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A picture is no substitute for anything: intertextuality and performance in Moyra Davey’s Hujar / Palermo

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A picture is no substitute for anything: intertextuality and performance in Moyra Davey’s Hujar / Palermo

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A Picture is No Substitute for Anything:
Intertextuality and Performance in Moyra Davey’s Hujar / Palermo

by
Katherine Hylah Rouhandeh

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
Curatorial Practice in the Public Sphere

May 2021

Copyright 2021 Katherine Hylah Rouhandeh
ii

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my primary advisor on this thesis, Andy Campbell.
Andy’s expertise, generosity, and mentorship have been indispensable to me throughout my
graduate program. With his encouragement, I was able to approach this project with
intentionality and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank my committee members, Maggie
Nelson and Jenny Lin, who have supported and advised me far beyond the scope of this paper.

Thank you also to Karen Moss and Amelia Jones, whose attention and support have thoroughly
enriched my time at USC. My colleagues in the MA program, and in particular, Hugo Cervantes,
have been excellent companions and interlocutors.

Lastly, I am grateful to my family, Stephanie Young, Jim Rouhandeh, Audrey Rouhandeh, and
Charlie Rouhandeh, for their love and support. Extra thanks to my best friend.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph……………………………………………………………………………………………. ii

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………iii

List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………………. v

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………… vi

Preface………………………………………………………………………………………………vii

Chapter 1: Portraits………………………………………………………………………………….1

Chapter 2: Pictures………………………………………………………………………………….19

Chapter 3: Performance…………………………………………………………………………….30

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………. 36

v
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Bindo Altoviti, Raphael, c. 1515. Oil on panel……………………………………………ix
Figures 2–9: Stills from Hujar / Palermo, Moyra Davey, 2010. Digital video with sound.……….xii
Figure 10: Tattoos, Moyra Davey, 1979. Silver gelatin print……………………………………… 3
Figure 11: White tanks, Moyra Davey, 1979. Silver gelatin print…………………………………. 3
Figure 12: Joseph Raffael in Grass, Peter Hujar, 1956. Silver gelatin print………………………….7
Figure 13: Paul Thek, Peter Hujar, 1968. Silver gelatin print.………………………………………7
Figure 14: David Wojnarowicz Eating an Apple, Peter Hujar, 1983. Silver gelatin print…………. 7
Figure 15: Self-portrait from Portraits of Life and Death, Peter Hujar, 1976…………………… 10
Figure 16: Still from Hujar / Palermo, Moyra Davey, 2010…………………………….………….10
Figure 17: Palermo Catacombs #7 (Two Girls Together), Peter Hujar, 1963.……………………. 13
Figure 18: Palermo Catacombs #3 (Man with Skullcap), Peter Hujar, 1963…….………………. 13
Figure 19: Untitled (Meat Piece with Flies), Paul Thek, 1965.…………………………………….14
Figure 20: Untitled from the series Technological Reliquaries, Paul Thek, 1966……….…………14
Figure 21: Invitation for Swan Lake, Louise Lawler, 1981. Printed card………………………….25
Figure 22:

Marquee for A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, Louise Lawler, December
7, 1979………………………………………………………………………………………25
Figure 23: Newsstand #9, Moyra Davey, 1994.……………………………………………………. 27
Figure 24: Newsstand #22, Moyra Davey, 1994…………………………………………………… 27
Figure 25: Newsstands printed in Long Life Cool White, 2008. Image by Dashwood Books.…….27
Figure 26: Detail from Bottle Grid, Moyra Davey, 1996—2000.………………………………… 28
Figure 27: Still from Les Goddesses, Moyra Davey, 2011. HD Video with sound………………. 32
Figure 28: Still from nostalgia, Hollis Frampton, 1971. 16mm film.……………………………. 32
vi
Abstract

This thesis is a close reading of artist Moyra Davey’s 2010 video entitled Hujar / Palermo.

vii
Preface

Moyra Davey’s video Hujar / Palermo begins with a soft-cover book laying atop a bed,
framed unevenly by slivers of a dull green-gray bedspread and a strip of bright sunlight that cuts
across the bottom right corner of the frame. A layer of glassine softens the book’s title, Portraits
of Life and Death, and cover image of a sun-dappled skull with gaping holes where features once
were; the lines “by Peter Hujar” and “Introduction by Susan Sontag” are cropped out of view. A
left hand, naked but for a wedding band, enters the frame and opens the book to its end matter,
revealing where the glassine has been folded over the soft-cover’s edges like a euro flap envelope,
secured with glossy Scotch tape. The hand releases two blank endpapers, before proceeding to
flip through eleven photos taken in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, followed by 29
portraits of photographer Peter Hujar’s friends and acquaintances.
1
Once the final image—the
first photograph in the book, a portrait of filmmaker John Waters in recline, holding a cigarette
and looking straight at the camera—has been revealed, the hand flips past the title page, to a page
bearing the following text, attributed to Peter Hujar: “The portraits were taken in 1974-75. The
catacombs were photographed in 1963.”
The hand then turns to the book’s introduction by Susan Sontag, printed in three
columns on a single page, and zooms in on a section towards the end of the center column, to the
following quotation, attributed to a character in Sontag’s own first novel, The Benefactor:
“When one has a picture taken, the photographer says ‘Perfect’ Just as you are!
That is death.”

1
Pictured, in order, are: John Waters, Robert Wilson, Michèle Collison, Paul Thek, José Rafael Arango, Edwin
Denby, Linda Moses, Susan Sontag, Bill Elliot, Kenneth King, Peter Hujar, Vince Aletti, Williams S. Burroughs,
Charles Ludlam, T.C., James Waring, Ann Wilson, Ray Johnson, Fran Leibowitz, May Wilson, H.M. Koutoukas,
Anita Steckel, John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Lola Pashalinski, Divine, Alan Lloyd, Remy Charlip, and Larry Ree.
viii
“Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.”
2

The camera wanders to the lower right-hand corner of the introduction page, where an
attribution to Sontag is printed. A dedication page follows, on which Hujar declares, “I dedicate
this book to everyone in it,” adding the following four individuals: Sam Mitnick, Bindo Altoviti,
Jimmy Parsons, and Tina Mandel.
3
Rustling of paper is heard as the camera pans across a print
out from T: The New York Times Style Magazine blog that has been tucked inside the volume,
featuring a portrait of artist Paul Thek, young and strikingly handsome, leaning up against the
stacked remains lining the Palermo catacombs.
4
Following the turn of the preceding page, a beat
passes while the camera strains to refocus, revealing two more title pages; on the final front
matter, Davey’s lens lingers on the lightly penciled figure in the upper right corner: 60. She closes
the book, and the frame once again presents the front cover. The triangle of blinding
overexposure in the lower right corner of the frame seems to occupy a larger section of the
monograph’s front cover, though only four minutes have passed. Finally, and improbably, the
video’s singular cut occurs in its final seconds, to a close-crop of the sun-showered corner
containing the photographer’s byline.

