Congratulations to art lovers who have never had someone say to them, "What purpose does art serve?" For aesthetes, the answer is obvious. At its most profound, art provides new perspectives, confronts injustice, assures those who feel like perpetual outsiders that they're not alone. Critic Megan O'Grady has always embraced conceptual artist Barbara Kruger's observation that art teaches a person, "through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Knowing a good title when she hears one, O'Grady borrows those words for How It Feels to Be Alive, a collection of five essays in which she investigates the way art "provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society." She has chosen works that raised "questions that still feel urgent to me" and "offered me an eloquent shorthand in an often-incoherent world."
These marvelous pieces follow a similar structure. Each begins by focusing on one artist and then expands into a larger discourse on pressing themes. Her essay on Kruger starts with Kruger's most famous image, Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), "depicting a woman's face, bisected into positive and negative exposures." The mother of a young daughter, O'Grady describes how works like Untitled taught her that her body was politicized in ways men's bodies aren't and wonders "how art could meaningfully respond." This leads to a more expansive essay on women being reduced to nothing but a body.
The other essays are equally provocative. Her piece on Agnes Martin's painting Friendship, a "gridded field of gold," and Martin's life off-grid--she left New York for a New Mexico mesa--elaborates on the role of grids, from Zoom boxes to strictures in one's life, that harmonize as much as constrict. Her essay on a photo from Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series, in which a Black mother and daughter apply lipstick while peering into vanity mirrors, addresses the desire of underrepresented audiences to see themselves in art. The water bottle decorated with "a sinister image of Flint, Michigan's water plant" by Pope.L calls attention to "the racism at play in the systematic undermining of the once-thriving town." And environmental artist Beverly Pepper's massive outdoor sculptures lead O'Grady to muse upon the land art movement from the 1960s and '70s, and many Americans' indifference to environmental disaster, as when she notes that the warnings represented by wildfires in Colorado, her home at the time of writing, inexplicably fail to elicit more than mild concern. How It Feels to Be Alive is a memorable and viscerally elegant treatment of these critical themes. Know anyone who questions the value of art? Hand them a copy of this book. -- Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: How It Feels to Be Alive by critic Megan O'Grady collects five essays about artists whose provocative works address pressing questions of sexism, racism, environmental degradation, and more.