Dear Ira:
Questions close to me you're asking:  the nature of interdisciplinary
collaborations, the value(? - I'd rather say function) of writing in visual
art.

My work between 1990 and 1993 intensely so, and somewhat since, was
collaborative with artists in several disciplines, and in fact with a
couple of scientists too.  One of the basic ways in which the work was able
to be successful was when it worked towards, not an either-or of the
disciplines, nor a juxtaposition, but in fact  a third issue.  Then there
could be an object of attention focusing work away from the inevitable
discussion of terms, and bringing them back to the concrete.  And in
discussion of the specific, the relation between terms could make sense and
be built on.

And, back in/to the 70s, the Theatre of Mistakes was an interdisciplinary
performance group (Anthony Howell poetry-dance, Miranda Payne sculpture,
Michael Greenall sculpture-installation, Peter Stickland architecture,
myself writer-theatre, Glenys Johnson installation-painting as the core
group, many many others involved from music to science to whatever).  One
of our methods of collaboration was to find out and try to work in each
other's terms, not necessarily to agree (too complicated) but to swop, or
to come up with game-like parameters that enabled multiple interpretations.
 This was partly a question of improvisation, and partly one of what you
might call experimental rehearsal in the sense that only by putting
differences into action could their products, and their "mistakes" be
discovered, and the mistakes then produce new possibilities, etc.

Often the most interesting work in any discipline is that which discovers
its form or doesn't care, meaning the motive makes the form.

That kind of work and much apparent mixed-disciplinary work in fact came
out of a background of conceptual art, completely separate from the
narrative or linear thrust of most writing habits.  When I quit the Theatre
of Mistakes in 1979 I was sort of making the choice towards a combination
of horizontal (linear) and vertical (mappable or game-structure-based)
work. 

 "Art" happened to be a generous umbrella in those days (mid-70s).  Theatre
wasn't.  My early performance work had little or no "text".  "Text" was of
different kinds - already written and read out, memorized, improvised, or
generated by game structures.  In a 1983 piece "characters" were defined by
which of those methods they operated according to.

You comment that visual artists use text as texture.  Obviously this is a
value-judgement for you.  I once taught a course called "How To Read, for
Visual Artists".  In fact, I think writers would have found some of their
"problems" interesting.  Language has such a baggage from our educational
histories - authoritarian, abstract, etc.  even if poets know the
materiality of it, to some extent.  There's also the issue of time which is
hard to incorporate with visual work.  But time is a material too, which
even linear often writing forgets.

I'm not saying I have solutions to your questions, these are just some
(only personally historical) thoughts from one whose art form is kind of
the interstice, or the linking.

Best, Fiona


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%