Meet CAS Resident: Amelia Groom

My mum and grandma always had art books around; that’s something I’m grateful for. As an undergrad, I did a bunch of different things (gender studies, cultural studies, a course I loved on Ovid…) before doing a PhD art history, and since 2014 I’ve taught mostly in fine art academies.

I’m really grateful to have this time to write. I also want to do walks and spend time on the coast… I’ve been trying to think about tides and seaside settings as part of a project I am working on about the artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and their lives by the beach on Jersey Island.

I can’t remember exactly what I meant when I said that, I was probably trying to be accurate because sometimes when I’m commissioned to write about art I end up taking an oblique approach so that the text hangs out in the vicinity of the art, without being directly about it. Maybe this can involve questions about where the “art” actually is; where it begins and ends. There’s this wonderful line from Adrian Piper in the 1970s, where she writes, “I like the idea of doing away with all discrete forms, and letting art lurk in the midst of things.” The verb “lurk” is so good here; it’s not just this idea of blurring the art / life distinction – it’s a desire to let art move around in furtive and creepy ways, so it can refuse participation while still maintaining a stealth presence.

They are separate activities, but they text each other and sometimes swap outfits and accessories. There’s a lot of inevitable overlap and leakage.

Well, over the last few years, I’ve held a critical pedagogies study group for teachers at the Sandberg / Rietveld Academy (as part of a platform called Hear! Here!). In 2020 we looked at Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation; in 2021–2022 we read bell hooks’s book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and in 2022–2023 we read Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Our conversations have often returned to the importance of coming to the classroom as a space that is always permeated by the world and always flowing back out into the world. This means constantly reminding ourselves that whatever is cultivated in the classroom also leaves its confines and enters the life that is outside.

One thing I can say, with hindsight, is that it became explicit in my research/writing at the exact time of my first Saturn’s return. I was born with Saturn conjunct to the Sun – they’re only four degrees apart – and that’s a really intense part of my natal chart. Saturn is, among several other shitty things, linear time. Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son gives us the god Chronos (whose name is linked to words like ‘chronology’ and ‘chronic’) as the patriarchal father who fearfully consumes the future that will replace him. Having this planet of disciplinary linear chronology so close to my sun can mean that there’s a lot of illumination, so it becomes something I have to contend with. But the conjunction is also so close that there’s a risk of combustion. You know, there’s more illumination closer to the sun, but if an object gets too close, it goes up in flames. Maybe that’s part of what’s going on in my fixation with time; it’s like I’m shining a light on the object while holding onto the possibility of burning it down.

I just finished a long, nerdy fan essay about Mariah Carey and – surprise, surprise – the ways that she exists outside of linear time. She opens her memoir by declaring “I refuse to acknowledge time,” which is just such an outlandish diva statement. That was my starting point, and I tried to really think about the ways that her voice, her career trajectory, her image, her hair, her approach to songwriting, and her general vibe have proposed alternatives to the stronghold of standardized, linear time. In some ways, the topic might be a departure from other things that I’ve written in recent years, because I’ve been thinking a lot about secretive realms like queer silence, and gossip, and hidden ruins, and the aesthetics of indirection – and then Mariah is this super glossy, sparkly, hyper-visible pop star. The vastness of the archive certainly made it a different kind of writing process; she’s had such a long, busy, well-documented, public-facing career, so I didn’t have the feeling that I sometimes have when I’m looking at the fragile, fragmentary edges of the historical record and wondering about the politics of exclusion and illegibility. At the same time, though, the Mariah topic is perhaps in line with other things I’ve written where there is a desire to be very serious about something that many would dismiss as frivolous or apolitical or otherwise just not worth taking seriously.