Tom Grant’s work in sound has been described as “subversive”, “devastating” and “neurotic”. “Abrasive” and “abusive” are also words occasionally used. While certainly accurate, they do not come anywhere near close to describing his diverse career or begin to suggest his singularity as an artist.
Grant is best known for his work using recorded voices. In addition to his work in sound, he has taught cultural studies and criticism extensively at a number of universities. For the past five years he has based himself primarily out of the small New South Wales cities of Newcastle and Wollongong. Grant’s current work in progress is a series of imagined interviews with one of his former university students, Nick Adler, who disappeared last year.
Tom and I conducted this interview via email and, eventually, in a single face-to-face meeting. Tom sent me the details of a coffee shop in Austinmer, located on a scenic look-out between the ocean and a mountainous backdrop. The winter sun was beating down hard and when I entered Tom was sitting in the back, staring out to sea. He didn’t look much like a poet, an intellectual, an artist. He was wearing a muted blue shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, as though he had been hard at work in a studio somewhere.
—STM
INTERVIEWER
How did you come to sound art?
TOM GRANT
I never wanted to be a sound artist. In high school, I had a friend who killed himself who wanted to be a heavy metal musician, and I picked up his dream and ran with it. Why not? He had ambitions where I had none. I had skill, where he was dead. But I was never really making heavy metal music, even though I liked it well enough as a genre. When someone told me that I was making might be sound art… well, that became the thing.
INTERVIEWER
That seems like a strange entry point for a career or a passion.
TOM GRANT
I would never describe something as a passion. I think that deletes a number of complexities about the way we work. You’ve got to hate what you do sometimes, really truly fucking hate it, and I don’t think you ever really hate a passion – you might hate with a passion. And please don’t get me started on the idea of a career… there’s no heroic code in calling something a career.
INTERVIEWER
It feels like a pretty rare opportunity to talk to you, despite much of your sound work being based on talk or other people’s voices and interviews, you yourself don’t give many.
TOM GRANT
I do plenty of interviews, even though I’m pretty hesitant when it comes to the form. I mean a lot of my work is yes definitely based on interviews, people talking, but that’s ultimately only ever going to be a half form. I read someone describe them as maggoty, interviews, which seems about right. The directness of talk misses the scenes in between and the subtleties of those scenes and I’ve got to build that up in the sound work myself. Talking is a pretty pure form of bullshit, don’t you think? As for interviews like this one, I do get in trouble whenever something like this runs. People come to interviews with artists with expectations. They’ve already dreamed up half of what you’ve said before you’ve even said it or before they even sit down to read the transcript. It’s hard to speak for yourself. I worked very, very briefly in a start-up gallery in Newie, and had to do interviews there in the lead up to the opening, and it’s easier to hide behind something like that – an organisation. Of course, reading back on those interviews they are a total waste of time, I’m not saying anything at all. It’s all publicity, not a single significant thought. And you have to figure out a way to deal with that. It’s a terrible movie, and I’m loathe to bring it up, but there’s a scene at the end of Beaches, where Bette Midler is watching herself on TV, giving an interview on a daytime kind of program, and she’s begging, pleading with herself not to give the answers she’s giving, even though it’s already been recorded and she knows exactly what she is going to say. I really like that scene and the idea that it represents, pleading with your past statements. It is saying something very true about the embarrassment of your former self.
INTERVIEWER
It doesn’t seem like you to agree to talk about this particular time though.
TOM GRANT
Not so much. It was a difficult time for everybody involved, so, yes, I choose to sit out on commenting on it too much. Reflection is incredibly important in this industry, of course, but you can get quite stuck in an incredibly complicated space of overthinking things. Easier done than said. So interviews about artistic practise aren’t so much fun always.
To read the rest of this long, wide-ranging and creative interview, grab a copy of the just-published TLB20.
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Sam Twyford-Moore is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and will direct the 2014 Emerging Writers’ Festival.