Bernadette Mayer | Memory

Bernadette Mayer

Memory

New York City, USA: Siglio Press, 2020

336 pp., 10 x 7.25"., hardcover

Edition size uknown

Originally published in 1975, Memory was long out of print and selling for between two and five hundred dollars on the secondary market, before the Siglio Press edition in 2020. This version features 1100 colour illustrations, while the original was strictly text.

The title was featured on best of 2020 lists at the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Cultured, Elephant and Ursula. 

Memory is available from the publisher, here, for $45 US. Also available is a signed and numbered deluxe version, in an edition of 31 copies. These copies are accompanied by a unique 6x 9 archival print housed in a vellum envelope inside the book. A second edition will be released next year. 

Mayer died two days ago, on November 22nd, 2022. She was 77 years old. 

"I was twenty-six years old when I started Memory. I look like such a kid in the photos . . . I can see myself growing up through the course of the month. I got the idea from Godard, who said that image and sound make a film. Then again, he also said all you needed to make a film was a girl and a gun.

July 1971 was a random point in time. I didn’t know what was going to happen, and that was the idea. I ended up being on the road a lot, going between city and country. Ed Bowes, my boyfriend at the time, had been hired by the Berkshire Theatre Festival to make films. I was taking a roll of film a day and developing it at night. I was also keeping a journal, recording my thoughts and feelings and transcribing actions as they were happening. It was exhausting. By the end, I had a total breakdown. Later on, I projected the slides I had taken and wrote a second text. I wanted to see what I had left out. The combination of these two texts—a text of sound and a text of image—is the audio component of Memory. I was presented with the choice of including everything or leaving a lot out. I chose to include everything, just to see what would happen.

[...]

I first met Holly Solomon at a party that winter. She invited me to have the first show at her new space at 98 Greene Street, which was in an old manufacturing building in Soho, before the neighborhood had any galleries. Gordon Matta-Clark, who was running FOOD at that time, who I remember making oxtail stew, helped install the exhibition. A.D. Coleman from the Village Voice reviewed the show, but beyond that it received little attention. It’s taken forty years for it to regain a new life.

Memory was an attempt to find out if people would get into that funny space where the words are floating around the room and so are the pictures. I still am hoping."

- Bernadette Mayer

Dan Graham | Rock My Religion

Dan Graham

Rock My Religion

Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1993

330 pp., 20 x 27.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Sharing its title with Graham's celebrated 1984 film (scored by Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth), this volume collects eighteen essays written by the late artist between 1965 and 1990. These include articles rejected by magazines such as Artforum, Arts, Esquire, ZG and Screen, and published by Aspen Magazine, Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's 0 - 9, Open Letter (Toronto), Real Life (New York), Parachute (Montreal), Art Press (Paris), and (eventually) Artforum. 

The volume is divided into three sections: "Information: Conceptual Art/Magazines/The Sixties", "Performance: Punk Rock, Popular Culture, Theater" and "Architecture: Art/Design/Urbanism". Each alternates between descriptions and documentation of Graham's own projects with his writings about other artists (Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman) and musicians (The Ramones, Devo, Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols, The Runaways, Lydia Lunch, The Slits). 

The title essay traces the parallels not only between religion and rock music, but between rock music and propaganda, rock music and capitalism, politics, the media, etc. etc. 

Flipping through it today - for the first time in years - I'm most enjoying a text about Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. It recounts the story of the band Adam and the Ants asking the impresario to help "reshape their image". McLaren began by ousting Adam as the lead singer, replacing him with fourteen year-old Annabella Lwin (and briefly, also, George Alan O'Dowd, who would later achieve superstardom as Boy George). Changing the band's name to Bow Wow Wow, he wrote the controversial lyrics to their songs which ranged from the innuendo-laden "Sexy Eiffel Tower" (complete with faux-orgasmic panting by the adolescent singer) and songs promoting cassette piracy (released on the largest record label at the time). 

The book includes Graham's influential interventions in newspapers and magazines, such as Detumesecence (1969) and Figurative (1965), important texts such as Homes for America (1966-67),  performative works like Performer/Audience/Mirror (1977) and early forays into public art, including 

Children's Pavilion (1989), a collaboration with Jeff Wall. 

Wall also provides a blurb for the dust jacket:

"Dan Graham's essays are essential reading for everyone interested in the big issues in art and culture since the 60s - and some of the little issues too." 

as does Kim Gordon: 

"Dan was the first person to encourage me to write. By participating in performance of his involving an all-girl band he also encouraged me to play music. Sonic Youth would never have existed without Dan Graham. Rock My Religion is a fresh momento of Dan's perceptive brilliant and friendship". 

Rock My Religion spans twenty-five years of Graham's work, which would continue for another thirty-two, until his death on Saturday at the age of 79.  

Siglio Press

Siglio Press has published books by and about Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, Nancy Spero and many others (see post below on their new Bernadette Mayer book). For the month of June they are donating a quarter of their revenue to Black Lives Matter causes.

Visit their site here.