2
Susan Sontag, introduction to Portraits of Life and Death (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).
3
Sam Mitnick was the editor for Portraits of Life and Death; Bindo Altoviti is the subject of a portrait by Raphael
housed in the National Gallery of Art, Jimmy Parsons sold bootleg records in the West Village, and Hujar attended
his dream-writing group briefly; Tina Mandel was Hujar’s therapist, first in a gay Gestalt therapy group and later
one-on-one (Joel Smith, “A Gorgeous Mental Discretion,” in Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (New York, NY: Aperture,
2017): 25).
4
The August 2010 blog entry was part of the press cycle for the Whitney Museum and Carnegie Museum of Art’s
major exhibition, “Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective.” Thek, who was one of Hujar’s boyfriends, was a frequent sitter
for the photographer; his portrait appears in Portraits of Life and Death. As the press clipping from T Magazine
suggests, Thek accompanied Hujar on the trip to Palermo when he shot the photographs in the catacombs.
Elsewhere, Davey has identified Thek as an artist of importance to her (Moyra Davey, interview with author, August
14, 2020).
ix

Bindo Altoviti, Raphael, c. 1515. Oil on panel.
x
Peter Hujar’s pairing of the remains in Palermo’s catacombs with portraits of the people
in his life associates corpses and models, quivering between a recognition of difference between
living bodies and mummified ones, and the register of the camera, which can only fix past images
of bodies in place. Likewise, Davey’s reverse reading of Portraits of Life and Death is a
performance for the camera that also oscillates between distinct temporalities: the fixed past of
the book’s content and the ever-ongoing and expanding past that the book—as object—accrues.
Operating the handheld camera with one hand while turning pages with the other, Davey
transforms each of Hujar’s photographs, each page of the book, and each passing second,
conjuring up a new text: Hujar / Palermo.
Throughout Davey’s oeuvre, intertextuality is both method and subject; the role of
citation in her body of work does much to align the artist as producer with the artist as
consumer, suggesting that to read is to choose is to make—or to live. In Davey’s 2003 essay “The
Problem of Reading,” the act of choosing reading material is elevated, made urgent:
It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do
that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her, redeem her. Often
what is at stake, should she want to spell it out, is the idea that something is missing, as in:
what is the crucial bit of urgently needed knowledge that will save her, at least for this
day?
5

Davey has selected a book before the camera starts rolling for Hujar / Palermo—a book which is,
crucially, more than a collection of photographs, but also a text. For Davey, a text is a portal and
a substance; into which she can dip her hand to scoop up “blue and green lozenges of April heat /
a year ago in another country.”
6
The transportive power of the text is that which she locates

5
Moyra Davey, The Problem of Reading, (A Documents Book, 2003), 1.
6
Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay” in Glass, Irony & God, (New York: New Directions), 8.
xi
beyond its recording of particular genealogies and histories, as a miraculous material within
which a reader can be in pursuit, can be chosen, redeemed.

xii

Stills from Hujar / Palermo, Moyra Davey, 2010. Digital video with sound, 4 min 20 sec.

1
1

Portraits
I could no longer play I could not play by instinct
7

In a body of work spanning from the last sliver of the 1970s to the present, Canadian-
born, New York-based artist Moyra Davey has produced photographs, videos, and writings. An
ongoing preoccupation with a suite of particular objects and technologies—books, papers,
records, dust, liquor bottles, consumables, and other paraphernalia of the domestic interior—is
evident in her output in each of the aforementioned mediums. The human figure is not typically
a central focus in Davey’s photographic practice, though she has dabbled with a return to
portraiture in recent years, and her earliest works—products of what she refers to as “early,
unschooled passion for the medium”
8
—featured her five sisters. These early photographs were
taken while Davey was an undergraduate student at Concordia University, just a couple of years
before the publication of Portraits of Life and Death, the only book Peter Hujar would produce
during his lifetime.
Davey depicts her sisters as tough and rebellious in her black and white 35mm
photographs suffused with punk aesthetics, such as those featured in an early exhibition titled “A
Catholic Girlhood.” Of the domestic atmosphere of her teenage years, following the unexpected,
accidental death of her father, Davey writes:

7
All epigraphs taken from titles of Francesca Woodman photographs. In an essay on Francesca Woodman’s work,
Peggy Phelan glosses Roland Barthes: “Thus, we can say that we have moved from the age of the spectacle as such to
the age of the spectator’s response to that spectacle; the spectator’s response has become its own performance.”
(Peggy Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One More Time.” Signs, Vol. 27, No. 4
(Summer 2002): 983). In Hujar / Palermo, too, the roles of reader and creator collapse onto each other at Davey’s
hand. One hand turns the pages, the other holds the camera.
8
Moyra Davey, Index Cards, (New York: New Directions, 2020), 112.
2
My mother, Patricia, retreated to the top of our big box of a house and all hell broke loose
below. The Davey girls were not writing poetry, studying Greek and Latin, and
procreating; we were listening to David Bowie, Roxy Music, and the Clash, and ingesting
too many drugs. Interviewed by a journalist friend about our active sex lives at the time,
my mother responded ruefully: ‘I’d mind less if I thought they enjoyed it more.’ It was a
different time and different kind of rebellion; nonetheless, many thought of us as a female
force—goddesses, no, but ‘Amazonian,’ yes, to be reckoned with. And that is what I tried
to show in a series of portraits I took in Ottawa and Montreal beginning around 1980.
9

The narrative above, when taken with photographs such as Tattoos and White tanks—which
depict the Davey sisters showing off tattoos placed in the curvature of their hip bones and posing
in white tank tops, respectively—conveys a far more forthright use of the photographic medium,
with explicit notions of narrative and gender at play, than later works by the artist. Many of these
photographs were later included in Davey’s 2011 film Les Goddesses, wherein the artist connected
her sisters to the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft (the most famous of these daughters being
Frankenstein author Mary Shelley), in a gesture typical of the artist’s practice of revisiting and
critically reframing past works anew.

9
Ibid, 91-92.
3

Left: Tattoos, Moyra Davey, 1979. Right: White tanks, Moyra Davey, 1979. Silver gelatin prints.

4
According to her own published writings, these originary photographs of her sisters
represented a fleeting moment prior to Davey’s encounters with the fashionable and influential
theory of the era, encountered first as a graduate student in the MFA program at the University
of California, San Diego, and subsequently as an enrollee in the Whitney Independent Study
program. Davey came of age artistically during an era of suspicion towards medium specificity,
and particularly, photography. Discourse was dominated by critiques of representation more
generally, coalescing, for Davey, in Craig Owens’s seminal 1983 essay, “The Discourse of Others:
Feminists and Postmodernism,” a treatise on the “apparent crossing of the feminist critique of
patriarchy and the postmodern critique of representation.”
10
The centrality of this text, as well as
the similarly influential work of people like John Berger, Laura Mulvey, and Martha Rosler
characterized her time as an art student, and Davey reports that she “really took to heart, in a
very Catholic way,”
11
these interrogations of representational art—and in particular, that which
represented women—consequently all but forbidding herself from making portraits for over
twenty years.
In the 1980s, the cumulative effects of Berger’s theorization of the gaze, Mulvey’s
psychoanalytically-informed critique of visual pleasure and narrative in cinema, and Rosler’s
interrogation and rejection of photography’s documentary function—to allude to just a few of
the most canonized texts of the period—marked a medium-specific crisis. In his 2005 essay,
“Photography’s Expanded Field,” titled after and in part intended as a rejoinder to Rosalind
Krauss’ 1979 essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” George Baker argues, “With hindsight,
however, we might now say that the extraordinary efflorescence of both photographic theory and

10
Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 59.
11
Moyra Davey, interview with author, August 14, 2020.
5
practice at the moment of the initiation of postmodernism, was something like the last gasp of
the medium, the crepuscular glow before nightfall.”
12
Baker goes on to argue that the “last gasp”
of the medium was also the genesis of photography’s “expanded field,” a shift which, I argue, is
observable and in part attributable to Moyra Davey’s work.
13
Hindsight also suggests that, rather
than constituting a political stance, Davey’s prohibition on portraiture was less about subject
matter and more about the genesis of her own elastic and evolving interrogation of the
photographic medium itself.
*
Peter Hujar, also prolific during the 1980s, developed his body of work abreast of entirely
different discourses around photography. Beginning in the 1950s and up until his death from
AIDS-related causes in 1987, Hujar produced spare and evocative portraits of acquaintances and
lovers, babies and animals, unknown inhabitants of lower Manhattan and the downtown scene’s
most famous figures. Neither the strength of Hujar’s work nor his circle of accomplished friends
and acquaintances led to significant recognition during his lifetime—a fact which is often
explained away with anecdotes about Hujar’s supposedly prickly demeanor. His stubborn
exactingness is likewise evoked in conjunction with his reputation as a master printer; Hujar’s
portraits feature deep, rich blacks and serve as pristine examples of photography’s analog origins.
Hujar’s artistic development can be outlined in tandem with his romantic attachments: early
photographs in Florida and Fire Island include portraits of painter Joseph Raffael, the boyfriend
through whom Hujar also met his subsequent partner, artist Paul Thek. Hujar would take

12
George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” in Still Moving, eds. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 2008), 176.
13
Baker addresses Davey’s practice specifically in the text “The Absent Photograph,” in Speaker Receiver (Berlin:
Sternberg Press and Kunsthalle Basel, 2010).
6
significant trips to Italy with each of these men; first with Raffael, who had won a Fulbright, and
then in 1963, on a Fulbright of his own, accompanied by Thek. It was on this latter trip that
Hujar photographed the Palermo catacombs during a visit that would also be hugely influential
for Thek’s work. Towards the end of his life, Hujar made portraits of a young David
Wojnarowicz, with whom a brief romance grew into an important friendship.
14

14
Wojnarowicz would later say of his work “Everything I made, I made for Peter” (Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly:
The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), 179).
7

Left: Joseph Raffael in Grass, Peter Hujar, 1956. Silver gelatin print. Right: Paul Thek, Peter Hujar, 1968. Silver gelatin
print.

David Wojnarowicz Eating an Apple, Peter Hujar, 1983. Silver gelatin print.

8
Despite his social milieu, Hujar’s practice can be characterized by hermeticism and
anachronism; he didn’t show or sell much, he had none of the courtly status and fashionable
reputation that was eventually achieved by his contemporary Robert Mapplethorpe, and
essentially lived out his life in poverty.
15
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why Hujar’s
photographs were not more wholly embraced in his lifetime; as decades have passed, they have
come to be seen more and more clearly. In 2018, Stephen Koch, Hujar’s friend and chosen
executor of his archive, expressed the work’s belatedness succinctly, writing: “I have lived a long
time with these images, and they never bore me, never pall. Each year they look better, aging into
a durable beauty that was once hard to see and is now obvious.”
16
This “durable beauty”
undeniably characterizes Hujar’s self-portraits, one of which is included in Portraits of Life and
Death, and is lingered upon by Davey’s camera in Hujar / Palermo. Hujar lies in bed with both
arms raised above his head and his face turned slightly towards the camera to his right,
mimicking Portraits of Life and Death’s final subjects: the Sicilians preserved in the Capuchin
Catacombs. Or, Hujar’s repose may even been construed as a directive: a posture offered as a
tutorial for his living sitters. By placing himself in his own series, Hujar emphasizes the artifice of
his project, almost meretriciously. He shows his reader than he too can perform the part, offering

15
In a catalogue essay, Philip Gefter writes “Historically, Hujar’s portraits fall in place in a legacy of photographic
portraiture that began with Nadar’s lucid pantheon of artists and writers in nineteenth-century France; Julia
Margaret Cameron’s romanticized portraits of poets and thinkers in nineteenth-century England; and Berenice
Abbott’s steadfast portraits of her expatriate circle of artists and writers in 1920s Paris. Richard Avedon and Irving
Penn seized the mantle for the remainder of the twentieth century, photographing the most accomplished artists and
writers of their era. But, in Hujar’s portraits, the intimacy adds a personal element that was absent in the work of his
predecessors” (Philip Gefter, “Peter Hujar: Éros, c’est la vie” in Speed of Life, ed. Joel Smith (New York: Aperture,
2017), 38-39). What Geftner leaves unsaid when placing Hujar in this illustrious company is that the “personal
element” of Hujar’s work—it’s achievement—may also have made its reception more labored and its market viability
unlikely.
16
Stephen Koch, “The Pictures,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/05/the-pictures/.
9
a reminder that all portraits are self-portraits, and that no photograph can truly offer up the
essence of its subject—durable beauty, though, it can.

