“Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis?” Olivia Laing asks in the foreword to her new collection of essays, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. Now this question is all the more topical since Laing first asked it in reference to existing threats of war, climate change, social inequality, and nationalism. As a Frieze Magazine columnist, Laing has been searching for the answers since 2015 by looking at the work of artists such as David Wojnarowicz and Philip Guston. In the book she describes how she posed for the painter Chantal Joffe and writes love letters to art critic John Berger, Wolfgang Tillmans and Freddie Mercury. In this collection, which brings together a career of writing for the first time, art criticism is combined with deeply personal observations. Whether the essays are autobiographical or fictional, Laing always takes a political stance, as she does in her novel “Crudo” and memoir “The Lonely City”. She writes intimately about artists, thinkers and writers of our time, even if she has yet to meet some of them personally. If art is a survival strategy, then so are Laing’s texts, offering both comfort and a call for resistance. (Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Savannah van der Niet)
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (Picador, 2020, 368 pp.)
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