Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.
For the past five years, Mayer, the author of more than 30 volumes, has actually marked herself as a cataloguer par quality of daily life, attuned to the rhythms of the world and her position as an artist in it. In 1971, then age 26, she set out to manufacture such experiences in a creative examination of memory by tape-recording the world as she lived it over the course of a single month.Each day in July 1971, Mayer shot a roll of 35- millimeter slide film and composed an exhaustive log of occasions, impressions, and dreams that together offer a glance into her visual and political advancement as an artist. Including over a thousand three-by-five-inch snapshots arranged in a grid along a single wall, the setup was accompanied by a six-hour tape recording of Mayer reading her composed entries to produce a total sensory experience.
For many years, Memory has taken many forms. A condensed variation of the work was displayed as “Remembrance” as part of curator and critic Lucy Lippard’s 1973 exhibition of female conceptual artists. In 1975, Mayer modified a version of the text, released by North Atlantic Press, without the accompanying color photos. It quickly went out of print however has given that been made available as a PDF through Craig Dworkin’s online Eclipse archive. In 2016, Memory was restaged as an installation at Chicago’s Poetry Foundation, where the photos were reprinted at a somewhat bigger size and the audio was made available to audiences on an iPad accompanied by headphones. In 2017, Memory was installed at New York’s Canada gallery, this time complete with the initial photos and accompanying audio track.
Never ever having actually seen a setup personally, I invited Siglio Press’s good-looking hardbound edition of Memory, which integrates full-color photos with Mayer’s text in a single volume spanning 300- odd pages. (The complete audio recording of Mayer checking out the text can be streamed online through the library at the University of California, San Diego, where her archives are kept.) Introducing the brand-new edition, she remarks that while Memory appears exhaustive, “so much is left out: emotions, thoughts, sex, the relationship between poetry and light, storytelling, walking and voyaging to name a few … I thought that by using both noise and image, I might include everything. So far, that is not so.”
Memory, by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio,2020 (Courtesy of Bernadette Mayer Documents, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego).
With its barrage of run-on sentences and its collection of haphazard, often fuzzy, dark photos, Memory syncopates the ebullient and the mundane to approximate the disproportion of life’s passage– that combination of significant pleasures, minor disasters, and minutes that float somewhere in between. Sweeping between the intimate and the impersonal, Memory’s combination of photography and written word simulates the flashing, short lived experience of awareness. Within its stream of text and image are spaces of acknowledgment between Mayer and the reader, minutes of synchronicity that collapse the decades-long gap in between the hot July days of 1971 and our aching present and make Memory a trademark of American conceptualism.
Born in 1945 to a conservative Catholic family in Ridgewood, N.Y., Mayer grew up a voracious reader. With her sibling Rosemary Mayer, who would be recognized as a pioneering feminist artist, Bernadette Mayer studied Greek and Latin, showing a particular tourist attraction to the ribald verse of Catullus. After finishing from the New School in 1967, where she studied with the poet Expense Berkson, she became a component on the downtown scene, collaborating with Vito Acconci on the influential however short-lived magazine 0-9, where she released her poetry as well as early conceptual works by Robert Smithson, Yvonne Rainer, and Adrian Piper. In the 1970 s, living in New England with the poet Lewis Warsh, with whom she raised three children, Mayer worked together with a number of artists on epistolary correspondences and magazines and cofounded United Artists Press with Warsh, releasing writers such as Hannah Weiner, Robert Creeley, and Alice Notley.
Her early verse, detailing the transpositions of daily living in a plainspoken, untouched design, was placed in the 2nd wave of the New york city School with Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman, the poetic inheritors of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. In 1970, Mayer was included with these luminaries in the first anthology of the New york city School, modified by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, the only lady among 27 males. Her contribution to the anthology speaks to the immediacy of experience she sought to record: “The end which comes/ is not as crucial as the movement/ held in the air/ stopping briefly in its course.”.
The thrum of the normal was as much of a political issue as an artistic one for Mayer, and throughout Memory, decisive events in the outdoors world barrel easily alongside internal contemplations. In Memory, remarks on the demands for better conditions by detainees in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility– months before the riot in September 1971– sit next to details of the bohemian activities of Mayer and her then-boyfriend, the filmmaker Ed Bowes.
Mayer’s style has not rarely been referred to as protean; Memory does little to dispute this label. Her prose varies from crystal-clear descriptions of her environments (” a red vehicle, leading clear white … a lady in blue-green with white trim”) to abstract comparisons (” he looks like a memory he appears like a check out in the middle of the night”). Her photos, too, divert towards blurry indecipherability however are regularly striking in their vivid information– clothing pinned to a line outside in the sun, intense yellow cabs in traffic seen from a guest seat, the white sails of a boat against deep blue waves. These generic observations are located in the middle of scenes of friends gathered around a dinner table and intimate shots of Bowes sitting naked in a bath or curled up in bed, images that communicate heat and familiarity regardless of their uniqueness. In in between these vivid, individual encounters, Mayer continually reviews what can not be recorded by word and image, describing, for example, the “pink and purple madness” of a “manic sunset” that stays unreproducible by movie or her frustrations with her relationships and her art.
To follow Mayer throughout t
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