Teasdale, Paul, Moyra Davey, Frieze, #44, London ... - Greengrassi

POLYVALENCE
BY MOYRA DAVEY
THE TERM MUSE is mired in a sexist
stereotype that may be impossible to
shed, connoting, say, Pablo Picasso
and Françoise Gilot—the nitty-gritty
of an older man attaching himself to
a woman 40 years his junior—or Art
Nouveau’s embodiment of the muses of
Greek antiquity in images of vaporous
femininity. I know that I once used the
term when I referred to my friend Alison
Strayer, the writer and translator, as my
“reading muse.” She has been introducing
me to books since we were both
15, starting with works by Colette, Jean
Rhys and Jane Bowles—and the list
goes on and on. But even then I felt a bit
sheepish about using the word. It seems
unbalanced, even arrogant, to assume
the role of “creator” for oneself while
assigning the role of “helper” to another.
I was never a good student,
stubbornly doing my own thing,
CURRENTLY ON VIEW
Works by Moyra Davey in
“New Photography 2011,”
Museum of Modern Art, New
York, through Jan. 16.
engrossed in my projects and not listening
very closely to what was being
taught. Consequently, I don’t have a
tool kit stocked with learned strategies
for making art. In the 1946 noir
classic Gilda, the character Johnny
Farrell says: “I make my own luck.”
And that is what I’ve been trying to
do in a haphazard, muddled fashion
for most of my life.
I don’t believe in muse, per se. I
believe that you plug away at things,
I trust in luck, and I
know about intellectual
generosity from
friends like Alison.
She has an unstoppable
flow of ideas
and will eagerly talk
anything through
with me, but I won’t
presume to call her
my muse. My partner,
Jason Simon,
also has a highly creative,
analytical mind
and will talk through
ideas—but again,
I simply consider
myself lucky to be on the
receiving end of the beneficence
of my friends.
If anything, muse is a floating
abstraction that reveals
itself unpredictably. It seems
to come from nowhere, but
in fact is rooted in words,
language, books, the process
of reading. I believe that you
should fill yourself up with
good things, the things that
give you pleasure, make
you happy, give you a high,
a spark, a thrill. And then, if
you’re lucky, one or two of
those good things will find
their way back to you when
you least expect it and most
need it. Those moments
when, as Louise Bourgeois
would say, you are in need of
a solution to a problem.
I can give two examples of this
mysterious process at work. I was in
Paris in 2008-09 with a grant to make
a video. I had a studio with a desk
I’d dutifully chain myself to every day
in an attempt to write the script. I
spent eight miserable months trying
to shape a tangle of notes from my
journals, some of which concerned
a letter Walter Benjamin wrote in
1931 describing his new study and
the view from its window of a clock.
40 ART IN AMERICA JANUARY’12

MUSE
This page, Moyra
Davey: The Coffee
Shop, The Library,
2011, 25 chromogenic
prints, approx. 64
by 93 inches overall.
Museum of Modern Art.
Opposite top, Davey
in her video Les
Goddesses, 2011,
61 minutes.
Opposite bottom,
Peter Hujar’s Portraits
in Life and Death.
Photo Moyra Davey.
All photos this article
courtesy the artist,
Murray Guy, New
York, and Greengrassi,
London.
He wrote, cryptically: “as time goes
by, it is especially this clock that
becomes a luxury it is difficult to do
without.” But I was trying to stuff too
many ideas into the project, and kept
searching in vain for a structure that
would hold them all.
I was also spending a lot of time
in Parisian cemeteries, not just the
famous ones like Montparnasse, Père
Lachaise and the Catacombs, but
also the smaller, lesser-known sites—
the village graveyards of pre-unified
Paris, for instance—taking pictures
and randomly videotaping some of
the graves. One day in April, the
eighth month of my stay, out of the
blue, I began to think of Peter Hujar’s
Portraits in Life and Death (1976), a
touchstone work that Jason introduced
me to many years ago. The
book has a simple two-part structure:
black-and-white portraits of Hujar’s
friends, mostly reclining, followed by
a short section at the end, 11 photographs
taken in the catacombs
of Palermo. It hit me like a heavenly
anointment that I should follow Hujar’s
example and compose the video in
two parts: portraits of each of the
nine Paris cemeteries, followed by a
section in which my friends (including
Alison and Jason) discuss the mysterious
Walter Benjamin letter. I titled
the video My Necropolis (2009).
The second example of a muse—
a textual one in this case—came
about quite recently. I was invited by
MoMA to photograph in their libraries
and archives, with a view to
making a piece for the current “New
Photography” show. I was frankly a
bit doubtful, as I’m not so drawn to
modernist architecture, but I decided
nonetheless to visit the spaces with
my camera. Waiting to be shelved was
a stapled book, coffee coffee (1967),
by Aram Saroyan, its title appearing in
large letters. I snapped a picture, and
later, looking at a small print of this
image, I remembered a note I’d made
in a journal sometime in the past 10
years: “the coffee shop, the library.”
(It is either from Gaston Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Space or George
Perec’s collection Species of Spaces;
I haven’t found the journal with my
handwritten note.) But the conjunction
of these two public spaces (of consumption)
had always intrigued me.
I’d always meant to write or make a
work about that, and it dawned on me
that this was the perfect opportunity.
Suddenly I had an idea for a piece I
could make that would incorporate
the images of MoMA’s library spaces.
To be making something as yet
unformed, unknown—to be living in a
deferred moment—is the most seductive
way to exist. When we stop this
forward motion, we risk being sucked
into a world of stasis and nonbeing
(as Virginia Woolf would say). Muse
is everything that allows you to forget
the past, that projects you into a state
of imminence.
MOYRA DAVEY is a
New-York based artist
and writer.
JANUARY’12 ART IN AMERICA 41

