The Olivia Laing Wormhole
Olivia Laing’s Many Lives
From Worms 7 we bring you a snippet of Caitlin Mcloughlin's interview 'Olivia Laing's Many Lives.' Naturally we spiralled and reached out to Olivia to get a reading list from her, and a few others from the Worms team reviewed a few of her books. Scroll for more ❤️
Olivia Laing’s writing spans many lifetimes. And most of them are not her own. Her work, interrogating the cultural and political landscape of our times, tends to be grounded in the life and work of writers, artists and cultural figures: Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, Nina Simone, Agnes Martin to name a few. Lives and work she handles with a careful tenderness as well as a deeply analytical, inquisitive spirit. I met Olivia at The Barbican Centre, the glamorous interior concealed within its great menacing fortress. It was graduation day for an unknown London university and the lobby was filled with swarths of gown-clad graduates, hovering nervously in groups and flanked by doting families. Everyone suited and booted and chattering. It was a nice atmosphere to be surrounded by. We finally found an empty seat as the last of the crowds disappeared into the Concert Hall. I balanced my borrowed tape recorder on the back of the sofa that we’d chosen, praying that our conversation wouldn’t be drowned out by the soft ripples of applause emanating from the walls, on the other side of which, the graduations were now taking place.
For the complete interview, buy your copy of Worms here.
Read an extract of the interview below:
Caitlin McLoughlin: I wanted to start with this bell hooks’ quote from her book Outlaw Culture, “Not only did I find in cultural studies a site where I could freely transgress boundaries, it was a location that enabled students to enter passionately a pedagogical process firmly rooted in education for critical consciousness, a place they felt recognised and included, where they could unite knowledge learned in classrooms with life outside.”
Olivia Laing: Ah, I love that so much.
I know, she's amazing. I was interested in that quote because it made me think of your work, less so in the sense of the classroom, but in this idea of using cultural studies as a way to transgress boundaries. You transgress boundaries between memoir, essay and biography, between history, literature, culture, politics AND activism. Do you feel like writing about culture (art, literature, philosophy, music, film) is something that has enabled you to do this?
I think what I wanted to do was write about political or social issues, or even philosophical issues, but to do it through the pathway of culture, because that's where I'm at home. That's what feels most natural to me, to use it as the material for thinking. And it's such great shared material for thinking because lots of people are totally in love with it. There's so much richness around it.
I was trying to think of how to define your work as a writer, does cultural studies come close? Or do you have a way of defining what you do? (Not that you need one.)
Well I think it’s taking a lot of the tools of academia, but using them outside the academy and for radical purposes, but also bringing in scholarship and bringing that kind of deep interrogation of archival materials or long form research. I suppose cultural studies, but with a sort of political edge or a political alertness to it at all times.
The second part of that quote "unite knowledge learned in the classroom with life outside" seems to me to be about embodying that knowledge.
Absolutely. But also I think what's exciting about it is the idea that you're doing it for and with other people. It's not just your own practice. It's a practice that involves a readership or educating a readership or having conversations with other artists, all of that sense of back and forth. I really try not to make books that are like, this is what I think, this is my opinion, but moreso, here's my possible opinion, here's somebody else's possible opinion, you, the reader, have total agency to move through, discard what you don't like, pick up what you do like, go further. At all times my books should feel inviting. I think that confuses a lot of readers of conventional non-fiction; who are used to the author being a very strong presence within the book, one that dominates the book. I'm much more ducking in and out.
That feels like a way of transgressing boundaries or working in between these different areas, even working to break down or demolish boundaries.
And undermining individualism. Right from the beginning, with the first two books, there’s that sense of them being porous and having lots of different voices. Using quotes, not just to have the material to critique, but to actually allow the other people to speak through time. So you get that polyphonic sense.
Everybody in particular is very political. It's about activism and you talk about your own involvement with grassroots climate activism. I wondered, how do you connect your work as a writer with your activism, do you see them as related in any way?
I see them as related, but I also see them as fundamentally different in that I think people are very glib about using the word ‘activist’ now and saying I'm an activist when they're not. To me, an activist is a street activist. It means street protest or doing things that are risking arrest. And I'm not. I'm writing books. I'm not under those levels of threat, I'm not that kind of activist anymore. But, that being said, the driving force of what made me an environmental activist – what made me live in trees or stand in front of police cars, all of that sort of thing – was in response to the conditions of the world that I wanted to change. There's the same impetus that drives the book: these are the things that are toxic and in crisis about the society we're in. These are some possibilities of how it can be better. But it's a totally different tool. It sort of worries me, that slide of what activist means because it feels like it becomes a bit of a ‘hashtag activism’ thing.
For sure. It's been co-opted in some senses.
Yeah totally. You know, chatting on Twitter is not activism, although it might be part of an activist practice. But I think it really needs to be tied to physical things in the physical world. That, to me, that's what activism means.
In Everybody you cite Nina Simone as saying “she didn’t think artists had to take a political stand but it was their duty to reflect the reality they live in.” I love this quote from her “I am not a doctor, sugar. All I can do is expose the sickness, that’s my job.”
Yes! And actually it's not even true, because I think she was a doctor. I think her job within civil rights activism is that she was giving people a shot in the arm every day. They can go to her music and they can suddenly feel re-energised and go back out again. It's that thing of ‘the artist as witness’ actually does have a healing effect because somebody telling you what the truth is and reflecting that back to you, I think that does have a spacious, grounding, healing effect. But it's not changing the world.
