Interstitial art

Interstitial art is any work of art whose basic nature falls between, rather than within, the familiar boundaries of accepted genres or media, thus making the work difficult to categorize or describe within a single artistic discipline.

The word interstitial means "between spaces", and is commonly used to denote "in-betweenness" in several different cultural contexts. Architects refer to the leftover gaps between building walls as "interstitial space", being neither inside any room nor outside the building. Medical doctors have used the term for hundreds of years to refer to a space within the human body that lies in between blood vessels and organs, or in between individual cells. Television station programmers refer to any short piece of content that is neither a show nor a commercial, but is sandwiched between them, as "an interstitial".

Take fiction as an example: If a librarian isn't sure where to shelve a book, that may be because the material is interstitial in some way, not fitting comfortably into a single, conventional literary category. For instance, when novelist Laurell K. Hamilton first began writing and publishing romances featuring vampires and fairies, bookstores faced a dilemma: How do you file these stories when you're working in a system that clearly labels one shelf for romances, a second shelf for fantasies, and a third shelf for tales of horror? There's no single, obvious answer, because such a novel is interstitial fiction, its essence residing somewhere in between the boundaries of these genres.

Or consider the performance artist Laurie Anderson: She might go onstage and sing, tell a spoken-word story, project shadow puppets on a screen, and play a hacked violin whose bow is strung with audio tape. Is she a singer, a monologist, a puppeteer, or some kind of tinkering instrumentalist? Classifying such an act as interstitial performance art would be imprecise but efficient and accurate.

In the mid-1990s, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Terri Windling, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Midori Snyder, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Gregory Frost, Theodora Goss, Veronica Schanoes, Carolyn Dunn, Colson Whitehead, and other American writers interested in fantastic literature found themselves commiserating over the common perception that the genre-oriented publishing industry found it difficult to market truly innovative fiction involving unusual, fantastical, or cross-genre elements—because the mainstream literary fiction field demanded stories based in realism, while the fantasy field demanded stories that mostly followed the standard conventions of sword and sorcery or high fantasy. Yet it seemed to the authors that some of the best literature was that which didn't quite fit tidily into either category but instead was being discussed in terms of more amorphous, "in-between" descriptors such as "magic realism", "mythic fiction", or "the New Weird". Further, the idea of interstitiality applied to other kinds of "in-between" fiction (unrelated to fantasy) and other "in-between" arts.

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