The first shot is of horses in a pasture—tails swishing, heads swaying to ward off pestering flies. Reflective, their hides glimmer in the brisk winter air, as their flanks tense and relax. One, wandering in the paddock, drops to the ground, recumbent; others trot asynchronously before finally congregating in intuitive assemblies, jostling each other in a spirited choreography. The camera focuses on these majestic animals, letting us glimpse them, in moments, through cell phone video clips of the view from a telescope—an update of early cinema’s iris shots. But the film is far from silent. In Moyra Davey’s HORSE OPERA, the titular creature, filmed with care and reverence, might be said to speak alongside, and occasionally for, the artist. A “horse opera”, after all (historical associations with TV cowboys and B-movie melodramas aside), suggesting at once the singularity of an aria, the dynamism of a duet, or the breadth of an ensemble.
At stake in HORSE OPERA, it seems, might be nothing less than a re-evaluation of the essayistic mode that has defined Davey’s work to date.
Shot in Rockland County, New York, before and during the pandemic, HORSE OPERA metabolizes the feelings of enclosure and social isolation that have coursed through recent years. Intimate in her first-person approach and scale, Davey’s is a work that has often attended to the stuff of habit, of domesticity—dust settling on sills and shelves, light pouring in through the window, the books and records at hand—readily available objects of observation and thought she elsewhere has called “low-hanging fruit”. Spun into expanding constellations of ideas and images variously realized through text, photographs, and films, Davey’s oeuvre interweaves biographical fact and (auto)fiction; history and speculation; reflections on art, literature, and image-making. Above all, it celebrates communities of thought and practice, assembling them in mention, in citation, in bibliography. These elements populate what John Berger might call a field: a space that concentrates observable events. Positioned at a remove from its outer limits, we open ourselves to acts of noticing what occurs within, able to grasp events in their singularity and interconnection without instrumentalizing them in service of narrative linearity and anticipated endings.1John Berger, “Field,” in "About Looking" (New York: Vintage, 1980), 199-205. Hilton Als, whose thoughts dot this film, advises on the matter: to write means “letting the mess come in” and skirting conventional narratives, which “feel inauthentic because they want control”. 2Hilton Als, “I had this terrible need to confess, and I still do it. It’s a bid to be loved,” interview by Emma Brockes, "The Guardian", February 2, 2018. See also Hilton Als, White Girls (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2013).
The injunction to “write about what keeps you up at night”, too, follows Davey in HORSE OPERA. Alongside shots revealing details of the inside of her home upstate and the surrounding field, animals, and flora, she appears herself on screen, wrapping fleece legwarmers around the horses or roaming through rooms replete withfamiliar household effects as songs by Prince, Lauryn Hill, Angelique Kidjo, and others croon in the background. All the while, the voice of a narrator introduces a protagonist known only as Elle, and elsewhere details the pressures of writing and its objects—the mundane, the ecstatic—under conditions of variously abundant and atrophied sociality. Ever pacing, Davey is fed these words through earphones before repeating them—always with her signature cadence, tonally uninflected and rhythmically staccato—producing something of an echo chamber or a mise en abyme, a doubling that offers a foil to the sense of confinement as well as an escape through fiction.
Looking back, on what is long lost and what has only recently vanished, Elle is faced with writing’s potential (in)capacity to summon and project these moments, but also with a quintessential writers’ struggle: to be a present participant rather than a distant observer.
At stake in HORSE OPERA, it seems, might be nothing less than a re-evaluation of the essayistic mode that has defined Davey’s work to date. In confinement, one is at greater risk of lapsing into solipsism—the opposite of the kind of relationality that characterizes even the most intimate of her inspirations. Her reading is grounding. She turns to writers like Christa Wolf, the German novelist who marked time through the disciplined act of penning a diary entry on the same day in September every year for half a century. 3Christa Wolf, "One Day a Year: 1960-2000", trans. Lowell A. Bangerter (Europa Editions, 2007), and the ensuing One Day a Year: 2001-2011", trans. Katy Derbyshire (Seagull Books, 2021). She finds solace in Catherine Malabou’s pandemic theorizations of quarantine,4Catherine Malabou, “To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and ‘I,’” in “Posts from the Pandemic,” ed. Hank Scotch, special issue, "Critical Inquiry" 47, no. S2 (Winter 2021): S13-S16. which, the philosopher estimates, might offer new potential for closeness and fuel for writing. (Elsewhere, Malabou writes: “Being a speaking subject in the prison of language paradoxically brings me close to those who don’t speak, to animals, animals in captivity, when they develop what is called stereotypic behaviours, made of repetition and routine.”5Catherine Malabou, “Life and Prison,” "e-flux Architecture", October 2020.)
But it is also the disappearance of a social field—bodies in proximate space—that Elle tries to recapture, the afterimage of a now-extinguished New York City nightlife recalled from a rural remove. Elle’s memories swarm around visions of community and intimacy, abandon and euphoria under the light of a dance floor silver ball, and her reminiscences serve as a palliative, it seems, for the solitude of the present. She chronicles episodes from David Mancuso’s iconic Loft parties, initiated in his SoHo residence on Valentine’s Day in 1970 before eventually swelling to over 500 revellers by the time the bimonthly party finally ended 15 years later. Mancuso—conductor of the dawn-to-dusk musical flow and, as Davey describes him, agent of egalitarianism and social progress with his diversely attended residence-turned-nightery—passed in 2016, but his legacy has been revived in recent years, inspiring numerous events and exhibitions in addition to this film, which nests a handful of these reprises. 6For instance, the artist Martin Beck reconstituted the Loft’s final 13-hour mix on its last night in June 1984 for a film, while the JOY collective organized parties up until February 2020 and the New York City-wide shutdown, which we hear about through Elle’s narrated experience.
This suspended hypnotization, a limbo between states of consciousness, manifests most immediately in Davey’s near-somnambulant stroll.
Looking back, on what is long lost and what has only recently vanished, Elle is faced with writing’s potential (in)capacity to summon and project these moments, but also with a quintessential writers’ struggle: to be a present participant rather than a distant observer (“to be in her body and in the moment and less fixated on an ancillary project such as writing”). More succinctly, hers is the struggle to live a writeable life. What position might be less nostalgic, more authentic? Elle dwells on the instances when boundaries liquify: she takes drugs (countless powders, joints, and tabs), chronicling their euphoric, but also debilitating, physical effects. Write about what keeps you up at night.
Davey’s text is both a “pathography”, as she ventures, and an account of the pleasures to be experienced in bodily processes, in the metabolization of form. She speaks of illness, aging, blood, guts, and shit readily in this film (subjects authors like Elizabeth Hardwick warn against), yet, gesturing to Als, also finds kinship with his delight in fleshy excess and fetid smells. Meanwhile, her own ill-timed discharges are sublimated into the imposing, sheer corporeality of the horses she films urinating lengthily and repeatedly, their forceful vectors of piss captured with fascination and admiration. Figures of freedom within constraint, Davey’s horses also bear affinity to those of a photographer she has long been in dialogue with. “I’ve never more appreciated [Peter] Hujar’s photographic genius than in these flawed attempts of my own to commune with equines,” she wrote for an exhibition pairing their work, noting how—abetted by a quiet, coaxing whisper—he managed to capture them as “as though hypnotized”. 7Moyra Davey, press release, Moyra Davey Peter Hujar, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, February 13-April 11, 2020.
This suspended hypnotization, a limbo between states of consciousness, manifests most immediately in Davey’s near-somnambulant stroll. Ever inhabiting and animating the interval—between writing and living, between the still and the moving image, between transition and flow—she lets no memory congeal lifeless on the page, in the voice, or within the frame. Davey lets in the mess and confirms her chosen forms as still viable. She lets no single form formalize.
Rachel Valinsky is a writer, editor, and translator based in New York and Paris. She is the Artistic Director at Wendy’s Subway and publishes artists’ books at Primary Information.
