RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Even though it was conceived in the moment of Xerox and Selectrics – long before the distribution formats for which its style is optimized – Bernadette Mayer’s Memory highlights other aspects of our current mediascape: the compulsory documentation of quotidian banality; the accumulation of massive time-stamped archives of bite-sized data; monumentalized ephemerality; distracting multimedia juxtaposition; and the sparks and flashes that make it all worthwhile ... a sumptuous, sturdy, oblong artist’s book. The coincidence of word and image both restores the initial conception behind the gallery installation and also offers a new work in its own right by combining image and print (rather than audio) in book format (rather than gallery space). If the clean, two-column typesetting distances the text from the immediacy of its 1970s typewriter production, the photographs more than compensate, immersing the reader in the period with a palpable closeness ... Memory directly links a long legacy of experimental writing. It combines the permutational prose of Gertrude Stein with the casual coterie references of the New York School poets, along with the non- sequitur juxtapositions familiar to both.
