GEETA DAYAL

Here’s the big review I wrote of the recent Stan VanDerBeek retrospective at the List Visual Arts Center, for the Frieze summer issue.

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Another new piece by me: A review of Rob Young’s book Electric Eden, for Bookforum.

The Big Exciting Thing I’m working on right now, which is occupying most of my time, is the proposal for my second book. Making lots of progress, and feeling inspired, which is always good. The proposal is 50 pages long, and extensively researched; it’s like writing a mini-book. I’m being purposefully vague about the subject matter right now except to say that it deals with music, and with art; more on this soon, once the book sells to a publisher.

More stuff coming out: I wrote a big review of the wonderful Stan VanDerBeek retrospective at the List Visual Arts Center for the summer issue of Frieze, which will be out soon. I’m also working on a big review of the Angus MacLise exhibition in New York, also for Frieze. Some things for The Wire and Rhizome are in the works as well. And other interesting things, too, including a big website I’m building, dealing with art and maps.

Over the past eight weeks, I’ve been in New York City, San Francisco (twice), Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and Ireland (Dublin, Belfast, and Galway, among other places). In Boston now, and it’s nice to be back.

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A big interview I did with Max Mathews for Frieze, a few weeks before he died. Such a long, incredible, and fascinating life. We talked for almost four hours, and the full transcript is twice as long as this; at some point, I’ll have to publish the full version. I’ll write more about it soon, but right now I’m boarding a plane to the West Coast.

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I just found this profile I wrote about the artist Carsten Höller, for the (sadly departed) Res magazine in 2006. I’ve typed it out here; hope you enjoy reading it.

ALTERED STATES: Carsten Höller

by Geeta Dayal

Res, Jan/Feb 2006

“SOME OF THEM are called mind-shakers,” Carsten Höller says mysteriously, referring to the objects in his new installation. “Instead of shaking your body, they’ll shake your mind in some way.”

The 45-year-old artist and his crew are building an amusement park inside of a giant exhibition space at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Amusement Park: Unfinished and Amusement Park: Finished, his two upcoming installations at the MASS MoCA, blow up earlier Höller works like Grönalund Tivoli Star and Roller Coaster (2005) and Carousel (1999-2000) to a massive scale. Amusement Park involves typical amusement park rides — bumper cars, a Gravitron — but the lights, music, and movement are drastically shifted in pace and timing. Höller talks excitedly about slowing the rides down to a molasses crawl. “It will be like a negative amusement park,” he says grimly, but with an edge of glee to his voice. “We are taking all the fun away.”

The more Höller talks about Amusement Park, the more it does sound like fun. He speaks with the infectious enthusiasm of a child discovering a new toy. “Everybody has a lot of memories when it comes to amusement parks,” he says. “It works on you on a very strong subconscious childhood level.”

Höller goes off on a tangent about the differences between American and European merry-go-rounds, spending ten minutes discussing the deep historical reasons why European carousels run counter-clockwise and American ones run clockwise. It’s fascinating stuff, and it’s all completely bonkers. He’s debating the inclusion of a rollercoaster in the new show, but it probably won’t happen. “But I’m still hoping for the bumper cars, Twister or Twirl-o-Wheel, a turning platform. . .” [click to continue…]

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A cool picture my friend Matt took of me in my house. I live in a very odd house.

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A few bits and bobs of things I’ve been involved with recently:

I wrote a two-page spread about South Asian pop music for the amazing New City Reader, a newspaper on display at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City as part of the current “Last Newspaper” exhibition. You can pick up a physical copy at the New Museum, or you can download a PDF of the whole issue here.

The current issue of the Italian art magazine Kaleidoscope includes excerpts from the panel I was a part of at Frieze Art Fair in London. I haven’t picked it up yet, but it looks good.

Also: I was on WNYC, New York City’s NPR station, to talk about Indian disco records on “Soundcheck.” It originally aired in September and re-aired on Thanksgiving. You can read more about it here, or listen to the full broadcast below.