Bernadette Mayer | Memory

Bernadette Mayer
Memory
New York City, USA: Siglio Press, 2020
336 pp., 10 x 7.25"., hardcover
Edition size uknown


Originally published in 1975 (see previous post), long out of print and selling for between two and five hundred dollars on the secondary market, Bernadette Mayer's Memory has just been re-issued by Siglio Press. The new title features 1100 colour illustrations, while the original was strictly text.

"In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: For one month she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a daily 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 1100 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 writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer’s durational and constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary—and unheralded—contribution to conceptual art.

Mayer has called Memory “an emotional science project,” but it is far from confessional. Rather, 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. The space of memory in Mayer’s work is hyper-precise but also evanescent and expansive. In both text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial, fleeting 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. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 and has been long out of print."

- Siglio Press release

The title is available from the publisher, here, for $45 US. Also available is a signed and numbered deluxe version, in an edition of 31 copies. These copies are accompanied by a unique 6x 9 archival print housed in a vellum envelope inside the book. The special edition is currently available for $235. 

Bernadette Mayer | Memory

Bernadette Mayer
Memory
Planfield, USA: North Atlantic Books, 1975
196 pp., 8.9 x 6.5 x 0.4 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown

Mayer's fifth book began in July of 1971 when she began experimenting with her memory. She shot a roll of 35mm film every day for a month, and kept a rigorous journal. In February of the following year, Memory was shown at 98 Greene Street in New York City: the unedited photographs were mounted on the wall in chronological order, while a recording of narration played over speakers.


“It’s a diary of one month. I wrote incessant notes and made drawings about everything that happened every day.  I wrote down as much as I could without interrupting my life.  It was the month of July, 1971.  I had chosen the month at random without knowing what I would be doing during that month, because I didn’t want to choose a time to do this experiment that would be particularly loaded, or particularly interesting or dull.”

"MEMORY was 1200 color snapshots, 3 x 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."

- Bernadette Mayer

The title is long out of print, but last week Siglio Press has released an expanded version, which couples the text and images together for the first time. See next post. 

Bernadette Mayer | Story

Bernadette Mayer
Story
New York City, USA: 0 to 9 Books, 1968

[38] pp., 28 x 22 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

In collaboration with her brother-in-law Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer ran 0 To 9 magazine from 1967 to 1969, publishing seven mimeographed issues in editions of between 100 and 350 copies, and selling them for a dollar each. The more than seventy artists, poets and composers who contributed to the periodical include Robert Barry, Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Morton Feldman, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Dick Higgins, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt (the first publication of his influential text Sentences on Conceptual Art), Lee Lozano, Jackson Mac Low, Adrian Piper, Bern Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Jerome Rothenberg, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Alan Sondheim, Gertrude Stein, Bernar Venet, Hannah Weiner, Emmett Williams and Jasper Johns (whose stencil paintings gave the magazine it's name).

"Vito and I created 0 To 9 as an environment for our own work, which did not seem to exist anywhere else," Mayer later noted, and the pair both self-published standalone projects under the 0 To 9 banner (see previous post for Acconci's Four Book). 

The title Story refers to the many stories (or "like-stories" as Mayer has called them) in the slim volume, but also to the random insertion within the text of synonyms for the word "story", such as "anecdote", "scenario", "lie", "report", "tale", and "myth".


“This is the first book I ever published. I published it myself. It’s called Story. It has no page numbers. It’s about thirty pages. The way it came into being was I wrote a story that was about falling down, tripping and falling down. It was nicely written, experimentally so, but it seemed dull. So I tried to figure out what to do with it; and being a twenty-year-old person at the time, I went overboard and made a structure that is like a diamond shape where I accumulated other texts. I was very interested in American Indian myths at that time so I included a Kwakiutl myth about hats and about smoking; their description of a hoop and arrow game; and then an Italian folk tale about fourteen men who went to hell; another Italian tale about a man who sold cloth to a statue; then from Coos myth texts, a story of the five world makers, and the man who became an owl. Then I accumulated some lists from the dictionary of other words for beginning, middle and end. There’s a recipe for true sponge cake, there’s a 19th-century letter about etiquette, a couple of quotes from Edgar Allan Poe, and an article by the biologist Louis Agassiz about coral reefs.

Each of these things I thought was relevant to the diamond-shaped nature or accumulation of the story…. As I was saying to Clark Coolidge, there is some aspect of this work that I can’t remember (as to how I did it). I took the longest work which was the story I’d written about falling, and I made that begin at the beginning and end at the end. Everything was going on in the exact middle of the work, and at the beginning and end only one thing was going on and it was gradually accumulating and decreasing. To make things worse, I decided to interrupt the text at random moments with all the words I could think of that would mean story…. There are fifty-one…anecdote, profile, life-story, scenario, love-story, lie, report, western, article, bedside reading, novel, thumbnail sketch, talk, description, real-life story, piece, light reading, confessions, dime novel, narrative poem, myth, thriller. It was interrupted at random. The confluences were amazing. All of a sudden it would say detective story, and the section that was randomly chosen to be a detective story really became one. Or could become one in the reader’s mind. Probably more so than in my mind.”

- Bernadette Mayer, 1989