Letters

Leonardo, Vol. 13, pp. 174-176. Pergamon Press 1980. Printed in Great Britain LETTERS Readers' comments are welcomed on texts published in Leonardo. The Editors reserve the right to shorten letters. Letters should be written in English or in French ON BOOK-ART Many things Richard Kostelanetz says on book-art [Leonardo 12, 43 (1979)] chime with my own feeling, for, although my own book Green Song is a private press book and, therefore, in an even more specialized category than he is considering, his remarks about book-artists concern me directly. One has to believe in oneself enough to design such books from print to paper and, in my case, decide 'which poems, which engravings' and to balance each page with the page opposite. No small problem when neither poems nor engravings were alike in size or in 'feeling'. Being, in fact, a 'one man band', it also follows that one has to 'blow one's own trumpet', and as loudly as possible so that the ears of collectors of fine press books may discern a new note. There is a catch phrase of the moment 'don't make value judgements', but a work of art is a continuing exercise of choice. Whether one is producing a ballet or a paintmg, a print or a poem, one has to choose between many, many alternatives-in my case, type face, paper, format, etc. His paragraph on 'blocks of type' is particularly pertinent, but there is one point he has not mentioned: A painter, often, and a poet, usually, bare their 'entrails' to the public gaze and, thus, must accept any comments made about them both as artists and as persons. Pauline Sitwell 46 Porchester Road Bayswater London W2, England INTERDISCIPLINARY SECONDARY-SCHOOL PROGRAMS I agree with Ronald N. MacGregor when he writes in his article [Leonardo 12, 201 (1979)] that programs of interdisciplinary studies generally do not work. Therefore I fear that his suggestion addressed to members of teaching staffs of secondary schools to exchange reliable information willproduce no positive results. To my knowledge, interdisciplinary programs in secondary schools have been organized only in the form oflimited projects. The problems arising from the choice of their subjects and the selection of competent teachers to plan the projects and the scheduling of them within time tables set by official programs make their execution extremely difficult, On the other hand, I am convinced that art education and aesthetics are such vast subjects that orily an interdisciplinary approach can deal with them. But, instead of leaving it to specialists of different disciplines, I think it is preferable to enlarge the range of each art teacher's knowledge (MacGregor, I presume, has a deep understanding of painting, photography, biology, physics and sociology-or am I wrong? To reach the level of specialists of different disciplines is not so important in 174 my view, because in many cases one does not use specialists' methods but only the results obtained. Willy Moerman Wagnbrugghelaan,35A 8200 Bruges 2, Belgium VISUAL ARTS AND THE ARTS OF THE UNSEEN paul Heyer's comments in Leonardo 13, 85 (1980) on my article [Leonardo 12, 231 (1979)] are a useful addition to my analysis of the place of Conceptual art in the history of aesthetic perception. His focus is largely different from my own, in that I am not concerned with the aesthetic implications of the techniques of Conceptual artists but with the aesthetic significance of their works as a whole and their continuity with the history of what I regard as 'aesthetic perception'. The use of photography in connection with Conceptual art does, of course, place photography in an ambiguous situation. As Heyer points out, photographs can function as documents recording and recalling original events, or they may become art objects in their own right. In this latter case, photography may supersede events to stand independent of them, as I find Volz's photographs do of Christo's 'Running Fence'. As pictographic rather than ideographic experiences, however, photographs exceed the strictly conceptual character that Conceptual art takes as its distinguishing feature. This may be all to the good, though, since the term .Conceptual art functions more as a slogan than...