Elephants in the Dark: Towards a Theory of Interartistic Practice 

A famous Indian folk tale tells the story of six men in a dark room, groping an elephant to learn what it is really like. Each one touches a different part and when they compare notes, they are in complete disagreement. The story remains instructive. Throughout the Twentieth and into the Twenty-First Century many significant artists have expressed themselves in more than one art form, drawing inspiration from different media. Yet, scholarly approaches to interartistic creativity – like the proverbial blind men of the parable – are often hampered by the sheer scope of their subject matter. Pointing their spotlights into the dark, academics have struggled to capture the intricacy and intellectual excitement of versatile creative invention. Traditional research in the field has centred on the creative exchange between particular media, emphasizing the demands and constraints of disciplinary fields (ekphrasis, adaptation, novelization) rather than the general social and psychological dynamics of interartistic creativity. Only recently, debates have focused on travelling concepts, as defined by Mieke Bal in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), and on ideas of (un)translatability (cf. Emily Apter’s Against World Literature, 2013). Translation has emerged, beyond its linguistic origins, as a powerful metaphor for cultural and artistic exchange, in a vibrant scholarly field ranging from Michael Cronin’s Translation and Globalization (2003) to Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015). Our project acknowledges these influences, but adopts a different perspective on creative practice. Instead of defining the interartistic as an indiscriminate idea or a fixed canon of works, situated between established media and genres, we focus on specific artistic experiences and experiments. A series of workshops, scheduled to take place in London, Birmingham, and Rome in Spring 2016, will highlight the practitioners’ experience with the interartistic and will reflect the variety and diversity of individual approaches and personal theories. Each event will consist of a plenary lecture, followed by a conversation with a renowned Italian artist and by scholarly response in the form of short papers. All discussants will be invited to submit a written version of their contribution, which will be published in the co-edited, peer-reviewed volume Towards a Theory of Inter-Artistic Practice. Theory itself is envisaged, in this context, as a constantly changing, dynamic field of self-reflective investigation, whose defining task consists in questioning academic orthodoxies and common sense. By foregrounding the practitioners’ perspective, we wish to embrace the open-endedness of interartistic creativity itself and echo its critique of normative boundaries, which has been, and continues to be, a driving force of modern art.