10

Self-portrait from Portraits of Life and Death, Peter Hujar, 1976.

Still from Hujar / Palermo, Moyra Davey, 2010. Digital video with sound.

11
*
Palermo, Sicily’s capital and largest city, contains a number of UNESCO World Heritage
Sites, and counts tourism as central to its economy. The crypts below the Capuchin monastery
have been a tourist stop since the nineteenth century. These catacombs, similar to others in Italy
and elsewhere, were initially established in 1534 when the Capuchins’ original cemetery reached
its capacity. At first, the four halls cut into limestone were intended exclusively for the Capuchin
monks, but eventually they came to accept the bodies of the area’s most privileged residents in
addition to the monks.
17
The dehydrated corpses, preserved to varying degrees, were sorted
according to various criteria: age, social status, gender. Infants are placed together, there is a hall
of women, a hall of men, a hall of professionals containing lawyers and doctors, one for monks
and a separate one for priests. Many of the dressed bodies lay stacked in horizontal repose; the
less fortunate, presumably due to crowding (or perhaps less impressive social standing) hang
vertically on hooks, propped up for the duration of their eternal rest. Once, the visitors to the
crypts in Palermo were relatives and descendants of the bodies mummified therein; by the time
Hujar photographed the catacombs, they had fully transitioned into a tourist site.
Hujar visited the catacombs with his boyfriend at the time, artist Paul Thek, in the
summer of 1963, following a year spent in Rome on a Fulbright Fellowship. Though Hujar’s
purported goal that year was to explore filmmaking, the most enduring product of his time
abroad was undoubtedly the set of images that came to comprise the second section of Portraits
of Life and Death, made in Palermo’s famous catacombs. This trip would later be considered

17
The Capuchins were an autonomous branch of the Roman Catholic Franciscan order of religious men which
began during the sixteenth century and grew until experiencing decline during the French revolution. Among the
notable interred at the Palermo catacombs is Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. (Bob Briar, “The Well-Dressed
Dead,” Archaeology, Vol. 56, No. 3 (May/June 2003): 33).
12
incredibly influential for Thek too, particularly inspiring his most well-known works, the
Technological Reliquaries series—or “meat pieces”—waxy hunks of decomposing “flesh” encased
in vitrines.
18
Writing on the Palermo catacombs, archeologist Bob Briar contextualized bodily
preservation in light of the Roman Catholic belief in “Incorruptibles”—“saints and religious
people who the faithful believe, were so holy, so pure, that their bodies did not decay.”
19
Thek and
Hujar’s visit to the catacombs crystallized (in different ways) the two artists’ fascination with
mortality’s knife’s edge—and their respective artistic practices as variations on imperfect
strivings towards art’s secular miracles of incorruptibility.

18
The Technological Reliquaries were prominently featured in “Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective,” which opened at
the Whitney around the time Davey made Hujar / Palermo, as is evidenced by the clipping stuck into Davey’s copy.
The exhibition marked the first retrospective of Thek’s work presented in the United States.
19
Briar, “The Well-Dressed Dead,” 33.
13

Palermo Catacombs #7 (Two Girls Together), Peter Hujar, 1963.

Palermo Catacombs #3 (Man with Skullcap), Peter Hujar, 1963.
14

Untitled (Meat Piece with Flies), Paul Thek, 1965.

Untitled from the series Technological Reliquaries, Paul Thek, 1966.

15
In her introduction to Portraits of Life and Death Susan Sontag writes, of the relation
between the book’s two sections, “the Palermo photographs—which precede these portraits in
time—complete them, comment upon them […] Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are
always, also, portraits in death.”
20
For Sontag, the photograph is an agent of transformation in the
Romantic sense—the camera is able to render the everyday miraculous, and conversely, to reduce
the magical to the banal.
21
Or, as she puts it in On Photography, photography is “a powerful
instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world […] it offers […] both participation and
alienation.”
22
In other words, the transformative alchemy of photography not only renders people
things and things profound – but living beings into corpses and decrepit mummies into figures.
Hujar’s own body, in his self-portrait, simultaneously echoes and refuses the posture of death;
there is a lucidity and seriousness in his gaze—a gaze that suggests a confidence in his own
image, and in the presence of his own future viewer.
In Camera Lucida, published just a few years after Portraits of Life and Death, Roland
Barthes argues that all portrait photography is a rehearsal for death. Though his argument
sometimes presents a corollary to Sontag’s introduction to Hujar’s book, Barthes’s text is
generated from the position of someone for whom the medium of photography has been utterly
transformed by personal tragedy.
23
He had recently suffered the loss of his mother and,
occasioned by the discovery of a photograph of her as a child (which he terms the “Winter

20
Sontag, Portraits of Life and Death.
21
Sontag identifies this as the definition of Romanticism given by Novalis, poet and philosopher of early German
Romanticism.
22
Susan Sontag, On Photography, (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), 131.
23
Barthes’ mother, Henriette, died in 1977; Camera Lucida was published in 1980, and translated into English in
1981. Barthes himself was struck by a laundry van in Paris on February 25
th
, 1980 and died a month later as a result
of injuries sustained in the accident. That the loss of his mother and his own death soon after serve as bookends for
his text on mourning is more than morbid coincidence; the painful loss of his mother certainly allowed Barthes to
access the medium in a new way—a way which is thrown into a terrible poignancy in light of his own untimely
death.
16
Garden photograph”), writes of photography as the medium of mourning from the perspective of
a son in mourning.
24
Allowing a degree of sentimentality to guide him—perhaps despite his own
resistance to doing so—Barthes accesses photography beyond the “cultural turn” to which he had
previously limited his interest in the medium.
25
Claims like, “All those young photographers who
are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are
agents of Death,” belie the sense of loss Barthes identifies as inherent to the photograph, in all its
banal objecthood.
26

