BERNADETTE MAYER’S MEMORY
One of the pleasures of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory project is its play between the fragmentary sensory inputs of memory and the elusive totality of biography. The piece, created over the course of one month in July 1971, is multimodal. On each day of that July, Mayer shot one roll (36 exposures) of 35mm film and created corresponding audio recordings. At the end of the month, she used both the snapshots and the audio recordings to recreate a 30-day journal of her experiences. In 1972, the resulting photographs were exhibited in an art gallery along with the recordings and finally, in 1975, Memory (the book) with the text reworked and the images omitted was published. Mayer’s journal entries are moment-by-moment dissections of each day in the form of Gertrude Stein-like prose poems. “You know,” says Bernadette Mayer in a 2017 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “I read something that I must have said in the past—that if you were surrounded by my memories and my voice saying what I did that you might actually become me.”
