I’d like artists and writers to have more money and time, but –while we don’t– I think we can imagine different futures by enacting them in temporary ways. 

 –  Anna Kate Blair

Sticky Teeth’s micro-interviews ft. words on the intersection of arts and writing. 

 

For this sticky teeth micro-interviewI chatted with Anna Kate Blair on the good and bad in between facets of art, writing, and time. She touches on her concerns over the lack of resources for the writing process, and also on history, capitalism and imagining alternative futures for creativity.

 

 

xx Tahney

Anna Kate Blair is a writer from Aotearoa based in Naarm. 

Her work has appeared in Cordite, Slow Canoe, Landfall, Archer, Reckoning, The Big Issue’s Fiction Edition, Meanjin, Good Weekend and other places. She holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, The Modern, was published by Scribner in September 2023. 

Tahney: When you think of issues that surround art and writing, what comes up for you?

Anna Kate Blair: I think the biggest problem is money, by which I mean time; devotion is expensive. It’s so rare to be able to afford substantial time for thought and observation, and because it’s rare, we skip past it, rush to writing, and fail to question ourselves.  I’m trained as an art historian, so I’m perhaps too preoccupied with the past, but I do think we miss a lot when we only read contemporary work and investigate the present moment. Given the pressures of life, though, it’s not surprising that history seems to vanish when we’re short on time. 
 
I don’t have a quick solution to capitalism, but perhaps my impulse toward this disclaimer demonstrates the point: capitalism trains us to seek quick and complete outcomes when we’re better served by places and processes that aren’t focused on outcome at all. I’m thinking, as I write this, of the School of the Alternative in North Carolina, where I led a workshop six years ago. It’s held on the original campus of Black Mountain College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southern Appalachia, and it’s somewhere between a queer commune and a DIY experimental art school. I really loved it. I feel, often, like low-cost artist residencies and protests do change the world for those involved in them.  I’d like artists and writers to have more money and time, but –while we don’t– I think we can imagine different futures by enacting them in temporary ways. 
 
I think, too, that history can help here: there’s merit in looking toward the past in order to envisage different futures, to see other directions in which we might have moved, and things like Black Mountain College in the 1930s and 1940s, like the lesbians who abseiled into the House of Lords to protest Section 28 in the UK in 1988, like Flood Wall Street ten years ago, like Peter Wollner’s film Friendship’s Death, can give us hope, pathways to action and a sense of continuity. Walter Benjamin describes this as “revolutionary nostalgia,” I think, which is again a demonstration of what the past might teach us… 
Anna Kate Blair

Who do you love working between art and writing?

It is very hard to choose!
I really love Timmah Ball’s work, which is always playful and intelligent and moves between forms deftly, resisting capture.I think, all the time, about An Invitation, published in This All Come Back Now, edited by Mykaela Saunders, a really brilliant short story set in a time when buildings have begun to disappear.
I also love Jazz Money, who has been mentioned by multiple interviewees before, and Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks, who write both together (as Snack Syndicate) and separately.
Beyond this continent, I think of Eley Williams’s Smote, or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front of a Print by Bridget Riley, which is probably my favourite piece of art writing ever, and Sheila Heti, who I adore. I think also of Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, but I think I had better stop listing things now…

A quote from any of them?

I’m currently moving house, which is chaotic, and these books are in boxes, so I will quote from another book I love instead, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s But The Girl. This is from a scene in which the narrator is visiting a Georgia O’Keefe exhibition at the Tate Modern: 

I had never wondered how it would feel to walk into the enveloped mouth of a giant rose, but now I did. I read on a placard that Georgia O’Keeffe had always denied that her flowers were images of vulvas. Had Georgia O’Keeffe been a bimbo? A person who plays games with what they do and don’t know in order to get what they want. I wondered what had happened to all the bimbos and where they had gone. Maybe they’d dyed their hair back to brown and become CEOs. 

Give yourself a shout-out! Fav project? And most recent? 

My favourite thing I’ve ever created was an essay-installation entitled Notes Toward a Subjective History of Honey at Arts, Letters and Numbers in New York in 2018. It was inspired by a bag of honeycomb shards I found in a closet. I explored honey in history, mythology, and my own life, examining my relationship to Aotearoa in childhood and after my mother’s death.

It consisted of sixty-three pieces of writing that could be read in any order, displayed on the walls of a room alongside objects I made that explored the essay’s reference points in other ways: large woollen clouds with beaded honey raining from them; an arrow sculpted from beeswax; small honey and bay leaf cakes that followed an ancient Greek recipe that I linked to the Apollo and Daphne myth; hand-drawn maps; newspaper clippings; the bag of honeycomb that sparked the project. 

There are some images and excerpts in the recesses of the internet and the text (albeit arranged in a linear format) was later published in an anthology, but it was the combination of text and objects, the way in which the essay could be read in many formations and required its audience to stand, to move, to shuffle around one another, surrounded by the piece, that felt particularly special. 

I loved the way that people responded to it; it provoked a certain kind of intimacy. I wish I could create essay-installations along these lines more frequently. 

The most recent (major) thing I’ve released is my first novel, The Modern, which Scribner published in September 2023. It’s about modern art, bisexuality and the forest. 

 

More on Anna Kate Blair here

Interview by Tahney Fosdike. 
Hey! My name is Tahney. I design words that fill the space between you, your creative project, and your audience.
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