Despite the contradictions within and between Barthes and Sontag’s writings on
photography, both locate a transformative power amongst the triangulation of camera,
photographer, and viewer — particularly alongside invocations of the medium as a technology of
mourning. Just as Barthes was reeling from the death of his mother, Sontag wrote the
introduction to Portraits of Life and Death from her hospital bed the night before she would have
her first exploratory surgery for cancer.
27
The profound experiences of mortality abutting Barthes
and Sontag’s writing invites review of the affect presumed inherent to photography, and the
consequent implications for Hujar’s two-part book. A small vertical brick of unattributed text
printed on the inside flap of the book jacket implies a tone altogether different from Sontag’s
introduction, and includes the following:

24
For a complicating rejoinder to Barthes’ analysis of the Winter Garden Photograph, see Fred Moten’s writing on
Barthes and the photograph of Emmett Till, in “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph,” published in In the
Break: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
25
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 3; Barthes had
previously written a notable rebuke on the popular, state-sponsored major photography exhibition, “The Family of
Man,” published in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1972), 100-102.
26
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92.
27
Joel Smith with Martha Scott Burton, “Chronology,” in Speed of Life, (New York: Aperture, 2017), 234. The bed,
where many of Hujar’s subjects are pictured, is also where Davey films the book; a site of births and deaths, illnesses,
love, creativity—the bed is a literal and figurative space that bookends lives.

17
Even so, despite all their deep resonance, there hovers over these photographs and air of
nonchalance, even gaiety. The book is odd, oblique, sometimes opaque, certainly
disturbing; but it sticks to the mind like a burr.
28

For a photographer known for such romantic and dramatic subject matter, Hujar resists
sentimentality — proudly and gleefully, even. What the passage above recognizes is the fact that,
though Hujar’s text certainly serves as a weighty meditation on mortality, the gesture of pairing
anonymous mummies with dear friends is also a puckish one. Apparently, Hujar was offended
that he was not invoked by name in On Photography.
29

*
Though Moyra Davey herself is compelled by the aforementioned texts by Sontag and
Barthes (she annotates her relationship to their writings on photography, alongside those of
Walter Benjamin and Janet Malcolm in her 2007 text “Notes on Photography and Accident”), it
is a difficult task to neatly reconcile her own self-imposed prohibition on photographing the
figure and critique of representational photography with the writings of these figures so central
to the twentieth century’s theorization of the photographic medium. Discussing her own sense of
irresolution around her prohibition on portraiture, Davey quotes Walter Benjamin: “To do
without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciations.”
30
In 2017, Davey
resumed making portraits, for a pair of interrelated projects for Documenta 14, Portrait
Landscape, a photography installation, and Wedding Loop, a video. She cites canonical 19
th

century portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron’s work as an inspiration for the family portraits she
made for the projects, some of which were made in front of the same white wall at her mother’s
house where she first photographed her sisters in 1979. Despite the return of the figure in these

28
Front jacket flap, Portraits of Life and Death.
29
A rumor conveyed by Davey during interview with author, August 14, 2020.
30
Davey, “Les Goddesses,” in Index Cards, 96.
18
and other recent photographs and videos, Davey’s latest work does not—and need not—suggest
resolution; the status of the figure remains a perpetual thread of inquiry throughout her oeuvre.
A few years prior to her return to portraiture, Davey recorded the pages of Portraits of
Life and Death. Paging through the book, from end to beginning, poses a textural web of desires:
for the Peter Hujar’s images, for the seductive transformations of photography as memento mori,
for the human figure before her camera, and for the book—the reading material that will “choose
her, redeem her […] save her.”
31
It is this last function, salvation, that Davey continuously
searches for in the work of her chosen interlocutors and reading material. Davey’s abandonment
and later return to the figure is not relevant in terms of subject matter, but rather as part of a
process of following one’s instincts. In Davey’s case, refusing the photograph’s illusion of
fixedness required a leave-taking of portraiture, photography’s most memorializing genre.

31
Davey, The Problem of Reading, 5.
19
2
Pictures
And I had forgotten how to read music

Moyra Davey characterizes the making of Hujar / Palermo pragmatically: a project
undertaken “so more people could see the book,” a rare and precious object.
32
She was prompted
to make it when invited to contribute to a large exhibition dedicated to Blinky Palermo at the
Dia:Beacon—Palermo, Palermo.
33
Davey’s husband, artist and curator Jason Simon, had found
three copies of the book in used bookstores soon after the couple moved to New York, knowing
that it was out of print. Invoking the title’s rarity, Davey suggests an economy of images underlies
her gesture; these images are hard to come by, and she wants to share them. She wanted to show
the camera some very special pictures.
34

Insofar as Hujar / Palermo is a frame for Portraits, it seems clearly beholden to precedents
set by the so-called Pictures Generation. This group of artists—who notably coalesced into a
cohort, in narrative sense, following the 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space—were
characterized by a shared sensibility towards medium, and in particular an interest in the status
of images as theatrical. Douglas Crimp, art historian, critic, AIDS activist, and curator of the 1977
exhibition, included only five artists in the show—Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie

32
Of course, the audience for Davey’s video, which is not available online, is also intimate and self-selecting. Though
she claims that expanding access to Hujar’s book was her goal, she is hardly doing so in terms of sheer numbers;
instead, her gesture is perhaps akin to John Baldessari’s with Baldessari Sings LeWitt, a 1972 video in which the artist
sang Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1968) to the tune of various popular songs, claiming they had been
“hidden too long in exhibition catalogues.” The shift from theoretical discourse to pop song or book to video signals
towards democratization/access, but in reality, these works are also for micro-audiences, not popular ones.
33
Moyra Davey, interview with author, August 14, 2020.
34
Or, in other words, it’s Davey’s desire to share these images that characterizes the project.

