Surplus Matter

For their 17 January shindig, the INS hired actors to play General Secretary Tom ‘Thunderbird’ McCarthy and Chief Philosopher Simon ‘Hip Hugger’ Critchley. The event sold out well in advance because a sensation hungry public were under the entirely false impression that they would be personally addressed by this notorious pair of lobster loving nude chefs. Despite Radio 4 (Today programme, 29 December 2008) making the outrageous claim that McCarthy is widely recognised as a best-selling novelist, the majority of those present appeared blissfully unaware of the fact that the thespians pretending to be the notorious INS nude chefs were Sexton Blakes!

Stewart Home reviews the International Necronautical Society’s inauthentic Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity.

Everything you need to know about the International Necronautical Society’s Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity which will be delivered by Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley at Tate Britain on 17 January.

Tom McCarthy at the Serpentine Gallery’s Manifesto Marathon 2008 in Dazed Digital.

Next week, Tom McCarthy will be in conversation with Alasdair Gray and Hans Ulrich Obrist. He will also deliver the International Necronautical Society’s Proclamation on Art and Democracy.

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 […]