Surplus Matter

Tom McCarthy talks about his Black Box Transmitter exhibit and about the art/writing interface.

Art is traditionally praised as a process of giving form, but instead it is a necessarily inadequate attempt to reproduce in matter the artist’s concept. So inauthenticity is intrinsically bound up with art, which is “a repetitive mechanism that functions through theft, forgery, copying, and embedding.” According to the Declaration, there are two ways of reading art’s repetitive aspect. First, “art attempts to extinguish matter and achieve authenticity as a hypnotic, monotonous, endless recurrence of repetition. This produces the trancelike stasis and intense psychic tingling that we sometimes think of as aesthetic pleasure. At times, it almost feels real. Then again, so can masturbation.” Thus, the Declaration’s second reading of repetition: “Art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments that attempt to cover over the traumatic event of materiality.”

Peter Schwenger deconstructs The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity.

Our problem with death is that we can’t describe it, and I think that’s why Catholics have got it sorted: they just have it for tea.

Margarita Gluzberg interviewed by Tom McCarthy back in 2001.

INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy and INS Chief Philosopher and author of Infinitely Demanding (Verso 2007) Simon Critchley will present a statement on the subject of Inauthenticity – in art, literature, philosophy, economics and politics – advancing it as a central tenet in INS doctrine.

These pictures were taken yesterday when Tom McCarthy read his International Necronautical Society classic Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art in Paris (Palais de Tokyo) and in French. Early on, the reading was disrupted by Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz. Schurz went up on stage and mooned McCarthy (an unintentional reference to the author’s forthcoming […]