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