A Toronto-born photographer and writer, Moyra Davey is known for producing images imbued with a delicate intimacy (close-ups of dog paws and dewy spiderwebs) as well as process-based works such as her mailers—photographs that have been folded to envelope size, mailed to an institution or individual, and ultimately unfolded and displayed, still bearing the markings of their postal journey. Often her work also takes a distinctly personal tone, particularly in her films, which—produced, shot, and edited entirely by the artist herself, mostly inside her Washington Heights, New York apartment — have built narratives around subjects like Davey’s psychotherapy sessions and photographs of her sisters in the 1980s.
Davey’s most recent body of work finds the artist—a voracious reader who at the time of our conversation was knee-deep in texts by Derek Jarman, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Hervé Guibert, among others—immersed in the life and writings of French literary figure Jean Genet. For “Burn the Diaries,” her exhibition opening September 19 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Davey will touch on the three central elements of her practice with a series of her mailer photographs, a text responding to Genet, and a film, My Saints. She spoke with Modern Painters assistant editor Thea Ballard about using literary encounters to explore personal subject matter.
THEA BALLARD: How did you get into this body of work?
MOYRA DAVEY: It all kind of started with reading Genet. I’d never read him before, and a friend of mine, Pradeep Dalal, made a remark that sent me to his interviews, which are really fascinating. I started with the nonfiction, his last book, Prisoner of Love. And eventually I read his novels. But I ended up writing a text that’s organized around this encounter with Genet, and then the video followed, and the photographs. It’s a triangle with equal sides—each one is as important as the other.
TB: What was it specifically about Genet that you first connected with?
MD: Pradeep was a respondent at a panel on writing and photography that Zoe Leonard and I did at the International Center of Photography, and I was talking a lot about my notebooks, as was Zoe. Something he said was very striking: “Does everything have to be commandeered for art? Can’t some things, like journals and letters, just be private?” And he cited Genet in that context—Genet was asked in an interview which books had influenced him, and he said no particular book: It’s music, it’s theater, it’s film, it’s reading, it’s kind of everything. To me, it’s a real conundrum because on the one hand, if you’re an artist or a writer, you have to cut yourself off from life in order to work. On the other hand, once the work, the writing, gets some momentum, it’s an incredible high to be in that creative space. But you have to sacrifice everyday life, leisure, just reading for its own sake, listening to music for its own sake, watching film for its own sake. I think there’s a thing that happens to artists where everything is grist for the mill. My friend Alison Strayer calls it “poaching on life.” I say in the video: “Why can’t we just take the time to listen to music for its own sake?”
TB: Personal details and images are central to your work. Do you struggle with negotiating what or how much to reveal?
MD: I do have a lot of doubts about revealing personal details and anecdotes. I divulge a fair amount, but I’m very careful. I feel like there’s a line that you can’t cross because it becomes this excess. You want to create a kind of tension, an interest in the viewer or the reader. But the way I deliver the material is very detached and disassociated, and that creates a counterbalance to the intimate stories that I’m telling. It offsets the personal nature of some of the material.
TB: For this exhibition you’re using Genet as something to activate material. In the past you’ve used Mary Wollstonecraft and others.
MD: For each new work that I make, I try and anchor it in reading one person in particular, and it inevitably branches out. A lot of what I come across is serendipitous, and to have these accidental encounters in reading is something that’s very pleasurable, to realize that a piece of writing has resonance with the thing you’ve been focused on, that it can take you in an unanticipated direction.
TB: Can you tell me a bit about the mailers?
MD: My gallerist in Toronto, John Goodwin, asked me to fold up some photos and mail them to him so he could make a little poster for a show I was doing. Then a few years later, I was in Paris and was asked to be in a summer show at Murray Guy. I remembered what I had done, and I thought, oh! I can take photos in Paris, and just mail them like giant folded postcards. I got hooked on doing it because it’s so manageable. Everything is within your control. Even the postal service is reliable—nothing has ever gotten lost. I like turning the photograph back into an object, making it a more casual thing, making it something you can handle, giving it this epistolary thrust. I think the long and short of it is I love doing everything myself.
TB: You produce your videos yourself as well.
MD: Yeah, I really like to work alone. In the case of My Saints, I’m just grabbing people who happen to be in my vicinity. There’s one person, Angela, who I met in another situation, and I discovered she had read all of Genet, so I interviewed her. I like to be able to work whenever I feel like it, though I think I should try working with people to change things up a little bit. It would force me to be a director in a different way, and to plan things out, which, when you’re working by yourself, you don’t really have to do.
TB: What led you to incorporate video into your practice?
MD: The initial impulse was that I felt that I didn’t have any more ideas for photography, that I had somehow backed myself into a corner, that my photography had become so enclosed and hermetic within the domestic sphere, focusing on particles of dust. I really wanted a break from that, and I also had this urge to write something. I really didn’t think my first video, 50 minutes, was ever going to circulate. I thought it was going to be a bottom-drawer piece. I thought it would be unbearable for people to watch this monologue—and of course there’s always the fear that it’s going to be perceived as solipsistic or exhibitionistic or whatever. But I’ve found that bringing in these other histories—Genet, Wollstonecraft, and so on—it broadens the focus, and it makes these connections that move the work out of your little world. I think that also makes it more accessible to viewers. I just published this little pamphlet for Camden Arts Centre in London. They ask you to choose a quote to put on the back. Mine is from Fassbinder: “I’d say the more you put yourself into the stories, that is, the more ‘honestly’ you put yourself into the story, the more that story will concern others as well.” Which is such an interesting idea. From personal experience I really believe it’s true, and again it’s like another paradox—you’re revealing something that’s so personal and idiosyncratic, but I guess there’s something about the quality of honesty and truth that people can connect to.
TB: When you’re working so closely with the life and work of someone like Genet, is there a point where you have to let go?
MD: Absolutely. The whole time I was reading him I was questioning my impulse to do this. I think it’s interesting to work with someone who you kind of rub up against. It creates a friction or tension that can be really generative. And now I’m actually reading Anne Sexton, who I have really mixed feelings about. She was pretty crazy, but she could be an absolutely amazing poet. She was accused by many people of being overly confessional, airing her dirty laundry, that kind of thing. I just made a piece that uses a line from one of her poems: “Why else keep a journal if not to examine your own filth?”
Another interviewer brought up this idea that I have hosts—Genet, Wollstonecraft, Benjamin, Sontag, Baudrillard, and so on. I immediately said to her, “I’m a parasite!” I’m sort of feeding on these people. But you have to be careful. I think the challenge is always to find the point where you connect and then pull yourself away and write about your thought process.
A version of this article appears in the September 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
