the first line of some essays in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020) by Olivia Laing (because my own writing isn’t going well):
- In the spring of 1982, a rumour started swilling around New York. (about Jean-Michel Basquiat)
- Art must derive from inspiration, Agnes Martin said, and yet for decades she painted what seems at first glance to be the same thing over and over again, the same core structure subject to subtle variations.
- The box is the central metaphor of Joseph Cornell’s life, just as it is the signature element of his exquisite and disturbing body of work, his factory of dreams.
- Toward the end of his relentlessly inventive life, Robert Rauschenberg confided an anxiety.
- Forget the morning glories and orificial irises, with their attendant readings of flamboyant female sexuality. (about Georgia O’Keefe)
- I like this room. (about Sargy Mann)
- The light’s behind them.
- The days are opening up, the streets covered in a rain of blossom.
- June 16 2016: a bad day.
- There were two dead moles in the wood, beached a few yards from one another, blood still wet on their noses.
- What’s the relationship between art and disaster?
- A good omen, at last.
- At a party in South London a man came up to me.
- A winter beach is a good place for seeing clearly.
- It’s 4.46 AM, but my body thinks it’s morning, which is why I’m standing in a kitchen in the East Village, eating bran flakes in the dark.
- The door is ajar.
- Every time I go to Chantal’s studio we eat cupcakes from Hummingbird Bakery, get hopped up on sugar and talk very fast.
- In August 1966, a part-time tutor at St Martin’s School of Art withdrew a book from the college library.
- If you wrote a book about alcohol and male writers, as I did, the one question you’ll be asked more than any other is What about the women?
- Some 24,000 migrants are detained in Immigration Removal Centres in the UK each year.
- I was a convent girl, which meant growing up amidst images of pain and grief, the body in all its variegated states of distress.
- I’m worried about my skin.
- The New York School refers to a sociable coterie of painters and poets at work and play in downtown Manhattan around the midpoint of the twentieth century. (about Jenni Quilter)
- Dick is such a dick. (about Chris Kraus)
- For the past few years, Emily Witt has been dispatching gripping, keenly strange field reports from the frontiers of contemporary desire. (about Emily Witt)
- The Mudd Club, New York City, Valentine’s Day, 1980. (about Chris Kraus)
- It’s an expensive business, being alive. (about Deborah Levy)
- Are Connell and Marianne normal people? (about Sally Rooney)
- There’s a man on the ferry. (about Arthur Russell)
- I only saw John Berger speak once, at the end of 2015.
- Late, up in my room, night rain, three people tweet about Ashbery.
- I (heart) Freddie Mercury.
- I don’t know where we’re going. (about Wolfgang Tillmans)
pink = Jeez, I kinda like that.