Sara Baume & Emily LaBarge: Opening Night
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What is the premise of Sara Baume’s book *Opening Night* and how did it originate?
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Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about our upcoming events, visit londonreviewbookshop.co.uk forward slash events.
Hello everyone and a very warm welcome on a thankfully slightly less warm night than this time last week. Yes, thankfully. Yeah, a very warm welcome to the London Review Bookshop where we are delighted to welcome Sarah Bourne to talk about her new book, Opening Night, published by Granta. I had the honour of reading this a little while ago in advance. And if you haven't read it yet, it's absolutely brilliant. It's really beautiful. And I do urge you to grab a copy tonight if you don't already have one. Sarah will be in conversation with Emily Labarge, great friend of the shop, brilliant chair, brilliant author, author of Dog Days, which we held launch when it came out. Thank you very much for being back as well.
And welcome to you for the first time. Our guests will talk for about 45 minutes. There'll be time for your questions afterwards. My colleague Anya will have this mic. If you want to ask anything, thank you for listening to me. And now for the good stuff, Sarah Emily. Thank you so much. Congratulations, Sarah. Cheers.
Hi, thank you everyone for joining us. And thank you, Sarah, for this really, I think, quite mysterious, beguiling... genre-less book
in a way um
and we'll get into that for me is very much about the relationship between writing and images between literature and art and perhaps more than anything about friendship and how that relates to those two things over a very specific span of years early on in the book you say i've come to realize in recent years that i tend only to sincerely like contemporary artworks after i've established some version of intimacy with the person who made them and when i was looking back through the book to come up with my questions that sort of struck me as a very nuanced kind of opening gambit for actually how the book unfolds in a way but i wonder if you could say something about this idea of requiring an intimacy with the maker of a work of art and how that began this project, but also how it kind of starts the book in itself.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, this is a question I'm maybe going to turn back around on you because I've done, I do bits of art writing, like my background is art school. So I went to art school and then after art school, I started kind of working in galleries and then from there started writing about art, like reviews and interviews and stuff like that. And then eventually wrote fiction. But in the years since, I do maybe like, maybe a couple, maybe only one, you know, catalogue essay or exhibition essay a year. And it's nearly always like, I guess I'm kind of, I'm kind of picky about who I do it for. And I mean, it's not a huge scene at home anyway, but it's, I'm always like, my modus operandi is, you know, invited to the artist's studio.
So you research their past work, you go and visit their studio, you talk to them, you look at the, maybe you go to the exhibition beforehand or whatever, you write the piece. But my modus operandi tends to be like every time, I can't do this too often because I do the same rough thing every time. And it's always like the essay ends up being a personal essay about me like driving to the house, wherever it is, to the lovely studio, sort of describing the countryside or fixating on what the artist gave me for lunch. Or I remember some sculptor who had like this really fascinating arrangement of flowers in her toilet. And I was like, this is too good. The flowers are going to end up in the essay. So like I just found it really hard to extricate myself
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the premise of Sara Baume’s book *Opening Night* and how did it originate?
0:00–13:03
2
How does Baume describe the need for intimacy with an artist before writing about their work?
13:03–35:28
3
What does Baume reveal about her process of visiting Molly Douthit’s studio and the impact of the studio environment?
35:28–1:02:04