Bell-Jones, Gareth, Moyra Davey’s ‘Les Goddesses’, art agenda, NYC, Nov. 6, 2011.
View of Moyra Davey, "Les Goddesses" greengrassi, London, 2011.
Moyra Davey’s “Les Goddesses”
GREENGRASSI, London
17 September–29 October 2011
Black-and-white images of young androgynous women illustrate the introduction to Moyra
Davey’s video Les Goddesses (2011). Wearing tight white t-shirts and cropped black hair, they
stare directly into the lens. Davey speaks over the images in monotone, and introduces the
female lead of the film, the protofeminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as her
children and her lovers. Various shots of the same four figures, together or paired in front of a
white colorama, individually on turf, against a brick wall: the characters Davey tells us of
become the young women that we see.
Davey’s new video is just over an hour long and is served in chapters. Title screens herald each
section and footage alternates from close detail of photographs and books, static shots of
Davey’s loft apartment, and shots from her windows. It’s unclear if she has just moved to the
place. The apartment feels like a lonely Sunday afternoon. Quiet and contemplative,
melancholic even. Bookshelves are half empty and frames packed in bubble-wrap.
Davey paces the apartment carrying a handheld recorder. One white headphone is held to her
ear, the other lies dangling. She is determined and concentrated as she speaks, making sure
she follows the recording. Unpaid bills are attached to the walls with masking tape; next to
them is a drawing of a tree, roots like lank hair. Mary attempted suicide with laudanum in
1795 but was saved by Gilbert Imlay, the subject of her unrequited love. Her daughter Fanny

used the same technique successfully at the age of 22; Davey’s son Barney was born two
hundred years later.
Under the heading “Les Goddesses” we see only a photograph, no narration this time, of four
figures dressed in glam-rock gear. May 22, 1976. The camera faces a mirror now: “How do you
feel when you are with your son and your husband walks in?” I start to find I can piece
together her apartment from the various shots and imagine her domestic life. Wollstonecraft
died eleven days after the birth of her second child Mary (later Mary Shelley). High ceilings,
airy, but the space feels claustrophobic; beyond are views over the water towers, rooftops, and
rising steam. As children, the two daughters, Fanny and Mary, and the adopted Claire became
known as Les Goddesses.
The room is flooded with sunlight. Davey sits on the floor of her bedroom leafing through
prints. The same four women from earlier, tight white t-shirts, slim. They stare, bare-chested
and free of inhibition. The camera studies their figures intimately; they must have been close
to the photographer. One illustrates an invitation card—”Moyra Davey: A Catholic Girlhood.”
These are figures from her past, but they blur with the lives of Mary, Fanny, and Claire. Davey
paces in and out of shot, always repeating her own recorded words. Galleries make Barney
sleepy. His ideal day would be spent watching planes taking off. Percy Shelley died in a
boating accident at Lake Geneva. At times a metallic Moyra Davey from the recorder can be
heard over her recital as she begins to slip. She becomes increasingly frustrated as she looses
the train of her narrative. Subtitles correct her. “Erratum: Percy Shelley died in the Gulf of
Spezia off the coast of Pisa.” To what extent everything we are told is accurate is quite unclear.
The narrative returns to itself, the making of the film, the motivation for specific shots. Whilst
we hear the overlaid narrative, she takes books from shelves and blows the dust from their
jackets: Mary Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. Like Wollstonecraft, these are players in the
inner space of Davey, a mental space we have been given an hour-long admittance. Small
grimy spirals scatter out of the open window towards the air-conditioning unit of the building
opposite. Images from Davey’s youth mingle with those of Wollstonecraft, her wider
influences, anecdotes, historical incident, her domestic life, Davey herself. We watch her
recite a recording on herself, by herself with a cold distance to this most intimate of subjects:
her errors and anxiety show up as a false objectivity. We hear about Goethe’s close
observations, about his ideas on the elasticity of air and space. Snow floats, hovers and falls
hard.
Outside of the main gallery space there is a selection of prints folded and posted individually
to the gallery. Each depicts a different individual, writing in the green-orange light of the
crowded subway. It is a return to figuration for Davey, but in her depictions of empty scenes
and domestic settings the figure is never far away. The same underground writers are
introduced in the film’s coda, one after the other, looking at the page lost in concentration,
oblivious. Exploring the gap between the thought, the written, and the communicated, they
are photographs of the subliminal. It is a space “Les Goddesses” manages to recreate for the
viewer. With precise observation, this psychological self-portrait is a series of clues with no
conclusion.
Gareth Bell-Jones is a curator and writer based in London. He is currently Escalator Curator
at WYSING ARTS CENTRE, Cambridge.

Teasdale, Paul, Moyra Davey, www.artweeters.com, London, December 2011.
Back: Moyra Davey
greengrassi
Moyra Davey’s films deploy simple strategies to tackle complex subjects. With a
far larger body of work as a photographer of quiet, seemingly inconsequential
images taken of her daily surroundings, they add a further layer of
documentation to her practice: the New York-based artist as writer and reader.
Davey’s 2006 film 50 Minutes, for example, focuses on the years she spent in
psychoanalysis, while My Necropolis (2009) analyzes an oblique line from Walter
Benjamin’s correspondence. Part diary, part work-in-progress, the piling of
citation and prose into short, refracted chapters results in reverberating visual
essays.
Switching between autobiography and historical inquiry, her third film, Les
Goddesses (2011), is disquieting in its simplicity. Using little more than a video
camera and voice recorder, Davey films herself walking around her apartment
with one earphone in, as she listens to and simultaneously repeats pre-recorded
passages. At just over 100 minutes long, it’s the most sustained of her films and
perhaps the richest. The set-up is clear: Davey recounts the lives of the writer
and political activist Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughters Fanny Imlay and Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), and their stepsister Claire Claremont
(the piece is fastidiously researched: errata appear twice as subtitles to correct
factual errors). These then segue into reminiscences about Davey’s own family.
Images of the artist’s sisters punctuate the film, as Davey riffles through a series
of black and white photographs she took of them and herself as young, defiant
women in the late 1970s.

Moira Davey Les Goddesses, 2011, DVD still
Wollstonecraft’s daughters were nicknamed ‘les goddesses’ by a family friend,
and were linked in love and tragedy by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Davey tells us that
Shelley initially had eyes for Fanny, before turning his attentions to Mary (and
then, allegedly, to Claire). Fanny, devastated when her sisters eloped to mainland
Europe with Shelley, followed her mother – who was similarly heartbroken,
having been rejected by Fanny’s father Gilbert – in attempting suicide by drinking
laudanum. Unlike her mother, however, Fanny succeeded and died at the age of
22. Neutralizing the frequently salacious accounts of these episodes, Davey’s
delivery is dense and monotonous. Her analysis spills over into the personal, as
affinities with her own life suggest themselves: she mentions her son, her father’s
early death, her sister Jane’s similarity to Mary Shelley, among other things.
Clearly Davey is more comfortable with research than with the confessional
mode. ‘Why does everyone want to tell a story?’, she asks, ‘Why do all my
students talk about “representing memory”?’. Later Davey mentions that a
selection of texts she has accumulated lie buried in a folder labelled
‘Pathography’. Just as with the method used in her short essay ‘The Problem of
Reading’ (2003), a beautifully weighted analysis of the economies surrounding
the dilemma of choosing what next to read, Davey’s self-analysis comes by a
process of self-deception. It emerges in the margins of her research.
At the end of Les Goddesses, Davey divulges that there was a period of roughly
ten years when she stopped taking photographs of people at the very time when
photography was under attack from theories ‘dismantling photography’s truth
value’. She surmises that this was due to her reticence to tell her own story. A
series of 25 photographs (‘Subway – writers III’, 2011) – folded, stamped and
mailed to the gallery – were shown alongside the film. Comprising snapshots
of commuters writing while travelling on the subway, they seem an uneasy return
to photographing people. Oblivious to the camera, rapt in concentration these
strangers – filling in crosswords, paying bills, reading – could just as easily be
Davey herself.

Caims, Steven, Moyra Davey, www.artforum.com, NYC, October 18, 2011.
Moyra Davey
GREENGRASSI
1a Kempsford Road (off Wincott Street)
September 17–October 29
Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses, 2011, still from a color video in HD, 61 minutes.
Moyra Davey’s HD video Les Goddesses (all works 2011) is a nearly hour-long exploration of
psychological space. Recorded in her New York apartment, the work feels by turns
claustrophobic and melancholic as it charts the links between her life and that of eighteenthcentury
British writer and protofeminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Binding the piece together is the
artist’s on-screen narration, her repetition of a prerecorded monologue that she wrote, which
is fed to her through a handheld recorder. Davey’s dependence on this device creates an
uneasy and slightly unhinged mood; she stumbles to deliver the lines and keep up with the
playback speed. As she listens to her own voice and repeats her own words, she effectively
weaves an element of doubt over her story’s accuracy, primarily through an attempt to mirror
dates and family relationships.
The show also includes photographs Davey took on the New York subway, each capturing an
unaware passenger in the act of writing. Part of the series “Subway – writers,” these hang on
the gallery wall, bearing the stamps and labels of their unconventional delivery—Davey
mailed them individually and without wrapping. While the occurrences depicted in the
photographs are uncommon, the personal isolation attained by putting pen to paper in public
resonates with Davey’s domestic acts. Her identification with these strangers subtly links the
genres of portraiture, biography, and autobiography, forming an uncertain and intriguing selfportrait.
— Steven Cairns

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
READING IS WRITING
BY GIGIOTTo DEL VECCHIO
32 Photographs from Paris (detail), 2009.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
For Moyra Davey, reading is both a pleasure and a problem. One can get
swallowed up by a novel, or thrown into difficulty by an arduous
essay. In any case, for Davey, the true requisite is a form of reading
that coalesces and is organized around her work. Gigiotto Del Vecchio
talks to an artist whose photographs, for years now, have been devoid
of human presence, yet full of dust…
40

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
(A)
(I)
(E)
(B)
(L)
(F)
(C)
(M)
(G)
(D)
(N)
(A) Rester Calme (detail), 2010.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
(B-C-D-G-L-M) 32 Photographs from Paris
(detail), 2009.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
(H)
(E-F-I) 16 Photographs from Paris
(detail), 2009.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
(H-N) The Whites of Your Eyes (for Bill
Horrigan), 2010.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
41

16 Photographs from Paris (detail), 2009. Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
gigiotto del vecchio: Your work includes photography, film
and video, and makes clear references to writing and to philosophy as well.
Could you please tell me something about this “world of intersections” that
influences your practice?
moyra davey: Photography, film and video are closely related, and it’s
very easy for artists to move from one to the other. When you’ve worked intensely
in one medium for a while – for me it was photography for many years
– it can feel invigorating to start fresh on a new project in writing and video.
These days I have a few things going at once: I am reading and writing on Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and that whole amazing circle of women, and
slowly some related photos and videos are creeping in. Probably I will hunker
down and seriously begin to evolve a video out of some of this writing, but for
now, it’s that very pleasurable form of “flânerie” known as research.
gdv: you suggest an affinity between the acts of reading and writing,
these two opposite sides of communication that intersect with each other;
what exactly you mean when you say that reading and writing are complementary?
Is this one of the topics in your book The Problem of Reading
(Document Books, 2003)?
md: Yes, it was a conclusion I came to in The Problem of Reading. I wrote
that essay because I had a serious confusion and restlessness about reading and
wanted to understand where it was coming from, how could I find focus, etc.
Many great writers have addressed the problem of reading, some directly, like
Virginia Woolf in her essay How Should One Read a Book, or Italo Calvino in
his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, or Kafka (“don’t waste your time
reading anything that’s not going to blow your mind”). Others (Benjamin, Sartre,
Barthes) say in one way or another that “reading is writing,” and that for
me was the most interesting discovery, and in a way the solution to my problem.
I came to realize that for me the most vital and gratifying form of reading is
one that gets organized around producing something of my own. I’m not sure
where the restlessness comes from, but I know that eventually I need to anchor
myself in themes and texts that will be generative.
gdv: I imagine that this was the dimension in which you developed your
recent show at Kunsthalle Basel, “Speaker Receiver”. Why this title?
md: It started with a simple
desire to title the exhibition
after one, or in this case,
two of the photographs in
it (I also did that with my
previous show at The Fogg,
“Long Life Cool White”).
I’ve always liked the pairing
of those two titles, “Speaker-
Receiver,” and as I thought
about it more I began to see
all sorts of resonances, especially
with the videos: Fifty
Minutes is largely about the
psychoanalytic relationship,
and My Necropolis is organized
around a letter Walter
Benjamin wrote in 1931, and
a group of people who try to
interpret it 75 years later.
gdv: There’s always
a sort of immobile dimension
in your works, the sensation of things and objects that haven’t felt
a human presence in quite a long time. People are very rarely represented.
Could you talk about this element: why the distance? Of course, this is a
question related to more than just the atmosphere of the image...
md: It’s true, it’s rare that humans find their way into the photographs, and
this has been the case for over 20 years. I made a lot of portraits up through
about 1984, but as I became exposed via graduate school and the Whitney
Program to the critique of representation, that impulse gradually atrophied.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a line George Baker quotes from Walter Benjamin’s
essay “Little History of Photography”: “To do without people is
for photography the most impossible of renunciations,” a sentiment I totally
agree with, yet Benjamin also adored Atget, whose work is mostly devoid of
people – “like the scene of a crime” is how WB famously described Atget’s
works. I love the tradition of the street as epitomized by Robert Frank, and
the diary, exemplified by early Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar,
David Wojnarowicz. I admire this work a great deal, but my temperament
and my way of seeing have somehow evolved in a hermetic, possibly even
agoraphobic direction, more in line with the evidence photograph, or occasionally
even eBay pictures: objects that infer a human presence but essentially
have a life of their own. Maybe the immobile quality comes from
the long time it took to make some of those pictures: time just seeps into the
image.
gdv: There is a passage in Eric Rosenberg’s text on your work that says:
“let the present be, say Davey’s photographs, let it have its time, let it take
its time, especially if the future means doing away with what’s broken before
we determine how the broken might still be employed, held or seen.”
Do you think you can add something to this observation? What exactly is
the meaning of time for you?
md: I am happy to see the word “present” in Eric’s sentence, because so
often I get asked about the “the passage of time”. I know many of the objects
in the photographs are antiquated, but that is not why I photograph them.
For each picture there’s a specific reason: it might be the way the light is
falling (Speaker); a formal confluence of shapes (Nyro); my ongoing fascination
with dust (Shure, Paw, Two Streaks, etc.); Glad is kind of a joke about
constipation from a Freudian perspective. The representation of music is
important to me (Greatest Hits etc). I see record collecting, for instance, as
a form of safeguarding and homage, and as inherently optimistic. But I’m
entirely in agreement with the sentiment Eric expresses: the rate at which we
consume new products is horrifying. The burning of fossil fuels, industry
and manufacturing are making the planet toxic, yet here in the US we’re told
to buy, buy, buy to save the economy. We’re headed for implosion, one way
or another.
gdv: Your photographs, always modest in size, never too spectacular,
show living and working conditions as a metaphor for the human condition.
Adam Szymczyk compared your work to what Cesare Pavese called,
in the title of his diaries, “il mestiere di vivere”, the art of living. Is this
position, from your point of view, more related to a poetic dimension, a
political one, or both? And why?
md: I like Adam’s invocation
of a book of diaries, because
I do think of many of
my photographs as diaristic,
and these days I think of the
camera and the notebook as
almost interchangeable. I
love the Cesare Pavese book.
I read parts of it in French
last year, and I just pulled it
off the shelf now. It is dogeared
in two places, and one
is about reading: “When we
read, we are not looking for
new ideas, but ones we’ve
already thought... confirmation...
that allows us to take
flight from new places within
ourselves,” and the second is
about writing: “we want to
make a work that will begin
by astonishing ourselves”
(these are rough translations).
The same is true of photography, (Gary Winogrand: “I photograph to
see what something will look like photographed”): we want to be surprised by
the image. In terms of a political dimension, I believe there are feminist politics
imbedded in some of the photographs, especially the ones that frame a domestic
space, the floor, the fridge, the piled-up dust. Also suggested is a way of life
where the focus is decidedly not on material things.
There is more clearly a feminist position underlying the things I write. I gave a
talk on Louise Bourgeois where I triangulate her as a historical, war-time figure
with Marguerite Duras and Mildred Pierce, the fictional character from James
M. Cain’s novel. And now I’m working on a text that borrows a lot from Mary
Wollstonecraft, the late 18th century feminist, educator and political activist.
gdv: I would love to ask you about your experience, and friendship, with
such an important figure as Colin De Land from American Fine Art; you
started exhibiting there in 1994. But also the experience of being part of
44

