Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey

 

In the introduction to her 2011 video Les Goddesses, Moyra Davey recites to the camera, "Sit on the floor in sunlight and read through eight small notebooks going back to 1998, looking for a phrase about Goethe: 'the stars above, the plants below.'" Initially, her statement throws us; the artist recalls her past action as if it were a future command. She later tells us the quotation could not be found, despite her lengthy search.

Like Davey, who thumbs through notes made by an earlier version of herself and whose precise movements and words she cannot clearly recall, we must take this phrase attributed to Goethe-the stars above, the plants below-on trust, like so much else. A logical chronology does not apply to Les Goddesses; past, present and future are frequently collapsed and misread. Instead, we watch the unfolding of a document of intimate observations, historical accounts, and speculations-elements that both enrich and destabilize the narrative structure of the video.

Les Goddesses borrows from the register of a personal diary, in terms of its content, delivery, and physical location: The artist shows herself on-screen pacing back and forth through the rooms of her New York high-rise apartment, occasionally turning the camera to look out her window, or capturing herself sifting through old photographs and postcards. On-screen and in voice-over, Davey speaks from a text-an incomplete and ongoing catalogue of remembrances. Here, time is equated with memory, witness accounts are equal to speculation, and coincidental fragments are placed in meaningful (rather than accurate) relation to one another. And, like all diary accounts, Davey is a compromised witness: She expresses a desire for an integrated relationship with history, while struggling to articulate a single discrete narrative of her own family life.

But the video also transcends that form: Other voices haunt Les Goddesses. They leak into the video's narrative. They begin to define its shape and content. Davey paraphrases the lives and words of Goethe and his mother; Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughters, and her lovers; Freud and Fassbinder; not to mention Davey's younger self and her family. Each voice rises to the surface of Les Goddesses in the form of citation, anecdote, or aphorism. Their utterances become an unlikely choir put to the service of a collective question: How can we negotiate history?

This polyvocal narrative forms a pattern of remembering, repeating, and working through, and such a pattern is embodied through the artist's own physical gestures: She appears before the camera, speaking with hesitations, repetitions, mistakes. We see her pressing her headphones closer to her ear, straining to hear, reciting aloud lines from an audio prompt. As the video clings to her mispronunciations and corrections, her faltering narrative exposes not only the fragility of the text she recites; it dramatizes Davey's conflicted role as both the writer and the most intimate reader of Les Goddesses.

 

Isla Leaver-Yap