For the full interview in Worms 7, get a copy here.
OLIVIA LAING'S WRITERS WHO ART AND ARTISTS WHO WRITE
Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement
Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge
Chroma by Derek Jarman
Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara by Joe LeSueu
Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, edited by Arne Glimcher
How to Be Both by Ali Smith
The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett
7 Miles a Second by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook
Mentioned in the Interview
Outlaw Culture by bell hooks
Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz
Last Days at Hot Slit by Andrea Dworkin
The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door by Andrea Dworkin (essay)
After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus
Great Expectations by Kathy Acker
Don Quixote by Kathy Acker
Mercy by Andrea Dworkin
Ice and Fire by Andrea Dworkin
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Olivia Laing by Ione Saizar
OLIVIA LAING titles
To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (2011)
The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink (2013)
The Lonely City (2016)
Crudo (2018)
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020)
Everybody: A Book About Freedom (2021)
The Garden Against Time (upcoming, May 2024)
Olivia gave us a preview of her upcoming book 'The Garden Against Time’:
The thing that's nice about this book is, The Lonely City and Everybody are these interrogations of hell – really hellish states – and then this one is really about the longing for a better world, the longing for a kind of Eden. So even though it's about many failed attempts through history, it just has this sense of fertile dreaming that was so pleasant to write about and to think about. Also I think everybody is just starving for it at the moment. I think that sense of wanting to talk about utopia is going to become more and more prevalent because I think we are done with dystopias. We are living inside one. We need to start desperately thinking about what we can do that's better, or we're going to be destroyed by climate change.
(coming out in May of 2024)
reviewed by worms
Pierce Eldridge
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing is surely one of my absolute favourite reads of the year. I’m obsessed with the portrait she has been able to paint of some incredible queer icons, meandering around their life in solitude, longing (maybe in the same way as Anna) to be felt, to be known, to be understood beyond their childhood pains. I’m particularly fond of the part where she discusses Andy Warhol’s bulbous red nose. When I read that I was in Clissold Park and tbh—idk what came over me—I started to cry because I have this strange complex of thinking—I mean, I fully know—that I have a lil-red-rudolph nose too. She gave me this alternative perspective of Andy that felt super refreshing too, knowing he wasn’t really a genius of ‘being’ with people but a genius at ensuring he wasn’t alone in his work or life. Which, to me anyway, says a lot about his practice. I wasn’t so fond of the Hopper chapter, I mean I like Hopper a lot, I got to see the exhibition at the Whitney when I was in NYC last year and was mesmerised, but back then felt the lack of cultural representation happening around him at the time in his secluded bubbled painted dreamscapes. Like, how many aristocratic people can we see one after the other? To know that he ridiculed his wife into not painting was majorly gross too and it just made me hate the work. No shade—so much shade—but when Josephine (Jo) Hopper donated all their life's work to the Whitney, where the archivists disposed of a majority of hers, is so telling of how the institution memorialised men and purposely tries to forget women. She was doing everything in her power to help make him successful and then is kinda just forgotten beside him. I think the exhibition had a room with their work hanging together, and it was the most interesting part because some of her journals were showcased, and the juicy words of their tumultuous relationship were laid bare; particularly when she recounts Edward saying that painters can’t be invested in other painter’s works. She certainly was a devoted and loyal champion of his. I watched the documentary, Hopper: An American Love Story and was glad Jo had her piece in there, remembered as the backbone to his work. Also, some say it’s super clever of him to have, in his last painting that came off the easel, painted Two Comedians taking their final bow but I think it’s gross. It felt like a satire way of him poking fun, although it’s remembered as him giving her a moment to shine. Psst. Idk. The BEST chapter in this book though is In Loving Him—offt, and I so do—about David Wojnarowicz. I’m in love with everything about David, particularly the part where he sits down for Interview Magazine to discuss with Nan Gouldin how he wants most for his work to be operative for the people feeling alienation. That made me well up big time. I’m sure many of you here are familiar with his Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration and I can’t recommend it more. Once, I was at Freedom Bookstore with all the Worms here, our little outing date together, and practically gushed so hard the whole of Whitechapel heard my sincere cries of passion. David embodies everything I hope to be, he strips the heart bare of its burdens by revealing its scars with total, uninhibited, vulnerability. I love him. I’m going to be reading this chapter about him forever. I suggest people watch Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, it’s such a great documentary about his life. Also, I haven’t read anything yet about Peter Hujar but I know that book is circulating my ‘up next’ list big time. V-excited to feel more of David through Peter, as the relationship between them seemed so tender.
Arcadia Molinas
Took me a while to finish Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency partly for the vast quantity of stimulating art that is discussed among the pages that meant lots of google searches and wormholes to sink into. This book has opened up a reality to me: the art writer, the cultural critic. I had never read so many articles, opinion pieces, short biographies in a row and I found that universe a rich one, a tempting one. Laing's taste is exquisite and refined. Her idols (Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, Chris Kraus) are well revered and made central figures of this anthology of articles, grounding each foray into a different artist's art in a particular lens and taste for the world.
This book was meant for slow reading, digressions in the form of google searches and YouTube videos and was a pleasure to digest. I only hope that the attention I paid to my reading brings a retention of all this reparative art.
Further reading:
Modern Nature by Derek Jarman
The Water Front Journals by David Wojnarowicz
Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
All this and much more in the Worms 7 ‘The Writers who Art and Artists who Write’ Issue
