Mary Walling Blackburn discusses her text, “Sticky Notes, 1-3,” published in e-flux journal #92—”on feminisms” (Summer 2018), with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen.
“The video editing suite sat directly across from 1607 Broadway. My mother’s boyfriend was editing a sequence of two figures fighting with long sticks. They were aiming for one another’s heads. Each man, in turn, carefully swung his fragile skull away from a baton, and then a baton toward another fragile skull swinging away. To the right of the screen was a window. From a certain low angle, at a standing vantage point several feet from the sill, the video sequence and a spectacular outside the glass read as an operative split screen.” Excerpt from “Sticky Notes, 1-3”
*Note from Mary: I should be very clear that when referring to dignity I am speaking about “white dignity”; I am trying to communicate that white dignity is bunk and wealthy dignity is bunk. Moreover, when I state that I don’t know why ‘anyone gets to keep their things with our status’…anyone, again means myself (who qualifies as the privileged poor) and those who operate in wealth within this amplified structure of riches.
Mary Walling Blackburn was born in Orange, California. Walling Blackburn’s artistic work engages a wide spectrum of materials that probe and intensify the historic, ecological, and class-born brutalities of North American life. Recent publications include Quaestiones Perversas (Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, 2017), co-written with Beatriz E. Balanta; “Gina and the Stars,” published by Tamawuj, an off-site publishing platform for the Sharjah Biennial 13; and “Slowness,” a performance text in the sound-based web publication Ear│ Wave│Event.