Interview: Olivia Laing

Photo: Suki Dhanda

I corresponded with Olivia Laing for this interview last year after the publication of her collection of essays Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. Since then, Funny Weather has been released in paperback, and her new book, Everybody: a Book About Freedom was published this spring. Laing—who identifies as non-binary—has okayed the use of female pronouns for this piece.   

 Much of the essays in Funny Weather touch on artistic collaborations and the continued reverberations of figures who have died. Why does community and artistic dialogue in this way interest you?   

Olivia Laing: We exist in networks, and I think most artists depend on conversation and encounter, if not active collaboration. I’m excited by the areas in which we touch each other. Even when I was writing about loneliness, what emerged was a richly populated story. I’m definitely drawn to collaborative communities, like the New York School, or artists who work collaboratively, like the filmmaker Derek Jarman, but I’m also skeptical about the notion of the lone genius. I want to know who or what is being written out of the narrative of artistic creation – like with Edward Hopper, say, where there is the lurking silenced figure of the wife, who serves as model and helpmeet but is denied a creative life of her own. A very good book on this subject is Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light, a model for interrogating the networks of care, dependency and exploitation in which we all exist.

Despite dealing with a lot of somber themes and histories, this collection left me feeling more hopeful than depressed and you note the book’s tone is not a negative one. When you were deciding what material to include, was overall mood a consideration? 

OL: Definitely. I put together Funny Weather out of a sense of oncoming emergency, but also because I was increasingly sure that art has a role to play in our social and political lives which isn’t articulated often or clearly enough. For years I’d been writing about how artists faced down or challenged inimical political conditions, from homophobia to misogyny, racism to the Aids crisis. I want to put those stories in one place, as a toolbox for a turbulent future. They’re designed to invigorate, to be a source of nourishment and inspiration.

In Funny Weather you discuss how art engages in resistance and repair. Do you think that art becomes more important for sustaining people during times of crisis? Does its capacity to effect change shift depending on political climate?  

OL: It’s not so much that the art object can effect change in its own right as that it can encourage ideas and insights in the viewer. This is why it can have very different effects or meanings as the historical moment changes. You as viewer bring different things to it. Right now, I think people are very hungry for a sense of both resistance and repair. There are so many things plainly wrong, from systemic racism to the ongoing catastrophe of climate change. Art is a space that can offer respite but it can also expose injustice, consider why things are as they are, and generate possibilities for new realities and ways of being.

You reflect on turning 40 and the strange nature of time, has your relationship to art changed with age? 

OL: In some ways, sure, but in many ways I’m still essentially the same as my seventeen-year-old self, sat on the floor in my bedroom, making riot grrl zines and taping songs off the radio. Books and music matter so much at that age. They serve as portals into a radiant and strange alternate reality. I think as I’ve got older I’ve been drawn to different types of work, but the essential desire to be seized by them, changed by them, has not really gone away. I’ve stayed very open to the possibilities of art.

You have been based in the UK and America, and in your piece about Maggie Nelson you remark that British publishing is becoming too timid. Do you still feel this way, or over the last five years has more space been allowed for transgressive writing in Britain? 

OL: It’s funny, I think that was one of the first (maybe the first?) reviews of The Argonauts, and after it ran I had emails from lots of English editors and publishers saying oh, I tried to buy that book but the sales department wouldn’t let me. And then obviously it was such a hit in the US and internationally that sales began to see there was a new audience, hungry for radical work, that they hadn’t quite noticed. I think in the intervening years a lot more experimental work has been published. There’s a readership that wants it, and I think social media has played a big part in developing that – people sharing work or sharing their excitement about work. It’s very encouraging to see.

Obviously, this book was being compiled years before 2020, but between the pandemic and the rise of populist politicians it does feel like globally we are in a bit of an emergency. As a committed environmentalist—who has lived off the grid and then chose to return to society—how do you foster hope for the future (if you do)?

OL: I do feel hope, actually. I was an environmental activist in my twenties and I burned out badly. For years I’ve felt total despair around the subject of climate change, but there’s a new generation of young activists who are determined that the subject can no longer be ignored. The same is true with Black Lives Matter, a movement which reignited during the pandemic, bringing about radical, thrilling change in a matter of weeks. When you watch the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston being rolled into the harbour, you see viscerally that it is possible to change society. It’s hard, and it will be resisted, but I do think we can build a more just and environmentally sane world. But these things don’t happen by magic. They happen because people learn, one by one, how to see the world differently, to grasp the devastating effects of capitalism or systemic racism. This is where art has a role to play, in elucidating how violence functions and what a better world might look like.