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.
Tom McCarthy interviewed (along with Stewart Home and Hari Kunzru) on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme.
I think this guy genuinely is a hero. And I think where this really comes out is the scene where he re-enacts the death of a drug dealer who’s been shot by another drug dealer in Brixton. He stumbles across the original shooting, which is all cordoned off like some sacred space by police tape, and he bribes people to find out what happened. Then he hires the stretch of street two weeks later, as though for a film set (although there’ll be no filming) and has it re-enacted. I think what horrifies him is forgetting — that within an hour of a life being taken the blood can be cleared away, the forensics will have done their job and the street can just be reopened to traffic and commerce as though nothing had happened. And this is what he refuses. He keeps re-iterating this mantra: ‘everything must leave some kind of mark.’ It’s a very Derridean thing, the idea of marks and traces.
Roger Orwell interviews Tom McCarthy in Static, the website of the London Consortium.
Magnus Haglund interviews Tom McCarthy in the Göteborgs-Posten.
Tom McCarthy talks about his Black Box Transmitter exhibit and about the art/writing interface.
A short video clip in which Tom McCarthy talks about Georg Trakl.
RSS