Interstices

Alexander Alberro is the Virginia Bloedel Wright ’51 Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Abstraction in Reverse, Institutional Critique, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, and Conceptual Art. Alberro has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others.

"The book reconsiders the art of marginalized, subjugated and colonized people within the context of neoliberal globalisation. It is an ‘interstitial perspective,’ attentive to displacement, diaspora, stereotyping, migrancy and appropriation across various borderlands: post-apartheid South Africa, the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Viceroyalty of Peru, and Potosí in Bolivia. The works that Alberro discusses resist Western cultural hegemony by being contingent, unruly, difficult, defaced, disastrous, and otherwise disruptive. . . . Above all, it is a book about the politics of attention: how and where we look, how we are seen, what is withheld, what we hide to ourselves and who, ultimately, controls the means of expression. . . . Like Alberro, we must cast our attention beyond the frame, the boundary, and the border—or risk finding ourselves, too, adrift."

• Introduction: Deprovincializing Contemporary Art1. Circulation2. Translating Difference3. Ch’ixi Epistemology4. Decolonizing NatureConclusion: Beyond HierarchyAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIllustration CreditsIndex