David Wojnarowicz: Untitled (Face in Dirt), 1991.
*
Olivia Laing has a beautiful house that I see from time to time on Instagram, scrolling as I do looking for bookish interiors and artfully jumbled gardens, and that is why I read Funny Weather. As someone who has cobbled together a precarious career at the edges of writing, I am fascinated by writers whose full-time hustle is getting to think and write about whatever they want, who've achieved a cruising altitude above the grind of proofreading business reports and ghostwriting copy. Plus, it was available at the library and had an appealing cover: calamine-pink, with a memorable David Wojnarowicz photo—Untitled, (Face in Dirt). It is a self-portrait of the artist in black and white, his brow, closed eyes, nose, parted lips, teeth, and chin visible, surrounded by dry dirt clods.
Funny Weather collects a variety of profiles, essays, and reflections Laing wrote in this century's troubled teen years for publications including frieze, New Statesman, and the Guardian on artists, writers, and the politics of the moment. It was published in the U.S. in May 2020. Unlucky timing, maybe, though the book is packaged as a response to the fractures of our time—the subtitle is Art in an Emergency. In the introduction, Laing says that the essays are about artists who make work "concerned with resistance and repair." She writes about the poets and painters of the New York School—lovable Frank O'Hara, etc.; Johns and Rauschenberg and Warhol and Basquiat; Conceptual artists "blow[ing] the bloody doors off the venerable white cube gallery"; musicians much beloved, like David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, and Arthur Russell; white women writers critically lauded, some with TV and movie deals, including Maggie Nelson, Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith, Chris Kraus, and Sally Rooney.
Laing's essays—thoughtful and accomplished, zeitgeistily enraptured by bodies and the radical potential of queerness—are rooted in love; one section is titled "Love Letters." Reading them feels validating when they are about things I enjoy—the exhilaration of someone smarter than me beautifully explaining why something I already appreciate is worthy, like a stream of happy-making candy-pink hearts bubbling up at the lower righthand corner of the screen. But these days, my love feels a little suspect. I would like to think the fact that white people made so many of my favorite books and songs and movies and works of art is somehow innocent, but it's not, not really. I realize again and again how much I have missed and continue to miss, the ways that how I see is a product of my place and time, and of the market, that wildly unfair space. And this book never let me forget that it is a product. Behind the words, I could see a ribbon of choices unfurling: essays commissioned and paid for by editors and publications looking for clicks and eyeballs, their subjects influenced by curators and galleries and PR people, bundled to create new value for the writer and a publisher. These artists chosen because their work, radical and resistant as it may be in certain contexts, can be understood and packaged and sold by an industry of people who make money convincing someone like me to read, look, think, and buy. Being loved is so very valuable.
Being a persuadable customer of literary criticism, recent reviews sold me on reading Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Klara and the Sun. I had read very little of his other work, though, and decided to go back to his earlier stories. I tumbled into a pair of novels written over thirty years ago about shifting awareness, memory, and culpability that felt uncannily urgent, ideas picked up at the exact right time.
In my memory, that David Wojnarowicz photo registers as an image of resistance. But whenever I actually look at it, I am struck by its ambiguity. It could be burial or it could be emergence. It could be torture or it could be transcendence. Things change so much depending on how you look at them.
Her face was the fresh imprint of her age. She spoke the words that were there for her to speak; she wore the only kind of shirt available at that time. It was not possible to see where she would go wrong.
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This.
Olivia Laing has a beautiful house that I see from time to time on Instagram, scrolling as I do looking for bookish interiors and artfully jumbled gardens, and that is why I read Funny Weather. As someone who has cobbled together a precarious career at the edges of writing, I am fascinated by writers whose full-time hustle is getting to think and write about whatever they want, who've achieved a cruising altitude above the grind of proofreading business reports and ghostwriting copy. Plus, it was available at the library and had an appealing cover: calamine-pink, with a memorable David Wojnarowicz photo—Untitled, (Face in Dirt). It is a self-portrait of the artist in black and white, his brow, closed eyes, nose, parted lips, teeth, and chin visible, surrounded by dry dirt clods.
Funny Weather collects a variety of profiles, essays, and reflections Laing wrote in this century's troubled teen years for publications including frieze, New Statesman, and the Guardian on artists, writers, and the politics of the moment. It was published in the U.S. in May 2020. Unlucky timing, maybe, though the book is packaged as a response to the fractures of our time—the subtitle is Art in an Emergency. In the introduction, Laing says that the essays are about artists who make work "concerned with resistance and repair." She writes about the poets and painters of the New York School—lovable Frank O'Hara, etc.; Johns and Rauschenberg and Warhol and Basquiat; Conceptual artists "blow[ing] the bloody doors off the venerable white cube gallery"; musicians much beloved, like David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, and Arthur Russell; white women writers critically lauded, some with TV and movie deals, including Maggie Nelson, Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith, Chris Kraus, and Sally Rooney.
