Through Thick and Thin

I first found my way to Moyra Davey’s Instagram feed (@moyradavey) on April 9, 2020. I remember the date because it marks a friend’s birthday, plus it was the start of the pandemic and the first days of lockdown in Los Angeles; blithely scrolling while waiting—waiting for what?—seemed appropriate. But the video frame I saw revved my lazy scroll into a fevered loop, the phone held at arm’s length. Onscreen, a snake whips across the ground, toward the person holding the camera; the camera keeps tracking the snake in a vertiginous tilt downward, almost somersaulting, barely keeping up with the twisting line of the writhing body until it is finally out of sight, the snake now possibly tangled around the photographer’s feet, surely winding up her leg. But then the video loops, beginning again, and the snake is there, at a safe distance. For a moment.Davey’s Instagram is full of animals, horses mainly, but there are bears and birds, too. The horse images are the best. Veiny, muscular flanks; soft muzzles; hooves; fur. Horses rolling in sand and dirt; horses trotting; horses and flies; horses expelling broad yellow rivers of urine. But why dwell on Davey’s Instagram? Because it points to the artist’s interest in the quotidian, and the ways in which seemingly mundane images augur more complex and profound themes of desire, existential dread, and death on the one hand, as well as moments of epiphany, connection, and creativity on the other. And the whip-fast snake video? It embodies the fort/da of terror, loss, release, and repeat that also epitomizes Davey’s work overall and its mode of restless, ongoing inquiry, a venturing outward and a return. The account also manifests a disdain for the hierarchies of the artworld and notions of a kind of fetishized art photography, something Davey has steadily undermined with her insistently un-precious images that mark a fundamental disinterest in artworld aura. And finally, the feed is personal but not poignantly so. More on this as we go.Davey was born in Toronto in 1958 and now lives in New York City; she is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer and boasts an extensive body of work that includes a dozen or so books, nearly as many videos, and hundreds of photographs that have been showcased around the world. In 2001, she edited and published a collection of essays titled Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, a project that she says gave her “permission to read” but it also demonstrated the inchoate network of interconnectivity that reading and writing can both encourage and bring forward. Toward the end of her introduction of the book, Davey writes, “The frequency with which an extended family of names crops up, intersects, and echoes throughout the assembled body of works is striking; what emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other…”1 These writers include Mary Kelly, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Alice Walker, and Joy Williams, among many others, but it is Davey’s observation about the interweaving of reading, writing, experience, and citation that will continue to be a theme throughout her subsequent work across books, videos, and photographs.The first book I bought and read by Davey was Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest, published in 2017. It is so lovely I hesitated to open it. There’s a white paper dust jacket, with an image of a bed and portion of a window; the image continues, however, onto the back of the jacket. So, to see it in full, you should remove the paper cover, spread it out, and then you’ll see that there’s a dog on the bed—Rosie—and a pair of shoes on the pillow. Never mind Rosie’s direct stare at the camera, or the shoes-on-the-bed-bad-luck omen. The image keeps unfolding to new meaning. Underneath the jacket is the book’s true cover, which shows a photograph of thirty or so images by Davey mounted in a collage on a wall. The images continue inside the cover, and the paper texture shifts, from the smooth exterior to the rough interior; and the same images appear even closer. It was all too much at first: the dense layering, the proliferation, the repetition. I wanted something to stick and stay still. I left the book alone for a while.The first essay in Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest is “Les Goddesses,” which was also published as “The Wet and the Dry” in 2011 as the second installment in a series of publications titled The Social Life of the Book, created as a collaboration between castillo/corrales, a Paris-based art venue, and graphic designer and editor Will Holder. The essay deftly weaves together several histories; one charts the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft; her daughters Mary and Fanny; and Claire, the child of Mary’s husband, William Godwin, with his new wife after Mary’s death. The three girls were named Les Goddesses by Aaron Burr, who was visiting the Godwin family in 1812, and Davey highlights their loves, travels, heartbreaks, bouts of depression, suicide attempts, and writing in part to think through their struggles but also as a way of celebrating their iconoclasm. A second through line focuses on diaries and books that tell of journeys, most specifically Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Flight to Italy, which chronicles the author’s travels in Italy between 1786 and 1788, and was published in 1816/1817 as part of Goethe’s larger autobiography. A third thread draws linkages between the Wollstonecraft lineage and Davey’s own family. Like Wollstonecraft’s parents, Davey’s parents had seven children, and there’s a sharing of names across both families. In the book, the essay is punctuated by images that Davey has taken of her sisters, and the designation of “Les Goddesses” expands to denote them as well.Written in twenty-four titled chunks (with a coda), the essay is not simply a weaving together of the three stories, however: the chronology of the segments shifts back and forth; bits of the stories are repeated; and Davey achieves a sense of the cinematic