He turned, finally, to the book Moyra Davey published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition for the 2018 Scotiabank Photography Award in 2018. It is the largest book by Davey he owns, like Index Cards an anthology of texts, but also a rich survey of the artist’s photographic and film work.
While flicking through the texts and images, he settles on ‘Walking With Nandita’, the text-image essay Davey wrote for South as a State of Mind No. 8 [documenta 14 no. 3] in Fall/Winter 2016, edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk. Turning back to the original magazine to compare the choice of photographs used in the reproduced essay to the original version, he noticed a startling typo in the reproduction’s epigraph.
Virginia Woolf had transformed into Virgina Wolff
The missing letters of the author’s name immediately transported you to the ornate letters from an early edition of Homer’s Iliad that were part of Davey’s installation Skeletal Buddha (2017) at the Neue-Neue Galerie in Kassel during documenta 14.
Here is a photo of the installation included in Moyra Davey.
And here are photos he took of the installation, with the two missing vowels ‘I’ and ‘O’ and the added ‘F’, which was not represented by the edition of Homer as it is not a letter in the Greek alphabet.
Given that Davey’s use of the Iliad in Skeletal Buddha was part of the artist’s re-reading of Simone Weil’s 1940 essay ‘The Iliad, of the Poem of Force’, he was reminded of his own essay, included in the subsequent issue of South as a State of Mind on Weil’s essay in relation to her critical work against French colonialism. He had wanted to call ‘No Consolation for Carthage: Simone Weil’s Bitter Victory’ (as part of an homage to Bill Horrigan, who had introduced him to Davey and who had first lent him the DVD of Nicholas Ray’s 1957 film Bitter Victory), but during the edits with Associate Editor Domenick Ammirati, the title gradually became ‘Blood is Flowing in Carthage: Simone Weil between Force and Colonialism’. Here is the title page with a pair of epigraphs:
With the error in Davey’s epigraph in mind, he recalled his own error at the end of his essay, when he wrote that we can learn from ‘suffering, oppressed colonizers’. He meant to write ‘colonized’.
Even if we take Weil’s argument about how violence harms the perpetrator as well as the victim, the bitterness of this error – a matter of a few letters – still bites at him to this day, and the writing about it here is of little consolation.
At the same time, as he writes this, he still somehow lives with and within this error, because the alternative is to have not have written it in the first place! Perhaps this is a case of learning from our mistakes by feeling them afresh that comes through so much of Moyra Davey’s work in what her fellow documenta 14 artist Mary Zygouri would the ‘pedagogy of the open-ended project’.