Finding Mememo: A Book in Search of an Author

Finding Mememo: A Book in Search of an Author opens with a fall. Hy Grader, called Mememo, drops from the balcony of the Cliff Dwellers, Chicago's storied art and literary club, and the fall rings against three earlier ones: his father's death seven years prior, the New York artist Ana Mendieta's death in 1985, and a strange attempted suicide Hy witnessed at the Art Institute of Chicago five months before.

At more than 670 pages and illustrated throughout in four color, it is Hugunin's largest book. It plays academic writing, detective fiction, and science fiction off one another to critique the seepage of neoliberal economics into academic life. The Pirandellan subtitle is a fair warning: a novel that keeps looking for the authority that would explain it, and keeps not finding one. That circling is what Hugunin calls ludicakadroman — a playful autotheory where lived memory is one material among theory, artworks, and texts. The art world Mememo falls out of is one Hugunin knows from the inside: thirty-three years teaching the History of Photography and contemporary theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.