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

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
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