dissolve, one segment of a life briefly brushing up against another segment of someone else’s life. And the sisters—all of them, across some two hundred years—are prone to depression, but they’re also badasses, refusing to abide by the rules of their respective cultures.After “Les Goddesses” was published as an essay, Davey made it into a video that was featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. In the video, we see Davey pacing around her apartment, looking at images and narrating the essay, using a technique in which she listens to a recording of herself reading the essay and then repeats it out loud, creating an oddly flat recording that shifts attention away from the performance to the words themselves. Davey later reflects on the essay version of Les Goddesses in Hemlock Forest, writing, “Les Goddesses was a love letter to my family. I linked my sisters to Mary and her siblings, my parents to hers. I forged a coincidence of dates two hundred years apart to make connections and enable a story.”2While Davey dubs Les Goddesses a love letter, in her 2021 book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Lauren Fournier calls it “autotheory.” She lists Davey’s essay alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2008/2013), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and defines “autotheory” as a term that describes “works of literature, writing, and criticism that integrate autobiography with theory and philosophy in ways that are direct and self-aware.”3 Fournier is highlighting the proliferation of books and essays that integrate theory and the self, and as even this brief list shows, the form is wildly diverse. She goes on to situate the practice within a broader history of American and European art and writing and enhances the definition with the notion of performance to offer “performative life-thinking.” This later phrase is tied to the writer Sofia Samatar, who used the term “life-thinking” to describe a mode of writing that is in effect living. Fournier identifies a notion of the self that has moved through the postmodern dissolution of the self-aware and coherent subject, added in an awareness of situated being, and celebrates the desire to bring the questions from philosophy and theory into enacted, written, and performed self-inquiry.If Fournier applies autotheory to explain Davey’s work, Margaret Iversen takes a slightly different tack. In a recent essay, “The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art After Barthes” (2021), Iversen places Davey’s work in conversation with the diaristic practices of Roland Barthes, which began the day after his mother’s death in October of 1977. Iversen reminds us that Barthes’s most famous essay, “The Death of the Author” (1967), argues that a text is not a static entity whose meaning is solely determined by the author; the reader brings interpretation and new meaning and hence the text is alive, and the author as authority recedes. However, Barthes would later find in the work of Marcel Proust the figure of the “writing self.” Iversen explains that this figure is “a way of evading both the egoism of autobiography and the arrogance of theory.”4 She goes on to limn the contours of the diaristic mode, writing, “The diary, like a series of snapshots, is an accretion of traces, daily notations,” and then adds, “Far from implying a fully present authorial subject, then, diaries are circumstantial, accidental and inconclusive.”5Well, this certainly applies to Davey’s work. Indeed, in her essay “Notes on Photography & Accident,” published both in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (2008) and again in Index Cards: Selected Essays (2020), Davey specifically highlights the notion of the accident, honoring contingency and chance. Comprised of forty-three titled sections, the essay explores the interconnections among cultural critics Walter Benjamin, Janet Malcolm, Susan Sontag, and Barthes and their surprisingly similar celebration of the accident in photography. Davey wrote the essay in response to what she calls the “bloat” exhibited by the forms of photography that favor the large, staged image. Where, Davey wonders, in these grand, static photographs is the sense of the vernacular, the found, the accidental? She asserts, in reference to her quartet of writers, “My goal is to reclaim this critical history of ideas in relation to contemporary photographs, and to understand how the notion of accident might still be relevant.”6 Then she adds that she has another motive, too: “I want to make some photographs, but I want them to take seed in words.”7 The essay then swerves suddenly in the next section, simply titled “Being,” to describe a scene in a hospital from 2006 and the minor epiphany that Davey no longer feels the need to prove anything. She writes, “I can just sit on the bed and be.”8Here we see Davey’s form so clearly, the erudition in synthesizing four very different theorists across several decades and contexts, next to a clear thesis statement, followed by a dip into what might be called by Virginia Woolf a “moment of being.” How do these elements relate? We’re invited to make connections ourselves, to derive meaning across the gaps among realms, from photography to life, from desire and curiosity to the body and its material needs. Davey’s process is never simple parataxis and never a gimmick. Instead, she constantly weaves, braids, connects, disconnects. And, in bringing accident to the fore, as well as her reliance on the fragment as form with its attendant circling, hovering, and returning, Davey models ongoingness instead of finality. This disinterest in finality shows up in the fact that Davey is also not afraid to voice an opinion, then circle back and rethink things. I like this: every statement is of a moment and ripe for reframing later, with full recognition of the evolution that occurs in between.While Davey moves from topic to topic in her essays, she similarly crosses boundaries of form, from photography to video to writing. She is attentive to the interconnections between the word and