Reading Art

 

Olivia Laing has been quite a favourite. Over the years, she has introduced you to new ways of seeing the world, through the eyes of artists and writers, and her own personal take on them. This one is more patchy than her normal work, perhaps because it is a collection of essays and pieces she has already published, a bit of a hodge-podge. It still inspires.

Laing writes about the value of art - about artists “who look with sharp eyes at the societies they inhabit but who also propose new ways of seeing.” She believes art can change things, by opening us to possibilities, while showing us the interior lives of others. She did that for me - managing to create that feeling of a window opening somewhere, into a world you haven’t really traveled to before. 

She leads you to artists who worked through rough times - when being gay was a crime, when Reagan-era government ignored the AIDS crisis, when borders closed and the world became insular. Literally, artists who created art in an emergency. Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Wagnarowicz, Derek Jarmen, all names I had to google. She has essays on Georgia O’Keefe and Hilary Mantel, painting and writing during times of personal crises. She writes love letters to David Bowie, Freddie Mercury. She writes about contemporary writers - Maggie Nelson, Deborah Levy, Chris Kraus, Sally Rooney; about women writers and alcohol (an echo to her own previous The Trip to Echo Spring); about Frank O’Hara and the New York school. She despairs about the state of the world - Brexit and Trump, walls and inhospitality. And it is always the art that is ‘reparative’ - planting a garden to stop a war. 

There are times when it can all be too much - too many artists you haven’t heard of, too many artworks you haven’t seen. But Laing writes as beautifully as ever. And as she brings one more unknown name into your consciousness, or when you are thrilled you have read someone she is writing about, you open yourself just that bit more to the ‘abundance of the cosmos’, to the ability to smell the flowers amongst the ruin. Laing does that to you. She is quite terrific that way.