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
the collective that started the New York artistrun
gallery Orchard. The program was really
exciting, and in my opinion, one of the last important
cultural moments. Orchard staged and
produced new projects by Allan McCollum,
Andrea Fraser, Michael Asher and many more.
DI GIGIOTTo DEL VECCHIO
md: Colin was a poetic, ambivalent figure who
played the role of art dealer almost as a masquerade.
After he and Pat Hearn died, many of us in
their orbit felt the loss acutely, felt a void in the
art world, and wanted a space that might address
some of what AFA had represented for us. I think
we crammed a lot into the three years Orchard
operated: a multitude of (mostly group) shows,
screenings, events, and tons of dialogue amongst
ourselves and with the community that quickly
formed around that space.
gdv: How did it work? I mean the organization
of the program at Orchard? What was
the cultural climate in and around Orchard?
md: The cultural climate was George Bush and
the Republicans: pretty horrible. Many of us were
so depressed by Bush’s re-election we felt we had
to do something just to survive psychically and
morally. Nic Guagnini (we were eleven members)
was especially insistent that the shows had to protest,
or at least be about the war in Iraq (in fact I
think only one show, curated by Nic, “September
11, 1973” was explicitly about the war). But while
we may have started off with a unified position, in
practice we began to diversify pretty quickly and
the shows became more about an individual’s set
of concerns than the group’s as a whole, though
the idea of showing inter-generational works (like
Asher’s) survived, and we mostly stuck to the rule
of not having solo shows. In the first year we met
a lot as group and had heated discussions about
our program, but then several members got jobs
in California, or traveled a lot for exhibitions, and
our core was reduced. And we started having the
disagreements that seem endemic to collectives...
But despite all of this, it was clear that Orchard
was very important in those three years, and is still
missed by a community of artists in New York.
I’m proud of the profusion of shows and events
we generated, you just have to look at the website
(Orchard 47) to see the thought and inventiveness
spilling out of each project.
Per Moyra Davey la lettura è un piacere e un problema.
Si può essere assorbiti completamente da un romanzo, o
messi in crisi da un saggio arduo e difficoltoso. In ogni caso,
per Davey, il requisito elettivo resta quello di una lettura
che si addensi attorno al suo proprio lavoro, che gli si
organizzi intorno. Gigiotto Del Vecchio incontra l’artista le
cui fotografie sono, da anni, scevre di presenza umana ma
cariche di polvere...
gigiotto del vecchio: Il tuo lavoro comprende fotografia, cinema e video. Inoltre, contiene
chiari riferimenti alla scrittura e alla filosofia. Potresti dirmi qualcosa di questo “mondo di intersezioni”
che influenza la tua attività artistica?
moyra davey: La fotografia, il cinema e il video sono strettamente legati ed è facilissimo per un artista
passare da uno all’altro. Quando si lavora intensamente, per un certo periodo, con un determinato medium –
nel mio caso si è trattato, per molti anni, della fotografia – può avere un effetto corroborante ricominciare da
capo con un nuovo progetto sulla scrittura e il video. Attualmente sto lavorando a diverse cose contemporaneamente:
sto leggendo e scrivendo di Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley e di tutto quello straordinario circolo
di donne; pian piano stanno cominciando a venire alla luce alcuni video e foto attinenti. Probabilmente
ad un certo punto mi metterò lì e comincerò seriamente a progettare un video a partire da questo lavoro di
scrittura, ma per ora si tratta solamente di quella piacevolissima forma di flânerie nota come ricerca.
gdv: Tu suggerisci vi sia un’affinità tra gli atti della lettura e della scrittura, due lati opposti della
comunicazione che si intersecano l’uno con l’altro; che cosa intendi esattamente quando dici che lettura
e scrittura sono complementari? È uno degli argomenti trattati nel tuo libro The Problem of Reading
(Document Books, 2003)?
md: Sì, si tratta di una conclusione a cui sono giunta in The Problem of Reading. Ho scritto quel saggio
perché ero molto confusa e inquieta riguardo all’atto della lettura e volevo capire da dove venissero quella
confusione e quell’inquietudine, come potessi trovare un centro d’attenzione su cui focalizzarmi, ecc. Molti
grandi scrittori hanno affrontato il problema della lettura, alcuni direttamente, come Virginia Woolf nel suo
saggio Come si legge un libro?, o Italo Calvino nel suo romanzo Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, o, ancora,
Kafka (“non perdete tempo leggendo qualcosa che non sorprenderà la vostra mente”). Altri (Benjamin,
Sartre, Barthes) affermano, in un modo o nell’altro, che “la lettura è scrittura”, il che ha rappresentato per
me la scoperta più interessante e, in un certo senso, la soluzione al mio problema. Mi sono resa conto che per
me la forma di lettura più vitale e più gratificante è quella che si organizza intorno alla produzione di qualcosa
di mio. Non sono sicura da dove provenga l’inquietudine, ma so che alla fine ho bisogno di ancorarmi
a temi e testi che risulteranno generativi.
gdv: Immagino che questa sia la dimensione entro la quale hai progettato la tua recente mostra alla
Kunsthalle Basel, “Speaker Receiver”. Perché questo titolo?
Opposite – 32 Photographs from Paris
(detail), 2009. Courtesy: Murray Guy,
New York.
Top – Blow, 2007.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
md: Tutto è cominciato con il semplice desiderio di dare un titolo alla mostra da una o, in questo caso, due delle
fotografie che vi ho esposto (l’ho fatto anche con la mia mostra precedente alla galleria The Fogg, “Long Life
Cool White”). Mi è sempre piaciuto l’accoppiamento di quelle due parole, “Speaker-Receiver” e, riflettendoci
più attentamente, ho cominciato a vedere nel titolo diverse risonanze, in particolar modo con i video: Fifty Minutes
si basa in gran parte sul rapporto psicoanalitico e My Necropolis è organizzato intorno a una lettera che Walter
Benjamin scrisse nel 1931 e su un gruppo di persone che, settantacinque anni dopo, cercano di interpretarla.
45

