Contemporary art has long accommodated practices that move between forms. An artist may write, perform, publish, organise, teach, make images, produce sound, construct situations or work with archives without experiencing these activities as departures from a primary medium. Yet the language commonly used to describe such practices remains dependent upon the disciplinary distinctions that the practices themselves may no longer sustain.

Terms such as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary continue to imagine disciplines as identifiable territories between which the practitioner moves. Multidisciplinarity proposes plurality; interdisciplinarity proposes relations between established fields. Polyvalence offers another way of thinking.

The term is not new, nor does it belong exclusively to art. Across different fields, polyvalent describes the capacity to assume more than one value, function or relation. Applied to artistic practice, its significance lies in this emphasis upon capacity rather than multiplicity.

A polyvalent artist is not simply somebody who does many different things. A practice may employ painting, photography, writing, performance and sound while retaining each as a separate disciplinary activity. Polyvalence concerns something else: the capacity of a practice to become differently operative without requiring its manifestations to establish separate disciplinary identities.

Writing may occur without the artist becoming a writer. A walk may constitute an artwork without establishing walking as the artist's medium. A publication may operate as an exhibition, an archive as a performance, or an institutional procedure as artistic material. What matters is not the crossing of disciplinary boundaries but the changing values and functions assumed by activities within the practice.

This shifts attention from what an artist makes towards how a practice operates.

The coherence of a polyvalent practice may reside not in a recurring medium, recognisable style or consistent category of object, but in its grammar: the procedures, relations and operations through which different manifestations become connected. Two works may share little formal resemblance yet operate according to a related grammar. Conversely, formally similar works may arise from quite different practices.

Practice grammar should not be confused with disciplinary grammar. Painting, for example, possesses historically accumulated conventions through which otherwise diverse works remain intelligible as painting. A painter may develop a distinctive practice grammar within those conventions. Polyvalence becomes significant where the relations through which a practice coheres cannot adequately be explained through any single inherited disciplinary grammar.

The signature of such a practice is not necessarily its style. It is its grammar.

This does not make form arbitrary. On the contrary, where no single medium guarantees the identity of the practice, the particular form a work assumes becomes more consequential. A publication may document an artwork in one instance and constitute the artwork in another. An archive may preserve earlier activity or become material for something not yet produced.

Documentation may cease to be merely evidential and become a mode of transmission.

Polyvalence therefore describes not an abundance of artistic means but a capacity for functional transformation.

Nor must the grammar of a practice be established in advance. It may develop through successive manifestations, with later activities making earlier relations newly intelligible. Coherence need not be evidence of an originating programme. It may become apparent retrospectively, through procedures whose significance was neither anticipated nor fully understood when they first occurred.

Such coherence remains provisional. A practice may contain discontinuities, abandoned procedures and relations that resist explanation. To identify its grammar is not to claim that everything an artist does belongs to a single system. Relations must be demonstrated rather than presumed, and the artist need not possess final authority over their interpretation.

Polyvalence does not abolish disciplines, nor does it establish a more advanced or desirable condition of artistic production. Disciplinary practices may possess considerable complexity, while the accumulation of different forms does not itself demonstrate polyvalence. The term becomes useful only where existing accounts of medium, discipline or interdisciplinarity fail to explain how a practice sustains and transforms its coherence.

To speak of the polyvalent artist is consequently not to identify a particular kind of maker distinguished by versatility or multiple competencies. It is to recognise a capacity of practice: the possibility that artistic activity may assume different forms, values and functions without any one of them determining the identity of the practice as a whole.

Polyvalence is the capacity for differentiated continuation: a practice may become otherwise without ceasing to be itself.