I first found my way to Moyra Davey’s Instagram feed (@moyradavey) on April 9, 2020. I remember the date because it marks a friend’s birthday, plus it was the start of the pandemic and the first days of lockdown in Los Angeles; blithely scrolling while waiting—waiting for what?—seemed appropriate. But the video frame I saw revved my lazy scroll into a fevered loop, the phone held at arm’s length. Onscreen, a snake whips across the ground, toward the person holding the camera; the camera keeps tracking the snake in a vertiginous tilt downward, almost somersaulting, barely keeping up with the twisting line of the writhing body until it is finally out of sight, the snake now possibly tangled around the photographer’s feet, surely winding up her leg. But then the video loops, beginning again, and the snake is there, at a safe distance. For a moment.Davey’s Instagram is full of animals, horses mainly, but there are bears and birds, too. The horse images are the best. Veiny, muscular flanks; soft muzzles; hooves; fur. Horses rolling in sand and dirt; horses trotting; horses and flies; horses expelling broad yellow rivers of urine. But why dwell on Davey’s Instagram? Because it points to the artist’s interest in the quotidian, and the ways in which seemingly mundane images augur more complex and profound themes of desire, existential dread, and death on the one hand, as well as moments of epiphany, connection, and creativity on the other. And the whip-fast snake video? It embodies the fort/da of terror, loss, release, and repeat that also epitomizes Davey’s work overall and its mode of restless, ongoing inquiry, a venturing outward and a return. The account also manifests a disdain for the hierarchies of the artworld and notions of a kind of fetishized art photography, something Davey has steadily undermined with her insistently un-precious images that mark a fundamental disinterest in artworld aura. And finally, the feed is personal but not poignantly so. More on this as we go.Davey was born in Toronto in 1958 and now lives in New York City; she is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer and boasts an extensive body of work that includes a dozen or so books, nearly as many videos, and hundreds of photographs that have been showcased around the world. In 2001, she edited and published a collection of essays titled Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, a project that she says gave her “permission to read” but it also demonstrated the inchoate network of interconnectivity that reading and writing can both encourage and bring forward. Toward the end of her introduction of the book, Davey writes, “The frequency with which an extended family of names crops up, intersects, and echoes throughout the assembled body of works is striking; what emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other…”1 These writers include Mary Kelly, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Alice Walker, and Joy Williams, among many others, but it is Davey’s observation about the interweaving of reading, writing, experience, and citation that will continue to be a theme throughout her subsequent work across books, videos, and photographs.The first book I bought and read by Davey was Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest, published in 2017. It is so lovely I hesitated to open it. There’s a white paper dust jacket, with an image of a bed and portion of a window; the image continues, however, onto the back of the jacket. So, to see it in full, you should remove the paper cover, spread it out, and then you’ll see that there’s a dog on the bed—Rosie—and a pair of shoes on the pillow. Never mind Rosie’s direct stare at the camera, or the shoes-on-the-bed-bad-luck omen. The image keeps unfolding to new meaning. Underneath the jacket is the book’s true cover, which shows a photograph of thirty or so images by Davey mounted in a collage on a wall. The images continue inside the cover, and the paper texture shifts, from the smooth exterior to the rough interior; and the same images appear even closer. It was all too much at first: the dense layering, the proliferation, the repetition. I wanted something to stick and stay still. I left the book alone for a while.The first essay in Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest is “Les Goddesses,” which was also published as “The Wet and the Dry” in 2011 as the second installment in a series of publications titled The Social Life of the Book, created as a collaboration between castillo/corrales, a Paris-based art venue, and graphic designer and editor Will Holder. The essay deftly weaves together several histories; one charts the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft; her daughters Mary and Fanny; and Claire, the child of Mary’s husband, William Godwin, with his new wife after Mary’s death. The three girls were named Les Goddesses by Aaron Burr, who was visiting the Godwin family in 1812, and Davey highlights their loves, travels, heartbreaks, bouts of depression, suicide attempts, and writing in part to think through their struggles but also as a way of celebrating their iconoclasm. A second through line focuses on diaries and books that tell of journeys, most specifically Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Flight to Italy, which chronicles the author’s travels in Italy between 1786 and 1788, and was published in 1816/1817 as part of Goethe’s larger autobiography. A third thread draws linkages between the Wollstonecraft lineage and Davey’s own family. Like Wollstonecraft’s parents, Davey’s parents had seven children, and there’s a sharing of names across both families. In the book, the essay is punctuated by images that Davey has taken of her sisters, and the designation of “Les Goddesses” expands to denote them as well.Written in twenty-four titled chunks (with a coda), the essay is not simply a weaving together of the three stories, however: the chronology of the segments shifts back and