Hi all,
We have nearly made it to Christmas, that time for rest after a whirlwind autumn. This year I am crawling towards my bed and dodging various forms of flu and plague that most people I know have. Fingers crossed I can hold on until the big day without coughing like a sickly Victorian child. Of course it’s no surprise that half the British population sounds like Dickens’s version of the ‘deserving poor’ (help) when people can’t keep their bodies warm enough to fight off illness that spreads like wildfire.
Solidarity with all the unions, who are putting up the only form of opposition it would seem to yet another looting of the public’s wealth for private gain, playing with our health (and health service) until the point that it is deemed no longer fit for service, too far gone to save. Make no mistake this is deliberate. I accept no commiserations. The mechanism of a brewing economic crisis is working so agilely that politicians really have outdone themselves this time. Because healing sick people is a luxury we just cannot afford, apparently. God forbid what the policies of Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 almost-government would have looked like, Britain would have fallen to its knees with that naively-dangerous idealist or evil antisemite, depending on which billionaire-owned paper you read. Before I lived with a load of Marxists at uni, I used to legit think he was bad news, lol.
In climates like this, it pains me that engaging with art becomes even more of a luxury. When people cannot breathe, art does not clear their lungs. That is the dirt bottom isn’t it. It is hard to put forward an agenda about art making life worth living when the fundamental basics are not even guaranteed for most people. All I can say is I joined a renter’s union, finally. It only took years of knowing I should. That’s where the hope and power is now, along with (often poorly resourced) artists who have the talent and insight to articulate what is happening.
Nothing about art writing is relatable
Emily, my ever-compassionate collaborator on MEDUSA gifted me Olivia Laing's Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency for my birthday. This collection takes form around the flammable potency of art to reflect, rebut, and reform our culture. I had previously heard of next to none of the artists that she talks about, and learned a great deal. Derek Jarman stood out as someone I must discover, particularly his writing on gardening as he battled AIDS, and Jean Rhys, brilliant but marred in her alcoholism, a writer I must reframe from university lectures (Wide Sargasso Sea is just so amazing, I really recommend it, the language is so vivid).
Rather than exist in simply outrage, Laing chooses to dissect art that speaks to hope instead of solely fear, or work that reveals something of us in its devastation. I was left hungry for a coffee with Laing to pick her brains about what-exactly-she-meant-when-she-said-that-profound-thing-and-then-the-column-ended more times than once. More to be unpacked, but she captures 'essence' so well. Her essays provide more space to glide, often striding whole movements of artists and writers. She has quite the knack for dropping you in the middle of her thought pattern, and making leaps across artistic examples so quickly that there is just no clunk for the reader. You are not reliant on having seen or read the works to get their feel; for that reason I think her writing is pretty accessible, albeit the subject matter is not. Read her work if you want to be a better writer.
But, I must say, I sometimes find the experience of reading about culture (hopeful or not), an implicitly violent thing. It can make me miserable rather than energised, mainly because of who is writing it. When we read, we are asked to set aside our own sense of identity in order to occupy the voice of the writer. In this case, Olivia Laing makes light jokes about rejecting Cambridge Uni to go and live in a tree for two years; escaping to New York and being horrified at Trump in a resoundingly liberal way; interviewing her sister-in-law Ali Smith, a famous writer. I'll chuckle along even though these experiences and connections could not be further from myself. That's fine, difference is good. But it's not difference when it's the same narrative or experiences being laid out time and time again. I've rather cruelly used Laing as a synecdoche - a part of a whole bigger problem of wealth, access and nepotism that fizzles in the arts. Her writing is astounding, but just once, I'd love to read someone critique art who isn't part of that elite group and does not write predominately for them either (who else reads frieze? I didn't even know what Frieze Week was until this year, now it's emblazoned in my brain). Where you didn't grow up playing hide and seek in your auntie's art studio, or a hippie living off the land, but instead went to Frankie and Bennie's after bowling and have 2010's X-Factor Halloween special outfits burned in your memory.
It's such a tiny percentage of the population that have a chokehold on the literature and dissemination of (high) culture that our consumption of it is massively skewed to align with their voices. It's not as simple as 'wealth', either, when I am talking about access to cultural capital over cash (although of course, they regularly go hand in hand, one often needed to access the other).
While I enjoy consuming writing on art, it's limited by that inner conflict. Every time I read these kinds of texts I am asked to ignore parts of myself, and align with dominant narratives that fill my day to day anyway. It actually boils my blood, the constantly shifting. Perhaps a wiser person would say, surely both can coexist, and perhaps they can, but they do not exist on a level playing field which is why I feel this discomfort and protectiveness so viscerally.
There is a fear that it would be so easy to lap up all these codes and pass them off as my own, in a bid to feel closer to the culture I consume (I mean last week I started this newsletter from an airport in Athens). But assimilate completely and bury a layer of my identity in shame in the process, nope. I am not surrendering at the cost of my own reality, my roots, myself. Because surrendering suggests I wasn't enough to begin with, and I reject that statement wholeheartedly. Nuance is tricky.
‘High’ and ‘popular’ culture are fascinating things in themselves, used to stratify people with codes for class, education and economic association. It’s why the phenomenon of trivial things like negroni cocktails and Ottolenghi’s cooking have become such a big deal for the upper-middle classes.
While I dispute that ‘popular’ culture is any less valuable than ‘high’ culture, it’s no surprise that given time and access, high culture often finds itself more world-building. That isn’t because of a lack of intelligence, wit or insight in popular culture - look no further than the love of huns instagram account - but carefully considered art, of any form, needs to open up new possibilities, ways of articulation about the human experience, and most importantly for me, doorways into feeling deep emotion. I think we should all have access to it all, which is exactly capitalism really do be shitting on the majority of us. Because to access it, you need time, money, education, people.
That’s all. Sorry, my neural pathways are accustomed to moaning - there is always hope, folks, as Olivia Laing's book actually really imbues before I went on a rant about writers and access to culture. Sorry Olivia. You really are a remarkable writer and I want to write as fluidly as you. But more people should be able to access what these writers, I worry, take for granted.
A Christmas break is needed. Radical hope is needed!! Eden to join some form of organising is needed.
Take care,
Eden
Balm for the week
I ended up in a TikTok hole this week, and way past midnight was actually quite moved to watch ex-gymnast Nile Wilson chat about his struggle with addiction in a mini TED Talk. I used to watch Nile’s YouTube videos, mainly because I fancied him (fickle I know) and he did very cool things like fly around the world doing somersaults. He was a proper gobshite but also insanely talented, the perfect recipe for a successful career in influencing. In this video he cuts the bravado and is honest about the fine line between being driven to succeed, and driven to the brink. Good on him.