“I should have become a thief,” Bernadette Mayer tells me. “I would’ve made more money, maybe.” For Mayer, thievery and poetry are not so different, property itself being theft, which is also true of poetry, because who do words belong to? It’s this periphrastic logic that runs through Memory, the durational experiment Mayer performed in July 1971, shooting one roll of 35-mm slide film a day and keeping a rigorous diary. First presented as an installation of 1,116 photographs accompanied by handwritten notes and a six-hour audio recording of the entire text at Holly Solomon’s 98 Greene Street
Few critics could match the Minnesota-raised Schjeldahl for his intimate knowledge of New York s art world, which he wrote about with undiminished enthusiasm for more than a half-century.
The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem harpers.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from harpers.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.