Index Cards

Moyra Davey author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions

Published:3rd Jun '20

Should be back in stock very soon

Index Cards cover

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.

‘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

ISBN: 9781913097264

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

264 pages