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

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.