May 20: Kate Zambreno and Moyra Davey in conversation

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Kate Zambreno and Moyra Davey will discuss writing and photography in their new books about Hervé Guibert and Peter Hujar.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, May 20th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be archived and posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.

Kate Zambreno – To Write As If Already Dead (Columbia University Press, 2021)

To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno’s failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault.

The first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.

Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost-companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert’s work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, “What is an author?” Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and “the facts of the body”: illness, pregnancy, and death.

The Shabbiness of Beauty, Photographs by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar, Text by Eileen Myles (Mack, 2021)

The Shabbiness of Beauty is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar’s archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City—even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania—these images crystallize tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey’s self-aware postmodernism against Hujar’s humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other’s work.

Kate Zambreno is the author of eight books, most recently Drifts (out now in paperback from Riverhead Books) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study on Hervé Guibert (Columbia University Press). She is at work on an essay collection, The Missing Person, to be published by Riverhead, and a novel, Foam. She is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.

Moyra Davey is a New York-based artist whose work comprises the fields of photography, film, and writing. She is the author of Index Cards, Burn the Diaries, The Problem of Reading, and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Davey's work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London. She is a 2020 recipient of the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.