RSSWireless Melancholia: Tom McCarthy’s ‘C’
- reading by Tom McCarthy and a dialogue with curator Magnus af Petersens
Time: 11 May, 6 -8 pm
Place: the Project Room, Iaspis, Konstnärsnämnden, Maria skolgata 83, 2 floor, Stockholm
Iaspis is happy to present Tom McCarthy, artist in residence, in dialogue with Magnus af Petersens about McCarthy´s forthcoming novel ‘C’ (published by Jonathan Cape UK/Alfred A. Knopf US, autumn 2010).
Building on the set of themes that shaped McCarthy’s 2008 artwork Calling All Agents, ‘C’ concerns itself with the aesthetic, political and psychic dimensions of radio, at the time of the medium’s emergence as the prime technology of modernity in the early twentieth century.
The novel centers around Serge Carrefax, who grows up in his father’s school for deaf children in the shadow of an older sister who dies in adolescence. Serge becomes an airborne radio operator in the First World War, then a student of architecture in the drug-fuelled London of the 1920s, then a civil servant in the British Ministry of Communications in Egypt. The novel’s final section depicts the construction of the Empire Wireless Chain – a network of the future – against the backdrop of ongoing archaeological activities leading perpetually back to the past. Throughout the novel radio stands as a correlative to modern subjectivity: fragmentary, cryptic and, ultimately, melancholic.
Tom McCarthy is the author of ‘Remainder’, winner of 2007 Believer Book Award, which is currently being adapted for cinema by Film4; also of the novel ‘Men in Space’; as well as the non-fictional work ‘Tintin and the Secret of Literature’.
Magnus af Petersens is curator at Moderna Museet, specialized in contemporary art and responsible for the collection of film and video material. He curated Moderna Museet’s exhibition Eclipse – art in a dark age (2008) which included McCarthy´s Calling All Agents.
Free of charge. For further information please contact Iaspis dep. project manager Jonatan Habib Engqvist, jhe@iaspis.se, tel: +46 (0)8- 506 55 094.