MUSCLE UNCLE
SELECT SHOP FOR YOUR MIND
HAND PICKED BY QINXI YU & YI-CHANG YANG
Jun. 23, 2024
Authorized by the author to share.
English / Chinese
[Fig. 8.1: Moyra Davey, Dust Floor, 2007, C-print]
In one of Moyra Davey’s photographs, whisps of dust are visible under a bed (Floor, 2003). In others, an item of furniture has been moved to reveal balls of dust against a skirting board (Dust Floor, 2007); dust is caught on the needle of an old record player (Shure, 2003) and under the paw of a dog (Paw, 2003). In the video 50 Minutes (2006), the artist’s camera catches dust motes as they shimmy in the light from a nearby window. Earlier in the same work, Davey picks books from her shelves and blows off the dust that has gathered on them, a gesture she repeats in later videos Les Goddesses (2011) and i confess (2019). She shows herself dusting a windowsill in Hemlock Forest (2016), a video homage to the recently deceased filmmaker Chantal Akerman. As the curator Andrea Kunard writes in a text on Davey’s work, dust ‘settles on books and records and clumps under furniture; it is an ephemeral substance, anathema to photography, ubiquitous, and resonant with mortality’. In Davey’s voiceovers and published texts, she comments on dust-covered books and dusty corners in homes – her own and her mother’s – and quotes other writers who mention dust, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean Genet.
Dust is a central motif in the practice of the New York-based Canadian artist, who has for many years now taken photographs of her own home and the objects around her: stacks of books and vinyl records, papers, kitchen appliances, empty bottles, the view from the window. During stays in Paris, she trained her camera on other objects, including coffee cups and old clocks. In the longish videos made over the past twenty or so years we see footage shot in her apartment and occasionally in other locations – on the New York subway, for instance, and in cemeteries. In the voiceovers, Davey reflects in measured tones on a variety of texts by and about writers to whom she is drawn, such as Wollstonecraft and Genet, and on her own family and artistic practice, more rarely on her experience of living with multiple sclerosis, to which she also refers in a couple of her essays. The images of dust and dusting form part of a constellation of related signs and concerns. Writing about works made by Davey during a spell in Paris, Chris Kraus alludes to that constellation, noting that ‘the associations between clocks, cemeteries, illness, and mortality are too glaringly obvious to be overlooked’. They are ‘too glaringly obvious’, it would seem, because the connections are well established, independently of Davey’s work, forming a poetics of finitude. This poetics organises itself around particular notions and experiences of time, which are often slow but are not reducible to slowness. Rather, they constitute a particular and recognisable way of articulating the relations of past, present and future. The aim of this chapter is to examine Davey’s work and, through it, this cluster of concerns and the implications it holds for our understanding of time.
In ‘Notes on Photography and Accident’, a 2007 essay in which Davey lays out many of her guiding preoccupations, she describes a stay in hospital in these terms: ‘I have the feeling for perhaps the first time in my life that I can simply “be.” I no longer have to push myself to do anything, to prove anything. I can just sit on the bed and be.’ In a later essay, ‘Index Cards’ (2010), she expands on the observation that illness brings a release from the temporalities of instrumental activity, writing, ‘[what] do we do when the part of us that could go “all out” is no longer available? When brainpower is addled by drugs? My lifelong supposition has been that to remain healthy I must work. Now I must close my eyes, sleep, breathe.’ These passages sketch an escape from the instrumentalisation of time, albeit one that clearly comes at a price. The last two chapters of this book presented waiting and sleep as experiences that can imaginatively be refashioned to serve as resistances to the 24/7 world. Is dust in Davey’s work a keynote in a vision that offers a similar resistance? Or is it the sign of another attempt to present slowness as a curative lifestyle choice, a matter of individual preference that has little purchase on time as an object of public contention? Given that so much of her work is set in her own home, the second of those two readings seems on the face of it the more convincing, but her practice deserves a closer look, if only because it shows a lucid grasp of precisely this dilemma.
