We talk to OliviaLaing about isolation, loneliness and why art matters
. Here, art proves consoling, a way to help puzzle over how to live when we aren’t connected to other human beings. Wojnarowicz – an American artist who created polemical works during the Aids epidemic in New York to which he would eventually succumb – she writes, “did more than anything to release me from the burden of feeling that in my solitude I was shamefully alone”.
OL: I guess I’m quite drawn to artists from traumatic backgrounds, and interested in art as a way of responding to trauma. I grew up in a queer, alcoholic family, and I’m also really interested in how trauma is political. As to prescience, I say in the introduction tothat I felt strongly when I started writing the columns that the times were changing for the worse, but that I had no idea of the events ahead, meaning Brexit and Trump.
OL: Sedgwick! She’s so brilliant, and that essay is so apposite right now. It was written during the Aids crisis and it’s about how there are two ways of reading the world. One is paranoia, which means being concerned by and defended against the bad surprises of the future. It’s very much the dominant mode of the present moment, and especially of Twitter. But what Sedgwick points out is that paranoia doesn’t actually protect you.
JM: You write in the John Berger chapter of his writing: “art criticism is rarely this plain, this fruitful, or this adamant that what happens on a canvas has a bearing on our human lives”. Is this a kind of principle of your own criticism too?JM: Is there an essay in the book that’s particularly resonant, or important, to you?
OL: Yes, I think isolation, loneliness can be a very special place, as Dennis Wilson once sang. It’s painful, but it’s often a spur for creativity too. One of the things I really wanted to get to grips with inwas how loneliness occurs because of marginalisation or stigma. We’re really seeing now that anyone can be lonely, that it’s circumstantial. It can be very frightening, but one of the remarkable things about loneliness is that feeling and sensation become almost painfully sharp.
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