Chris Kraus on Bernadette Mayer and A Collection of Image + Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

Chris Kraus does it again, this time reviewing at Bookforum a new book entitled It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image + Text Work by Women Artists & Writers, edited by Lisa Pearson. Kraus writes:

Explaining her decision to select only from works composed by women, Pearson asserts: "There is still deep gender inequality when it comes to the coveted real estate of exhibitions . . . and I preferred to make space . . . for work by women." Her statement seems as dangerously uncool as it is accurate, but Pearson's boldest editorial move is bringing together works by artists and writers who are not normally thought of together.

She touches on affinities suggested by inclusions of Carrie Mae Weems, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Alison Knowles, Adrian Piper, and more. "Still others," she writes, "pursue a poetics of the quotidian, using pictures and words to describe particular places and states of being." What we would like to specifically point out is Kraus’s interest in Bernadette Mayer:

Most welcome of all is Pearson's inclusion of Bernadette Mayer's 1971 photo/text project Memory and an excerpt from the late Hannah Weiner's 1972 Pictures and Early Words. Ripe for recontextualization, the early work of both poets sprang partly from their involvement with New York conceptual art during those years. In subsequent decades, these writings came to be read (if at all) within the Language School canon, the radical epistemologies devised by these writers eclipsed by their linguistic strategies.

In Memory, Mayer, then twenty-six years old, undertook to record thirty days of her life through a series of more than one-thousand snapshots and a taped narration that, when transcribed, filled nearly two-hundred pages. Spiraling, grandiose, and raw, Memory is a gorgeous attempt to affix mental and physical drift into pattern. Close in intent to the work of Mayer's friend and sometime collaborator Vito Acconci, the grand scope of Memory wasn't fully perceived when Mayer first exhibited it. Commenting on the project one year later in her subsequent work, Studying Hunger, Mayer wrote: "MEMORY was described by A. D. Coleman as 'an enormous accumulation of data.' I had described it as an 'emotional science project.' I was right." In Pictures and Early Words, Weiner famously began to record her clairvoyant-schizophrenic experiences, transcribing the words that began to appear before her eyes in capital letters, slants, and italics. Free of self-interpretation, Weiner's remarkable writings, which she later developed as "clair-style" poems, describe an out-of-body experience in the most prosaic terms: "It's true I'm not hungry. Water suffices. . . . I've had it with the lights. My eyes hurt. NOT MY EYES on chair. What else? No answer."

The entire review can be found here.