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
Newsstand No. 2, 1994.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
46

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
Newsstand No. 3, 1994.
Courtesy: Murray Guy, New York.
47

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
From top, clockwise –
Receivers, 2003.
Courtesy: Murray Guy,
New York.
Long Life Cool White,
1999. Courtesy: Murray
Guy, New York.
Fridge, 2003. Courtesy:
Murray Guy, New York.
Paw, 2003.
Courtesy: Murray Guy,
New York.
Opposite – Shure, 2003.
Courtesy: Murray Guy,
New York.

Mousse 26 ~ Moyra Davey
gdv: C’è sempre una sorta di senso di immobilità nelle tue opere, la sensazione
di cose e oggetti che non abbiano visto la presenza umana per molto
tempo. Le persone sono raffigurate molto raramente. Potresti parlare di
questo elemento? Perché una simile distanza? Ovviamente è una questione
che non riguarda solo l’atmosfera dell’immagine...
md: È vero, è raro che nelle mie fotografie compaiano esseri umani, ed è così
da più di vent’anni. Fino al 1984 circa ho realizzato molti ritratti ma, grazie
all’esposizione alla critica della rappresentazione – attraverso la scuola di dottorato
e il Whitney Program – quell’impulso si è gradualmente atrofizzato. Ho
pensato a lungo a una frase, tratta dal saggio di Walter Benjamin Piccola storia
della fotografia e citata da George Baker: “La rinuncia all’uomo per la fotografia
è, fra tutte, la più irrealizzabile”. È un sentimento che condivido pienamente;
tuttavia, Benjamin adorava anche Atget, la cui opera è quasi completamente
svuotata della presenza umana: “come la scena di un crimine” è la famosa frase
con cui Walter Benjamin stesso ha descritto le opere di Atget. Amo la tradizione
della strada, incarnata da Robert Frank, e quella del diario, esemplificata
dal Larry Clark degli inizi e da Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz.
Ammiro particolarmente questo tipo di lavoro, ma il mio temperamento e la
mia visione si sono in qualche modo evoluti in una direzione ermetica, perfino
agorafobica, più in linea con la fotografia testimoniale o, in qualche caso, perfino
con le immagini di eBay: oggetti che lasciano intuire una presenza umana, ma
che essenzialmente vivono di vita propria. Forse quell’immobilità caratteristica
deriva dal lungo tempo che ci è voluto per scattare alcune di quelle fotografie: il
tempo penetra nell’immagine.
gdv: Nel testo di Eric Rosenberg sulla tua opera vi è un passo in cui si
dice: “Lasciate che il presente sia, dicono le immagini di Davey, lasciate che
abbia il suo tempo, che si prenda il suo tempo, specialmente se il futuro significa
disfarsi di ciò che è rotto prima ancora che abbiamo determinato in
md: Mi piace che Adam abbia citato dei diari, perché io stessa ritengo che
molte delle mie fotografie siano diaristiche; di questi giorni penso che la macchina
fotografica e il quaderno per gli appunti siano quasi intercambiabili. Amo
il libro di Pavese. Lo scorso anno ne ho lette alcune parti in francese e proprio
recentemente l’ho recuperato dallo scaffale. In due punti ho piegato gli angoli
delle pagine e uno di quei due passi riguarda la lettura: “Leggendo non cerchiamo
idee nuove, ma pensieri già da noi pensati, che acquistano sulla pagina
un suggello di conferma. Ci colpiscono degli altri le parole che risuonano in
una zona già nostra – che già viviamo – e facendola vibrare ci permettono di
cogliere nuovi spunti dentro di noi,” e il secondo riguarda la scrittura: “vogliamo
realizzare un’opera che comincerà stupendoci”. La stessa cosa vale per la
fotografia, (Garry Winogrand: “Scatto fotografie per scoprire che aspetto avrà
la cosa fotografata”): vogliamo essere sorpresi dall’immagine. In termini di dimensione
politica, credo che in alcune delle immagini vi siano elementi di politica
femminista, specialmente in quelle che ritraggono uno spazio domestico, il
pavimento, il frigorifero, la polvere ammassata. Inoltre viene suggerito uno stile
di vita che non concentri l’attenzione sulle cose materiali.
La posizione femminista emerge più chiaramente nelle cose che scrivo. Ho tenuto
una conferenza su Louise Bourgeois in cui effettuavo una triangolazione
tra lei, in quanto figura storica del periodo bellico, Marguerite Duras e Mildred
Pierce, il personaggio fittizio del romanzo di James M. Cain. E ora sto lavorando
ad un testo che deve molto a Mary Wollstonecraft, la femminista, educatrice
e attivista politica di fine Settecento.
gdv: Vorrei chiederti della tua esperienza e della tua amicizia con una
figura importante come quella di Colin De Land di American Fine Art,
dove hai cominciato a esporre nel 1994. Ma vorrei che mi parlassi anche
dell’esperienza di far parte del collettivo che ha creato Orchard, la galleria
newyorchese gestita da artisti. Il programma era davvero eccitante e, a parer
mio, uno degli ultimi momenti culturali importanti. Orchard ha messo
in scena e ha prodotto i nuovi progetti di Allan McCollum, Andrea Fraser,
Michael Asher e molti altri.
che modo ciò che è rotto potrebbe essere riutilizzato, tenuto o visto”. Pensi
di poter aggiungere qualcosa a tale osservazione? Che significato attribuisci
esattamente al tempo?
md: Sono molto felice di leggere la parola “presente” nella frase di Eric, perché
spessissimo mi vengono poste domande sul “passare del tempo”. So che
molti degli oggetti che compaiono nelle fotografie sono antiquati, ma non è
quello il motivo per cui li fotografo. C’è un motivo specifico per ciascuna immagine:
può essere per il modo in cui cade la luce (Speaker); una confluenza di forme
(Nyro); la mia continua attrazione per la polvere (Shure, Paw, Two Streaks,
ecc.). Glad, invece, è una sorta di scherzo sulla costipazione da un punto di vista
freudiano. E poi c’è l’importanza che per me riveste la rappresentazione della
musica (Greatest Hits ecc.). Per esempio, considero il collezionismo di dischi
una forma di salvaguardia e di omaggio e qualcosa di intrinsecamente ottimistico.
Ma sono totalmente d’accordo con il sentimento espresso da Eric: il ritmo
con cui consumiamo nuovi oggetti è spaventoso. L’uso di combustibili fossili,
