OLIVIA LAING Funny Weather: Art in a emergency. Reviewed by Anna Verney

Olivia Laing puts the case for art in times of crisis.

2021 – what a hell of a year. 2022 – not shaping up to be much better, yet.  Where do we turn in times of strife?  Well, in search of solace in the middle of Sydney’s long lockdown last year, I picked up British essayist and novelist Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an emergency. Published in 2020, the book is a collection of columns drawn from Laing’s reporting in the 2010s for Frieze art magazine, along with short essays about art and the nature of creativity.

Funny Weather was compiled in the aftermath of Trump’s election and the Brexit vote: a time when ‘the political weather, already erratic, was only going to get weirder’, although Laing confesses that she ‘by no means predicted the particular storms ahead.’ (Really, who could have?) The question the book examines is, as Laing puts it: ‘Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis?’

Laing’s essays are short and easily digestible, grouped together by form. One section gathers book reviews, another Laing’s Frieze columns, another love letters to artists whom Laing admires, for example. While the format lends itself to the reader dipping into essays at random, in my experience following Laing’s order allowed the eclecticism of the pieces to build into an effervescent whole. Laing starts with a group of profiles of primarily visual artists, among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin and Derek Jarman. Characteristic in style of the rest of the collection, it’s useful to pause on them as a lens through which to consider what makes Funny Weather such an engrossing read.

A masterly essayist, Laing uses the fluidity of her genre to move easily through diverse but rigorously researched material on the artists: their personal lives and politics, descriptions of their work, artistic concerns and practices. Laing draws together these disparate threads and themes – ‘this immense entanglement of everything’ – into shimmering images that give her essays cohesion and meaning and illuminate the artist as both personality and creator.

Of the American Surrealist Joseph Cornell, for example, known for assembling discarded artefacts into diorama-like boxes, Laing writes:

The box is the central metaphor of Joseph Cornell’s life, just as it is the signature element of his exquisite and disturbing body of work, his factory of dreams. He made boxes to keep wonders in: small wooden boxes that he built himself in the basement beneath the small wooden house he shared with his mother and disabled younger brother, the two fixed stars of his existence … [H]e didn’t attempt to physically escape his circumstances, choosing instead to master the difficult knack of conjuring infinite space from a circumscribed realm.

It would be difficult to find many writers who can produce such psychologically perceptive and elegantly written critical observations, but these are peppered throughout Laing’s book.

While many of the artists she writes about are well known, Laing also often finds something new and astute to say about them that would be missed in a more traditional style of profile. For example, on Georgia O’Keeffe – one of the most celebrated and written about female artists of the twenty-first century – Laing starts not at the standard entry point of O’Keeffe’s famous flower paintings, but elsewhere:

Forget the morning glories and orificial irises, with their attendant readings of flamboyant female sexuality. If there is a painting that encapsulates the mysteries of Georgia O’Keeffe, it’s of something far more humble, far less glamorous. An adobe wall of a house, a smooth brown expanse capped by sky and punctured by a door, a rough black rectangle of absolute negative space.

The door Laing fixes on was the door to the New Mexico farmhouse that O’Keeffe bought and made her home. Confident in her understanding of O’Keeffe’s psyche within the historical context of her work, Laing posits a theory:

The attraction was a puzzle, and yet walls and doors figure large in the story of O’Keeffe’s singular life. How do you make the most of what’s inside you, your talents and desires, when they slam you up against a wall of prejudice, of limiting beliefs about what a woman must be and an artist can do? O’Keeffe didn’t kick the wall down – hardly her style – but instead set her considerable canniness and will at prising a new route in.

This quest to find new openings becomes the theme through which Laing examines O’Keeffe’s life and work, concluding: ‘She made it happen, those simple scenes that are anything but, opening a door to a new way of portraying her country, a new kind of woman’s life.’ Through the generosity of her close engagement and openness to finding new meaning, in these deceptively readable but incisive profiles, Laing herself often opens doors in our understanding of famous artists and their creative practice.

How then does this diverse collection answer Laing’s question of what art can achieve in times of crisis? Laing tells us that the answer lies in two themes: resistance and repair. For Laing, both are intrinsically connected to art as a form of political activism. As she writes in her Introduction:

We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.

In Funny Weather, Laing’s consideration of these themes is most apparent in her writing on queer artists, including David Wojnarowicz and Derek Jarman, who were ‘politicised by [their] sexuality’. In these essays, Laing builds her strongest argument for art’s capacity to defy and subvert hegemonic identities, to ‘bear witness to scenes that most people never encounter’ and to build communities of resistance, particularly in her examination of Wojnarowicz’s and Jarman’s work during the AIDS crisis. In these essays, looking at queer artistic communities, she also builds her case for art’s capacity when pursued as a collective and relational enterprise to be reparative and supportive. That is, to build communities in which to live more freely.

Beyond art as resistance and repair, to my mind it’s also notable that Laing often uses profiles in Funny Weather as the vehicle for her ideas: in her love letters to artists, conversations with four British female artists, including the writer Hilary Mantel and painter Chantal Joffe, and an essay on female writers and alcoholism (‘Drink, drink, drink’, a companion to Laing’s excellent earlier book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On writers and drinking). In her essay on Joffe, Laing writes of her that ‘we both use portraiture as a way of getting at something deeper’.

The question here is what deeper truth Laing achieves. While a politically conscious sensibility is common to some of the artists Laing covers in Funny Weather, it is not their unifying feature. Rather, the guiding principle in her selection of artists is how excited and moved she is by their work: a joy sufficient to spark curiosity about the person behind it and the circumstances of its creation. This excitement is infectious and translates to the reader regardless of whether they are familiar with the artist: as Laing writes of art in her Introduction, ‘Don’t you want it, to be impregnate with all that light?’

In this affective transmission, I think, lies another answer to Laing’s question of whether art can do anything. In her profile of the American abstract painter Agnes Martin, Laing writes:

‘I paint with my back to the world,’ Martin famously declared, and what she wanted to catch in her rigorous nets was not material existence, the earth and its myriad forms, but rather the abstract glories of being: joy, beauty, innocence, happiness itself.

In communicating the abstract pleasures of discovering and experiencing joy and beauty in art, of expansive curiosity in it, Laing creates a deeply pleasurable work of literature. While her answer for what art can achieve goes far beyond that, in this way Funny Weather makes its own case for art as nourishment when times are rough.

The cover image is a photograph by Wojnarowicz, ‘Untitled (Face in Dirt)’. In it, Wojnarowicz’s face is buried beneath grey rubble, eyes clamped shut but lips grimacing defiantly free for breath. And like the image, what I took from Laing’s Funny Weather was that when subsumed in the rubble of trying times, art provides those short moments of breath, defiant in their being simply for pleasure. Couldn’t we all use some?

Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an emergency Pan Macmillan 368pp $19.99

Anna Verney is a writer and lawyer based on Gadigal land, completing a Masters of Creative Writing at The University of Sydney supported by the Janet O’Connor Scholarship for promising women writers. You can find her at: https://www.annaverney.com/ .

You can buy Funny Weather from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: Agnes Martin, artists, Chantal Joffe, David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, Georgia O'Keeffe, Hilary Mantel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Olivia | Laing