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.

...a treasure of a book ... What is so: this dreamy volume gathering the eleven hundred photographs and two hundred pages of rolling prose that Mayer produced in those thirty-one days. It is as much a conceptual exercise as a diaristic one, a Hydra dancing at the intersections of language and image, calling forth what time and a voracious mind can create there ... Mayer’s sentences simulate life’s whoosh—its uneven rhythms, the crashing half thoughts ... Her seductively offhand snapshots make modest monuments of daily nonevents: a slack clothesline strung from a window; a tidy white curtain blown by a breeze; a ceiling light glowing at night; a friend, her hair pulled back, sitting in the front seat of a convertible; a lover, nude, reclining in the bath. To a reader leafing through Memory now, Mayer’s feral run-ons may elicit a wistfulness for an era that appears so much freer than our own, and her photos’ rich cinematic hues might prompt a person to wonder how our age, so manically documented, seems far less vivid in comparison. And while prescience is always a dicey claim, Mayer’s self-portraits, often taken while staring into the lens, somehow appear like eerie proof that she was seeing us long before we would see her.

In Siglio’s reprint, which joins the images and text in book form for the first time, I find a new book entirely ... Of the more than a thousand snapshots included, my favorites are a pair depicting an open, yellow cardboard carton of white eggs sitting in the sun, a visual synecdoche for the grocery shopping and scrambling and coddling and budgeting that, in Mayer’s work, receive the attention other poets reserve for an ex-lover or a Grecian urn ... Mayer wrote that 'a month gives you enough time to feel free to skip a day, but not so much time that you wind up fucking off completely.' This hardback edition does not fuck off at all, materially elevating Mayer’s 'emotional science project' to something final, even if her messy mnemotechnics defy its glossiness.

Whatever memory is, Memory was an exploration of the layers of what a person thinks they remember firsthand ... This spirit of transience extended to Memory itself, which for decades lived mainly in memory, surfacing every now and then in altered forms ... This year, the project has morphed yet again: all the photographs, along with Mayer’s original diary, have been published by Siglio, a new and beautiful embodiment of the work that speaks uncannily to our particular time ... Bound in a book, Memory is set free within time and space. The Airstreams and roadsters, the delis and coffees are there whenever and wherever we want to experience them, and they can be reanimated on demand ...It’s hard to quote from...since its dense linguistic braid unravels when you sever it ... At our moment in history, Memory reads in part as an archive of suspended (in both senses of the word) pleasures. 'Old cemetery we looked for a place to swim,' Mayer writes. 'I showed grace the insane gazebo with wooden horse & carriage.' These pleasures are privileges, too. Mayer and her friends are white: no Black American would feel as free trespassing in somebody’s woods—not then, and not now.

Now, at last, we have the complete Memory — published in full by Siglio Press. Its cover is velvety to the touch and its size is comfortable to read at a desk, on the couch, in bed. It seems miraculous, after all the decades of longing, to be actually able to read it inside one’s own home; it’s like having a pet constellation to marvel at in fierce containment ... The effect is a record of 'memory,' with specific details anchoring it in its time (some poets have discussed whether the quality of sunlight itself has changed since Memory was first written). But it is also what occurs before memory is created, or when the present becomes past—that infinitely tiny segment of time, that incandescent sliver of consciousness moving into shadow, the time we always feel we are living in always, but which we cannot hold onto. Thus, I can read it today and find in its juxtapositions of date, image, documentation, and imagination a essential relation to now in all its mysterious existence.

I surprised myself by reading Memory in an afternoon. I read it lying flat on the concrete slab that is my outdoor space, hunched over the glossy book, my legs hot against the new spring heat that bounced off the pavement. There was something I had been craving that Memory offered me in its precise record of time, its willingness to linger, its aberrant take on self-documentation ... Mayer...considers the unspoken sentence: the vastness of our mind that is often forgotten and rarely shared ... We can’t remember every detail of our lives .... And so I keep going back to the white sink, where Memorybegins, because don’t we all have a white sink that we begin our day with, and which we eventually forget?

