A revered classic of 1970s New York conceptualism, Bernadette Mayer’s Memory synthesizes writing and photography in this prescient “emotional science project”
A New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick
In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer’s durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary—and often unheralded—contribution to conceptual art.
Mayer has called Memory “an emotional science project,” but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet’s eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is—as she says—“always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.”
This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print.
Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Bernadette Mayer: Memory.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Bookforum
Jennifer Krasinski
A fabled work of installation art that plunged viewers headlong into the fizzing slipstream of [Mayer's] consciousness [...] Her epic's newest form: a treasure of a book
Publishers Weekly
Editors
This substantial volume will engage fans of Mayer and introduce new readers to a particular and remarkable voice.
Elephant
Emily Gosling
The American artist and poet spent one month in 1971 photographing her day-to-day life in minute detail, sharing both intimate and mundane moments, and delving into the slippery nature of memory.
Paris Review
Each of Mayer’s daily journal entries rolls and eddies as she allows herself to thoroughly investigate the elasticity of language and the contours of her mind. Arrayed in grids, the photographs—of grass, cats, friends, flags, skies, boats, herself, the moon—fix into place the minutiae of her days.
Garage
Phoebe Chen
Memory is not strictly a diary, but it pockets the day with similar devices; the entries read like consciousness spilled, even though, after the fact, she used both journal notes and the photos to refine and complete the text. Lines fall and trip over themselves to keep pace with her thought; objects are pilfered from their verbs; words and phrases repeat so many times they end up aural refrains cleaved from ordinary meaning.
TANK Magazine
Barbara Epler
Time travel into summery freedom on a 1971 road trip: this sumptuous book offers a portal into life off the leash. The result is an epic photo-poem: an incantatory work that investigates the nature of memory, monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and intimate in feel.
BOMB
Diana Hamilton
Though Mayer’s writing has exemplified many of the stylistic traits of the New York School—detailing day-to-day life, chattiness, an emphasis on memory, an eschewal of lyric sanctimony—she explicitly rejected her then-contemporaries’ “addiction to style.” Her ambitions here are not stylistic, but relational: the goal was to, without writing a book, get the audience to become “a real reader,” by which she meant she would give them so much access that they might become her. I, sadly, did not become Bernadette Mayer reading Memory—which reassures me that the projects of both Memory and memory are ongoing, after all.
Hyperallergic
Marcella Durand
In Memory, the poet shapes a new visual and textual language that explores the simmering possibilities of consciousness.
Frieze
An American poet – and synesthete – considers the ever-changing colours of the alphabet.
New York Times: T Magazine
Seen in another light, the project seems to anticipate the way we think about representing life today, whether we’re sharing snippets of our days on Instagram or unpolished fragments of thought on Twitter. [...] In her thoughts and images, we find an immersion in quotidian minutiae, synecdoche for a lost era that feels almost eerily contemporary.
Nation
Thea Ballard
It may bear reiterating that when Mayer made these notes on her life, self-conscious as she was, it wasn’t her writing that she meant to make known. Perhaps doing this kind of reading can help us, saturated as we are with sculpted life narratives, keep better diaries. The little uneven crevasses that form throughout the document to which her estate has granted us access are what make it especially satisfying to read, a different kind of historical documentation of how an artist comes to be.
New Yorker
Dan Chiasson
Elegy always has a way of creeping into art that documents the once teeming, now empty past: it is almost too painful to glimpse the innocence and the freedom of Mayer’s summer from the point of view of our current fearful season. It can seem a dubious advantage to have survived all those disconnected phones, defunct addresses, dead or forgotten friends. At our moment in history, ‘Memory' reads in part as an archive of suspended (in both senses of the word) pleasures.
London Review Of Books
Janique Vigier
[Memory] has been more frequently exhibited in condensed forms, and the text was published without accompanying photographs in 1975. Now Siglio Press have published a complete edition, interspersing the photographs with her journal entries
New York Times
Luc Sante
Mayer’s Memory [contains] more than 1,100 artfully artless photographs collecting rooms, skies, flowers, streetscapes and landscapes, friends and family in vibrant 1970s color. The photos are necessarily small (roughly 2½ inches by 1¾ inches), arrayed in grids of nine, along with intermittent full-page blowups, and as lovely as individual images are, their power is cumulative: a wide-ranging work of personal cinema, in stills. Her journal provides the narration in galloping long-breath prose poetry that feels as spontaneous and alive as the pictures.
Photo Eye
Luc Sante
Mayer's artfully artless photographs — which collect streets, landscapes, clouds, weather, friends, family — are often very beautiful on their own. Arrayed in tight grids of small-scale reproductions they become something else: an expansive work of personal cinema, relayed in stills. And Mayer's mighty, long-breath journals provide a dynamic narration, making a work that is large and resonant while attentive to the smallest things.
DC's
Dennis Cooper
What is illuminated in Mayer’s attempt to record what she experiences as she experiences it is the space where images, interiority, and action flow into each other and carry equal weight.
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Saturday, April 13 at 6 PM, Prospect Heights bookseller Unnameable Books celebrates Siglio’s reissue of Bernadette Mayer: Memory with a reading of excerpts from the book by Brenda Coultas, Phil Good, Laura Henrickson, Bob Holman, Paolo Javier, Shiv Kotecha, Dorothea Lasky and Max Warsh. continue to blog
Sunday, April 21 at 2 PM, Time & Space Limited celebrates Siglio’s new printing of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory with a special moving-image presentation of Memory (created for the Museum of Modern Art in 2019). continue to blog
Congratulations Siglio Press, publisher of Bernadette Mayer: Memory, extensively reviewed in this week's New Yorker, where Dan Chiasson calls the book "a new and beautiful embodiment" of Mayer's 1971 conceptual project that "speaks uncannily to our particular time." We are so moved by this searching, prescient, open-ended book, which Chiasson describes elegantly. "Nostalgia—for the carnal, improvised mood of 1971, but also for the halcyon days of, say, last summer, before we were afraid of communal life—has become the work’s dominant key. Yet Memory, also seems ahead of its time: a database of half-captured meals, barns, bodies—a kind of analog Internet. The visual images are underexposed, overexposed, and double-exposed. Objects are edged half into or half out of the frame; scenes are never complete. The text propels you past tantalizing sights and experiences. It’s all too much, in ways that seem very familiar to anyone who watches stimuli whiz by in a feed." continue to blog
Featured image is one of 1,100 photographs taken by Bernadette Mayer during the month of July, 1971. These have been collected in Memory, the new Siglio book collecting this body of work, alongside two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording that Mayer made as part of the project. The corresponding entry for July 22 begins: "To burn to be sharp to drive to nourish to choke to breathe, last week in 1850, to bind to increase to bend to cover to vault over to shine to seize to take hold of, last week in 1850, to cut to hide to shut to lean, last week in 1850, to hold to run to turn round to cultivate to cook to give to show to tame to lead to eat to live to exist to put to place to speak, last week in 1850…” To hear contemporary poets read from the book, by day, throughout July 2020, please visit Language is a Temptation: Daily Readings from Bernadette Mayer's 'Memory' at Poets House. The reader for July 22 is Fanny Howe. continue to blog
Before there was Instagram, before there were selfies and iPhones, there was Bernadette Mayer's "emotional science project," Memory. Featured grid—culled from more than 1,100 photographs in all, made over the course of July 1971, one 35mm roll of film per day—is from the sequence shot on July 5. "With this road you didn't need a house," Mayer writes in the accompanying daily text, "everyone set the sun & sense the presence of other people. This is about watching other people, then creating someone for people to watch, understanding the desire to watch other people to understand them or just to watch them, not finding any place to set things down then save this for later & wait. I saw I talked about. The sun set…" continue to blog
A revered classic of 1970s New York conceptualism, Bernadette Mayer’s Memory synthesizes writing and photography in this prescient “emotional science project”
A New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick
In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer’s durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary—and often unheralded—contribution to conceptual art.
Mayer has called Memory “an emotional science project,” but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet’s eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is—as she says—“always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.”
This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print.
Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.
