Moyra Davey's INDEX CARDS

short bluesky summary ⌘ One of those volumes where an artist loosely muses about books they're reading, conversations with friends, and their creative process. I can feel critical of books like this, wishing the material had been more rigorously shaped, but I also have a soft spot for them

 ⌘ I love the fragment as a form but I also absorbed a dose of Protestant work ethic which kind of demands that the fragments be reassembled into a compelling new shape

 ⌘ and yet I could also read these types of books all day long. they kind of flow over me in a pleasant wash of ideas, details, curious facts, bits of gossip, the illusion of sociality, inhabiting a satisfyingly fizzy space one step above a social media feed and one step below a more demanding Work

 ⌘ I have a multidisciplinary creative process and a notecard index with 20,000+ items in it, I sort of feel like I could write a good book like this, but I also know that I would be mistrusting it every step of the way

 ⌘ I also feel like there is something Gendered about them (boiling down to something like "women are better at writing these kinds of books and that's part of why men are so ready to dismiss them") but untangling that thought without stepping into an essentialist trap is a project for another day

 ⌘ critical responses of relevance here range from Rachel Syme's appreciative identification of "Well Read Woman" writing (also "deep synthesis") to Sunny Lu's hater criticism of "Verso slop" (also "lit review but bad"). reminder here to read IMMEDIACY which I think marks out a spot on this spectrum

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Notes [oldest to newest]

1. Martha Rosler's "in, around, and afterthoughts"

2. Photographs and Surrealism

3. What something will look like photographed

4. "Enraptured prose beings"

5. Jean-Pierre Gorin on flimmaking

6. Story and structure, material and form

7. Photography, light, and sky

8. Meanings in the relations among things

9. Chris Marker's "Passengers"

10. "Choosing is easier than inventing"

11. Tillie Olsen's "Silences"

12. Chantal Akerman on the particular and the general

13. Creative work beyond adolescence

14. Hans Haacke's "Shapolsky et al"

15. Some contemporary artists Davey appreciates