May 11, 2020 Arts & Culture Vanished into Music By Olivia Laing Arthur Russell. There’s a man on the ferry. He’s wearing jeans and a baseball jacket, and standing at the stern, his handsome face pitted with acne scars. Everyone else is looking at Manhattan. It’s 1986: the twin towers dominate the view. But this man isn’t looking at the buildings. He’s staring at the swirling water, the confluence of tides, the East River and the Hudson coming together in the harbor of the city. Out here, everything is expansive. Out here, everything falls away. He has his Walkman in his pocket, his headphones around his ears. The music he’s listening to is a mix he finished late last night. When he was done—though nothing he does is ever done, exactly—he took the cassette and left the studio. Full moon, of course. He has been recording this album every full moon for three years now. Sometimes he curls up in the studio for a nap, waking in the small hours with a new idea, an unprecedented sound bubbling through his mind. His name is Arthur Russell. He’s thirty-five. He’s a gay man, a Buddhist, a cellist, a country singer, an avant-garde composer, a disco queen; he is the greatest musician you’ve never heard of. The music he’s been making doesn’t sound like any music that’s ever been made before. It’s like music from the bottom of the ocean, it’s like music they play in nightclubs on the moon. The album he’s working on, his first, is called World of Echo. Just his voice and his cello, in a studio in the deserted Financial District, surrounded by empty, glowing offices. One man pushing music to its limits, finding the breaking points, making the most beautiful songs imaginable and then teasing them apart like taffy, amplifying and distorting until they dissolve into lakes of sound. Read More
April 11, 2019 Look Chantal Joffe’s Many Faces By Olivia Laing Chantal Joffe, Self-Portrait, 1st January, 2018, oil on board, 24 1/8″ x 18″. © Chantal Joffe. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Here’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper: “small heads—meditations—buy lots of small boards.” The first was painted on January 1, 2018, “the worst day of the year,” not that the rest of the year was that much brighter. Joffe’s marriage was breaking up. She painted herself nearly every day, sometimes at night, always in fairly pitiless light. Speaking broadly for a minute, she looks in this extraordinary series of self-portraits like someone almost warping under a heavy weight. Bowed down, weighted by feeling, she peers back at herself, artist prowling after sitter, avid to catch pouches, moles, sags, bags, and quirks of flesh. Maybe at first it looks like someone giving herself a hard time, the visual equivalent of how (women) rail against their face, their thighs. Something funny happens when a woman looks at herself, as if she can’t ever not be narcissistic, flaunting the way she either measures up or doesn’t to the flawless face we all carry around inside the handbag of our heads. That’s inevitable, you can’t unthink political realities, but it isn’t exactly what’s happening here. The clue, I think, is what it’s like to look at these faces communally, as a chorus. They are so wildly specific, peering at you sideways, each one differently unhappy, each one concrete, present, original as in not a copy of the last. Read More
September 4, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Olivia Laing By Olivia Laing In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Kathy is conducting an audit of her fridge. She has just had an email. A man she knows, B, who is truly among the most beautiful men ever to live, is in the hospital with an inoperable brain tumor. The symptoms had begun, the email said, two days after she had last seen him in May. B with his doe eyes, B who had set himself against death, who had been a hospital carer for so many years, was himself about to die. Once, they had been about to meet when she mentioned casually that she had a cough. No, B said. I can’t see you. I am looking after a neighbor who is immunocompromised. Somewhere on her laptop there was a photo of him when he was very young and recently bereaved, his arm around a cheetah. They looked the same, like blood relations. Read More