2020 has involved a lot of being alone for many of us, so I picked up this book, which has been on my bookshelf for a while.
The only way I can think to describe “The Lonely City” by Olivia Laing is as an art history memoir. And, given that 2020 is the year when we all lived in Edward Hopper paintings, it is very, very fitting.
“Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.”
Throughout the book, Laing draws connection between her loneliness in New York and the way artists in the 20th century experienced loneliness and portrayed loneliness in their work.
On Edward Hopper, Laing writes:
“Just as these artists’ lives varied in sociability, so their work handled or moved around the subject of loneliness in a multitude of ways, sometimes tackling it directly and sometimes dealing with subjects – sex, illness, abuse – that were themselves sources of stigma or isolation. Edward Hopper, that rangy, taciturn man, was occupied, though he sometimes denied it, with the expression of urban loneliness in visual terms, its translation into paint. Almost a century on, his images of solitary men and women glimpsed behind glass in deserted cafés, offices and hotel lobbies remain the signature images of isolation in the city.”
On speech, and the way it changes with loneliness, Laing writes:
“The irony is that when you are engaged in larger and more satisfactory intimacies, these quotidian exchanges go off smoothly, almost unnoticed, unperceived. It is only when there is a paucity of deeper and more personal connection that they develop a disproportionate importance, and with it, a disproportionate risk.”
Laing then ties speech into Andy Warhol, citing a interview from 1967, where
“he sits rigid against a backdrop of his own Elvis I and II. Asked if he ever bothers reading interpretations of his work, he gives a campy little wobble of the head. ‘Uhhhh,’ he says, ‘can I just answer alalalala?’ The camera zooms in, revealing he’s by no means as disengaged as the affectless, narcotic voice suggests. He looks almost sick with nerves, his make-up not quite concealing the red nose that was the bane of his existence and which he tried repeatedly to improve with cosmetic surgery. He blinks, swallows, licks his lips; a deer in headlights, at once graceful and terrified.”
From discussing Warhol’s outsider loneliness, Laing writes about Valerie Solans, the woman who shot Warhol.
“In her controversial book, the SCUM Manifesto, she considers the problems of isolation not in emotional terms, but structurally, as a social problem that particularly affects women. And yet, Solans’s attempt to make contact and build solidarity by way of language ended in tragedy, amplifying rather than relieving the sense of isolation that she and Warhol shared.”
Laing wrote about loneliness in cities.
“It was becoming increasingly easy to see how people ended up vanishing in cities, disappearing in plain sight, retreating into their apartments because of sickness or bereavement, mental illness or the persistent, unbearable burden of sadness and shyness, of not knowing how to impress themselves upon the world. I was getting a taste of it, all right, but what on earth would it be like to live the whole of your life like this, occupying the blind spot in other people’s existences, their noisy intimacies?
“If anyone can be said to have worked from that place, it’s Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor who posthumously achieved fame as one of the world’s most celebrated outsider artists, a term coined to describe people on the margins of society, who make work without the benefit of an education in art or art history.”
Laing then goes on to describe Darger’s body of work. I had never heard of him before reading this book. From her description, his art seems ghastly otherworldly. The rest of the book continues in this fashion – Laing writes about a specific feeling or period of her loneliness, then discusses an artist who connects to that in their work. It feels like the book as a whole is driven more by the art history side of things and less by the memoir – the memoir is merely a map that guides us to each of the artists we’re here to see.