l’industria e le manifatture stanno rendendo tossico il pianeta; ma qui negli Stati
Uniti ci viene detto di comprare, comprare, comprare per salvare l’economia.
In un modo o nell’altro ci stiamo dirigendo verso l’implosione.
gdv: Le tue fotografie, sempre di dimensioni modeste e mai troppo spettacolari,
mostrano le condizioni di vita e di lavoro come metafora della
condizione umana. Adam Szymczyk ha paragonato il tuo lavoro a quello
che Cesare Pavese, nei suoi diari, chiamava “il mestiere di vivere”. Questa
posizione, dal tuo punto di vista, si lega maggiormente a una dimensione
poetica, politica o a entrambe? Perché?
md: Colin era una figura poetica e ambigua, che interpretava il ruolo di mercante
d’arte quasi come una messinscena. Dopo la sua morte e quella di Pat
Hearn, molti di noi, che gravitavamo nella loro orbita, hanno sentito un forte
senso di perdita, la sensazione di un vuoto nel mondo dell’arte, e volevano
trovare uno spazio che potesse essere un po’ quello che l’American Fine Art
aveva rappresentato per loro. Penso che abbiamo sgobbato molto nei tre anni di
attività di Orchard: abbiamo dato vita a una moltitudine di mostre (prevalentemente
collettive), proiezioni, eventi e abbiamo dialogato molto tra noi e con la
comunità che si è rapidamente formata intorno a quello spazio.
gdv: Come funzionava? Com’era organizzato il programma di Orchard?
Qual era il clima culturale al suo interno e quale fuori?
md: Il clima culturale era quello rappresentato da George Bush e dai repubblicani,
quindi orribile. Molti di noi erano così depressi per la rielezione
di Bush che sentivano di dover fare qualcosa semplicemente per sopravvivere
fisicamente e moralmente. Nic Guagnini (eravamo undici membri) insisteva
particolarmente sul fatto che le mostre dovessero protestare contro, o almeno
riguardare la guerra in Iraq (in realtà penso che solo una mostra, curata da
Nic e intitolata “September 11, 1973” fosse esplicitamente incentrata sulla
guerra). Inizialmente siamo partiti da una posizione unitaria, ma nella pratica
si è assistito ben presto ad un processo di diversificazione e le mostre hanno
cominciato a riflettere un insieme d’interessi individuali piuttosto che quelli
di un gruppo preso nella sua totalità. Nonostante ciò l’idea di esporre opere
intergenerazionali (come quelle di Asher) è sopravvissuta e nella maggior
parte dei casi ci siamo attenuti alla regola di non organizzare mostre monografiche.
Il primo anno ci siamo incontrati spesso come gruppo e abbiamo
avuto accese discussioni sul programma; poi alcuni membri hanno ottenuto
lavori in California, mentre altri erano sempre in viaggio per le mostre e così
il nucleo si è ridotto. È stato allora che sono cominciati i disaccordi che sembrano
endemici ai collettivi... Nonostante ciò, è evidente l’importanza che
ha avuto Orchard in quei tre anni, e una comunità di artisti di New York ne
sente ancora la mancanza. Sono fiera della profusione di mostre e di eventi
a cui abbiamo dato vita; basta dare un’occhiata al sito web (Orchard 47)
per rendersi conto della riflessività e dell’inventività che emergevano da ogni
progetto.
49

MARCH2010

April 2010 | Issue 130
Some Things Moyra Taught Me
ART HISTORY
The intertwining of melancholy and possibility
in contemporary photography
by George Baker
Thinking about this column has stirred a vague
set of memories. It is the winter of 2003, the last
winter of my life as a New Yorker, the final
months before I moved to Los Angeles. Perhaps
because of this, I remember a lot of snow: tramping
and stumbling about in the stuff, visiting Chelsea
galleries. In the wake of one particularly brutal
blizzard, I make my way to American Fine Arts. Moyra Davey, 32 Photographs from Paris (detail, 2009)
I am, rather auspiciously, with Kaja Silverman
Courtesy of Murray Guy, New York
and James Coleman. But these are the final months
of the gallery’s existence, not long after Colin de Land’s death from cancer earlier that year. The exhibition is Tom Burr’s ‘Gone,
Gone’, an installation of all-black sculptures that seemed to react to the gallerist’s passing, to his partner Pat Hearn’s death and
perhaps to larger, more collective losses. A series of monumental black vinyl flowers have been strewn throughout the space, thrown
or draped or hoisted into the air by cruel wires. A reflective black box stands littered with cigarettes and empty glasses, as if it were a
bar. Indeed, bar stools pose beside it and lie toppled all around, some of them covered by the vinyl flowers, like shrouds. The party, it
seems, is over, and other activities have come into play, a sculptural process more reminiscent of the fort-da game Sigmund Freud
played with his infant grandson, or the charged psychic labours of destruction and reparation.
The next month, I was back at American Fine Arts. Was it for the last time? I cannot remember. But I had also forgotten until now
that the show immediately after Burr’s was by the photographer Moyra Davey. Again, it had snowed and, again, I was visiting the
gallery with close friends; with my sister, I think, and a very young Gary Carrion-Murayari, before he started curating. We were all
touched by Davey’s small-scale, delicate photographs, and spent a long time wandering back and forth from print to print. Although
many of the photographs were of empty liquor bottles irradiated by light, I did not associate them with Burr’s drunken, passed-out
bar stools from the month before. The photographs seemed an obsessive, if random and half-hearted, mapping of Davey’s domestic
interior: photographs of dust along a floorboard, of vinyl records or books heaped upon a groaning shelf, of dishevelled, paper-strewn
tables and desks. It did not occur to me until now that Davey’s photographs were as much a reaction to – and mourning of – De
Land’s death as Burr’s blacked-out party space. It was as if De Land’s dishevelment had become Davey’s too, as if her forlorn
photographs had taken on qualities linking her home to the typical condition of his gallery, her images to his notorious persona – and
this introjection of the lost object remains one of the defining experiences of melancholia.

