Lois Bielefeld ‘Commit to Memory’

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Photo via Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art

Lois Bielefeld ‘Commit to Memory’

It was an article in the Milwaukee Record that prompted to visit Portrait Society for Lois Bielefeld’s current exhibition, “Commit to Memory,” on view through November 13. Matt Wild’s brilliant piece was specifically dedicated to a single work in the show, a 14-hour video of Bielefeld’s father’s chair aptly titled Dad and Chair. Wild camped out in the gallery, watched the video in its entirety from his own easy chair, and documented the experience moment-by-moment. On second thought, it was less of an “article,” or “review,” than a kind of meta-art project in its own right.

Wild’s act was one of endurance about an act that was itself one of endurance. The effort unearths a history of stamina art, the most notable example of which is Andy Warhol’s Empire, a grainy eighy-hour shot of the Empire State Building from a single vantage without any edits. It happens that there’s also precedent for the sleep-in-as-response-to-endurance-art. Christian Marclay’s Clock, a 24-hour montage of clocks captured in moments on film invited, indeed dared, visitors to view the entire sequence at Paula Cooper Gallery, which stayed open around the clock for several weeks in 2010. And a few hard-core art geeks actually managed to do it in a single go. The content of these examples of long-form video projects though are mostly ontological, about media and time itself; feeling of time in Warhol’s case, and seeing it in Marclay’s.

Bielefeld’s 14-hour shot on the other hand is a meditation on her relationships to her subjects, which are her parents and her childhood home. Dad and Chair tracks a day in her parents’ life second-by-second, and is, as a result, far more intimate, tender, and personal than any self-reflexive comment about the medium of film.

Additionally, this particular piece thrives in the context of a generous supply of supplementary artwork. The video, though a fascinating talking point, is only one player in a flourishing ensemble. A captivating video that captures Bielefeld listening to her mother recite Bible verses at a kitchen table resounds with humanity and pathos. Another one of the artist unsuccessfully trying to climb a tree in her yard that has grown over the years, as she has, offers a beautifully absurd metaphor for the frustrating impermanence of things that seem permanent. Trees, like relationships, grow with painful consistency.

The show is peppered with mundane but cinematically crisp photos of Bielefeld’s parents in the yard and kitchen performing routine daily rituals, all titled twice, once by the artist and again by her parents, underscoring their divergent perspectives on the world. Those granular snapshots put the flesh of time and history onto the skeleton of that single, day-long video take which drew me to the show in the first place and reveals so much about how the accumulation of even the simplest actions build over time into more complex histories.

Given the power of the many artifacts in “Commit to Memory,” the history of daringly long works of video art might seem irrelevant … if I hadn’t entered a conversation about maps with the gallery manager, Paul. We managed to stagger into a discussion about cartography and how maps are hopelessly inexact representations of other realities but are still the best worst tool we have to approximate any single perspective.

It’s a paradox we naturally projected onto art, and specifically to the work in the show. We discussed how if one measured the coastline from Seattle to Los Angeles on a political map it might be a thousand miles long, but if we measured it while walking along the ocean line it would be 10 times longer. And if we used a microscope, it would be ten times longer still. Abstract stuff, yes, but as art is its own kind of map, the microscope scenario here is unmistakably a 14-hour video, totally inclusive, but only a fragment without additional context.

A fragment finally calibrated by other work, like audio of Bielefeld’s father Eric saying daily prayers, images of his discarded banana peels, and others of her mother, Sally, surgically redeeming those peels for compost. These artistic details are the keys and legends we gather throughout the show to flesh out a fraught but tender relationship between the artist and her parents. In so many ways, the aforementioned video does for Bielefeld’s personal history what Warhol’s did to the medium’s relationship with content itself–it’s all necessary heavy furniture needed to frame the more revealing artifacts on the shelves in the background.

I left the gallery thinking about that 14-hour segment as a singular act of committed emotional mapping, that inspired another one, which eventually inspired my own; a tessellated chain of regenerating perspectives, each true only from a single point of view. Those nested realities reminded me that art can’t tell one truth any more than a single map can but are fully capable of unleashing interrupted flickers of meaning as they move around and into its subjects, in moments, across days, and over years. Bielefeld’s work throbs across media as a kind of atlas of a single gorgeously complicated relationship…whose terrain can be mapped out on one’s own terms through Nov. 13 at Portrait Society Gallery. 

Description: The show is peppered with mundane but cinematically crisp photos of Bielefeld’s parents in the yard and kitchen performing routine daily rituals, all titled twice, once by the artist and again by her parents, underscoring their divergent perspectives on the world.