Nº73: Dasha Loyko-Greer
The interdisciplinary artist recs marriage, a luxury spa and The Bible read by Johnny Cash
We’re back with Dasha Loyko-Greer. Read on to find out what she’s into, and if you’re new here, hit subscribe for secret recommendations every week.
Dasha Loyko-Greer is an interdisciplinary artist. She works predominantly across written & performed language, multisensory installation, and painting. She is currently writing a speculative autofiction novel Safe Nuts and is working towards her next solo show HAPPINESS & SHAME.
☞ MARRIAGE: I’ll dive right in — marriage! 10/10 best thing ever. I got married to my favourite person in the whole world this summer and the total display of sincerity in the spotlight of a legal and spiritual bind has been utterly life-changing. I’m generally very into personal re-invention and re-articulation of the self every chance I get — after the Buddhist teaching of non-attachment, mainly to the image of self — and this has been the biggest shedding of old skin and inventing of new, including my new freshly double-barrelled name!
☞ THE CURSE: Nathan Fielder is a master of speculative autofiction (if I may diagnose his oeuvre as such). This is spooky and hilarious and perfectly scripted, scored, and performed all the way from the start to the very end. It got some terrible reviews but don’t be fooled. Granted, it is weird. Exquisitely so.
☞ NANDINE: My go-to impromptu dinner (and also weekend brunch!) spot in Camberwell. Kurdish food, very cosy and delicious. You’re safe to pick anything at random from the menu and are guaranteed a megafeast. The lamb shank IS TO DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOR. (don’t have pics but look at their instagram and just trust me – all of these recommendations are GOLD)
☞ READING:
Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti (Verso, 2023). This is an absolute must-read. I think of this book pretty much daily. Count me among the megafans. Also, the lecture-performance that Sophia Giovannitti did at the ICA at the book launch event was the best of its kind that I had ever seen. She had my unwavering attention for the full two or so hours and I will go watch anything else she ever does. This book does what it says on the cover. It draws parallels between selling art and high-end elective sex work. This has blown the cobwebs off my mind and profoundly challenged my thinking on money in general and specifically on how I view selling art.
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin (Penguin, 2024). I’m savouring this one slowly but my god it has already done so much for me. I love Lauren Elkin’s use of the figure of the monster as someone who refuses to fit into binaries; monstrosity as transcending well-defined categories. A brilliant practical insight I have picked up so far is seeing self-doubt as a socially constructed received idea. It has already seen me through many a bind.
The Bible narrated by Johnny Cash I had never read the book from start to finish before so there was a big cultural reference gap to close + I’m curious about the figure of Jesus as a historical mystic — so I found the audio version narrated by Jonny Cash on Audible. I’m into it.
The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks (Harper Collins, 2010). I listened to this one on Spotify. The whole book explores the idea that we all have a threshold for how much happiness we are able to tolerate. I had had a hunch, prior to reading this, that people had wildly varying abilities to experience joy — a therapist once referenced the hedonic treadmill, the tendency to settle to a generally set individula level of happiness, no matter the ups and downs — but I found that this book offered a really interesting perspective I had never heard of before. In a nutshell, Hendricks explores how all of what we call self-sabotage comes from having an internal barrier to how much happiness we are willing to tolerate and offers practical steps to raising that barrier.
☞ LUXURY SPA: Akasha at Hotel Café Royal. I have had my best ideas this year crystalise in the steam room in the underbelly of London. I love going to this spa especially during big events. Like when England was playing some kind of a big football match earlier this year and it was all total chaos in Central London. This spa is right under Picadilly Circus. I love the energy there. It is the eye of the storm.
☞ MIDNIGHT GOSPEL: This has been a long-time favourite. A cartoon illustrated by Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time), based on Duncan Trussell’s long-running podcast about spirituality, consciousness, magic, life, death & everything in between. The script of Midnight Gospel is adapted from a selection of Trussell’s podcast episodes. Guests include people like Daniel Echols who — wrongly accused — spent close to two decades on death row, during which time he became ordained as a became a Buddhist monk, and many other extraordinary people. It packages all of this content into a fun story set in outer space.
☞ HOT TAKE: Violent [art]work gets traction because it feeds our addiction to stress. I see so much art that cashes in on images or narratives of violence that is seen to have a ‘critical edge’ and honestly I think at this point we have all lost the plot a bit here. This really gets my blood boiling. I am all for marking some work as ‘not for me’ and just moving past it… but when I see work that mimics the affect of watching the news or scrolling on social media get critical acclaim for being ‘urgent’ or ‘of its time’, I call big big bs. This is a classic case of ‘the more a path is used the more a path is used’ (Sarah Ahmed, 2017). In assigning cultural value to stories, we can do so much better.
A great piece of writing I keep returning to that shaped my early thinking on this is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1995 essay ‘Paranoid and Reparativee Reading’ that captures the dominant mode of critical enquiry — paranoia as the superior methodology — which has only become more entrenched since this essay was written.
☞ ADVICE: Ask for what you want! In the spirit of this, I am currently working on my next solo show — of paintings — called HAPPINESS & SHAME. If you would like to chat about hosting it at your space — write to me! Let’s see if we’re a match.
♪ LISTENING TO: Anything and everything by Alabaster DePlume and Enjoyable Listens. Go see them live every chance you get.
☠ HATES: Working super hard to be the coolest dude in the cemetery.
Thanks Dasha! Follow Dasha here!
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