Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

by Olivia Laing

Overview

“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era.

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time.

We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393867398
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	120,997
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She lives in Suffolk, UK.

Table of Contents

Foreword: You Look at the Sun 1

Artists' Lives

A Spell to Repel Ghosts Jean-Michel Basquiat 11

Nothing but blue skies Agnes Martin 20

Keeping up with Mr Whizz David Hockney 32

The Elated World Joseph Cornell 40

For Yes Robert Rauschenberg 49

Lady of the Canyon Georgia O'Keeffe 58

Close to the Knives David Wojnarowicz 71

A Great Deal of Light Sargy Mann 78

Sparks through stubble Derek Jarman 85

Funny Weather: Frieze Columns

A Stitch in Time 99

Green Fuse 102

You are welcome 105

Faking It 108

Doing the Watusi 111

Bad Surprises 114

The Fire This Time 117

The Body-Snatchers 120

Dance to the Music 123

Paradise 126

A History of Violence 129

Red Thoughts 132

Between the Acts 135

Under the Influence 138

Four Women

Hilary Mantel 143

Sarah Lucas 154

Ali Smith 162

Chantal Joffe 169

Styles

Two Figures in the Grass: Queer British Art 177

Free if you want it: British Conceptual Art 185

Essays

Feral 195

Drink, drink, drink 203

The Future of Loneliness 216

The Abandoned Person's Tale 230

Lamentations 236

Party Going 240

Skin Bags 244

Reading

Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman 251

New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight Jenni Quilter 255

The Argonauts Maggie Nelson 261

I Love Dick Chris Kraus 267

Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love Emily Witt 272

After Kathy Acker Chris Kraus 278

The Cost of Living Deborah Levy 283

Normal People Sally Rooney 288

Love Letters

David Bowie, 1947-2016 295

Vanished into Music: Arthur Russell 299

John Berger, 1926-2017 304

John Ashbery, 1927-2017 307

Mr. Fahrenheit: Freddie Mercury 308

Say You're In: Wolfgang Tillmans 311

Talk

A Conversation with Joseph Keckler 317

Acknowledgements 335

Index 339

Editorial Reviews

"A thought-provoking, inspiring collection that you can go back to whenever the weather takes a funny turn."

Evening Standard - Susannah Butter

"Funny Weather gives the reader a tangible sense of the sprawling garden of work which Laing has planted. She is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full of empathy and awe."

Irish Times - Mia Colleran

"As exterior life shuts temporarily down, Funny Weather is an immensely useful reminder that new space can be intellectual as well as physical.… Laing animates her prose with concise, brainy descriptions of visual art.… Laing is a tremendously gifted genre-mixer, and her writing flourishes most when its topic requires her both to observe and to imagine.… Funny Weather is an invitation to Laing’s imaginary museum, where minds if not bodies meet, and where true hospitality resides."

Hyperallergic - Lily Meyer

"Laing writes of her creative subjects in a winning, passionate voice that proves both soothing and galvanizing, especially amid a panic.… It’s not just art we need in an emergency, but writers, like Laing, who gently guide our eyes to what’s out there."

Observer - Alina Cohen

"An incisive meditation on the value of heartfelt, messy art in our paranoid times."

Telegraph

"Laing opens each piece with a deceptive ease [and] alights upon poetic insights.… [H]er light touch throughout these essays makes room for some stunning perceptions."

A.V. Club

"A fine writer’s embrace of the artists who preceded her, friendly visits with their lives, and loving acknowledgement of their foundational contributions. A work of joy in recognition."

Sarah Schulman

03/02/2020

This timely collection from Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring) asks “Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis?” She shows that, indeed, art can change things for the better, pinning her assertion on critic Eve Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading,” which encourages readers to use hope, creativity, and survival in their interpretations. Broken up into sections that include artist profiles, literary criticism, and personal essay, the book shows where art can fight back, as with painter David Wojnarowicz’s writing and photography documenting his former partner’s death from AIDS at a time of political inaction. Thanks to the short length of her essays, she’s able to cover a lot of ground, touching on, in addition to the AIDS crisis, climate change, gender, and in two especially biting selections, the plight of refugees in the U.K. and the Grenfell Tower fire in London. Laing soars in her writing on Maggie Nelson, whom she describes as creating an “exhilarating new language for considering both the messiness of life and the meanings of art.” As a collection that aims to exemplify “new ways of seeing” to break through a “spin cycle of terrified paranoia,” this will leave readers eager to reengage with art they know well, and explore art as yet new to them. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Laing opens each piece with a deceptive ease [and] alights upon poetic insights... [H]er light touch throughout these essays makes room for some stunning perceptions."

