In Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, a corner diner is brightly lit. A server stands behind the counter; customers sit before it. Curving glass exposes this small interior. Someone in the street can see inside, but no entrance appears in the painting. It is not an empty room. Precisely because people are there, a viewer may feel more keenly what it means to remain outside.
Olivia Laing's The Lonely City begins from a comparable distance. Living in New York in her thirties, after an intimate relationship failed to continue, Laing lacked familiar people nearby. The city had no shortage of inhabitants; what was missing was a relationship one could approach. Loneliness takes a specific form: living close together does not ensure entry into one another's lives.
Published in 2016, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone appeared in Yang Yijing's Chinese translation in 2017. It places personal experience beside artists' lives and works. Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Henry Darger appear, but readers need not arrive knowing them. Laing introduces them while changing what initially seemed a simple question: why does someone feel lonely?
There is no sequence of exercises guaranteed to produce friends. Instead, the book asks what we hear when someone describes loneliness. A defect to remove quickly, or a life we have not yet tried to understand?
Why Can People Make a Picture Feel Lonelier?
Calling Hopper a painter of loneliness is not unreasonable. But a label can stop us looking. Nighthawks reminds us that loneliness does not require a solitary figure. Several people in one place can produce distance. Glass admits the gaze while keeping the body outside. Such arrangements have more force than invented unhappy biographies for everyone depicted.
The Art Institute of Chicago's description likewise notes the absence of a visible entrance. We need not fabricate misfortunes for the customers or suppose they are all unhappy. The painting offers a recognizable situation: warmth and company seem close, but one does not know how to join them.
Laing's way of looking is moving partly because it does not immediately demand that viewers overcome this feeling. Advice about loneliness arrives quickly: go out, join an activity, talk to someone. It may help, yet its speed can make a person feel incapable of even these simple steps. Art temporarily slows that process. We may stay a while and acknowledge familiarity with being on the other side of glass.
The figures' unspecified identities leave room. Viewers need not share the painter's marriage, occupation, or age to recognize experience in an arrangement of space. This is not a psychological test with one answer. Different people may recognize different things.
Nor does Laing turn every New York window into melancholy scenery. Other questions emerge. Some people fear closeness, some meet rejection, and some have lost friends they once had. The resulting feelings may resemble one another; their causes cannot simply be merged.
The Person Carrying a Recorder
Warhol makes the assumption that lonely people lack social lives harder to sustain. He had associates, collaborators, and visitors, and left a dense record of images and sounds. Extensive contact need not exclude an inward sense of distance.
Laing notices how cameras and recording equipment helped him approach others while buffering the awkwardness of direct conversation. Recording preserves an encounter but also allows the recorder to step back. Warhol even called his tape recorder his “wife.” Behind the light phrase is an attachment not easily exhausted by calling the machine a tool.
Laing does not merely expose a celebrity's fear of contact. The step backward enabled by a machine may make contact bearable. For someone who struggles with conversation, sharing an object of attention or recording may be easier than an immediate demand for emotional openness. Recognizing that need does not mean machines meet every need for intimacy.
Here the book touches ordinary contemporary experience. A screen may help someone avoid a person nearby, or make possible words that otherwise could not be spoken. Judging a medium requires knowing who is using it and with whom, not merely noticing the presence of a machine.
In a 2017 New School interview, Laing rejected the blanket dismissal of online contact as unreal. Distant communities can offer important support where someone's immediate surroundings are unaccepting. At the same time, a screen cannot provide certain comforts of bodily presence. Neither point cancels the other. Technology does not remove the difficulties of relationships, nor invalidate every relationship conducted through it.
Warhol thus changes the opening image. What stands between people does not always obstruct. Sometimes it helps them approach gradually. We may think helping means removing every screen, while the other person is not ready to stand so exposed.
Some Distances Are Imposed
Wojnarowicz's life turns the discussion again. Where someone faces hostility and denied opportunities, urging greater courage in approaching others is far from sufficient.
An American artist, writer, and activist during the AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz experienced childhood injury, made art, and lived through illness and the deaths of friends. He died of AIDS-related illness in 1992, aged thirty-seven. Loneliness here is not occasional evening sadness. It concerns whose lives receive protection and whose suffering can be ignored.
Consider alongside this discussion his work Untitled (One Day This Kid…), held by the Whitney. A childhood photograph shows him smiling. Surrounding words anticipate punishment from families, religion, and public institutions for his same-sex desires. Exclusion not yet present in the photograph has become clear in the adult's account.
The work hurts because apparently separate judgments accumulate around one particular child. If we see only the eventual loneliness, we may attribute everything to his inner life. Laing reconnects the routes by which that loneliness was produced.
But he left more than a history of victimization. He made work, expressed anger, formed relationships, and resisted society's accounts of people like him. Art does not only offer gentle consolation. It can disturb, bringing forward what readers might otherwise avoid and asking them to listen rather than leave because the voice is insufficiently calm.
Discussing the research later, Laing described listening to his recorded diaries in New York University's archives. Biography requires verification and organization, but hearing someone's voice differs from knowing the group to which he belonged. The recordings do not restore the dead; they allow later listeners to know more than a diagnosis, a period, or a death toll.
Reducing this to an artist turning pain into beauty would let the work settle the account for the injury, as though a worthwhile artwork compensated for what happened. The work deserves preservation; the injury still demands scrutiny. Expression may move us while the circumstances it resists remain unacceptable.
Looking at Others, Watching Ourselves Look
The book lets forms of reading usually kept separate illuminate each other. Personal memory brings us toward art, which gives private feelings a longer history. Its range extends beyond these three artists to Darger's enormous body of work, online life, bodies, and shame. It will not always advance along a single storyline; readers must accept changes of direction.
A Goodreads reader, Warwick, notes that someone expecting an urban memoir may find the center of gravity closer to art criticism. That is more useful than calling the book soothing or depressing. Its attraction lies in following a viewer toward different people and works. Readers interested only in Laing's recovery from heartbreak may experience those excursions as detours.
The method also leaves a question. Does recognizing ourselves in another's work make us assume too quickly that we know its maker? These artists had distinct lives. Finding companionship in a picture does not establish that its painter intended precisely the feeling we now discover. Resonance can begin understanding, not replace the understanding still to come.
Fortunately, Laing does not require art to do everything. In the interview, art is explicitly not a universal route to happiness. Sometimes it means feeling less utterly unaccompanied during a difficult period. That is limited, but not negligible.
Hopper's glass, Warhol's recorder, and Wojnarowicz's diaries bring Laing before different lonelinesses. Sometimes art supplies companionship; sometimes it requires a move beyond personal feeling toward another's circumstances. Following those turns offers more than a remedy list. We may remain lonely while becoming better able to distinguish how someone needs to be approached, and which barriers keeping them outside cannot be dissolved by consolation alone.