(l) Short story as art criticism, or possibly the other way around:

Olivia Laing is just about my favourite writer at the moment; reading The Lonely Cityand To the River have played a significant part in keeping me sane over the last two years. So maybe favourite’s not the right word. She is my essential writer at the moment. From 2015 to 2019 she wrote a regular art-cultural criticism column for friezemagazine, and the best of them are weird tales easily the equal of anything else I’ve chosen here. ‘A History of Violence’ begins with a man at a London party coming up to her and just starting to talk:

“My dad was Irish, he said, he worked on the building sites. London was built by the Irish. They all died young. No compensation. It was the asbestos, it got into their lungs.”

Which makes zero literal sense if you actually think about it, but is culturally true. Or, as Laing goes on to elucidate, is capitally true. “Everything is seeping to the surface now,” she writes, “the slow or hidden violence of late capitalism… You can be an accidental connoisseur of snuff movies simply by scrolling through Twitter with a breakfast cup of tea.” In the space of barely three pages she glides through, or rather connects up, the fate of Irish navvies, the tar pit of social media, contemporary French literature, and the blood-soaked art of Ana Mendieta — then takes a final vertiginous step into Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and how “Eichmann’s trial testimony was marked by a constant refrain of looking away.” Except from one thing: a burial ditch from which the blood would not stop seeping.

Eichmann refused to look so he could pretend he hadn’t seen. Laing’s humane genius is to look at everything, to bear witness, and to bring back the stories of what she hasseen.

First published in frieze, June, 2018 and available to read here. Collected in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Picador, 2020