The idea is that these creators and their works can help when the world shifts:
I went back and read the introduction again after I read the book, a bit underwhelmed and perplexed by who was included, and tripped on that "it's up to you." I remember the first time I read anything about Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, two artists Laing writes about here. I was a teenager, and I picked up Calvin Tompkins' Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. Before I read it, I would have had no idea how to look at a goat stuck in a tire or a painting of flag, and getting clued in to a way to understand them thrilled me. It was like getting a secret decoder ring. And I suppose it was up to me to read the book, but I needed its help to even know where to begin with those artists, and how it got on my parents' bookshelf and the fact that later I could travel to look at goats and flags for myself were products of privilege and circumstance. Art is conversations and convergences, and no one navigates it without guides.
Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis? In 1967, George Steiner wrote a famous essay in which he observed that a concentration-camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke in the evening and still carry out his duties at Auschwitz in the morning, regarding this as evidence that art had failed in its highest function, to humanize. But this makes art sound like a magic bullet, which should reorganize our critical and moral faculties without effort, while simultaneously obliterating free will. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It's work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it's up to you.
I went back and read the introduction again after I read the book, a bit underwhelmed and perplexed by who was included, and tripped on that "it's up to you." I remember the first time I read anything about Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, two artists Laing writes about here. I was a teenager, and I picked up Calvin Tompkins' Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. Before I read it, I would have had no idea how to look at a goat stuck in a tire or a painting of flag, and getting clued in to a way to understand them thrilled me. It was like getting a secret decoder ring. And I suppose it was up to me to read the book, but I needed its help to even know where to begin with those artists, and how it got on my parents' bookshelf and the fact that later I could travel to look at goats and flags for myself were products of privilege and circumstance. Art is conversations and convergences, and no one navigates it without guides.
Laing's essays—thoughtful and accomplished, zeitgeistily enraptured by bodies and the radical potential of queerness—are rooted in love; one section is titled "Love Letters." Reading them feels validating when they are about things I enjoy—the exhilaration of someone smarter than me beautifully explaining why something I already appreciate is worthy, like a stream of happy-making candy-pink hearts bubbling up at the lower righthand corner of the screen. But these days, my love feels a little suspect. I would like to think the fact that white people made so many of my favorite books and songs and movies and works of art is somehow innocent, but it's not, not really. I realize again and again how much I have missed and continue to miss, the ways that how I see is a product of my place and time, and of the market, that wildly unfair space. And this book never let me forget that it is a product. Behind the words, I could see a ribbon of choices unfurling: essays commissioned and paid for by editors and publications looking for clicks and eyeballs, their subjects influenced by curators and galleries and PR people, bundled to create new value for the writer and a publisher. These artists chosen because their work, radical and resistant as it may be in certain contexts, can be understood and packaged and sold by an industry of people who make money convincing someone like me to read, look, think, and buy. Being loved is so very valuable.
Being a persuadable customer of literary criticism, recent reviews sold me on reading Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Klara and the Sun. I had read very little of his other work, though, and decided to go back to his earlier stories. I tumbled into a pair of novels written over thirty years ago about shifting awareness, memory, and culpability that felt uncannily urgent, ideas picked up at the exact right time.
An Artist of The Floating World and The Remains of the Day are similar in tone and structure (Floating World was published in 1983, several years before Remains of the Day). First-person narration loops backwards from abbreviated moments in the protagonist's present to more discursive moments in the past. Slowly (at least, if you are me, ha) the pieces begin to form a picture. In An Artist of The Floating World, Masuji Oji is a Japanese man on the edge of old age, living in a house that is beautiful but damaged. Around him, the city is rebuilding after war; one daughter is looking to get married, another has a young son. And sideways and slantwise, painfully and in pieces, he is evaluating what his life as an artist has meant as the world around him has changed. As a promising young painter, he came under the sway of a friend who convinced him that his art should be for something, and he chose to break with his teacher and make work that spoke to crisis, a choice that ripples through his life in unsettling ways. In The Remains of the Day, a British butler named Stevens makes a short trip to visit an old colleague, reflecting on his life in service to a Lord Darlington, a man, who, for a handful of years, seemed to be standing at the fulcrum of world events, though just how only slowly becomes clear. I had dim notions that this was a love story (cue the melancholic visages of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thomson) and it is, but not in the way I expected. It, too, is about choices and their repercussions, but Stevens' worldview, prioritizing service and self-sacrifice, blurs his agency. His job was to do what was asked, not to see, not to act, and yet he has to live with the things done and undone, what he saw and what he missed.
In my memory, that David Wojnarowicz photo registers as an image of resistance. But whenever I actually look at it, I am struck by its ambiguity. It could be burial or it could be emergence. It could be torture or it could be transcendence. Things change so much depending on how you look at them.