With its barrage of run-on sentences and its collection of haphazard, often blurry, dark photographs, Memory syncopates the ebullient and the mundane to approximate the unevenness of life’s passage—that combination of major joys, minor disasters, and moments that float somewhere in between. Flitting between the intimate and the impersonal, Memory’s combination of photography and written word mimics the flashing, fleeting experience of consciousness. Within its stream of text and image are spaces of recognition between Mayer and the reader, moments of synchronicity that collapse the decades-long gap between the hot July days of 1971 and our aching present and make Memory a hallmark of American conceptualism ... Her photographs...veer toward blurry indecipherability but are more often striking in their vivid detail—clothes pinned to a line outside in the sun, bright yellow cabs in traffic seen from a passenger seat, the white sails of a boat against deep blue waves ... Thumbing through the hardbound volume, I found myself nostalgic for the bohemianism of a time I never experienced. What becomes clear throughout Memory’s pages is Mayer’s ability to discern moments of grace within the quotidian and her scrupulous attention to the world around her.

I’ve seen 'plainspoken' attached to [Mayer's] style, though, like Gertrude Stein’s, Mayer’s candor still sings mysteries on the page. Memory is not strictly a diary, but it pockets the day with similar devices; the entries read like consciousness spilled, even though, after the fact, she used both journal notes and the photos to refine and complete the text. Lines fall and trip over themselves to keep pace with her thought; objects are pilfered from their verbs; words and phrases repeat so many times they end up aural refrains cleaved from ordinary meaning ... Here is an artist’s early push against limitation, vacillating between mediums in search of a form that can hold all the sensory matter that makes up the present ... Maybe going back and forth between things is the only way to see it whole.

...another route to the everyday sublime ... Here, the everyday is filtered both through Mayer’s vantage point both as she lived it and as she remembered it later; because Mayer edited her diary entries after the images were printed, the project is inflected by a double remembering by the artist of her own impressions, thoughts, and dreams ... Mayer’s exhaustive account of one month in her life through text and image, in a manner almost filmic, appears now to anticipate contemporary artistic practice as well as contemporary developments in digital and social media.

Writing at the pace of life, sometimes through the haze of booze or hash, Mayer captures the sensibility of the early 1970s—part hippie, part intellectual, part ennui ... My copy of Memory arrived as Covid-19 social distancing took effect, when New York itself became mostly a picture seen through a pane of apartment window glass. In the uncertain days that followed I slowed my reading pace to real time, one or two daily entries at a go. I felt the hiccupping momentum of Mayer’s run-on sentences and casual capitalization, the passages of free-association wordplay, and her lists of shitty meals or all the people (first names only, some now famous) she saw in a given day ... a continuous record of living ... In her intensive chronicling of her life, most of the language is descriptive, object-like. From this emotional distance, she searches for an audience, much as we shout into the electronic void.

Who, really, can resist New York City in the 1970s — the elongated yellow taxis, shop signs and hot-dog vendors, the World Trade Center rising? Mayer captured the Big Apple before the gloss, before Starbucks and bank branches colonized the streets and artists and writers fled, first for the other boroughs, then for other cities entirely. But Memory is first and foremost a deeply personal exercise in observation, its pages filled with shopping lists, friends, interiors of diners, evidence of trips upstate, breakfasts, trees, a shaggy-haired lover. (There’s even an analog selfie.) Seen in another light, the project seems to anticipate the way we think about representing life today, whether we’re sharing snippets of our days on Instagram or unpolished fragments of thought on Twitter. Mayer...was a rebel of form who refused to see life as a continuous, unspooling narrative filled with straightforward meanings. In her thoughts and images, we find an immersion in quotidian minutiae, synecdoche for a lost era that feels almost eerily contemporary.