Bernadette Mayer: Memory

A revered classic of 1970s New York conceptualism, Bernadette Mayer’s Memory synthesizes writing and photography in this prescient “emotional science project”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 quo