forth; bits of the stories are repeated; and Davey achieves a sense of the cinematic dissolve, one segment of a life briefly brushing up against another segment of someone else’s life. And the sisters—all of them, across some two hundred years—are prone to depression, but they’re also badasses, refusing to abide by the rules of their respective cultures.After “Les Goddesses” was published as an essay, Davey made it into a video that was featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. In the video, we see Davey pacing around her apartment, looking at images and narrating the essay, using a technique in which she listens to a recording of herself reading the essay and then repeats it out loud, creating an oddly flat recording that shifts attention away from the performance to the words themselves. Davey later reflects on the essay version of Les Goddesses in Hemlock Forest, writing, “Les Goddesses was a love letter to my family. I linked my sisters to Mary and her siblings, my parents to hers. I forged a coincidence of dates two hundred years apart to make connections and enable a story.”2While Davey dubs Les Goddesses a love letter, in her 2021 book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Lauren Fournier calls it “autotheory.” She lists Davey’s essay alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2008/2013), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and defines “autotheory” as a term that describes “works of literature, writing, and criticism that integrate autobiography with theory and philosophy in ways that are direct and self-aware.”3 Fournier is highlighting the proliferation of books and essays that integrate theory and the self, and as even this brief list shows, the form is wildly diverse. She goes on to situate the practice within a broader history of American and European art and writing and enhances the definition with the notion of performance to offer “performative life-thinking.” This later phrase is tied to the writer Sofia Samatar, who used the term “life-thinking” to describe a mode of writing that is in effect living. Fournier identifies a notion of the self that has moved through the postmodern dissolution of the self-aware and coherent subject, added in an awareness of situated being, and celebrates the desire to bring the questions from philosophy and theory into enacted, written, and performed self-inquiry.If Fournier applies autotheory to explain Davey’s work, Margaret Iversen takes a slightly different tack. In a recent essay, “The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art After Barthes” (2021), Iversen places Davey’s work in conversation with the diaristic practices of Roland Barthes, which began the day after his mother’s death in October of 1977. Iversen reminds us that Barthes’s most famous essay, “The Death of the Author” (1967), argues that a text is not a static entity whose meaning is solely determined by the author; the reader brings interpretation and new meaning and hence the text is alive, and the author as authority recedes. However, Barthes would later find in the work of Marcel Proust the figure of the “writing self.” Iversen explains that this figure is “a way of evading both the egoism of autobiography and the arrogance of theory.”4 She goes on to limn the contours of the diaristic mode, writing, “The diary, like a series of snapshots, is an accretion of traces, daily notations,” and then adds, “Far from implying a fully present authorial subject, then, diaries are circumstantial, accidental and inconclusive.”5Well, this certainly applies to Davey’s work. Indeed, in her essay “Notes on Photography & Accident,” published both in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (2008) and again in Index Cards: Selected Essays (2020), Davey specifically highlights the notion of the accident, honoring contingency and chance. Comprised of forty-three titled sections, the essay explores the interconnections among cultural critics Walter Benjamin, Janet Malcolm, Susan Sontag, and Barthes and their surprisingly similar celebration of the accident in photography. Davey wrote the essay in response to what she calls the “bloat” exhibited by the forms of photography that favor the large, staged image. Where, Davey wonders, in these grand, static photographs is the sense of the vernacular, the found, the accidental? She asserts, in reference to her quartet of writers, “My goal is to reclaim this critical history of ideas in relation to contemporary photographs, and to understand how the notion of accident might still be relevant.”6 Then she adds that she has another motive, too: “I want to make some photographs, but I want them to take seed in words.”7 The essay then swerves suddenly in the next section, simply titled “Being,” to describe a scene in a hospital from 2006 and the minor epiphany that Davey no longer feels the need to prove anything. She writes, “I can just sit on the bed and be.”8Here we see Davey’s form so clearly, the erudition in synthesizing four very different theorists across several decades and contexts, next to a clear thesis statement, followed by a dip into what might be called by Virginia Woolf a “moment of being.” How do these elements relate? We’re invited to make connections ourselves, to derive meaning across the gaps among realms, from photography to life, from desire and curiosity to the body and its material needs. Davey’s process is never simple parataxis and never a gimmick. Instead, she constantly weaves, braids, connects, disconnects. And, in bringing accident to the fore, as well as her reliance on the fragment as form with its attendant circling, hovering, and returning, Davey models ongoingness instead of finality. This disinterest in finality shows up in the fact that Davey is also not afraid to voice an opinion, then circle back and rethink things. I like this: every statement is of a moment and ripe for reframing later, with full recognition of the evolution that occurs in between.While Davey moves from topic to topic in her essays, she similarly crosses boundaries of form, from photography to video to writing. She is attentive to the interconnections between the word and the image, the photo and the page, to thinking, writing, imaging. In an essay published in October in 2016 titled “Caryatids and Promiscuity,” Davey addresses this cheerful eclecticism, writing, “More important to me than fidelity and adherence to a medium is a kind of devotion to promiscuity (to lift that concept from a lexicon of Gregg Bordowitz), an embrace of materials, formats, histories, and genres, and lastly but perhaps most importantly, an investment in language.” She goes on to add, “I am a believer in heterogeneity as an enabler and enhancer of the story wanting to be told.”9 Promiscuity and heterogeneity: with these terms Davey gestures toward queerness and a desire for proliferation and abundance rather than singularity and sovereignty, while also signaling her investment in a sense of emergence.Davey’s promiscuity supports her video practice, which expands on her writing and photography. Having seen and heard her videos, it is impossible to read the associated essays without also hearing her voice, with its odd cadence. This is especially true of the video script for Fifty Minutes (2006), which is titled in reference to a fifty-minute therapy session. In the video, we see Davey pacing through the rooms in her apartment, holding the microphone wire close to her mouth, looking with concentration at nothing, the look of thinking, the look of elsewhere. The video script circles around the notion of nostalgia; Davey describes reading a 2001 essay by Vivian Gornick titled “Reading in an Age of Uncertainty,” a dazzling piece about the loss of nostalgia and a certain relationship to equanimity, now gone forever. Davey goes on to situate the term in critical theory; the word has its root in the Greek nostos, a return home, and algos, pain. She also cites cultural critic Jane Gallop: “after ‘homesickness’ and ‘melancholy regret’ in the dictionary there is a third definition of nostalgia, which is ‘unsatisfied desire.’”10 Davey reflects on the “unconsummated desire kept alive by private forays into the cultural spaces of memory,”11 which is a lovely sentence to be sure. But what of the unconsummated desire experienced by the Fifty Minutes viewer? In the video, the complexity of both thought and sentence structure comes of writing, but Davey is also speaking and moving, and there is, as a result, a sense of ongoing deferral and peripatetic performance; each thought leads to another question, another citation, and more movement. We remain suspended, then; rather than marching toward a conclusion, we hover, digress, and circle.The thirty-two-minute My Necropolis (2009) is a bit more rooted. In the video, Davey talks with an array of people about a vexing line in a letter written by Walter Benjamin in 1931 to Gershom Scholem about a clock outside his window. The first section shows images from French cemeteries and the graves of literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Colette, Marguerite Duras, Susan Sontag, and Gertrude Stein, among others. The video then turns to present a group of people who, one after the other, offer their interpretation of the line in Benjamin’s letter about the clock, shot in single takes and with Davey often speaking from behind the camera. The camera wavers as if handheld, we see the mic, and there’s little attempt at formal documentary polish. This format shifts when Davey’s partner, artist Jason Simon, speaks, and rather than seeing him address the camera, we see footage of various spaces, perhaps the mansion that he references in his analysis. Overall, however, the video demonstrates total disinterest in creating a beautiful image or making a typical movie. Instead, it is defined by inquiry and a mode of thinking in and through the camera. Only at the end, with footage shot from a train showing a rapidly repeating pattern of bridge trestles and shards of green color, does the video veer into an abstract cinematic beauty, an accident perhaps.Notes on Blue, completed in 2015, is a twenty-eight-minute video that weaves together thoughts on illness, blindness, and the color blue, and references most specifically Derek Jarman’s film Blue (1993), an experimental feature film made by the British artist and filmmaker as he struggled with AIDS, which diminished his sight, tinting it blue. The film features a dense soundscape that accompanies an unchanging blue screen as Jarman narrates scenes from his life as it draws close to its end. Although visually static, the film’s soundtrack produces a richly textured and entrancing cinematic experience, and indeed, people often report “seeing” various images as they stare into the blue space. In contrast, Davey’s video features a very active visual register with several shots of the interior of the artist’s New York apartment, images shot from a window showing a nearby building wrapped in a material labeled Blueskin, shots on the subway, and images of a bird’s nest cupping a blue egg. Midway through the video, an intertitle in pink letters appears reading “DEREK JARMAN,” and Davey, pacing back and forth past a static camera, states, “It is the most perfect thinking and writing, responding to somebody’s art, wrote Chris Kraus, especially when the art in question is writing and filmmaking.” With this line, Davey neatly assembles her interests—thinking, writing, filmmaking, art—as well as the significance of one’s response to it all, and one’s reliance on the thinking and artmaking of others.The fact that Davey uses a quotation here merits continued attention, and indeed, not only is Davey’s work highly citational, but it is also a form of “leaning against” as described by Maggie Nelson in an essay titled “‘A Sort of Leaning Against’: Writing With, From, and For Others” (2012). Nelson, who explains that even her own use of “leaning against” is