“Imagine standing at the window, at night, on the sixth or seventh or forty-third floor of a building. The city appears as a collection of cells, hundreds of thousands of windows, some dark, others flooded with green or white or golden light”. Olivia Laing walks through the streets of New York and creates a strange and sentimental map, one that walks the edge of the abyss of isolation. Thanks to Laing, New York becomes all of the cities that we have passed through, and presents a very particular expression of a form of solitude that is exquisitely urban.
A formidable book that explores solitude up to and beyond our present; set out in seven chapters for seven special residents, seven artists who have lived in Olivia Laing’s lonely city, a true “city apart” that we discover is actually a very crowded place. We begin with the picture-aquariums of Edward Hopper, to then move on to Andy Warhol, who, “terrorised by the idea of physical contact” only went out clad “in an amour of video cameras and recording devices”, or with David Wojnarowicz, an activist, author and photographer who protects himself with the mask of Rimbaud, right up to Zoe Leonard and her 302 fruits that have been dried and sewn to repair her fragmenting caused by mourning and loneliness.
Via a QR code, spectators are able to listen to the work by Laing – like a narrative intrusion during the cast – thus forced in some way to change their pace and gaze in relation to the urban landscape, their own solitude and art as a form of resistance and testimony. An urban performance and a metropolitan project that accompanies the spectator through a series of urban locations.