A. V. Club

"[Olivia Laing is] a kind of cultural sage...an accidental literary grande dame of the emotional havoc wrought by late capitalism and digital disconnect... Laing is radically empathetic, a writer-activist."

Vulture - Hillary Kelly

"I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they’re the essence of great twenty-first century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, willful, and wonderfully unbound."

Philip Hoare

"Like all great critics, Olivia Laing combines formidable intelligence with boundless curiosity and fabulous taste, but she also has a rare quality of intimacy; an ability to connect the reader to a work of art or literature (or for that matter a facet of life itself) with a directness that lights it up like nothing else. It’s why I read her."

James Lasdun

"These essays showcase Laing as an imaginative and empathetic critic of the arts. She gets at texture, technique, feeling, and politics all at once... It's a pleasure to follow Laing as she pokes around companionably, examining the things that interest her."

NPR - Annalisa Quinn

"Laing’s arts writing is sharp-minded, and her manner is generous toward both subject and reader."

John Glassie

05/01/2020

This collection of art, literary, and cultural criticism by essayist and novelist Laing (The Lonely City) explores difficult material. Many of the themes—loneliness, alcoholism, the frailties of the human body, gender relations, runaway technology—long predate the contested politics implied in the subtitle (Brexit, the Trump presidency). Laing asserts this is not a depressing book, however, and finds inspiration in the work of the (mostly contemporary UK and U.S.) visual artists and writers profiled, creators who propose new ways of seeing via art that responds to crisis with generosity and engagement, art that is reparative. Many of the bracing, unflinching essays examine the lives of artists working in extremis, such as terminal illness (Derek Jarman, Kathy Acker) or disability (Sargy Mann, a painter who lost his eyesight). Readers will value Laing's talent for writing with equal discernment about the very different media of painting and sculpture on the one hand and fiction on the other (e.g., Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith). She draws perceptive insights from the biographical details of the artists' lives, sketching them in incisive profiles. VERDICT An excellent introduction both to the work of a fine cultural critic and to the creative figures discussed. [See Prepub Alert, 11/11/19.]—Michael Dashkin, New York

Library Journal

★ 2020-01-26
A stellar collection of essays and reviews from the award-winning London-based writer.

Laing, the winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, is often described as a cultural critic, but insofar as the term suggests a sole focus on the arts, it belies the wider sweep of these pieces, most of them previously published. A graceful stylist and superb reporter, the author is a journalist in the spirit of Michael Dirda, who calls himself “an appreciator” rather than a critic, and Laing includes no negative reviews here. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of first-rate arts criticism in her appreciations of painters like David Hockney and Jean-Michel Basquiat and novelists Patricia Highsmith and Sally Rooney along with musings on topics like gardening and a standout essay on the surrealistic horrors faced by an asylum-seeking refugee who spent 11 years “trapped in Britain’s infinite detention system.” Laing’s aesthetic tastes lean toward idiosyncratic or transgressive work that involves links between art and disaster, whether a crisis imperils the human body or the body politic. Disease and death stalk her pages—Kathy Acker’s breast cancer, Freddie Mercury’s AIDS, Georgia O’Keeffe’s agoraphobia, and Hilary Mantel’s migraines—but she brings a fresh and humane eye even to ills exhaustively covered elsewhere, such as David Bowie’s cocaine addiction. Afflicted with corneal edema, the painter Sargy Mann “took a hair dryer to the National Gallery, plugged it in and calmly dried his soggy, waterlogged eye in order to see the paintings.” Laing sinks only briefly into lit-crit jargon in discussions of “reparative reading,” and sometimes her enthusiasms run away with her. Were the 700 or so poems by Frank O’Hara truly “as original and lovely as anything of the century”? Still, the author’s praise never appears less than genuine or unsupported by deep observation, and she consistently shows the talent James Wood ascribed to Mantel: She has “the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting.”

Vibrant commentary on art and society by a writer with a sharp eye for the offbeat.

Kirkus Reviews