least a dozen Cultural Studies and Visual Studies departments in major universities. Such issues as whether high and low culture (i.e., 19th century painting and comic books) should, or even can, be compared usefully have manifested in hot debates erupting in symposia and roundtables dedicated to the topic.
Basic questions concerning what belongs to the realm of art and what to the realm of popular culture connect with issues of class, race, and gender. Indeed, where connoisseurship—the learned appreciation of an artwork’s techniques and principles—once presided, now a larger social awareness has arisen. This is not to say that one can no longer appreciate a beautiful brushstroke, but is instead a reminder that conventions of beauty should be questioned even while they are being enjoyed.
These questions, regarding what art “is” and what it “isn’t,” have a lot to do with pragmatic issues surrounding contemporary art production. Take, for example, the activity of art collecting: private collectors and museums have acquired paintings, sculpture, rare books, photography, and even performance documentation to support artists in their work and to ensure that an archive of that work continues to be available for future generations. In the last thirty years, media such as video have presented dilemmas in regard to conservation and collecting. It’s nearly impossible to keep the effects of time from eating away at video—one solution is to make new copies of the videos, or to transfer them to DVD. But, do these processes disrupt the idea of there being a singular or “original” artwork? And what about works like those made by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, creations that intentionally side-step conventional ideas of a non-reproducible piece of art?
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