A celebration of the recent 2nd edition printing of Memory the conceptual art book based on Mayer’s 1971 groundbreaking visual and poetic work. Featuring a screening of the special 35 minute moving-image presentation of this artwork (created for the Museum of Modern Art in 2019), followed by a panel discussion with Mayer’s daughter and literary critics.

Siglio Press second printing copies of MEMORY will be available for purchase at this event.

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.

Tickets $8 TSL Members, $10 General
(Note: online ticket sales will shut off approximately 30 minutes before the event)

For more information about this project, go to the Siglio web page about the book and its history.

About Bernadette Mayer:
BERNADETTE MAYER, 1945-2022 is the author of over thirty books including the acclaimed “Midwinter Day” (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, as well as the “The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters” (1994), and most recently “Milkweed Smithereens” which—like “Works and Days” (2016)—is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.