The experience of time that is described in Davey’s work is comparable to the temporal dimension of the flânerie. The artist refers in ‘Notes on Photography and Accident’ to the Baudelairean figure of the flâneur, the loiterer in thrall to modernity, who is cast by Baudelaire as a model for the artist. And she regularly alludes to Walter Benjamin, who reflected on Baudelaire’s allegorical figure and who, with the Arcades Project, turned his own research into a form of flânerie, as Davey observes in the same text. The flâneurs of Baudelaire and Benjamin wandered around the city, whereas Davey’s work is mostly set in indoor spaces, but she adopts the flâneur’s leisurely mode of attention. Susan Buck-Morss has suggested that for Benjamin one of the attractions of the flânerie was its gentle pace: the flâneur, taking refuge in the Parisian arcades from the busy streets of the city, could move at his own speed. She cites a passage from the Arcades Project in which Benjamin observes that around 1840, ‘it was elegant to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. (This gives a conception of the tempo of the flânerie.)’
Davey plays the part of a flâneuse as she walks around her own home, where time passes at a different pace, as the musical equipment and dog-eared books demonstrate. Of course, the trails of dust in her photographs and clips of her blowing dust from books in the videos carry similar suggestions. Dust is also a signal motif in the Arcades Project, where it serves as a counter-image to the myth of progress, warning against the conflation of technological development with social betterment.^ But for Davey, it is not — or not primarily — a sign of the illusory character of narratives of progress. It is an emblem of slowness and stasis, the sign of a gaze that is unhurried and without fixed objective, one that has taken the time to look under the bed and behind the bookshelves. It points to a mode of living that has adjusted to the pace of the flâneur.
The passage in which Davey blows dust from books is one of the more arresting in 50 Minutes, which tells the story of her many years in psychoanalysis, interspersing it with thoughts on reading, collecting and nostalgia. The dusting comes across as a quasi-ceremonial act of homage to the authors of the books, whose names can be glimpsed on the spines (Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf . . .). Later in the video, she mentions W. G. Sebald’s book The Emigrants (1996), in which the author traces the destinies, real or imagined, of Jewish émigrés in the post-war period. Here too, dust is a crucial metaphor. In his account of the life and ancestry of a painter who settled in Manchester, Sebald describes the artist’s constant painting and scraping, drawing and erasing, and the dust and grime that carpeted his studio:
the floor was covered in a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust . . . This, said Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure. It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continually fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house.
Ferber’s work follows a repetitive cycle, producing only dust, ‘the most palpable proof of his failure’, but in its repetitiveness it is also reparative, which is presumably why he loves dust ‘more than anything else in the world’. For Davey, too, dust is the sign of a creative process that loops back on itself. In blowing dust from her books, she recognises that she has not picked them up in a while, but the gesture is also a tribute. Dust comes to indicate an attention that is episodic but enduring, like that of the flâneur. It is also a motif that resonates with the video’s structure and more particularly with a characteristic looseness in its organisation and editing. Davey in her voiceover moves freely from topic to topic as she talks about the frustrations of psychoanalysis, discusses perspectives on nostalgia and touches on texts – by Sigmund Freud, Jean Baudrillard and others – that have illuminated her thoughts on these and other topics. With little continuity and no effort at resolution, the video makes a virtue of its own duration, the fifty minutes of the psychoanalytic session.
[Fig. 8.2: Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses, 2011, high-definition video with sound (still)]
The repeated images of dust are also indications of time passed (since a book was last read, since corners of the apartment were last cleaned) and as such they suggest nostalgia. Davey repeatedly invokes her childhood in her texts and voiceovers. She talks about growing up with her sisters, touching on their adolescent experiments with sex and drugs. In Les Goddesses she investigates the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters as an indirect means of reflecting on her own siblings and youth. In i confess she looks back on an early encounter with Pierre Vallières, a writer and at one point a major figure in the Front de libération du Québec. Much of her work of the past twenty years engages in retrospection, occasionally aided by old photographs. It relies on formats and technologies that are themselves outdated. She uses an analogue camera and disdains digital manipulation. In an era in which email has largely displaced postal communications, she has taken to folding photographs and sending them to friends by post. In her films and photographs we see her old record player and receivers, signs of attachment to obsolete forms. As Emily Apter has argued, the pull of the démodé is strong in Davey’s work. The artist herself admits to the lure of nostalgia in ‘Notes on Photography and Accident’, noting in a passage on Benjamin that she identifies ‘mostly with his nostalgia, which seemed to ebb and flow’. But she is also uneasy about the nostalgic notes in her work, declaring in 50 Minutes that ‘nostalgia has a negative, even decadent connotation . . . I am told nostalgia is the intellectual’s guilty pleasure.’
In her defence of these accents in her work, she mentions Svetlana Boym’s distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia. The first is an impulse to revert to an earlier stage in the history of a people, an imagined time of stability and adherence to tradition, and is associated by Boym with reactionary revivals and nationalisms. The second is a fascination with a lost time or place that expresses itself in the cultivation of ruins and relics, signs of decay and finitude. It is the longing for ‘that imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia’. Davey signals her engagement with this second nostalgic current by giving an example of her own, stating that as she writes she is propelled back to a park she once visited with her mother on a summer day in Montreal.
Our understanding of time is explicitly at play in another video work, My Necropolis (2009), in which sequences shot in cemeteries, mostly in Paris, alternate with clips of various friends and the artist’s partner and son, who are asked to consider the significance of a puzzling text, a letter written by Benjamin to his friend Gershom Scholem in 1931. In the letter, the writer announces that he has moved to a new apartment and hints, as so often in his correspondence with Scholem, at financial difficulties, complaining about his rent and borrowed furniture. He also notes that his study has no desk and that he now lies down on a sofa to write. As this comment is relayed to us by Davey in the voiceover, we see footage of a tombstone marked, ‘She is not dead but sleeping.’ The passage in the letter that most concerns the artist comes a little later when, describing the view from his window, Benjamin writes that he can see an ice rink and a clock and, ‘as time goes by, it is especially this clock that becomes a luxury it is difficult to do without’. Why, Davey asks her interlocutors in My Necropolis, should he see a clock in public view as a luxury? As one of her friends, Alison Strayer, sensibly points out, ‘anything that reminds you of the passage of time would be, one would think, quite the opposite of a luxury’. Other interlocutors put forward their own conjectures: he values the clock because he doesn’t have one of his own, because he somehow realizes that time is running out, because it reminds him of external constraints and so draws him out of his isolation, and so on.
Davey herself offers no answer to the question, remaining in the background, but her camera provides an oblique commentary as it lingers on the graves of writers such as Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Gertrude Stein. It is drawn to book-shaped plaques that sit on tombstones, holding messages of remembrance. It picks out flowers on the graves of Colette and Samuel Beckett and a metro ticket with a scribbled message on Susan Sontag’s. In the process it creates a circuit of dovetailing images: Benjamin at work on his sofa leads to men and women who are ‘not dead but sleeping’ and among these are writers who are alive in the minds of visitors who come by metro to see their tombstones. These figures are mostly horizontal and in this they recall other pieces by the artist. Beds, couches and reclining figures feature prominently in Davey’s work: the artist takes photographs of her own bed, she describes her analyst’s couch and pictures her partner lying down as he reads in 50 Minutes, she revisits Peter Hujar’s photographs of recumbent sitters in her video homage Hujar/Palermo (2010) and she puzzles over Annie Leibovitz’s picture of Sontag in bed in ‘Notes on Photography and Accident’. In one essay she tells the reader that, like Benjamin in his 1931 study, she writes only when lying down. In My Necropolis, the sofa and the horizontal figure carry broadly the same symbolic charge as dust in 50 Minutes. Indeed, the video embraces stasis in its very structure, which is organized around the repetition of Davey’s question and so implies with each new interlocutor that the question has not yet been fully answered. This looping structure, continually deferring resolution, acts as a defence against what Benjamin termed ‘homogenous, empty time’; that is, against the rational notion of time on which modern systems of production and narratives of progress depend. Inasmuch as the video returns repeatedly to the same question, it uses its own duration unproductively, advancing, in the place of the forward march and dénouement of the traditional narrative, a sociable stillness, in which puzzlement and conjecture are their own rewards. And since the video concerns itself not just with the experience of time in general but also with the temporal experience of text in particular, it apparently exemplifies and endorses an approach to text that is inventive, dilatory and non-linear.
Out of the materials touched on so far in this chapter, the repeated images of dust, the tombstones, beds and horizontal figures, the direct and indirect allusions to mortality, Davey creates a knot of references that are, as Kraus says, ‘too glaringly obvious to be overlooked’. They describe an expanded present that is shaped by poetic retrospection and the anticipation of future hardship or death. And they are obvious insofar as they draw on and extend a given cultural nexus, one that covers a vast array of representations, from the Dutch vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century to the surrealist works of Salvador Dalí and Joseph Cornell and on to the present. Occasionally moralising or whimsical in tone, these representations revolve around mortality and the ambiguous satisfactions of retrospection, and often, particularly in more recent times, carry an underlying sense of loss or drift. So where does Davey stand in relation to vanitas currents in contemporary culture?
Among the artists who address vanitas themes today are T. J. Wilcox and Ulla von Brandenburg. A brief excursus on their practices will help to situate Davey’s, and to illuminate the larger stakes – and pitfalls – in cultural treatments of these themes and temporalities.
A whimsical thread runs through Wilcox’s work and particularly the films of his Garlands series, which recall Cornell’s intricate mid-twentieth-century shadow boxes in their use of found images, in their retelling of historical anecdotes and even in some of their recurrent motifs (birds, toys, maps). Many of his Garlands and more recent works use subtitles to sketch the lives of notable women, such as Marlene Dietrich and the society hostess Pamela Digby Churchill, to whom Wilcox gives something of the skittish glamour of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Apparently culling materials from the society pages of old newspapers and magazines, Wilcox strikes poetic notes of absence and loss, the sense of transience in his works deriving as much from his use of Super 8 film and other transient materials as from the premature deaths of (some of) his featured celebrities.
Wilcox regularly looks back to a whimsical strain in twentieth-century culture (the roles of Marlene Dietrich, Breakfast at Tiffany’s), but he invokes an older tradition when, in a series of works on the life and death of the singer Patsy Cline, starting with the film Yours, Patsy Cline (2010), he deploys vanitas imagery. On folding screens that were displayed in exhibitions alongside the film (including A Weeping Willow Crying on His Pillow, 2010), Wilcox shows a diving light aircraft like the one in which Cline died and a willow that serves as a reference to her 1957 hit ‘Walkin’ after Midnight’ (‘I stopped to see a weeping willow . . .’). Next to these are a skull and musical instruments, memento mori that recall the seventeenth-century vanitas still lifes of artists such as Willem Claesz Heda and Pieter Claesz, whose paintings invited viewers to reflect on the finitude of existence and transience of sensory pleasure.
[Fig. 8.3: Ulla von Brandenburg, Singspiel (Songplay), 2009, 16mm black-and-white film with sound (still), duration fifteen minutes.]
We find some of the same concerns and affective cues in von Brandenburg’s work, which regularly mixes intimations of sadness and play. In her film installation Singspiel, which featured in the 2009 Venice Biennale, men and women wander around Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye to the accompaniment of a song that speaks in dreamy tones of suffering and resignation. Her camera moves down corridors and in and out of rooms as it lovingly surveys the house on the outskirts of Paris, while tracking the movements of a family or group of friends as they sleep, eat, move around and congregate. Von Brandenburg conjures a sense of tenuous belonging as she captures the interactions of her characters and their temporary presence in a house that she shows none of the ordinary signs of occupancy. The song that shadows their movements opens, ‘It was only a little pain / please don’t take it too seriously’, and hints throughout at experiences of loss and injury. Loss of what? The past? Le Corbusier’s time or the ideals that guided his work? Closer familial or social bonds? The film, with its interiorised vision and studied lightness, leaves these questions open, treating them as necessary but beyond its field of capture. It closes with an enigmatic sketch performed in the villa’s garden, the curtains that frame the performance-within-a-performance recalling the labyrinth of suspended fabric that viewers in Venice had to negotiate to enter the viewing area, while the labyrinth in turn acted as an echo of the network of rooms and corridors in the villa. The film installation employs framing devices to fold the viewing experience into the work itself. Here modern vanitas imagery allies itself with whimsy and a series of effects that insist on their distinctness as purely artistic contrivances and on the autonomy of the work from its wider environment.
Artworks organized around notes of loss, mortality and drift run the risk of lapsing into whimsy, which becomes little more in these projects than an indication of what might be called ‘artness’. They are circular in effect, assuring the viewer that they have a place in an artistic lineage and that their tone has a privileged connection with art as a distinct pursuit, with an ‘artistic sensibility’. This is what the artist Martha Rosler means when, considering the appeal of obsolescence as a focus of artistic attention, she writes that ‘artists have been expected to liven up patrons’ lives by dusting off the discarded, the overlooked, the obsolescent, translating these elements into treasures of taste and allegories of mortality’. Svetlana Boym makes a similar point when, in her effort to rehabilitate nostalgia, or rather her ‘reflective’ nostalgia, she stresses its humorous and critical dimensions and hostility to sentimentality. In her scheme ‘restorative’ nostalgia is earnest and unsmiling as it strives for a return to origins (to tradition, to a putatively stable national past), while reflective nostalgia is not: it ‘can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment and critical reflection’.
Artists and writers expressing this reflective nostalgia are, in her terminology, ‘off-modernists’. Among them are exiles such as Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Vladimir Nabokov and others who view the lost time or place with a combination of affection and alienation. As Davey points out in ‘Notes on Photography and Accident’, for Boym the nostalgic accents in the works of off-modernists carry a utopian charge: they suggest a longing for conditions other than those that prevail today, a longing projected onto the past rather than the future. Small wonder, then, that Davey values Boym’s thinking on the topic: it suggests that her work can distance itself not just from the restorative nostalgia of conservative rhetoric but also from the serious whimsy and poetic circularity of work by artists such as Wilcox and von Brandenburg.
The literature on Davey’s practice is rich, but in it her work tends to come across as humourless. This is misleading: her videos and photographs consistently show an incisive wit and a taste for paradox, qualities that serve as one line of defence against the serious whimsy of the contemporary vanitas current in art. There is a certain humour in talking about a clock while walking around in cemeteries, surrounded by the remains of men and women who are no longer subject to time (My Necropolis). A comical premise also underlies 50 Minutes, in which she details the disappointments of her psychoanalysis in a monologue that lasts as long as a psychoanalytic session. Her humour often hinges on intimations of failure and stasis. Her Bottle Grid series (1996-2000), for instance, consists of black-and-white photographs of whisky bottles, shot in a kitchen and displayed in a grid. The bottles are empty; as always, her preferred tense is not the present or past continuous but the simple past, the slackest tense. The images of bottles are at first sight sober in tone, but their grid-like arrangement plays on the double vision of the comic-book drunkard. And they clearly recall the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who also worked in black-and-white and created series. But the Bechers laid claim to a rigorous taxonomic method and quietly monumentalised their cooling towers and blast furnaces, whereas Davey’s apparent rigour is comically out of line with the banality of her motif. The heroism of production has given way to a notably unheroic vision of consumption, and where the Bechers memorialise a declining industrial order, Davey focuses on alcohol, which aids the process of forgetting.
Elsewhere her humour takes a scatological turn. In Glad, a photograph of 1999, she shows her fridge, together with the breakfast cereals and other products left on top of it and the scraps of paper that have been affixed to its door and side. Among the various brand names and other messages that are legible in the photograph, a few stand out. Below the ‘Colon Cleanser’ is the magnetic card of ‘Gary the Plumber’ and a flyer with the heading ‘New Solid Waste Collection’, the phrases setting off a chain of narrative openings and comic associations. A parallel is implicitly drawn between the circulation of nutrients in the body and the circulation of water in the piping of a house, and another between bowel motions and waste disposal. Given these connections, other details come to seem significant, including the light chain to the left, which could be mistaken for a toilet chain. Even the title comes across as comically suggestive: it refers to the roll of plastic wrap on the fridge but conceivably also to bowel movements and the pleasure or relief they can bring. In 50 Minutes, Davey talks about her fridge and the anxieties it provokes in her, admitting that she feels worried after shopping at all the food that has to be consumed before it starts to decompose. She continues,
[Fig. 8.4: Moyra Davey, Glad, 1999, C-print]
Once every ten days or so the fridge fills up with food and the Sisyphean cycle of ordering and chewing our way through it all begins anew. This rodentlike behavior is my metaphor for domestic survival: digging our way out, either from the contents of the fridge, or from the dust and grit and hair that clog the place: or sloughing our way through the never-ending, proliferating piles of paper, clothing, and toys.
Then, for a few seconds, Glad appears on-screen. So the fridge becomes for her a vanitas emblem, but a paradoxical one: it comes to stand in for the very processes it is designed to delay (decomposition, starting over again). The humour in the photograph – and video – turns on her ambiguous preoccupation with waste and decay and on a related longing for an escape from the ‘Sisyphean cycle’ of biological compulsion.
As Davey surveys her home, revisits favourite books or wanders around cemeteries, she enacts a particular mode of being in time. In her work, time tends to slow down. Occasionally it moves back under the sign of recollection; at other points it loops back repeatedly to the same point of departure. It is not used so much as spent or left to pass. As she describes it, experience has little forward momentum: ahead lies illness, at some point death, in any case the constant repetition of the ‘Sisyphean cycle’ of day-to-day existence. The slackness of this temporal regime is a sign not just of nostalgia but also of illness and blockage. It is in hospital that Davey ‘can just sit on the bed and be’. And she speaks repeatedly of reaching a creative standstill. ‘I may as well admit it. I’m blocked,’ she writes in ‘Notes on Photography and Accident’, while in a later text she puzzles over Jane Bowles’s periods of writer’s block, adding, ‘I have to admit to some schadenfreude in reading the letters, of finding consolation in someone else’s blockage.’
But this absence of momentum is also a precondition for the emergence of a social temporality, a time of exchange. Her work is conditioned by her conversations – with family and friends, with her analyst, with other artists and above all with writers and their texts. In her essays and videos, other voices intrude constantly on her thoughts, entering into dialogue with them and shaping them, corroborating or qualifying them, setting them on new tracks. Surprisingly for works that are mostly devoid of figures, they hold to the pulse of a sociable time. To the extent that Davey’s slack time follows the cadences of social exchange, it really is a luxury, particularly today. Our lives are more and more tightly governed by the rhythms of the market – by schedules and deadlines, the pace of modern communications. All the repeated glimpses of dust in her work are reminders of ill health and blockage: dust serves for her as a vanitas symbol. But they are also signs of liberation from the wayward impulsions of instrumental activity. They present standstill as an affliction but also a relief, particularly to those who, like Sebald’s Ferber, find ‘nothing so unbearable as a well-dusted house’. What Davey outlines in her work is a slack and sociable time, a broad, dilatory present that is open to past and future – and that has to be the basis on which modern counter-temporalities are built, even if it portends suffering and death.
Her work is certainly bittersweet on occasion but not in the same sense as the vanitas narratives of artists such as Wilcox and von Brandenburg. It superficially resembles those projects in its nostalgic overtones and deployment of vanitas symbols, but it guards against their whimsy through its humour, which pre-empts a circular insistence on artness, particularly where it hinges on the mechanics of the body. Her work also defends itself against the inwardness of whimsy by foregrounding its social and dialogic dimensions. She is closer, as she implies herself, to Boym’s off-modernists, who are self-reflexive in their nostalgia, splicing their longing with irony. What separates her from some of the other artists who are revisiting vanitas themes and imagery is what makes her perspectives on the intersections of past, present and future as compelling as they are.
Too often slowness is put forward as a cure for modern ills. As we have seen in earlier chapters, it is unattainable to those who have to live at speed just to get by and attainable but unwelcome to others, including the unemployed, who have not slowed down by choice. Davey deserves credit for presenting it as the ambiguous prize that it is.