Marcella Durand Reviews Bernadette Mayer's Memory

In this weekend's edition of Hyperallergic, Marcella Durand carves a path for readers and gallery-goers alike, through Bernadette Mayer's Memory, a performance piece that debuted at Holly Solomon Gallery in 1972, and installed more recently at the Lower East Side's Canada Gallery through this weeekend. "Canada’s installation of Bernadette Mayer’s 1971 performance piece, Memory, for which she shot a roll of 35 mm film and composed a journal entry every day for a month, addresses issues of time, narrative, nostalgia, narcissism, and documentation, along with the possibilities of art and poetry in relation to perception and remembrance" Durand explains. From there: 

At the time Mayer created Memory, she says she was thinking of Cy Twombly’s work and 15th-century Dutch still lifes. These references ground Memory in art as well as poetry. At a panel discussion on Memory, she recounted how a gallerist told her after its initial exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery in 1972, that she wasn’t “slick enough” to be an artist. And so she transitioned to poetry, writing time-and consciousness-based poems such as “Moving,” “Studying Hunger,” “Midwinter Day,” and “The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters.”

Indeed the piece is not “slick.” Much as a fossil arrests time in its disruption of the surrounding rock, Memory is instead a snag, a trap where memory is caught and held. Its small, slowly discoloring photos installed as a wall-to-wall horizontal spread, accompanied by a recording of the artist reading her journal, evoke what is unwritten. As Mayer says, “memory is air.”

Memory is not timeless, and as such questions whether any work, even a 15th-century Dutch still life, can be so. Small shifts in time are documented by small shifts in space; as Mayer shoots the film, she repositions the camera just enough to create a series of occurrences: taking road trips, eating breakfast, washing clothes; friends and lovers smoking, talking, moving, changing. Rather than time being stopped, or stilled, she represents life as a continuous progression. She explains,

It’s impossible to put things exactly as they happened or in their real order one by one but something happened that day in the middle of seeing some people & talking about some, something happened that day (look it up in stories) & what happened was what began this: and this came later, the day after that […].

Yet there is still a relation between the way that both Memory and still lifes establish a space between the infinite and the finite. Like a still life, Memory is inescapably of its time. The cars and buses are the first to betray this, along with the clothing and hairdos, the architecture and street signs. The landscapes of upstate New York and New England have also changed, due to invasive plants and trees, less pollinators, more deer, habitat loss. 

Read more at Hyperallergic.