20
Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith—but the Pictures Generation came to comprise a larger
group that also included Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, and
David Salle, among others. The subjects of Crimp’s writing are often linked to one another
through their oft-used strategy of appropriation. The work of a few of these artists in particular—
such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine—crystalize appropriation as tantamount to the
Pictures Generation. However, Crimp’s early writings reveal appropriation to be just one element
of these artists’ unique positionality in relation to the dyad of imagery and imaging:
Picture, used colloquially, is also nonspecific: a picture book might be a book of drawings
or photographs, and in common speech a painting, drawing, or print is often called,
simply, a picture. Equally important for my purposes, picture, in its verb form, can refer
to a mental process as well as the production of an aesthetic object.
35

The multiple meanings and usages intrinsic to Crimp’s chosen lexicon directly reflects the artists’
orientation towards the system of categorization so inherent to the display, sale, and archiving of
artworks: medium. The flexibility of the word “picture” offers not only a description of the works
made by the Pictures Generation artists, but also explicates the way in which the elusive and
opaque nature of a “picture” can be part of a critical apparatus.
This did include acts of appropriation; images, like texts, are understood to be quotable—
material frothing around and moving through the world prior to, and following, the artist’s
capture. In the catalogue essay for that aptronymic first exhibition, Crimp, somewhat
prophetically, wrote:
If it had been characteristic of the formal descriptions of modernist art that they were
topographical, that they mapped the surfaces of artworks in order to determine their
structures, then it has now become necessary to think of description as a stratigraphic
activity. Those processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging that constitute
the strategies of the work I have been discussing necessitate uncovering strata of

35
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures” in October, Vol. 8 (Spring 1979): 75.
21
representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of
structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.
36

The oft-quoted line, “underneath each picture there is always another picture” suggests a ghostly
history—a past and future for every image—and also mode of criticality which implicates both
the artists producing these works and the viewers, critics, and theorists who behold them.
37
To
call for “uncovering strata of representation” suggests that each work is a fossil, composed of
layers of sediment built up on the scale of geologic time, and that each of these layers, not some
hidden essential meaning beneath them, compose the work. In many ways, Crimp recalls
Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” published a decade prior to the Pictures exhibition. Barthes’
polemical essay argued that the critical apparatus was part and parcel of a text—in fact more so
than any imagined interiority or origin, for “the text is a tissue of quotations.”
38
Though Barthes’
“birth of the reader” can be taken as an edict to replace the author with the reader (such as in
reader-response theory), its relevance to the Pictures artists is found beyond the polarized pairing
of author and reader, but rather in his insistence that the text is never static. His argument has
been widely applied via the most generous definitions of “text,” so it is not remarkable in and of
itself to read his essay with visual art in mind; for the Pictures artists though, a particular relation
to text and language is defining. Crimp’s methodology fits both Portraits of Life and Death and
Hujar / Palermo, because they are crucially each both text and image(s) – neither category solely
defining Hujar’s book or Davey’s video.

36
Ibid, 87.
37
Crimp’s ubiquitous line also echoes French artist Claude Cahun writing in 1930, “Under this mask, another mask.
I will never finish removing all these faces.” (Lauren Elkin, “The many masks of Gillian Wearing and Claude
Cahun,” March 16, 2017: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/magazine-identity-parade-gillian-wearing-
claude-cahun). Cahun’s work, which explored self-imaging and identity through self-portraiture, could offer
subjectivity as a parallel to Crimp’s “picture” — and another way of applying Crimp’s writing expansively.
38
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang), 146.
22
*
The minutiae of choosing a book and recording the turn of its pages can be dissected
infinitely – every second of Hujar / Palermo bears the trace of some facet of decision making;
maybe though, only two decisions constitute the gesture that forms the piece: the selection of
Portraits of Life and Death and the choice to begin at the book’s end. Both the book’s objecthood
and the particular genealogies presented therein can be folded into these two actions, actions
which can be reduced to quotation and intervention. To frame and record a book is to re-present
its content; to disrupt the narrative and temporal technology of the book form by beginning at
the end is to trouble it. In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection, Susan Stewart writes magically about the relation between the book as a technology
and narrative as subjectivity-forming. According to Stewart’s scopious analyses of scale,
storytelling, and objecthood, readers of narrative become characters, and reading is performing:
“Yet, in the way it is bound, the book denies us a transcendent simultaneity; we must unfold the
pages in time, and this unfolding bears little relation to the speed of the text […] The printed text
is cinematic before the invention of cinema.” Davey’s gesture emphasizes the cinematic, while
also reversing its teleological thrust. The dialectical relation between these two elements of Hujar
/ Palermo echoes the nuanced schema of appropriation found in the Pictures artists’ work.
Louise Lawler, in particular, provides context for Davey’s piece and larger body of work.
A curatorial sensibility prevails—Lawler is best known for her arrangements of works by other
artists, credited as “Arranged by Louise Lawler” as well as her photographs of artworks in the
homes and offices of collectors; each of the many appearances of the interiors of Davey’s own
home in her photographs and videos operate like a careful installation—of loose papers, empty
bottles, books, cut through with dusty sunlight. In Moyra Davey’s body of work, appropriation
23
typically takes the form of quotation and invocation – of writers and artists and their works – and
occurs somewhere between tribute and style.
39
Both artists are interested in print paraphernalia
(postcards, invitations, mailers), and both also re-present their own works, cycling concepts and
content through various formats and presentations; each could be said to draw upon John
Baldessari’s notion of the “deskilling” in their economical and tightly wound works.
40

While some among the Pictures group came to be inextricable from the Reagan-era art
boom, their own skyrocketing valuations, and the aura of slickness that came along with the
period; Lawler remains known for her relentless critique of the art market. In works such as Swan
Lake (1981), for which Lawler printed and sent invitations to attend a particular performance of
the ballet at Lincoln Center, Lawler’s selection of and orientation towards the ballet constitutes
the work. Douglas Eklund, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2009 “Pictures
Generation, 1974-1984” exhibition, writes:
Lawler’s gesture recast the quintessential uptown “elitist” event as a conspiratorial, wittily
invisible infiltration of a black-tie audience with double agents, who would naturally
oscillate between viewing the performance through Lawler’s “quotation marks,” as it
were, and succumbing to the guilty pleasure of watching the ballet (two of the invitees,
Crimp and Owens, were serious balletomanes).
41

Though the invocation of “double-agents” fails to capture the sophistication of Lawler’s project,
the specter of quotation marks describes her relationship to appropriation—as that which
produces instability, a restlessness between frame and content, ballet and “ballet.” Swan Lake’s
form echoes Lawler’s earlier work, A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, first staged at the

39
Other figures who Davey quotes, responds to, and addresses throughout her work include: Derek Jarman, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Walter Benjamin, Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman, Hervé Guibert, Natalia Ginzburg, and many more.
40
Douglas Eklund, “Image Art After Conceptualism: CalArts, Hallwalls, and Artists Space,” in The Pictures
Generation, 1974-1984, (New York and New Haven, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press): 23.
Baldessari’s pedagogy as an instructor at CalArts is often treated as a point of origin for the Pictures Generation
artists. Baldessari notably believe that art could not be taught, and that the hierarchical relationship between teacher
and student must be abandoned.
41
Ibid, 258.
24
Aero theater in Santa Monica in 1979. This piece, as its title indicates, is a film screening devoid
of images—only the selected film’s soundtrack plays, and the title is not announced in advance
(the first film was John Huston’s The Misfits). By withholding spectacle or placing it in quotation
marks, often in service of revealing the skeleton structures of the art world and marketplace,
Lawler’s construction of frames, in their very “frameness,” illuminate the drift between container
and content.

25

Invitation for Swan Lake, Louise Lawler, 1981, printed card, 3.5 x 5.5 in.

Marquee for A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, Louise Lawler, December 7, 1979.
26
Though Moyra Davey’s work is clearly informed by the work of the Pictures Generation
artists, Davey also entangles the dailiness of her own life, and her own encounters with the
images she culls in a very different way than an artist like Lawler. Davey’s work is not
confessional per se, but she implicates the quotidian, produces writing, and reuses material,
thereby centering a kind of subjectivity which remains enigmatic in the work of someone like
Lawler. In front of Davey’s lens, even works that play with taxonomy and indexing, such as her
Newsstand and Bottle series, offer an affect that belies a particular relationship to newsstands or
empty liquor bottles. The relationship, crucially, is a temporal-spatial one: Davey walked up to
each of these newsstands, perhaps even bought something from them; Davey or someone else in
her presence drank the last drop from each of the empty liquor bottles.
42

42
Art historian Marcus Verhagen points out that writing about Davey’s work often depicts it as remarkably
earnest, missing its humor and critique of bourgeois values. For Verhagen, this aspect of the work is restored
through invocation of the figure of the flâneur, Baudelaire’s “loiterer in thrall to the spectacle of modernity.”
(Marcus Verhagen, “Moyra Davey: Slack Time,” in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 29
(2012): 19). The flaneur, also an important figure for the Walter Benjamin of the Arcades Project, is a particular type
of observer: a mobile figure collecting associations and impressions. If a text or an artwork is a tissue of quotations,
Davey’s distinction from her appropriative forbearers is that she promises that her own subjectivity, body, and
intellectual life are where these quotations coalesce.

27

Left: Newsstand #9, Right: Newsstand #22, both Moyra Davey, 1994.

Newsstands printed in Long Life Cool White, 2008. Image by Dashwood Books.

28

Detail from Bottle Grid, Moyra Davey, 1996—2000.
29

If I squint hard enough, I can oscillate between watching Hujar / Palermo, the video, and
looking at Portraits of Life and Death, the book. This slippage represents Davey and Lawler’s
shared positionality. But what about the tone? According to Eklund, Lawler’s invitation to the
ballet serves as a biting critique of the rituals of the upper class, and enjoying the performance is
a “guilty pleasure,” while Davey often explicitly adores her subjects. But then what of Lawler’s
invitations to her friends, Crimp and Owens, the “balletomanes?” Lawler’s practice is indeed
hypercritical, but as Eklund also notes:
Lawler’s pictures aren’t really indictments, however. To do what she does, you have to
have a more complex view of things than pure condemnation or celebration. One clear
feeling she brings into the mix of her pictures in poignancy.
43

Making a work truly intended for one or two viewers; this is the poignancy Davey and Lawler’s
work shares. Though Lawler applies her criticality to the structures endemic to high art, while
Davey takes the contents of her refrigerator and dust gathering on her bookshelves as subject,
both artists’ works engender intimacy. Filming the pages of a book “so more people will see it” or
inviting guests to Swan Lake is not an exercise in expanding readership or audience, but rather a
self-conscious acknowledgement of the fact that Davey’s camera and Lawler’s invitation will act
upon and change Hujar’s book and George Balanchine’s ballet—a few people will see something
different.

43
Eklund, 269.
30
3
Performance
Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands

Writing on Moyra Davey’s 2011 film Les Goddesses, Isla Leaver-Yap noted the film’s
relationship to book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, wherein Pygmalion, having refused the
company of women he deems flawed and tainted, carves his ideal woman in ivory. He falls in
love with the idealized form and fantasizes about the sculpture as if it were a woman. Venus,
goddess of love, grants Pygmalion his wish and transforms his hunk of ivory into a sentient
being; he goes on to marry his creation and she bears a child. Pygmalion’s story is of a
transmutation from stone to woman, for which desire serves as a catalyst. Leaver-Yap suggests
that Pygmalion-like desire animates Davey’s capture of her domestic setting and the objects it
holds, such as boxes of her photographs from the 1980s, taken prior to her move away from
portraiture, which are “imbued with the talismanic significance of a personal iconography.”
44

Davey layers the biographies of her own subjects—and the loss of some of them—upon the
disappearance of the figure from her own images, providing an atemporal narrative with her own
voice. Objects, some of which are images and even portraits, signify dually, simultaneously
constituted as memento mori through both their existence at present and their links to a
historical past. Unlike Pygmalion, whose sculpture comes alive, the photographs Davey presents

44
Isla Leaver-Yap, “Pygmalion Desire in Les Goddesses,” in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 29
(2012): 29.
31
in Les Goddesses and Hujar’s portraits in Hujar / Palermo do not undergo a unidirectional
transformation, but rather present “a restless state of becoming and returning.”
45

As Leaver-Yap also notes, with “audio and image running in anachronic parallel,” Les
Goddesses calls to mind Hollis Frampton’s nostalgia (1971), which also used an unstable relation
between sound and image to unseat narrative, as form, from chronology. Frampton’s film
presents a series of his photographs being burned one by one on a hotplate, narrated by out-of-
synch descriptions of the circumstances of the photographs being taken. In another film of
Davey’s, Fifty Minutes, she calls nostalgia a “leave-taking of photography” and notes the
combination of melancholy and self-deprecation, regret and irony:
The film ends on a strange note of terror, with the narrator saying: “I think I shall never
dare to make another photograph again.”
46

The conflict between the flickering, burning prints on Frampton’s hotplate and his voiceover
blurs object and action, image and narrative, consumption and performance.
47
Though Hujar /
Palermo does not have a voiceover, as most of Davey’s films do, it functions as if it might—pages
turn, and supposedly fixed photographs disappear from view. The voiceover is not needed; it has
gone directly to her hands.