itself borrowed from poet Alice Notley, opens the essay with this confession, “For a long time, I worried there was something wrong with me as a writer, because I leaned so heavily against the thinking and writing of others.”12 She then points to Notley’s 1998 poem “Lady Poverty,” and goes on to explain that the gesture of leaning is tied to a feminist notion of intersubjectivity and a human reliance on others. “We were all born from a body,” Nelson writes, and thus we begin from birth with a sense of connection in relation to the care of others.13 She goes on to explain that quite often in her own work there is a “ghost book” that “secretly—or not so secretly, as the case may be—stands behind my book, not just as its muse, but often as its literal stylistic and/or structural model.”14 Nelson acknowledges the potential of this kind of leaning, what it suggests about our interconnectedness, and I think her description suits Davey’s work well. Davey frequently leans, quotes, cites, and queries in deep relation to the ideas and questions of other writers and artists, and indeed, the emblematic feature of her work is precisely the idiosyncratic nature of her intellectual pursuits, weaving the personal, political, and philosophical. So while there is leaning and referencing, Davey invariably charts her own curious pathway, bringing us along for the ride.Davey’s latest book is The Shabbiness of Beauty: Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (2021), which is based on a show that she curated pairing a selection of her own photographs with images by Peter Hujar, the New York City-based photographer known for his stunning portraits and poignant animal pictures. Davey explains in an essay at the end of the book, “I curated myself with Peter Hujar; a risky act, but it was an invitation (from Galerie Buchholz, Berlin) I could not resist.” Hujar, who died in 1987, was of a different generation than Davey, a fact that she underscores, noting that she and many other photographers like her are as interested in “what’s going on behind the camera—the emotional register, the labor register, the thinking register, the mechanical register, the risk factor”15 as they are in the image itself (if not more so). Hujar, in contrast, was extremely attentive to the image, to its framing, lighting, focus, texture, tonality. This statement offers a tidy summary of the history of photography and a shifting relationship to representation across more than forty years. That said, it is difficult to register the generational contrast when the images of these two artists are mixed. Instead, taken together, the images converse and reflect, they hail us and haunt at the same time. The book announces the shabbiness of beauty, which is one way of indicating the quotidian, but there is also a piercing sense of mortality, certainly due to Hujar’s death in 1987 at the age of 53, caused by AIDS, but also perhaps due to the opening essay by poet Eileen Myles, written during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her essay begins bluntly: “Steve died.” She goes on to tell the story of Steve, her neighbor whom she had known from his childhood, and, at the bottom of the essay’s first page, notes, “Time puts its stamp on everything.”16 Indeed.The images collected in The Shabbiness of Beauty eschew any absolute temporal markers of their moment, and yet, in the physicality of bodies, many nude, and the gravitas afforded many of the animals, there resonates a sense of vulnerability and loss, not of what or who is depicted but of a point of view, a way of being, a sense of self-in-relation. In relation to what? To the now. Davey takes up a lineage in this book and gently carries it to a new site, opening up new connections and resonances, from one era of sickness and death to another, from one era’s set of concerns to another’s. While Hujar’s precise attention to the aesthetics of photography differs from the concerns central to Davey, both relish the body, the odd detail, the gesture, and both have managed to capture particular moments. For Hujar, it was downtown New York of the 1970s and ’80s; for Davey, it was a series of images of her sisters from the 1980s.Davey’s photographic work after the early images of her sisters often brings forward the material conditions of things as they exist and move through the world. In a series of folded photographs, for example, Davey creases, tapes, and mails her photographs, which are then unfolded and presented in the gallery or museum. The Copperheads series, which she began in 1990, features extreme close-ups of Abraham Lincoln’s profile on copper pennies. The mottled, scratched surfaces become landscapes of deterioration, marks of traversal among innumerable hands and pockets, and metaphorically a reflection on the wear and tear that tarnishes politics and capitalism. She has also photographed other prosaic objects such as empty liquor bottles in her apartment, which serve as a kind of time stamp of their own, marking an end, as well as evidence of what’s been imbibed. Taken together, all of these images bring to the foreground the vibrance of shared activity that happens in and around the photograph rather than a celebration of what specifically sits within the frame. The day-to-day comes forward for consideration, not as aesthetic object so much as a record of process, movement, and exchange, an affective circuit of shared references and the communities we create among the living as well as the dead, who sustain us through thick and thin.Checking Instagram, I see that Moyra Davey has posted a new video. In it, a black horse trots into the frame from the right, followed by two thick-furred ponies, a white one and a tiny black one. They all trot across the steep side of a snow-covered hill; one gives a gentle snort, and then the little one nips at the bigger one, almost as if trying to nurse. All three stand still for a moment and time seems to open and pause. Then the video loops to repeat.