{"id":8497,"date":"2024-02-20T14:32:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-20T12:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/?p=8497"},"modified":"2024-03-19T10:44:26","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T08:44:26","slug":"anna-kate-blair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tahneyalexandramay.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/20\/anna-kate-blair\/","title":{"rendered":"Sticky Teeth | Micro\u2013interview with Anna Kate Blair"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I\u2019d like artists and writers to have more money and time, but \u2013while we don\u2019t\u2013 I think we can imagine different futures by enacting them in temporary ways.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n

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\u00a0–\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/i>Anna Kate Blair<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sticky Teeth’s<\/a> micro-interviews f<\/i><\/b><\/span>t. words on the intersection of arts and writing.\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/p>

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For this sticky teeth micro-interview<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>I 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.<\/span><\/span><\/p>

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Anna Kate Blair is a writer from Aotearoa based in Naarm.\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/h2>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Her work has appeared in Cordite, Slow Canoe, Landfall, Archer, Reckoning, The Big Issue\u2019s 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<\/a><\/span>, was published by Scribner in September 2023.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Tahney:\u00a0<\/span>When you think of issues that surround art and writing, what comes up for you?<\/h2>\n
Anna Kate Blair:\u00a0<\/i>I think the biggest problem is money, by which I mean time; devotion is expensive. It\u2019s so rare to be able to afford substantial time for thought and observation, and because it\u2019s rare, we skip past it, rush to writing, and fail to question ourselves.\u00a0<\/span>\n\n<\/span>I\u2019m trained as an art historian, so I\u2019m perhaps too preoccupied with the past<\/b>, 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\u2019s not surprising that history seems to vanish when we\u2019re short on time.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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I don\u2019t 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\u2019re better served by places and processes that aren\u2019t focused on outcome at all.<\/b><\/span>\n<\/span>\nI\u2019m thinking, as I write this, of the School of the Alternative in North Carolina, where I led a workshop six years ago. It\u2019s held on the original campus of Black Mountain College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southern Appalachia, and it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/b><\/span>\n\n<\/span>I\u2019d like artists and writers to have more money and time, but \u2013while we don\u2019t\u2013 I think we can imagine different futures by enacting them in temporary ways.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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I think, too, that history can help here: there\u2019s 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\u2019s film Friendship\u2019s Death<\/i>, can give us hope, pathways to action and a sense of continuity. Walter Benjamin describes this as \u201crevolutionary nostalgia,\u201d I think, which is again a demonstration of what the past might teach us\u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Who do you love working between art and writing?<\/span><\/h2>\n
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It is very hard to choose!<\/div>\n
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I really love Timmah Ball\u2019s work, which is always playful and intelligent and moves between forms deftly, resisting capture.I think, all the time, about An Invitation<\/i>, published in This All Come Back Now<\/i>, edited by Mykaela Saunders, a really brilliant short story set in a time when buildings have begun to disappear.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n
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Beyond this continent, I think of Eley Williams\u2019s Smote, or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front of a Print by Bridget Riley<\/i>, which is probably my favourite piece of art writing ever<\/b>, and Sheila Heti, who I adore. I think also of Isabella Hammad\u2019s Enter Ghost and Katie Kitamura\u2019s Intimacies, but I think I had better stop listing things now\u2026<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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A quote from any of them?<\/h2><\/div>
I\u2019m 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\u2019s But The Girl<\/i>. This is from a scene in which the narrator is visiting a Georgia O\u2019Keefe exhibition at the Tate Modern:\u00a0<\/div>

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\u2019Keeffe had always denied that her flowers were images of vulvas. Had Georgia O\u2019Keeffe been a bimbo? A person who plays games with what they do and don\u2019t know in order to get what they want. I wondered what had happened to all the bimbos and where they had gone. Maybe they\u2019d dyed their hair back to brown and become CEOs.\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>

Give yourself a shout-out! Fav project? And most recent?\u00a0<\/h2>

My favourite thing I\u2019ve 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\u2019s death.<\/p>

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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>

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.\u00a0<\/p>

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.\u00a0<\/p>

The most recent (major) thing I\u2019ve released is my first novel, The Modern, which Scribner published in September 2023. It\u2019s about modern art, bisexuality and the forest.\u00a0<\/p>

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Any other writing you’d like to reccomend? <\/h2>\n