In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter - with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book - and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists - Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others - in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

About the Author

Moyra Davey is a New York-based artist whose work comprises the fields of photography, film and writing. She has produced several works of film, most recently i confess (2019), which will premiere in North America at the Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of Burn the Diaries, The Problem of Reading, and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Her work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Tate Modern in London. She is a 2020 recipient of the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Reviews

'Her work is steeped in literature and theory without being deformed by contemporary iterations of such. I have a deep admiration of her as an artist, writer, thinker and person.'
- Maggie Nelson, Artforum

'A rich anthology of ideas, broad in its scope, and undoubtedly rewarding.'
- Daniel Baksi, The Arts Desk

'Index Cards is an essential portrait of an artist wide open to the world and ever-in-formation: reading (always reading, the undertow of her practice), looking, suffering, talking, loving - preparing to make work and risking the making of it. I could not put it down.'
- Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art

'Moyra Davey is a genius of the aleatory. With this collection, perfectly titled Index Cards, hopefully Davey will finally be positioned within her rightful peers - the note-like lectures of Roland Barthes, the talks of Anne Carson, the strange essays of Susan Howe, the collage spaces of Chris Kraus, the uncanny digressions of W. G. Sebald.'
- Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts

'Moyra Davey's writings are intense meditations on desire and knowledge, limits and wellness, domestic life, literature, traces and art: a life of the body and mind. Originally written in tandem with her photography and video work, these pieces both narrate and propel her artistic process. The art world has long known that Moyra Davey is one of the most interesting, challenging and sincere contempoary writers. Now others will know it too.'
- Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

Book Information
ISBN 9781913097264
Author Moyra Davey
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions