Artful Resilience
A Review of Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency
Words: Meghan Davidson Ladly
At one point in Funny Weather, Olivia Laing describes sitting as a model for her friend the painter Chantal Joffe: “There I was, the figurative thing, one continuous accident: a bag of old skin, tired, frightened, electrically alive.” The essay is a meditation on the body and aging, but that last line, and its descriptors — tired, frightened, electrically alive — seem well attuned to our present climate. Waist-deep in a pandemic, with political nationalism soaring across continents, 2020 was an eerily appropriate time for the publication of Laing’s book.
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is a collection of columns, essays, and reviews that Laing wrote during the last decade — many composed within the last few years — and gathered together they attempt to address the role art can play in fraught times both macro and micro. In the introduction, Laing expresses her debt to the late queer academic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay: “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”, and Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading where in a world of bleak 24-hour news cycles one is “more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison”, holding hope while not being blind to or unaffected by disenchanting realities. You can be a damaged and oppressed reparative reader, and many of the artists referenced in this book are just that.
Art for Laing is critical because of its capacity to be a portal for change, making injustice visible, and accessing alternative visions of the possible. And in this book we meet many of the people who have been longstanding touchstones for Laing herself as well as others whose work and motivations have sparked her curiosity. There are tenderly curated biographical essays on towering figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hockney as well as her personal talisman Derek Jarman and the sharp persona of David Wojnarowicz — whose brutal work graces the cover. She profiles Hilary Mantel. In the section subtitled Love Letters she writes, among others, of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. We glimpse her friendships with Ali Smith and Chantal Joffe.
Laing uses portraiture as a way of accessing her subjects. Even in her collection of book reviews we catch the narratives of the authors as well as their works. She is a champion of fresh, skilled and challenging voices on both sides of the Atlantic as witnessed in her writing on Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (before Nelson had found a UK publisher) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. And Chris Kraus makes not one, but two appearances.
The personalities examined in Funny Weather are mostly contemporary UK voices, and many of them were deeply affected by — and in some cases did not survive — the Aids-crisis. The columns, which she wrote between 2015 and 2019 for the art magazine Frieze, are short bursts of urgency and lamentation, and it is here, and in her essays, that we get Laing at her most intimate.
One of the most striking pieces in this collection isn’t about art at all. In “Feral”, Laing describes her youth involvement with the environmental protest movement and the time she spent living alone off the grid. Another haunting standout from this section is “The Abandoned Person’s Tale.” Part of a larger project pairing refugee detainees with writers, the essay details one man’s struggle to keep his identity as he is swallowed by a nightmarish immigration system. In her column “Faking” It about the novelist Patricia Highsmith’s character Tom Ripley, Laing points to Tom’s switching identities as queering the fake or passing; reality becoming just another malleable commodity. It is a concept that feels searingly relevant now, and reflective of much of the populist rhetoric of this new decade.
Yet whether she is describing the intertwining individuals of British conceptual art or the conspiratorial dance between Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Laing makes clear this is not a collection of lone geniuses, but stories of collaborations and reverberations, sometimes beyond death. And despite the subject matter — heavy at times, covering topics like alcoholic female writers and explorations of loneliness amidst technology — Laing has a deft touch with her writing, an ability to take the reader to challenging spaces and linger there, all the while being dexterous enough not to get bogged down in the gravity of her subject matter. Funny Weather is not a depressing read. There are threads of hope presented as glimpses of better selves and better societies, what might be possible with effort — art as a challenge to the status quo, that is what art can give us. In her essay on Derek Jarman she is poetic on his influence, but it could just as easily be a reference to creativity at its best: “It’s how we all go, in and out of the dark, but oh, to have given off such a blaze.”