Surplus Matter

Fascinating videos of Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy at the Belgian premiere of Double Take at the Ghent Film Festival.

Another Dutch interview with Tom McCarthy.

Liberals. Liberal humanists. That would be the enemy, in all positions. This confessional, self-assertive tone that dominates publishing. Not what dominates contemporary art, despite the sentimental valorisations of someone like Tracy Emin - although even she actually takes this whole avant-garde tradition and overwrites it with self-confessional expression. But on the whole I think art is classically not that. What dominates mainstream media culture and literary culture is psychologising: the kind of discourse where the self is never put into question. There is a self who exists prior to anything who goes around emoting, experiencing and developing. This is what I hate.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Clodagh Kinsella in the July issue of Dossier.

I think DeLillo is taking a very nineteenth-century model of the writer — the kind of person who declares the way the world is and maybe changes it through that declaration. The writer is perhaps obsolete in that sense, and the terrorist is a good index of that obsolescence. But the twentieth-century modernists — like Beckett, for example, or Blanchot, or Alex Trocchi — recognize that obsolescence, and argue that the task for literature is now to accomplish its own dying, not to contain the world heroically and serve it up to itself, but to manage or mediate a kind of slipping away into silence.

Tom McCarthy and Johan Grimonprez are interviewed in the summer 2009 issue of Bidoun.

A Croatian interview with Tom McCarthy. The title translates as “All Art is Political”.

Right now I’ve just installed a ‘Black Box Transmitter’ in an art institute in Germany. It sends out looping sequences of poetry created by cutting up and mixing together stock market prices, weather forecasts and lines of Hölderlin. Radio really interests me at the moment. I’ve just finished a novel about early radio and its relation to poetry and death. Technology is always haunted, too: that’s what makes it so sexy.

Tom McCarthy profiled in today’s New York Times.

Really good art and literature is always political—perhaps all the more so the less directly it seems to be. In a way (I’m being provocative here, but I believe this, too), engaging with the symbolic order directly, with the realm of meaning, hacking right into its source code, is more radical than taking meaning for granted in order to simply make a statement.

Tom McCarthy takes part in a roundtable in the latest issue of Bookforum.

J’ai habité à Prague à cette incroyable époque : des artistes aux manettes, des fêtes partout, une sorte d’euphorie postrévolutionnaire - et plus tard, un sentiment de déception, de promesses non tenues. D’un point de vue thématique ou symbolique, je trouve fascinante la désintégration des pays, des idéologies, des individus.

Tom McCarthy interviewed in Standard.

In English, it’s called Remainder: there’s always an extra — something too much. (Laughs.) So there’s always this material extra and, in a way, it is an allegory of art. No matter with how much craft we simulate the world, the world itself will be too much.

Tom McCarthy interviewed on Radio Eins during his German tour.

Tom McCarthy and Roberta Cremoncini discuss the enduring influence of futurism on modern art on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.