Reviewers of Index Cards—the most recent book by the artist and writer Moyra Davey—often begin by either quoting Davey herself or one of the many artists who riddle her pages: Elizabeth Bowen, Susan Sontag, or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example. Index Cards is a collection of fifteen prose pieces penned between 2003 and 2019. Bearing traces of both the memoir-driven narratives of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti as well as the more conceptual approaches of Maggie Nelson and Chris Kraus, Davey’s autotheoretical writings take up themes at the heart of contemporary aesthetic experience: the fraught relation between reality and fiction; theory and identity; and, yes, the penchant for locating a truth (or something like it) in the compilation of fragments. Reviewers—myself included—find themselves unable to resist the seduction of her search for a fragment that will open up a whole world.
Davey began her career in the 1980s as a photographer before expanding her practice into writing and video, mediums in which she has been primarily working for the last two decades. Often classified as a conceptual photographer or experimental documentary filmmaker, Davey came of age in the era of the MFA. As a graduate of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, she learned to make art when the idea was everything, critique was taken for granted, and theory was where one turned not only for inspiration but for explanation. Like other artists who rose to prominence in the ’70s and ’80s, Davey rejected the autonomy of conceptual art and strove to reinvigorate it with the personal that her (mostly male) predecessors often rejected. Her video works, several scripts for which are included in this collection, often feature Davey wandering around her apartment, reading from the notebooks where she logs her pithy thoughts. Her critical writing is interspersed with banal observations about her day (“Wake at 6”) or how she is feeling (“body breaking down”).
One reviewer describes Index Cards as haunted “by the specter of the imagined book,” the book that is yet to come or is in the process of becoming.[1] The work’s completion is arrested in favor of lingering in the act of seeking, the self-conscious performance of what, in Lauren Fournier’s recent book on autotheory, she refers to as “intertextual intimacy and identification.”[2] Davey writes, “I’m piecing together fragments because I don’t yet have a subject” (150). If Davey’s photographic and video work explores the illusion of completion inevitably imparted by the status of the object, the texts in this collection afford a different way into art. They resist the allure of the finished work to reveal the doubt and endless searching which lurks just underneath its surface. As a medium, writing never attains the evidentiary nature of the photographic image; it is, to quote Roland Barthes, “by nature, fictional,” lending itself more easily to a disclosure of the potential of images with which Davey’s work plays but ultimately obscures.[3]
Formally aligned with the style of Walter Benjamin or Sontag, the essays in Index Cards read like lists rather than complete thoughts or arguments. We see Davey grappling across diary entries with what it means to create by turning to the art of others. She is exhilarated, inspired by Benjamin and many, many other artists and writers, but prefers to reside in ambiguity: if not comfortable with uncertainty, too full of doubt to pronounce or conclude. The style of her prose is direct: honest but not overly revealing, artful but not artificial, erudite yet unassuming.
Engaging with art is not a neutral activity for Davey; Index Cards documents her struggle with the perceived need to instrumentalize her consumption. In one essay, Davey collects the reading habits of other writers, searching desperately for the one “right” way to read, the method that will allow the essence of the text to be revealed. In another, she quotes Henrik Ibsen to observe that “I’ve come to realize I’ll never find happiness in idle pleasure” (156). She bemoans the temptation of “low hanging fruit,” the shame of using family members as subjects, the work that is too easy, and the fear of unoriginality. Each new source of inspiration, such as a sudden urge to recreate an especially beautiful scene in Chantal Akerman’s film News from Home, is fraught with insecurity and doubt.
Reading and looking are generative processes for Davey. Reflections on her own art blur into references to the work of others, watching a film leads to a line from a book, listening to a piece of music reminds her of a friend. The in medias res nature of her epigraphic pieces evokes the aura of the accident which has animated so much writing on photography. Rather than analysis abstracted from life, however, Davey places both her embodiment and her identity as the collector of these ideas at the center of her work. In the script for her film Les Goddesses she filters memories of her and her sisters through stories about Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters; in “Notes on Photography and Accident” she juxtaposes a history of photography and its theorists with her own reflections on the form in hopes that a return to the medium’s past will reinvigorate her present.
Index Cards explicitly takes up the common ground between Davey’s two disciplines, photography and writing. Her photographic practice is characterized by reduction and repetition, the elimination of people in favor of returning again and again to the same bare subjects: dust, bottles, newsstands, and so forth. It is a practice mirrored in her writing’s obsession with themes such as creative practice, labor, consumption, embodiment. In one essay, Davey refers to Barthes’s elaboration of the punctum as she reads Janet Malcolm, thrilling to certain interjections which, she writes, signal “‘truth’ in the way that strange eccentric details nearly always do” (25). The punctum, for Barthes, is the photographic detail which “pierces”; it is the sudden moment when a photograph becomes “something,” rather than an “anything whatever.”[4] Davey’s photographic and reading practices are haunted by the punctum’s accident, documenting both her encounters with its sudden eruption as well as her attempts to freeze it. But how to convey the experience of that moment of “truth” to another? How does an artist capture not just a thing but its essence? How to document the momentary high associated with feeling seen through the words of another?
“It’s becoming clear to me,” Davey writes, “that accident is to be located outside the frame somehow, in the way we apprehend images” (43). Davey’s turn to video followed a period in which she assembled collages out of photographs and fragments of text, work that emphasized the photograph’s contingency through the elaboration of potential contexts and connections. In much the same way, her writing does not just hoard quotations but uses them to build out intellectual and narrative worlds. When the experience of “truth,” in all its radical subjectivity, evades her (something it often does), Davey’s strategy is, in Guy Debord’s words, to “follow the dérive,” to just keep reading, which means to just keep writing and just keep looking. “One of the ways I’d kept photography alive for myself,” Davey writes, “was through writing” (117). An image once passed over always holds the promise of becoming “something,” or something else through the addition of a new text, or its re-arrangement amidst a sea of fragments.
More than a mere documentation of the anxiety of creation, then, Davey’s practice, as it surfaces in Index Cards, is the articulation of a philosophy of aesthetic encounter. Just as in the experience of the punctum, the moment a piece of art comes to be a “something” to an audience, rather than an anything whatever, is defined only in its accident. But that doesn’t mean one can’t or won’t search for it just the same. That search looks like the proliferation of connections in Davey’s work, the self-generating way in which ideas and memories surface through her reading and looking and build upon each other in her writing. Davey refers to this style of aesthetic encounter as “deferred,” completed “over short distances of time and place,” both through a continual return to the object as well as a looking beyond and about it (48). Barthes wrote that the punctum could emerge belatedly, through memory, as one recalled a photograph after encountering something else. Art’s essence has always been contextual, continually altered and renewed, defined not in its materiality but in the relations it instantiates between subjects, objects, and their environments. This collection of Davey’s wide-ranging reflections on both art’s process and its encounter affords both Davey and her readers one means of making sense of how art becomes “something” not in a moment, not in a day, but across a lifetime through memory, in the meaning that occasionally surfaces from a new arrangement of the fragments to which we so desperately cling.
Notes:
[1] Tess Michaelson. “Brief Moments Upon the Blank Page: Moyra Davey’s Index Cards. TheRumpus.net, October 21, 2020, https://therumpus.net/2020/10/index-cards-by-moyra-davey/.
[2] Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021).
[3] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 87.
[4] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 49.