Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World -John Szwed
Over ten years ago, I read a great book by Lomax called “The Land Where The Blues Began” and was hooked and even wanted to work for his Global Jukebox project. Then in 2006 I saw a terrific little show at Fireproof in Brooklyn. They had his recording equipment, photographs of chain gangs, and then a series of listening stations with a selection of his CDs of field recordings all over the world. Music and Photography works nicely for me. Now I am waiting for his book of photographs to be released later this year, meanwhile, dig into this book.
Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin – Rustom Bharucha
I have been thinking of Tagore a lot – I saw the great documentary on him made by Satyajit Ray at Walter Reade a few years back, dipped back into his writings on art edited by Ratan Parimoo decades ago, then saw E O Hoppe’s of him at Shantiniketan taken in 1929 in a small show in Mumbai, and then saw a superb show of his paintings at Asia Society last year, and also read the diaries and sketchbooks of the artist Somnath Hore who studied at Shantiniketan and was deeply influenced by him. When a friend recommended this book, I got it right away.
Songs of Kabir – Kabir (Author), Arvind Mehrotra (Translator, Introduction)
Over the years I have gathered a bunch of translations of the poems of Kabir from the 14th century including those by Tagore and Bly, yet it is this new translation by Mehrotra that captures the attitude of the anticlerical, anti-authoritarian traditions of the bhakti movement. Here is a small fragment:
“To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas
To idol worshippers and idol smashers,
To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites,
To Vedic pundits and Faber poets,
The weaver Kabir sends one message:
The noose of death hangs over all.”
The Queer Art of Failure -Judith Halberstam
In one of my favorite sections of Artforum – “500 Words” – the author, Judith Halberstam explained the premise of her new book and I was captivated:
“Most of my writing emphasizes range: I try to show that when we clump work together in whatever way, we’re making associations that don’t organically belong. There is a difference between arguing that artists belong together in a generic way on the one hand and finding surprising connections between people’s work on the other. In my work,
I think thematically and try to use a range of examples in order to track an idea across a wide field. Academia tends to favor generic association, and it relies mostly on modes of argumentation that are logical and sustained. I am less captivated by this style of knowledge production and more drawn to speedier forms of thinking. Obviously this shows in my work and may be both its appeal and its limitation.
In my estimation, the production of art is never as neat as it may seem in a disciplinary study. In my new book I associate unlikely projects with one another in order to examine how an idea or a structure like failure, forgetting, or stupidity might crop up in different places to different effect. I combine fine art with animation; Finding Nemo with pieces by Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli; mainstream film with avant-garde productions. I wanted to find connections between the queerest corners of the mainstream and the most mainstream corners of the queer world. I think it is fruitful to think about the places where these corners spark each other. Queer artists might be very preoccupied with failing and losing precisely because they have symbolically been associated with these things by virtue of their status as nonnormative.
Biography
Pradeep Dalal is a Mumbai-born artist and writer based in New York. His work was recently included in the exhibitions: “Picturing Parallax: Photography and Video from the South Asian Diaspora” in San Francisco and “Exchanging Glances” at Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai. He was also included in “Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic” at Murray Guy gallery, and “Fifty Artists Photograph the Future” at Higher Pictures in New York. He has exhibited at the Herter Art Gallery in Amherst, and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, and at Orchard, and ps122 Gallery in New York, TART in San Francisco. His work is included in Blind Spot 43. He is a recipient of the Tierney Fellowship, and has an MFA from ICP/Bard College and a MArch from MIT. He is on the faculty at the International Center of Photography and Pratt Institute in New York, and he also directs the Warhol Foundation | Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant Program.
Artist's Atheneum 