ABSTRACT
Tate Britain first launched its Triennial exhibitions in 2000, the purpose of which has consistently been to showcase the best in contemporary British art. The 2009 exhibition was the largest and most ambitious Triennial to date. Led by internationally renowned curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, it focused on what he called Altermodern; the cultural milieu, Bourriaud argues, in which we now find ourselves. Such a sensibility reflects social and cultural changes affecting the world in this era of globalization and the World Wide Web. Bourriaud’s theorization of the altermodern is set out in his introductory essay to the Tate Triennial 2009 (2009a) and ensuing monograph The Radicant (2009b), both of which concentrate upon visual art. This chapter introduces altermodernist fiction. First, I define and expound altermodernism before providing a conceptualization of experimental fiction of the epoch in Section II through recourse to W.G. Sebald. In Section III, the boundaries of the genre are extended through the analysis of three case studies of altermodernist fiction: Liam Gillick’s Erasmus is Late (1995 [2 000]), Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing (2003 [2009]), and Charles Avery’s The Islanders project (2010a). Section IV concludes the chapter by identifying other writers whose works might also be considered as altermodern.
