The IAF  rocked 2009 with interstitial salons, publications, auction, new website & new friends! Everyone at the IAF Executive Board & Working Group is jazzed and energized, and trying to figure out where to go from here. So we’ve cobbled together a Wish List for 2010. We know we can’t do it all in 12 months, but this seems like a good place to start . . . .

IAF Wish List for 2010:

• Post more regular news, reviews, events, and promotion of interstitial artists and their work.
• Establish a forum for interstitial artists to exchange ideas, collaborate, network, and brainstorm.
• Create an online art gallery.
• Feature guest bloggers on a regular basis.
• Organize an interstitial art symposium.
• Begin work on Interfictions 3.
• Generate a wider engagement with the interstitial art community through co-sponsored events with other artists & organizations.
• Hold more salons in towns across the U.S. & in Europe (Please visit our new How to Host an IAF Salon page!)

What would you like to see the IAF doing or promoting in 2010? What else can we do to make more of an impact, and to build a greater interstitial art community?

And how do you suggest we do that? Are you willing to volunteer some time or skills?

What are we missing, here?

Please add your ideas to our Wish List for 2010 in the Comments section. We promise to read, and to respond!

In a recent New York Times article on new paths for independent filmmakers (Declaration of Indies:  Just Sell it Yourself! 1/17/10), Manohla Dargis writes:

This seems to me to be very much what the IAF has always had in mind:  We’re not trying to compete with existing genres, just to make the world more aware of other options.  We’re not trying to set up an Interstitial Canon, just to encourage everyone who likes the Interstitial to let each other know what they’re liking at any time.
What do you think?  Any suggestions on how to make that happen?

Interfictions 2 is coming to the Twin Cities! Four wonderful authors read from our eclectic anthology:

Will Alexander, David Schwartz, Kelly Barnhill, and Alan DeNiro
Friday, January 29th, 7:30 p.m.
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
3038 Hennepin Ave. South
Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Free
http://www.magersandquinn.com/index.php?main_page=event

Excerpts from today’s New York Times Book Review piece by Pankaj Mishra:

“Ideological inconsistency,” [Zadie Smith] writes in her foreword [to her new collection, Changing My Mind:  Occasional Essays], “is, for me, practically an article of faith.”

Smith’s hope . . .  derives . . . from academic high theory, which assumes that those who live between cultures best represent and articulate the human condition today.

. . . as Salman Rushdie and other practitioners of postcolonial postmodernism have stressed — ambivalence, doubt and confusion are essential to forming dynamic new hybrid selves.

Smith’s broad-brush pronouncements underscore the limitations of the academic theories she often rehearses. Having hybrid identities, not belonging anywhere or indeed belonging everywhere, may have its advantages, but these attributes must still contend with pressing circumstances like the voraciousness of 21st-century capitalism. Far from floating free in a state of unbelonging, most people are trapped in predetermined social and political positions; they must act within the history that surrounds them.

And that, my interstitial friends, is why we’re here.

A short story by Franz Kafka reads in its entirety, “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”

This dreamy little fable serves as an excellent metaphor for the cycles of modern art. The leopards are the artists of the avant-garde, instinctive animals like Picasso, Pollock and Julian Schnabel who desecrate the hallowed precincts of high art and introduce a wild new beauty and freedom. But then they keep coming back. Their once revolutionary gestures become routine, and they are absorbed into the pantheon.

– Ken Johnson, Art Review, ‘Leopards in the Temple,’  New York Times, 1/15/10

This also makes me think of Interstitial Art.  People are always asking us to define it, and we keep saying, “We’re the thing that doesn’t fit in; the thing you don’t expect, that you don’t have a place for.”  Interstitial Art doesn’t define itself except for that.  Work that was interstitial even 20 years ago may well since then have become part of a recognized genre or canon.

So are we the giraffes in the temple?

Join us for our first Interfictions 2 reading of the year*, sponsored by St. Mark’s Bookshop and on Carlos’s birthday, no less!

Interfictions 2 is also coming to the Twin Cities on January 29th, so mark your calendars:

Will Alexander, David Schwartz, Kelly Barnhill, and Alan DeNiro
Friday, January 29th, 7:30 p.m. at Magers & Quinn Booksellers

Read more…