Art as a weapon

Olivia Laing’s collection of non-fiction mixes clarion calls for compassion with fierce denunciations.

Her work is certainly eclectic in its topics. These begin with a series on visual artists, including David Hockney, Joseph Cornell, Georgia O’Keeffe and the underrated Agnes Martin. The next section is columns from Frieze magazine, which are breezy and angry at the same time, and more limited to the immediate. There are profiles of four women; Hilary Mantel, Sarah Lucas, Ali Smith and Chantal

Joffe, followed by two more aesthetically polemical essays. After that we have some what I might call “fugitive pieces” including a memoir-esque about her time “off-grid” and protesting against roadbuilding, eight book reviews, “Love Letters” to figures such as David Bowie and John Berger (I might personally have called them elegies or obituaries) and a final transcription of an interview. So plenty of diverse matter and material.

Does it cohere? To an extent, yes. In the introduction, Laing pays homage to the queer studies writer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, especially Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This

Essay Is a About You. The central conceit is that paranoid reading is “identifying poison” and reparative reading is “finding nourishment”.

But Laing’s is certainly not for languid luxuriance. Art has to be weaponised. As Kafka put it: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Here the frozen sea is within and without, and involves the political, feminist and trans rights, the apocalyptic, the way in which HIV changed perceptions if not policies and much more.

Writing about Chris Kraus, Laing identifies her own aesthetic via their

mutual interest in the work of Kathy Acker. “The fluid, fragmentary nature of identity, the shattered world with its abysmal imbalances of power.”

In an essay about conceptual art she moves from flourish to flourish – it would be “a banger in the face of stuffy, elitist modernism” wanting to “blow the bloody doors off the venerable white cube of the gallery”. (For those not au fait with modern art, White Cube is a gallery).

She is all for “the anonymous, the cobbled together, the hand-me-down, the postscript; the collaborations between strangers that marry jubilantly, that don’t quite fit”. It is what

I would call a traditionally avant-garde ideal, rarely realised.

In terms of production, I suppose one good thing about the internet is that if you can’t immediately visualise an Agnes Martin or Derek Jarman’s garden (there are no illustrations), then you can be taken there (and your interest will be noted).

I would have been more intrigued by a book where Laing takes on other figures that chime with her concerns, or even what she does not like. Her moral clarion for compassion is admirable, but it seems ill-fit with the denunciations in the book of those with whom she disagrees.