These memories return to me at a moment when I have been attempting to think about the fate of photography – analogue
photography, the indexical image – in the face of its technological demise, but also potentially of its afterlife; what I have elsewhere
called photography’s ‘expansion’. It seems to me that melancholia has coloured photography’s fate, and it is artists like Davey who
embody this relationship most incisively. For here is an artist who seems to have closed off the outside world to become a prowler of
the domestic interior, shut off from the city streets that so long nurtured the hopes of the photographic document. Here is an artist
who seems to emulate Marcel Duchamp, with his laziness and his dust, and one whose artistic process seems an extended languishing
– a flânerie of books and articles and films – an almost passive consumption of other products, in the hope that they might spur an
image or produce the desire to make a photograph. In Davey’s video 50 Minutes, begun in the summer of 2003, she interspersed
footage of her own domestic photographs with a deep reflection upon nostalgia, declaring it ‘the intellectual’s guilty pleasure’.
Quoting a critic, she continues: ‘I admit to being disconcerted by a grieving that has been made beautiful. Grief, absence, loss,
longing, wandering, exile, homesickness […] nostalgia is itself a lovely and piercing word.’ In her more recent video, My Necropolis
(2009), the artist fixated on Walter Benjamin, a notoriously saturnine thinker, interspersing images of tombstones in Parisian
cemeteries with footage of the artist’s friends trying to decipher a letter Benjamin once wrote to his friend, the philosopher and
historian Gershom Scholem, in which he mourns for a clock visible from his apartment window – an object he cannot own but to
which he is attached nonetheless, and that he calls ‘a luxury it is difficult to do without’.
‘But,’ objects Josiah McElheny, to whom I am explaining some of my ideas, ‘Moyra’s work is not melancholic.’ And that’s just it:
Davey shows us that an attachment to loss – of the photographic medium to its own loss – has become a space of possibility for
contemporary photography. Far from a pathological fixation, such melancholia should be understood as a space of opening (an open
wound, if you will). Consider, for example, Davey’s series ‘Copperhead’ (1990). Produced during an earlier economic recession (one
to which we can reconnect today), Davey’s low-tech images focus on the profile of Abraham Lincoln engraved on the United States
penny – the most devalued piece of American currency. Although almost worthless, the pennies that Davey depicts are ‘like’
photographs in many different ways: they are objects of circulation and of use kept close to the body, in wallets and pockets; they are
tokens stamped with their date. They are miniatures, enlarged by the photograph’s innate habit of holding on tight to its objectworld,
progeny of the close-up and the zoom. They are obsolete, throwaway vestiges, but also keepsakes, collectors’ items, the useless
avatars of blind luck or cunning thrift simultaneously. Indeed, each ‘Copperhead’ seems a memorial to photography’s eradication, or
– what amounts to the same thing – its ceaseless dedication to that which is on the verge of disappearance. The photographs capture
the immeasurable variety of the decay of each cast profile upon the penny’s surface, embodying meditations upon loss, erosion, and
the slipping of a thing into the status of detritus.
And yet, in fixating on this image-loss, the ‘Copperhead’ series depicts the penny as a receptor surface, a skin infinitely susceptible to
wounds, gouges and scratches – in other words, a site of contact; an object, like the photograph, endlessly open to receiving the marks
of the world. In recording this, Davey’s work mirrors photography in yet another way: these are images of serial objects, replicas, all
given over to the condition of absolute chance and singularity. If each photograph seems an image of disappearance, a cast or imprint
fading away before our eyes, the images’ condition as ‘last photographs’ can also be reversed. It’s as if we are gazing upon photograph
after photograph of what seem to be latent images, a form at the point of its emergence, like a landmass surfacing from the ocean’s
depths, an unknown object blanketed by deep snow. The photographs are at once images of destruction and resurrection, loss and
potential rebirth.
This points to both how and why melancholia has become a tactic, today, in the process of being transvalued by many contemporary
artists. For melancholia, we might say, is above all a form of connection. It is a recalcitrant insistence on attachment, a passionate
embrace, but to an object that is in fact gone; this is a connection staged around loss. Melancholia thus embodies a form of impossible
connection. For photography, at least, this has always been the medium’s central condition, but it is a paradox we can only fully sense
today, as the medium itself has been subjected to its own processes of death. To seize upon connection at the point of loss: Freud
once insisted, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915), that melancholia was not only a fixation, but also a ‘taking flight’, a mysterious
passage of the lost object into the ego, so that – just perhaps – ‘love [might] escape [...] abolition’. And so it is with photography
today, as well.
George Baker
George Baker is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art,
Vice-Chair UCLA, Department of Art History, Los Angeles, USA.

