This is my second book by Laing, a British writer of culture who explores the role of art in the modern world by looking at the past. In this one she writes about Georgia O'Keefe, David Bowie, Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel, Patricia Highsmith. A wonderful book full of humor and heart where Laing shows how art can help in the terrifying time of Trump and politics. ( )

[Auckland Libraries]

Feels like a collection of writings loosely threaded together by the inaugural and final pieces, both of which explicitly emphasise the role of art in political change. Laing writes in the foreword that art is not a magic bullet and that empathy takes work. That what art does "is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces." In the final piece, an interview with artist Joseph Keckler, Laing says that she doesn't think that there is a "political realm that's truly separate from the cultural realm or the emotional realm or the social realm," that everything is immensely entangled. And while I agree with this, it feels as if the writing that takes up the majority of the book is skirting around, or on the edges, of this entanglement. Much is extremely subjective and personal, which is both a virtue and a vice, as I feel that the issue of wider accessibility, which is critical to contemporary art and its politics, has been left out of the view.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading Laing's writings a lot, especially when she writes about other people in that way which is reverent and honest, revealing as much about herself as she does the subjects of the essays. If anything, these essays mark out a way of engaging with art that is productive, open-minded and relevant to subjective, personal experience. And that skirting around I mentioned before may be a corollary of the refusal to lock art into a specific task, made manifest by Keckler in the final sentences of the book: "The best work is always going to seem both deeply unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. It's always going to be operating outside of whatever job description you assign it."

Beyond that, I'm grateful for this book because it allowed me to discover many interesting artists and writers (many of whom I'd previously neglected). I'm super excited to read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's ideas on reparative reading.

I am completely torn on this book. It really feels like two books. One is deeply thought and insightful and includes excellent essays on artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Joseph Cornell and Patricial Highsmith. The introduction to the book is one of the best considerations I've read of what art means in today's weird world.

Then there's the second book. Many are articles and columns from various periodicals and most of them feel flat, as if she was meeting a deadline. There are pieces on David Bowie and John Berger which are no more than a few pages long. I kept wishing she would have expanded on them for this book, because I love basically everything she writes and when she doesn't throw her full intellect into a topic, I am disappointed. ( )

A few years back I started reading and fell in love with essays. There is something so personal about these short glimpses into what or who authors chose to write. In these Laing gives us a glimpse into the lives of some important artists, writers and singers of the 20th century. In biographical sketches she chose some I had never heard; such as Rachel Kneebone.

"An artist who created monumental, frightening complex sculptures out of porcelain. I've never seen anything that so purely captures the indifference of vitality, the way life is always shifting into death and out again?"

I had to look her up and adore her work. https://www.artsy.net/artist/rachel-kneebone. She also includes O'Keefe whose work I love. Mantel and Ali Smith, a little Bowie and Patti Smith. Some of my favorites were her cultural commentaries. She covers much in a relatively few short pages, some that deserve rereading.

This is a thought to which I can certainly relate.

"After the American election, I fell asleep each night packing a bag in my mind. A map, a compass, cash, a torch. What kind of disaster did I think was coming? Everything was eroding: language, truth, civil rights."

ARC from Edelweiss ( )