45
Ibid, 35.
46
Moyra Davey, “Fifty Minutes” in Index Cards, 11.
47
The voiceover in nostalgia is not spoken by Frampton himself—it is voiced by conceptual artist Michael Snow,
further distancing the film from any notion of straight autobiography. Snow published Cover to Cover, a film-like
collection of still images, in 1975. This unique artist’s book also uses sequencing of still images to blur the
technologies of photography and the book with that of film.
32

Still from Les Goddesses, Moyra Davey, 2011. HD Video with sound, 61 min.

Still from nostalgia, Hollis Frampton, 1971. 16mm film, 36 min.

33
In Moyra Davey’s films, flipping through photographs and turning the pages of a book
are cyclical actions: they have happened before, and they will happen again. Davey’s uses of
intertextual references are neither scholarly nor finite and suggest perpetual recursive exploration
rather than linear analysis. Davey is always looking and reading—ongoing states of infinite
becoming and unfolding, embedded within daily life. As a reader, Davey’s relation to her objects
is fluid; she uses photographs, books, previous artworks to produce new work, and she also falls
back into them. In the spirit of Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” Davey is not subject to the
creators of her intertextual references, nor does she master her objects in her own works. In the
essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think
This Essay Is About You,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick outlines what she argues is an undervalued
type of reading, which perhaps offers a model pertinent to Davey’s practice. Sedgwick argues
against “paranoid” reading and methodology—dominant critical practices characterized by
suspicion, anticipation, and exposure. This diagnosis largely refers to academic/critical contexts,
but also identifies a broader trend through which suspicion and paranoia become bulwarks
against naiveté, and even presented as misguided substitutes for action and intelligence. They are,
to Sedgwick, unintended side effects of what Paul Ricoeur termed the “hermeneutics of
suspicion,” which, over time, “may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the
local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its
narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller.”
48
By contrast, according
to Sedgwick, reparative reading is characterized by a more capacious, mutable relation to one’s

48
Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay
Is About You,” in Touching Feeling, (Durham & London: Duke University Press: 2003), 124. According to
Sedgewick, Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” was coined initially to describe the positionality of Marx, Freud,
Nietzsche and their intellectual offspring.
34
object. Sedgwick offers psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of the “depressive position” as a
means of illustration:
The depressive position is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only
sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting: this is the position from which
it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘‘repair’’ the murderous
part-objects into something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like
any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying
object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in
turn. Among Klein’s names for the reparative process is love.
49

For Sedgwick, Klein’s theory of positions offers a way to think around paranoia, and offers
something to the project of queer reading, and queer uses of psychoanalysis more generally,
unburdened by the totalizing notions of sexual difference and the phallus. Davey’s performance
is in many ways, a reading of a queer image-history, containing more portraits of death than life
by the time of her 2010 recording. Hujar’s blithe book on mortality became an awful portent;
almost exactly a decade after its publication, Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS, on January 1, 1987,
and passed away later that year.
50
The AIDS pandemic also hastened the deaths of a number of
the book’s subjects. Which is to say, by 2010, Portraits of Life and Death exists as a different text
than it was upon its publication, laden with new losses and a spectral temporality. Davey’s choice
to read Hujar’s book in reverse, refuses the framework of paranoia and exposure as the work
unfolds, instead offering her perpetually shifting relation to an object, artist, and historical
record.
*

49
Ibid, 128.
50
Hujar died in Cabrini Medical Center on Thanksgiving Day, 1987. Immediately following his passing, David
Wojnarowicz photographed Hujar’s body, producing 23 photographs (Joel Smith, “A Gorgeous Mental Discretion,”
in Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, 33).

35
Reflecting on why I chose to spend so much time looking at Hujar / Palermo, I must
recognize my own desire to understand Davey’s choice: why Portraits of Life and Death? The
Problem of Reading teases a key to understanding Davey’s selection of Portraits: because it saves
her, “just for one day.” I too have wanted to be saved by a text—and have been. But these are
temporary salvations, requiring constant renewal, like a library-set fort/da. And though Davey
admires Hujar’s body of work, Hujar / Palermo does not serve as a suggestion that the two are a
cosmically linked, inextricable pair, nor would that provide a satisfying explanation for the
choice. Figures that reoccur throughout Davey’s universe, like Hujar, are points of entry scattered
across a mutable map, and suggestions for a phantom audience.
Across her complete and growing body of writings, photographs, and films, Davey
constructs intertextual fields of associations that bend, rise, and redouble, forming a gesture that
extends through and beyond Hujar / Palermo. Davey’s practice is not about what she finds in the
work of other artists and writers, but rather how her reading—her constant pursuit—constitutes
an artistic practice and a life. Production and consumption collapse onto one another, and
images and texts open up like gaping portals. I want to fall into these portals too, and I have. In
fact, I have fallen so deeply into Davey’s portals that I have forgotten how I got there. So, why
Hujar? The answer still evades me. Perhaps Portraits of Life and Death is simply the text Davey
selected.
¥

36
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis is a close reading of artist Moyra Davey’s 2010 video entitled Hujar / Palermo.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rouhandeh, Katherine Hylah (author)

Core Title A picture is no substitute for anything: intertextuality and performance in Moyra Davey’s Hujar / Palermo

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 05/03/2021

Defense Date 04/29/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag intertextuality,Louise Lawler,Moyra Davey,OAI-PMH Harvest,Peter Hujar,Photography,Pictures Generation,portraiture

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Campbell, Andrew (committee chair), Lin, Jenny (committee member), Nelson, Margaret (committee member)

Creator Email kate.rouhandeh@gmail.com,rouhande@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-458194

Unique identifier UC11668937

Identifier etd-RouhandehK-9573.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-458194 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-RouhandehK-9573.pdf

Dmrecord 458194

Document Type Thesis

Rights Rouhandeh, Katherine Hylah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA