Becoming Bernadette Mayer
Considering Bernadette Mayer's Memory in an excerpt from my book, The Uses of Art
Dear Friends,
I’ve been thinking of Bernadette Mayer often since her death in November. A few days ago, while visiting a writing class for visual artists at Pratt, teaching Bernadette Mayer’s work, I found myself talking about what a free and freeing writer she was. Her work continues to give off enormous, resounding waves of permission.
Below you’ll find an excerpt from my book, The Uses of Art that considers Memory, Bernadette Mayer’s mind-altering multimedia piece from 1971.
— Sal
Becoming Bernadette
Memory
Experience cannot be captured, and yet we try. Some mysterious alchemy turns the pure present-hood of outer sensation and inner feeling into meaningful ‘experience,’ and from experience into memory, and from memory into the construction of a self.
Some of the difference between perception and experience is meaning. As sensation passes through us, aspects of it are, or become, personally meaningful, and what becomes meaningful we remember; the more meaningful, the more likely we are to remember. We rarely see this transformation, this making, actually take place in others. We can only posit it. Novels, perhaps, come closest to giving us the ability to inhabit another person’s interior life.
I walk in to a big white box of a room, a room I’ve been in before for other shows. On the far wall is a large grid of photos, snapshot-sized, faded and color-shifted towards orange. Across the middle of the room is a line of benches, placed so that you can contemplate the photos, and to the right and left are black boxy speakers. A young woman’s voice speaking quickly. Words float over the speakers:
Summer you never saw summer
But I saw it
I knew it would be right where it was You might collapse like some building I like you
Or: step back to 1971, a kind of time travel. The sunset colors of the faded photographs are the time machine. Kodachrome ’70s. This is Bernadette Mayer’s Memory—one hundred forty-four square feet of snapshots, ninety thousand words, and seven hours of Mayer’s voice on audiotape. One month of minutely recorded memory, but not in the simplest sense.
In her description:
MEMORY was 1200 color snapshots, 3 × 5, processed by Kodak plus 7 hours of taped narration. I had shot one roll of 35-mm color film every day for the month of July, 1971. The pictures were mounted side by side in row after row along a long wall, each line to be read from left to right, 36 feet by 4 feet. All the images made each day were included, in sequence, along with a 31-part tape, which took the pictures as points of focus, one by one & as taking-off points for digression, filling in the spaces between. MEMORY was described by A. D. Coleman as an “enormous accumulation of data.” I had described it as an “emotional science project.”
Mayer said she wanted to see if, by standing in front of these images and hearing her voice, another person could become her.
White Sink
I try the experiment, first poring over the photos, then reading. Here’s what I see of the first day, the first thirty-six snapshots:
White linens in a white sink; a figure taking her own photo, like a ghost in blackness; sideways: a block of tenement buildings; young man in a striped shirt and ponytail looking to the right; gears or film spools & a sideways window; Coronet VSQ brandy billboard & a city street from above; woman sitting in an open window with the ghost of film spools on the left; city out the window & NY sign on a building; buildings, clouds, the empire state, cars on the street—one brown—a crowd; a building? a striped surface; orangey cars from above looking like they are underwater; shrubs, one branched, one green, and a walkway; cars as if in a flood; a white sky with a dark tree and some rectangular forms; trees and cloudy sky with a white building; a white quadrangle, a window, an organic dark form (a tree?), a floating rectangle; someone in the kitchen reaching a hand to stir something on the stove, a curtained window; a man with long hair, perhaps on a couch, partly obscured by something in the foreground; blurred shapes, maybe a bookshelf, maybe a photograph of a photograph; chair and table in a hallway, atmospheric yellow; night silhouette of trees and building; hazy night, street lights, reflection; dark hazy night street lights; night reflection of building windows in a window; looking down a street at night; wet night, fire hydrant, blooms of light; wet night, light that looks like sprays of water from a giant hose; construction at night, lit backhoe; a lit figure, a construction against blackness.
A Whole New Language
Mayer’s own account of the first day runs seven-and-a-half pages, beginning
& the main thing is we begin with a white sink a whole new language is a temptation. Men on the wall in postures please take your foot by your hand & think that this is pictures, picture book & letters to everyone dash you tell what the story is once once when they were nearly ready thursday july first was a thursday: back windows across street I’m in sun out image windows & so on riverdale, did you know that, concentrated dash was all there was mind nothing sink . . . with my white pants in it. I dont remember this dont remember thinking one on one white & whiter the word pictures, sing on the wall in pictures did you get it right thought: yellow slat on the left side where are you?
Mayer was and is primarily a poet, and the installation Memory is singular in her work. When she made it in 1971, she was collaborating with Vito Acconci in editing the journal 0 to 9, which remains a key document of the New York avant-garde; both Memory and 0 to 9 date from a moment when conceptual art and experimental writing shared the same roots. The procedural yet free-flowing writing that makes up the text of Memory shares some aesthetic resonance with the work of Eva Hesse, and indeed Hesse’s friend and mentor Sol LeWitt’s iconic “Sentences on Conceptual Art” was first published in the pages of 0 to 9.
Mayer’s invocation of ‘a whole new language’ in the white sink was everywhere alive in the early seventies. 0 to 9, though short-lived, was one of the places that a new language flourished. And yet in Mayer’s writing there is also a fidelity to the ordinary, to that laundry in the white sink. Language (the ‘concentrated dash’ of the laundry detergent, which is in her memory but not in the photograph) is observed in just the way her soaking pants are, or the way light falls through the windows. Her mind hesitates and remembers and forgets, “Did you get it right?”
Becoming
To become Mayer means to succumb to a flood of associations. To go all the way into the experiment would be to lose yourself in the whirl of a mind not your own. Even Mayer herself found that difficult. After completing Memory, she wondered about her own sanity.
A short time later she began a second set of journals, which she would later publish under the title Studying Hunger. In the introduction she says:
I kept these journals while seeing a psychiatrist. I’d gone to see him because I thought I might be crazy after my work on memory, shooting 36 pictures a day & keeping a detailed journal having driven me to the brink. But I thought why not go over that brink & see what’s there. On the other hand I didn’t want to wind up in a mental hospital, tied to some bed or chair.
And yet, I do want to become her, even if fleetingly, to take the Kodachrome time machine back to the ’70s, to let myself-as-me dissolve into self-as-images. Maybe any work of art, fully entered into, risks madness.
Sun
Months later, bleaching curtains after a long winter, I feel Bernadette in a flash: white curtains soaking in a white enamel basin in a white sink. Of such moments is our ordinary life made, its ordinary beauties. And this is our whole new language.
Hanging the curtains on the line, in the wind and sun, I remember the annual ritual described in Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, where the linens are laid out on the snow to be bleached by the sun. “The bleaching season came in January and February under the lunar calendar, and snow-covered fields and gardens were the bleaching grounds.” I think of snow bleaching every time I lay something in the sun to freshen it.
Or my own teenage hair that I covered with lemon juice to make the sun do its work faster.
I spend the afternoon reading Memory and drinking iced coffee, leaping up at intervals to check that the curtains haven’t been snatched away by the high winds. Cormorant overhead. Some of the curtains look good, others I might bleach again tomorrow if the sun is back. Memory makes me feel headlong, as if caught in a wind, tumbled through layers of days and hours. Whipped up like the waves.
Bernadette Mayer’s Memory was on view at Canada Gallery in New York, September 9 - October 8, 2017.
You can learn more about Memory on Bernadette Mayer’s website.
Siglio Press has published a beautiful edition of Memory which pairs Mayer’s photographs and text.
A facsimile of the 1976 book, Memory, published by North Atlantic Books (Plainfield, Vermont), along with a downloadable reading copy are available from Eclipse Archive.
You can listen to Bernadette Mayer’s audio from Memory via the Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, at the University of California, San Diego.
This meditation on Bernadette Mayer’s Memory is excerpted from my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara