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In Conversation with Tom McCarthy Part Three
by Dan
Author Q & A + Fiction / October 10, 2007
Here, in the third installment with my conversation with Tom McCarthy, we talk about art and Tom's work with the semi-fictional avant-garde network the International Necronautical Society.
(Read the previous installment here)
WARNING: This conversation contains adult themes and references to modern art!
Part Three
DW: You frequently explore and imitate the Kafkaesque nature of the Cold War (show trials, propaganda, arcane secrecy, sound recordings, radio broadcasts etc) in your work. On top of this, your interpretation of Soviet bureaucracy/totalitarianism is almost Dadaist. Do you see yourself in that tradition as artist and writer?
With the work I've done in a fine-art rather than literary field, I've definitely plugged into those histories. My semi-fake organisation the International Necronautical Society, or INS, deliberately uses the forms and procedures both of early twentieth century avant-gardes such as Dadaism, Futurism and Surrealism - manifestos, proclamations and denunciations - and of totalitarian political processes. So when we held a series of INS 'Hearings' in a London art gallery in front of the press and public, interrogating prominent contemporary artists and writers about their work, we looked at photos of the Stalinist show-trials and got a top theatre set designer, Laura Hopkins, to copy and reproduce the layout of the rooms: where the microphones are, where the press sits and so on. Later we broadcast a continuous stream of coded radio messages from the Institute of Contemporary Art, sending it around London by FM and over the web for rebroadcast by collaborating radio stations throughout the world, like some Cold War propaganda. What's really interesting when you look into these histories is how the artistic and political realms mirror one another: after all, both come out of a period in which the world was being remade by man, moulded by technology, ideology and aesthetics, like an art piece. The Russian Revolution is amazing in that artists were actively involved in shaping public life during and after it - for a moment at least, before they were packed off to labour camps by Stalin.
DW: Thinking of the sound-recording aspect of both your INS work and MEN IN SPACE, have you seen the movie The Conversation?
I have now, but when I wrote the first draft of Men in Space I hadn't. I'd seen an old Czech movie, made in the hiatus after '68 and quickly banned, called Ucho or 'Ear', all about audio surveillance, planting bugs in people's flats. By the time I came to redraft Men in Space I had seen The Conversation, and I'm sure it had an influence. It's a piece of genius: the audio surveillance expert lost in the labyrinth of his own phantasms and of a social and moral (or amoral) order too big for him to navigate; the death of God as represented by his hollowing out of his statue of Mary as he searches for bugs in it--My police agent in Men in Space, who starts out boasting that he can always get a strong signal from his bugs, then ends up losing the signal, all signals, and becomes a symbol of humanity abandoned by the message, by totality, by God: he has a lot in common with Coppola's hero - whose surname, by the way, is Caul: watch that space...
DW: Parts of MEN IN SPACE reminded me of Andy Warhol's 'Death and Disaster' series (death, repetition, etc). Is Warhol an influence on your work?
Absolutely. I think he's probably the best visual artist of all time. On top of that, his roots are Slovakian - or more precisely Carpathian-Ruthenian (the subject of a very funny documentary I'd love to see again, about Ruthenia's bid for independence with Warhol as their national symbol: I never quite worked out if it was a parody or not) - and after the Velvet Revolution he was very big in Prague. All the Czech artists imitated him without really working out why or what it was they were trying to do. There was even this one big graffiti portrait of him that appeared on a wall opposite a flat I was sleeping in one night, which became a kind of shrine.
DW: What other artists interest you?
Loads. I like Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Josef Beuys, Francis Bacon - and then some of my contemporaries in London are doing amazing stuff: Rod Dickinson with his re-enactments of traumatic events like the Jonestown Massacre and Milgram Experiment; Mark Aerial Waller with his strange, cryptic films about nuclear contamination and secret technological undergrounds; Margarita Gluzberg with her warped shopping-and-slashing drawings. The creative dialogue in the UK seems to be taking place in the artworld at the moment: whereas mainstream publishing has purged itself of almost all high-literary content, these people I just mentioned are thinking seriously about literature in their work. Nauman too of course, with the enormous evidence of Beckett's writing in his images and actions...
pornography/forest (1 of 5) by Eva Stenram
DW: What is hanging on your living room wall?
I've got a large photo by Rut Blees Luxemburg called Orpheus's Nachtspaziergang or 'The Night Wandering of Orpheus'. It shows a public toilet bathed in blue light, and it was taken with a twenty-minute exposure, which means that there are actually people in it who passed in front of the camera but whom you don't see. In the same vein, I've got an image by my girlfriend Eva Stenram (who was a pupil of Luxemburg) from her 'Pornography' series, in which she's downloaded hardcore porn from the internet then digitally removed the bodies, so you just get an 'event-space' with no event in it - in this case, a quilt in a forest clearing. I've got an Alex Hamilton print in which he's redone the front page of a German newspaper as a series of illegible ciphers, and a drawing by Jim Harris in which two figures sit on a carpet shunting an empty canoe between them. Oh, and a postcard of Yves Klein leaping into the void, that a friend's altered to put his own face in the background (we'd had an argument about whether Klein actually leaped or faked the whole image).
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Photo: Tom McCarthy with John Calder