the image, the photo and the page, to thinking, writing, imaging. In an essay published in October in 2016 titled “Caryatids and Promiscuity,” Davey addresses this cheerful eclecticism, writing, “More important to me than fidelity and adherence to a medium is a kind of devotion to promiscuity (to lift that concept from a lexicon of Gregg Bordowitz), an embrace of materials, formats, histories, and genres, and lastly but perhaps most importantly, an investment in language.” She goes on to add, “I am a believer in heterogeneity as an enabler and enhancer of the story wanting to be told.”9 Promiscuity and heterogeneity: with these terms Davey gestures toward queerness and a desire for proliferation and abundance rather than singularity and sovereignty, while also signaling her investment in a sense of emergence.Davey’s promiscuity supports her video practice, which expands on her writing and photography. Having seen and heard her videos, it is impossible to read the associated essays without also hearing her voice, with its odd cadence. This is especially true of the video script for Fifty Minutes (2006), which is titled in reference to a fifty-minute therapy session. In the video, we see Davey pacing through the rooms in her apartment, holding the microphone wire close to her mouth, looking with concentration at nothing, the look of thinking, the look of elsewhere. The video script circles around the notion of nostalgia; Davey describes reading a 2001 essay by Vivian Gornick titled “Reading in an Age of Uncertainty,” a dazzling piece about the of and a to now Davey goes on to situate the term in critical the word has its in the a and She also cultural and in the there is a third definition of which is Davey reflects on the desire by into the cultural of which is a lovely to be But what of the desire by the Fifty Minutes In the video, the of both and of writing, but Davey is also speaking and and there as a a sense of ongoing and each to another another and more rather than toward a we and is a more In the video, Davey with an of about a line in a letter by Walter in to about a his The first shows images from and the of as Susan Sontag, and among The video then to present a of one after the offer their interpretation of the line in letter about the in takes and with Davey speaking from the The camera as we see the and there’s at This shifts Davey’s and rather than the camera, we see of perhaps the that in his however, the video disinterest in creating a image or a Instead, it is by and a mode of in and through the at the with from a a of and of the video into an cinematic an accident on in is a video that weaves together on and the and most specifically an made by the and as with which his sight, it The a dense that an as from his life as it draws close to its the a and cinematic experience, and images as stare into the In Davey’s video a very with several of the of the artist’s New York apartment, images from a a in a material on the and images of a a through the video, an in reading and pacing back and a static camera, is the most and writing, to wrote especially the art in is writing and this Davey her writing, well as the of response to it and reliance on the and of fact that Davey a and not is Davey’s work but it is also a form of as by Maggie in an essay titled of and For who explains that even her own of is from Alice the essay with this a I there was something with me as a writer, because I so against the and writing of She then points to and goes on to explain that the of is tied to a notion of and a reliance on were all born from a writes, and we from with a sense of in relation to the of She goes on to explain that in her own work there is a that not so as the my book, not just as its but as its the of this kind of what it about and I think her Davey’s work Davey and in relation to the ideas and questions of writers and and the of her work is the of her weaving the and while there is and Davey charts her own bringing us for the book is The of Moyra Davey and (2021), which is on a that she a of her own photographs with images by the New York photographer for his and Davey explains in an essay at the end of the book, “I with a but it was an I not who in was of a different than a fact that she that she and many like her are as in on the the the the the as are in the image not more in was attentive to the image, to its This statement a of the history of photography and a to across more than it is to the the images of these two are Instead, taken the images and us and at the same The book the of which is one way of the quotidian, but there is also a sense of certainly to death in at the of by but also perhaps to the essay by the of the essay She goes on to tell the story of her she had from his at the of the first page, its on images in The of of their and in the of many and the many of the animals, there a sense of and loss, not of what or who is but of a of a way of being, a sense of In relation to the Davey takes up a lineage in this book and it to a new up new connections and from one of and death to from one of to attention to the of photography from the to both the the odd the and both have to For it was New York of the and for it was a series of images of her sisters from the work after the images of her sisters brings the material of as and through the world. In a series of photographs, for Davey and her photographs, which are then and in the or The which she began in of on The of marks of among and and a on the and that and She has also as in her apartment, which as a kind of of their an as well as of been all of these images bring to the the of that in and around the photograph rather than a celebration of what specifically within the The for not as so much as a of and an of and the we among the as well as the who us through and I see that Moyra Davey has a new In a horse into the frame from the followed by two a white one and a all across the of a one a and then the one at the almost as to three still for a moment and to open and Then the video to

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