September 7, 2020 Issue

It’s fascinating to see a great critic grapple with a complex, experimental work, trying to describe it, analyze it, extract meaning from it. That’s what Dan Chiasson does in his superb "Suspended Pleasures," in this week’s issue. The object of his study is Bernadette Mayer’s 1971 “crazy-headed journal” (Mayer’s words) Memory. He considers it variously as an exploration of the layers of what a person thinks they remember firsthand”; as nostalgia (“Nostalgia—for the carnal, improvised mood of 1971, but also for the halcyon days of, say, last summer, before we were afraid of communal life—has become the work’s dominant key”); as “a database of half-captured meals, barns, bodies—a kind of analog Internet”; as “a time capsule” ("Mayer wanted 'Memory' to serve as a time capsule, its meaning deferred until a future, or a range of futures, that she couldn’t have foreseen"); and as elegy (“Elegy always has a way of creeping into art that documents the once teeming, now empty past”). 

Of Chiasson’s many brilliant analytical moves, my favorite is his “reanimation” of some of Mayer’s subjects. He writes,

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. Reading “Memory” with a phone handy, I followed Mayer and her crew along the back roads of the Berkshires to Nejaime’s, a local liquor store, which, I learned, stayed open this spring, deemed an essential business. In the city, Mayer took a photograph of a New York storefront: Casa Moneo. The business closed in 1988, but Google reveals its old address, on Fourteenth Street, in a building that once housed Marcel Duchamp’s studio. When I came across mysteries in the text—a forgotten restaurant, a long-gone landmark—I posed my questions to the Internet, and got answers from the hive mind. Though “Memory” is a famous work, it has been experienced firsthand by relatively few people: it is still a choose-your-own-adventure—uncharted, wide open. Finding a path through “Memory” seems like both a highly personal lark and a spur to collaborate.

That “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” is thrillingly good! The same goes for the whole piece. I enjoyed it immensely.