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Funny Weather by Olivia Laing

funny weather by olivia laing - book review | brunch at audrey's

– I received a free copy; this post contains affiliate links. –

To be published by WW Norton on 12 May 2020
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In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

Funny Weather:‌ Art in an Emergency. With a title like that, this collection feels like it was written for this exact moment in time, though in fact, the collection is comprised of essays written and published over the years of Laing’s career. As such, most of the essays are readily available online, but this compilation frames the essays in a new way, drawing focus on—you guessed it—art in an emergency. And with 2020 shaping out to be an apocalyptic year on top of the regular hum of existential dread, anxiety, and panic, right now, all the emergency alarms are certainly blaring.

What I wanted most, apart from a different timeline, was a different kind of time frame, in which it might be possible both to feel and to think, to process the intense emotional impact of the news and to consider how to react, perhaps even to imagine other ways of being. The stopped time of a painting, say, or the drawn-out minutes and compressed years of a novel, in which it is possible to see patterns and consequences that are otherwise invisible. -“You Look At The Sun”

I’m no more certain about anything now than I was before the book, but this was an immensely restorative read. This book was art for this emergency. Like, actually a work of art!‌ Peep Laing’s photo of the textured cover and stunning endpapers. I‌ could ogle at the book all day long.

But if this book has taught me anything, it’s that art is deeper than aesthetic. It’s a force of resistance and repair. It’s a way to situate yourself in crazy times. It’s a way to stop time altogether.

Laing shows how artists have done just that, looking at their contexts and motivations, sharing commentary on art and culture through artists profiles, columns, essays, book reviews, love letters, and more. I’m no art buff, so I was delighted to recognise some of the figures, including Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keefe, Ali Smith, Sally Rooney, and David Bowie. The artist profiles at the beginning of the collection introduced me to more, illuminating individual artists and providing additional context for the subsequent essays. Through Laing, I grew to admire David Wojnarowicz and Derek Jarman, and it is easy to see their influence.

Wojnarowicz features in his own artist profile “Close To The Knives,” as well as in “A‌ Stitch In Time” and on the cover of the book. He was committed to bearing witness to those who were silenced and invisible. He tragically died from AIDS but his photographs, paintings, and writing live on, speaking for him where he no longer can.

It was Wojnarowicz, of course: still finding novel ways to be heard, to counter untruths. Not long before he died, he made a photograph in the desert of his own face, eyes closed, teeth bared, almost buried beneath the dirt, an image of defiance in the face of extinction. If silence equals death, he taught us, then art equals language equals life. -“Close To The Knives”

The mouth is for speaking. But how do you speak if no one’s listening, how do you speak if your voice is prohibited or no one understands your tongue? You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot. -“A‌ Stitch In Time”

Jarman, too, features in his own artist profile‌ “Sparks Through Stubble,” as well as in “Paradise.” Soon after he was diagnosed with AIDS, he started his famous garden. He created something from nothing, life in the face of death. Laing, a gardener herself, describes how gardening situates you in time, the oasis that grows in space. This topic is so interesting to me, and I definitely want to get around to reading Jarman’s Modern Nature, the diary of his garden and one of Laing’s favourite books.

I’ve killed a succulent and a 50 year old bonsai, but Laing almost got me considering giving it another go.

Would there be a future?‌ Was the past irreparably destroyed?‌ What to do?‌ Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina; alchemise terror into art. -“Sparks Through Stubble”

It was true. Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere… Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises. -“Paradise”

All of the essays in this collection stand on their own and do not explicitly bring every argument back to the theme of art in an emergency, but the foreword—”You Look At The Sun“—suggests this lens through which to read these essays, though it too stands on its own. The foreword borrows queer studies pioneer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of “paranoid reading” vs. “reparative reading,” where “paranoid reading” is driven by “an avoidance of pain” and “reparative reading” is driven by “a seeking of pleasure.”  This idea challenges how we consume content and invites us to allow this collection, as well as art in general, to be a source of repair amidst destruction. The other essay in this collection that speaks directly on this perspective is “Bad Surprises.” I would highly recommend both of these (short!) essays for these strange times.

It felt reparative, listening to that; it felt like my imaginative ability to frame utopias and then to move purposefully towards them might have been restored, at least for a minute, at least inside those book-clad walls… The disaster had already happened, the bad surprise was finally here. The question was what would happen now, how to live on alongside loss and rage, how to not be destroyed by what are manifestly destructive forces. It felt like the room got bigger as he talked, until we were all sitting in an enormous space, a cathedral of potential, in which the future was as yet unsketched.‌ -“Bad Surprises”

Finally, I must also point out the essay “The Future of Loneliness,” published a year before her book The Lonely City. I have yet to read The Lonely City, but it’s probably safe to assume that the essay would be a great preview to her book, if you’re contemplating reading it. I think both would be comforting reads while we are all self-isolating.

Not every essay resonated with me (the ones I mentioned were my favourites), but what this collection gave me was a way to hit the pause button every time I cracked open the spine. Whenever I feel overwhelmed with what’s happening in the world, with change, with disaster, I will return to these pages, take a breath, stop time.

~

Here I’ve linked up the table of contents to the original articles I could find in case you’d like a sneak peek of the collection or a visual companion to go along with the book as you’re reading, as the book (or at least my eARC) doesn’t include photographs like the articles do (my favourites bolded). Though the foreword is not published outside of this collection, I would recommend checking out Laing’s recent article, “Feeling Overwhelmed? How Art Can Help In An Emergency” as an overall preview to the collection, if you feel so inclined.

I’ve also highlighted so many quotes and shared them on Goodreads (as I always do)! I’m just waiting for someone to flag me for copyright infringement, oops. And now I’m off to find copies of The Lonely City and Modern Nature!

PS: 2019 reading recap, 2020 bookshelf tour

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Catch me burrowed in a book with some boba on hand. My life is pretty average, but it’s the little things that count, right? Thanks for stopping by! -Audrey

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