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We’ve reached a critical boiling point, haven’t we? Politics is high drama, in a way it hasn’t been since the 2008 elections. There is, of course, the enormous international maelstrom surrounding WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and the leaked diplomatic cables. Add in the massive protests in London against a threefold increase in tuition fees, and the face-off between students and police. Add to that the Nobel Peace Prize going to the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was barred by the Chinese government from receiving one of the most prestigious prizes on the planet. Add in the big Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery censorship debacle involving a contested piece by the artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. The meltdown of the Irish economy. The tremendously flawed tax cut plan going through Congress, and Obama’s support of it — a major disappointment to everyone I know, myself included. I could go on, but let’s stop there for now. [click to continue…]

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December is generally the time of year when critics put out their Top 100 lists, their Best Albums of 2010 lists, their top singles of the year. I have some ideas on the subject, but I haven’t worked out my own painstakingly ordered list yet. Partly it’s because I’ve been caught up in the seismic shakeups in journalism, politics, technology, and everything that’s happening in the world at large (more on this later). But it’s also because I’ve never much cared for making ranked lists; I’ve voted in Pazz and Jop and various other critics’ polls for almost ten years now, but I never have much fun doing it, to be honest. I’ve argued in the past that the practice of list-making — of ranking items into strict hierarchies, and arguing about said hierarchies — seemed to me to be a strangely male phenomenon. I know plenty about labels, genres, years; I have an absurd knowledge of arcane trivia, as any good critic should. But I just don’t view music in a linear way; my view is more oceanic, omnidirectional. In my head, Cluster’s 1974 album Zuckerzeit, a Ron Hardy DJ mix from 1986, and a mixtape a friend made me were all essential parts of my 2010, too. [click to continue…]

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I’ve been back home for a week now, but I’m still living out of a suitcase in my own apartment. I have lots of practice; over the past month, I lived out of suitcases in London, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Krakow, Vienna, and Berlin. There is plenty to write about all of these cities — especially London, where I spoke on a panel at the Frieze Art Fair and had a wonderful time. For now, I’ll write about randomly meeting Brian Eno in Poland, a surreal experience that makes for a good story, too.

My little book on Brian Eno, Another Green World, came out about a year ago. I didn’t interview Eno for the book when I started it in 2006; I really wanted to, but it seemed impossible. I know that Eno dislikes talking about the deep past; I probably could have talked to him about his current record, but it seemed dishonest to interview someone about a new project when I was really trying to find answers about something else.

And so I pressed on for the next two years, trying to find clues in the hundreds upon hundreds of pages of archival interviews (I was literally knee-deep in printouts at one point), and from interviews I did with Eno’s friends and collaborators. I read dozens of books; some of them had to do with Eno and many didn’t, or at least not directly. I didn’t write the book to meet Brian Eno; I wrote it to understand.

About six weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from my old friend Heiko, the editor-in-chief of the German music magazine Groove. Heiko was going to London the next day to interview Eno about his new record, Small Craft on a Milk Sea. Heiko handed him a copy of my book during the interview. Eno said he had never heard of it, or the 33 1/3 series, but that he was interested in reading the book, and took the copy with him.

About three weeks later, I was in Krakow for the Unsound festival. On the final night of the festival, Ben Frost led an orchestral reinterpretation of the classic soundtrack to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and Eno was credited for the slowly morphing visual backdrop. I didn’t think that meant that Eno was actually there. But then, at the end of the performance, Eno materialized on stage to give a brief bow, before disappearing again.

I went backstage after the performance. I’ve met plenty of famous people over the course of my career as a music critic — it just becomes part of the job — but this made me a bit nervous. I opened a door and Eno poured me a glass of red wine. I told him my name was Geeta, and offhandedly mentioned that I’d written a little book about him. He didn’t pay much attention to me at first, and went back to the small crowd of people he was with. Then, a few minutes later, he turned around and said, “Hang on, is your name Geeta Dayal?” I said yes. Eno told me that he had just read my book and loved it so much that he bought four copies. He kept talking about how much he loved it; his enthusiasm for it was palpable and real. We proceeded to have a very nice, and somewhat surreal, conversation. A few minutes later, I bumped into Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid — a band whose music I like very much — and talked to him for a while about Belgium, and ambient music.

About a week later, when I was in Berlin, I got in touch with Eno and thanked him for his nice words. A few days later, when I got back to the United States, I saw a little note from him, which I pinned to a slanted wall in my 200-year-old apartment in Boston:

Hello Geeta!

XXB

Right now, I’m writing a proposal for a second book about music. When I get frustrated — which is often — I look at the note, and I feel inspired again.

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