(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Strange about this loneliness that we escape from through work and dispersion that makes us inferior, but which can give us the most important thing in life. For a while while living in New York, author Olivia Laing was struck by the widespread sense of loneliness among people in big cities. She was lying on the couch at home and browsing the net. Moving outside, she felt a membrane around herself and others.
Loneliness Study. One day she caught sight of some black and white photos of the city that affected the feeling she had. A mood and sensation that nourished the city and things. She then worked on loneliness by studying the work and life of other artists: Edward Hopper's paintings from NY, Andy Warhol's life, social outsiders such as feminist Valerie Solanas and photographer David Wojnarowicz, marginal artists like Henry Darger and the screen and net culture's mirror worlds.
Laing saw the duality of loneliness: on the one hand, the longing for closeness and contact, on the other, the loneliness of creation. Laing became an urban wanderer and eventually the loneliness appeared to her "as a populated place, a city in itself". She realized how many of our actions and decisions can be traced back to solitude. She read Virginia Woolf's diaries describing inner loneliness as a "sense of the noise of the world when loneliness and silence tear you away from the habitable world." While collecting her material, she listened to a song she knew from the past, Dennis Wilson's "Loneliness is a very special place". She realized that loneliness is not only something we should avoid, a depression over the deprivation of the company of others, but "one experience that goes directly to the heart of what we value and need." By combining interpretations of artworks and art life with psychiatric and psychotherapeutic professional books, Laing creates an inspirational document on loneliness in the urban life of the 21st century.
Glass walls. In Hopper's paintings, she gets on the track of loneliness as something that settles into the body, in the things one senses, for example c. . It is like «walls of glass» in the social interaction that can only be painted. Hopper's paintings capture this "conflict between independence and desire", this "escape from intimacy, as a way to escape from real emotional demands". Laing refers to the psychiatrist Robert Weiss' study of modern loneliness as "an exhilarating experience in itself" but also a "self-protective amnesia" – and what he calls a "perverse satisfaction of loneliness" arises. Loneliness expands and creates its own hyper-sensitivity. Andy Warhol is a good example whose life work Laing sees guided by a deep longing for closeness and at the same time the horror of self. "To see and not to be seen," he said, "I want to be a machine." The machine distance was liberating. But if loneliness is defined as a longing for closeness, "it also contains a need to express, be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Proximity can only be achieved if the parties concerned are ready to expose themselves ».
Loneliness emerged as a populated place, a city in itself.
They think differently. Warhol was a deviant, a crooked existence, but he fought the feeling of being outside society in a passive way, Laing writes. But what happens if you want to combat the feeling of being outside in an active way, if you want to attack the established norms of society? For the feminist Valerie Solanas, famous for both shooting Andy Warhol on the open street in New York, who survived, and for her SCUM manifesto ("Society for Cutting Up Men"), the result was extreme isolation. "She never managed to make contact using words." She died alone in a hotel room. Photographer Wojnarowicz also had a sense of being from another planet. He broke through with the photo series Rimbaud in New York with pictures of a man walking around the streets with a paper mask depicting the face of the French poet. Photos taken at places where Wojnarowicz himself lived his desperate childhood and youth in the 70s runned down NY. "The story of Wojnarowicz's life is a tale of masks, why they are needed, why they can be mistrusted, why they may be needed to survive." He visited the city's port district and the homosexual seclusion made it possible to enjoy the solitude in the middle of the city. According to Laing, loneliness, separation, and acute death consciousness had a decisive impact on the gay and AIDS-stricken art scene in NY up through the 80s.
The gentrification of the emotions. The Warholian sense of kinship with the machine calls Laing "a hunger for electronic calories, a longing to enter an artificial mirror world". Like tech psychologist Sherry Turkle, Laing sees a connection between loneliness, loss of concentration and intimacy, and people's constant connection. We have all become small andy-warholes with a deep longing for contact, but intimidated by intimacy. She asks, "What do we long for when we upload pictures?" She sees the exposure culture as totalitarian because it shatters the self-esteem that is a prerequisite for closeness. But her scoop here is not this well-known pathology criticism, but the link to the horror of exposure culture by the different thinking, different looks, the hungry bodies, the prostitute, the foreign immigrant, the unclean. She calls modern metropolitan online culture a "gentrification of feeling". Just as high house prices create homogenization and unification in urban spaces among people and culture, the web's mirror world creates a "deep fear of dissent, a horror of the dirty and contagious, a reluctance to allow disparate life forms to coexist". What she calls "the sterile net culture" is the hold of the easy feelings, where one does not work and reflect, but stun with images and oneliners as if it were drugs. She ponders whether this self-anesthetic "bottoms up the anxiety that we will one day remain lonely, the last species to survive this diverse floral ornamental planet floating through an empty space". Several important places in NY, including Time Square, are being kept free of "unclean types". A homogeneous smooth space must ensure the empty culture of consumer culture. "But closing the city core involves loneliness for everyone." The crooked, sensitive existences creep into their caves. Like Henry Dager, an exposed marginal artist who for 40 years worked as a handyman in a hospital and lived alone in a lobster (tiny room, ed. Note) all his life. Instead of labeling his art as a schizophrenic disease story, she convincingly argues for Dager's painting as a space of repetition that creates its own overreal realms.
"The sterile online culture" is the stop of the simple emotions, where one is overwhelmed with images and oneliners who were the narcotics.
Loneliness is political. Loneliness usually does not arouse empathy, but Laing's studies of artists and skewed socially exposed existences confirmed her in "the potential beauty of solitude". "Much of the torment of loneliness is due to mystery, to the feeling that vulnerability must be hidden away, to avoid the unpleasantness of having to hide scars as if they were something disgusting. What is so embarrassing about missing out, longing, not being satisfied, but feeling sad? Where does this need to constantly be at the top, or to be conveniently enclosed in an ambiguity, to turn inward, away from this outer world? "
We need loneliness, and we need the art of giving back some of it that we miss and have lost.
