Archiving the Ephemeral

Every artist, especially those who want to create work that feels genuinely new, must know the history of their art form: you can't push your medium forward if you don't know where it's been. For performing artists, this creates a difficulty. As Peggy Phelan argued, "performance becomes itself through disappearance." The perishability of performance is one of its central characteristics, which means that artists only ever have a partial understanding of works that predate us. They can be resurrected through grainy video footage or photographs, but these resurrections often feel zombie-like, lacking in the essential vitality of the live event. Another way to appreciate the meaning of a work is to read first-hand accounts of what the piece felt likel in its original context. This is the valuable service rendered by the new Laing and Apple titles.

The British writer Olivia Laing has published three previous works of non-fiction as well as the 2018 novel Crudo, but Funny Weather is her first collection of essays. Funny Weather weaves autobiography and criticism, and Laing foregrounds her own subjective experience of the art she describes. She begins an essay on Freddie Mercury with "I ♥ Freddie Mercury," and introduces the filmmaker Derek Jarman by telling us she was turned on to his work by her sister, then eleven years old.

Laing has a deep connection to the queer artists of the 1980s and 90s, a bond forged through her own experience growing up with a lesbian mother. Two of the book's best essays were originally published as introductions to Jarman's book Modern Nature and David Wojnarowicz's book Close to the Knives. Wojnarowicz responded to the Reagan administration's murderous contempt for queer life with searing anger, writing, "some of us are born with the cross-hairs of a rifle scope printed on our backs or skulls." Laing finds inspiration in Wojnarowicz's refusal to be silent in the face of oppression, writing that if silence equals death "then art equals language equals life." His memoir is itself an archive of the ephemeral: protests, performances, hook-ups, doctor's visits. Wojnarowicz is still not silent, even in death.

In contrast, Jarman's Modern Nature is a gentler form of rebellion, officially a book about gardening. Jarman fought against the Thatcher administration's response to AIDS by creating "another kind of life: wild, riotous, jolly." Laing recounts the transformative experience of reading Modern Nature as a teenager, writing, "It was here I developed a sense of what it meant to be an artist, to be political, even how to plant a garden (playfully, stubbornly, ignoring boundaries, collaborating freely)." The garden Jarman created, along a rocky shoreline and within sight of a power plant, is still there, more than twenty-five years after his death. Like his films, it is an exercise in controlled chaos, austere and whimsical at the same time.

Laing covers a lot of ground in her book, taking in David Bowie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Maggie Nelson, and Georgia O'Keefe. The collection could feel scatter-shot, drawing on a half-decade of columns, reviews, and introductions, but Laing's distinctive voice binds it together. Though many of the artists she writes about are securely canonical, Laing writes about them as if they were her dear friends.

Like Funny Weather, Jacki Apple's Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983–2018 collects pieces originally written for a variety of publications, including Fabrik, Artweek, Media Arts, Visions, and High Performance. Apple is a Los Angeles–based artist who has worked in a dizzying variety of media, including fashion design, radio art, music, performance art, installation, and film. She hosted a radio program called Soundings from 1982 to 1995 on which she interviewed performance artists and presented works of sound and radio art. Her dual position as an artist and a critic makes her an ideal guide to the last forty years of American...