March 2010
Four photographs in Moyra Daveyʼs
installation 32 Photographs from Paris,
2009, C-prints with tape, postage and ink,
each 113⁄4 by 173⁄4 inches; at Murray Guy.
MOYRA DAVEY
MURRAY GUY
New York Moyra Daveyʼs first
show with Murray Guy was an
engrossing demonstration of the
cameraʼs ability to isolate detail,
organize content and serve
agendas both simple and
complex. Since the early ʼ90s,
the New York-based
photographer has created
photographs, videos and
publications whose subject
matter—including studio
ephemera, domestic objects and
books—may suggest more
sympathy toward the page than
the wall. Davey steadily
documents segments of her own
world and operates in that
narrow gap between the novel
and the cinema. She is
something of an intimist, and her
modestly scaled C-prints, none
larger than 20 by 24 inches,
feature the things we value and
accumulate.
The earliest works on view,
five images from the series
“Copperheads” (1990), are
extreme close-ups of pennies,
revealing their weathered,
gouged surfaces, with Lincolnʼs
profile serially repeated.
Eisenstein (1996), an image of
crammed bookshelves, was
taken in Daveyʼs home and
shows the artistʼs studio as
academy. Popular culture
informs Greatest Hits (1999), in
which a collection of LPs on a
shelf can be read as
portraiture—who hasnʼt looked
through someoneʼs books or
records to learn something about
their owner?
Daveyʼs 32 Photographs from
Paris (2009) wrapped around
one room, the small
images—café tabletops, clock
faces, book pages and
depopulated domestic
settings—simply pinned to the
wall in a horizontal row. After
printing them, Davey folded
them up and mailed each one to
a friend, later reassembling them
for display; the stamps and
handwritten addresses are
visible on many of the prints.
Steeped in nostalgia for the
handmade and pre-digital, these
photos of café life may call up
the viewerʼs inner Francophile.
Exhibited in the same room
was the 30-minute video My
Necropolis (2009), which begins
with a tour of the graves of
cultural figures in Paris
cemeteries. The camera drifts
over the weathered memorial
stones, looking for arrangements
of personal remembrances left
there by visitors. While such
sites usually attract those
seeking psychic connection to
mythic figures, for Davey they
appear to operate as locations
where things accumulate. Later,
Davey (off camera) leisurely
converses with artist friends,
who often make guest
appearances in each otherʼs
work. Here, they comment on an
enigmatic passage in a letter
written in 1931 by a depressed
Walter Benjamin to his friend
and fellow philosopher Gershom
Scholem (a copy of the letter
was available for visitors to
read). While fretting over his
living quarters, Benjamin
professes fascination with a
clock that is visible from his
window, calling it a luxury that is
increasingly impossible to do
without. Daveyʼs exchanges,
which include one with her
young son Barney, are as cozy
as the couch provided by the
gallery for our viewing comfort.
The press release states that
Davey desires, among other
things, to “reclaim a practice of
photography grown out of
contingency and accident.” In
this, she is not alone.
–Tim Maul

BEST BOOKS OF 2008
SHANNON EBNER
If a writer’s style can be characterized as
photographic, then this is how I would refer to
Moyra Davey’s stylistic approach in her essay
“Notes on Photography & Accident.” Published on
the occasion of the artist’s first museum exhibition
(at Harvard’s Fogg, curated by Helen
Molesworth), Long Life Cool White is a small,
elegantly designed paperback that neither feels
nor reads like a typical catalogue.
Davey’s writing is scholarly while never losing sight of a more personal and notational expository
drift. And it is precisely this drift that grants her prose its photographic quality. Taking up the
question of whether the notion of accident may hope to retain its relevance, Davey looks to
Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Janet Malcolm, each of whom has mined
this history of analog slippages in his or her texts. Through their writing, Davey locates
precedence for a renewed interest in the camera’s mechanical mishaps. One gets the sense that
Davey, in casting herself into the interstitial spaces of thought, is not so much thinking about
things as thinking between them. As an example, among Davey’s notes are ideas about
photography’s ascending market value and correlative expansion of scale; Benjamin’s idea of the
optical unconscious in relation to psychoanalysis; Davey’s own declining health; and, finally,
thoughts on the drive to take photographs in the “real,” as opposed to the imagined (read: staged)
world at all. Definitive conclusions are not necessarily what Davey values.
What readers may find of value, however, are Davey’s photographs, in particular her
“Copperheads” series, 1990–92. Here, the distressed surfaces of pennies, the lowliest form of
currency, are surveyed by the camera’s uncompromising lens, investing the cent with the exploits
of visual information not commonly bestowed upon it.
Perhaps what struck me most about this book was Davey’s low-grade anxiety about analog
photographic technologies on the cusp of obsolescence. In her summary of the quotes (from
Barthes, Sontag, et al.) that began her journey into the topic of “Photography & Accident,” Davey
formulates the proposition that “accident is the lifeblood of photography.” If we are to accept this
claim, one may ask, what will it mean for the medium when photography loses touch with the
analog—which requires, at the very least, an actual subject, even if inanimate—and so
surrenders some control to the fate of a mechanical camera? Will photography be leached of life,
or will the notion of accident merely undergo a radical redefinition? In medias res, this pun is
intended.
Shannon Ebner is an artist based in Los Angeles.

Murray Guy
453 West 17 Street New York NY 10011 T: 212 463 7372 F: 212 463 7319 info@murrayguy.com
December 19, 2003
ART IN REVIEW
Moyra Davey
American Fine Arts
530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through Jan. 10
A forensic investigator might conclude that the disheveled living spaces documented in
Moyra Davey's photographs belong to a depressed and possibly dangerously alienated
person. Gallerygoers will instantly recognize the lifestyle of the bohemian New York
loft-dweller. It is the world of Nan Goldin's early snapshots, with the people gone for the
day.
The funky, beat-up furniture and stereo equipment, the shelves groaning under the weight
of thousands of vinyl records, the dust and spider webs under the beds, the empty liquor
bottles on cluttered counters: these are the spaces of people who invest their resources in
things other than domestic beautification. In fact the photographs depict places where Ms.
Davey herself has lived over the last 10 years.
The photographs have an appropriately down-and-dirty look, the opposite of the oversize
and overproduced prints that continue to glut the market. Because their color is grimy, the
light is wan or murky and the focus is on unlovely things -- two bare light bulbs in a
cheap ceiling fixture, dust caught around a stereo needle, a rubber ball lost under a
dresser -- the photographs have a mournful feeling and a quiet metaphorical
reverberation. They are poems about the soul, lost and starved in a land of material
overabundance and manic extroversion.
KEN JOHNSON

Murray Guy
453 West 17 Street New York NY 10011 T: 212 463 7372 F: 212 463 7319 info@murrayguy.com
March 1, 1996
ART IN REVIEW
Moyra Davey
American Fine Arts
22 Wooster Street
SoHo Through March 9
A gallery statement that links Moyra Davey's collages of different photographs to the
tradition of trompe l'oeil bulletin boards by 19th-century American painters like William
Harnett may be stretching things a bit. Nonetheless, for all their buttoned-down
Conceptualism, Ms. Davey's accumulations of images are surprisingly suggestive and
satisfying in the ways they evoke and contrast different human needs and obsessions, all
the while comparing different photographic methods.
Most of the collages are dominated by detailed color photographs of messy desktops or
shelves filled to overflowing with books, records or films, evoking the life of the mind as
well as the incessant accumulation and arranging of material and information that it
frequently requires.
Smaller, fuzzier pictures depict more plebeian pleasures: a quaint roadside hot-dog stand
and film stills of a man eating by himself on an ocean pier. Somewhere in between these
extremes of consciousness are smaller bits -- ticket stubs and photographs of ticket stubs
to various popular movies.
The continual zigzagging between what might be called cultural sustenance and the other
kind gives the work a slightly snobby, even classist undercurrent, but in the end so many
different aspects of life, thought and knowledge are called forth that the invitation to
browse and muse is very hard to resist.
Also good, in the gallery's office, are three small black-and-white photographs of camera
store displays, which underscore Ms. Davey's penchant for self-reference and also bring
to mind Walker Evans.
ROBERTA SMITH