Larry Bell’s ‘Iceberg’ at Milwaukee Art Museum

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Photo via Milwaukee Art Museum - mam.org

Larry Bell’s ‘Iceberg’ at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Larry Bell’s ‘Iceberg’ at the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum’s new “Winter Series” program promises to bring a little light and creative warmth to Milwaukee’s stubborn cold months. The series will fill the Windhover Hall with installations each year from December through March that emphasize natural beauty, color, and presumably the viewshed outside the windows onto Lake Michigan. The Museum chose to kick off the program with an installation by well-traveled Light and Space artist Larry Bell, which despite its lack of reach and risk, is safe in a most satisfying and spot-on way.

Bell’s work Iceberg features four laminated glass panels spaced a few feet apart in zig zagging footprints. Each panel cuts the same 7-foot-high profile and resembles, as one might expect, a floating chunk of ice. Their colors vary slightly across a palette of transparent blues and greens further suggesting the interplay of light and reflection on ice and water.

Like icebergs, much of the significance and impact of Bell’s work lies beneath the surface. His work grew out of 1960s minimalist traditions, but with an emphasis on atmosphere, optics and post-industrial materiality that Southern California afforded. Bell and others like Craig Kaufman, Bob Irwin, James Turrell and dozens of others who nibbled at its edges merged a world of surfboards and sunsets into fine art. Our age of retinal bombardment has tended to characterize this type of work as starchy simple; however, in its day it was both phenomenally and materially on a bleeding edge. It’s difficult to tell young artists who’ve been to iMax theaters how to realign their optical centers in order to appreciate a Turrell or a Doug Wheeler, but if one does, it’s the closest they’ll come to reconciling physics with metaphysics.

Optics and Objects

Bell for his part has always tended to split the difference between optics and objects, and Iceberg is a fine example. On its face it is striking enough, but 90 percent of its generosity comes, as do most minimalisms, with patience, commitment, and immersion. As you engage Bell’s installation in the atrium at MAM it begins to flicker to life. Iceberg takes on a different presence from nearly any vantage. The transparent colors add and subtract with that of the atmosphere, creating a kaleidoscope of chromatic potential. The work formally rhymes with Calatrava’s angles on the one-hand, and with the stones and water on the other, connecting the shore to the land to the architecture of the city with an articulation that only an artist could do. I saw the work at museum close on a glowing evening and was hypnotized; I can’t wait to see how it reacts to a cold, grey morning.

I always hesitate to rhapsodize too much in words about works in the minimal or phenomenological vein because of how it raises expectations. It should be clear that the difference between art and a ride at Universal Studios is that the art lets you complete the form where an amusement park controls the entire experience. Artists like Larry Bell aren’t looking for quality control; precisely the opposite in fact. He/they are hoping for the work, the viewer, and the atmosphere to open up infinite new perspectives and help unlock unique and delicate experiences. So don’t expect to be water-park-thrilled when you see the work at MAM, but given a little commitment, expect to connect to the land and water around you in an entirely new way.

Event Listings: February 4 – February 10, 2024

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Sunday, February 4, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Jewish Museum Milwaukee

• “Banned Book Club – Burning the Books, A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge”
• Sunday, February 4, 1–3 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Sunday, February 4, 2–3 p.m.

Wilson Center

• Opening Reception: Wisconsin Arts Educators Association Exhibition
• Tuesday, February 6, 1–3 p.m.

Charles Allis Art Museum

• Free First Wednesdays
• Wednesday, February 7, 1–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Gallery Talk: “Beyond Heights: Skyscrapers and the Human Experience”
• Thursday, February 8, 12–1 p.m.

Charles Allis Art Museum

• After Hours Tour: explore “Screen Time” with Allis curators
• Thursday, February 8, 6–7 p.m.

Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)

• Carl von Marr Day
• Friday, February 9, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Play Date with Art: Needle and Thread
• Friday, February 9, 10 a.m.–12 p.m.

Tory Folliard Gallery

• Opening Reception and Artist Talk for “Chroma”
• Saturday, February 10, 1:30 p.m.

WMQFA

• Opening Day Event for “Winter Quilt Show”
• Saturday, February 10, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.

Port Washington (222 East Main St.)

• Port Art Showcase
• Saturday, February 10, 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Saturday, February 10, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Story Time in the Galleries
• Saturday, February 10, 10:30–11 a.m.

OS Projects (Racine)

• Opening Reception: Toby Zallman, “What We Leave Behind”
• Saturday, February 10, 1– 3 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tour: Art by Artists of the African Diaspora
• Saturday, February 10, 2–3 p.m.

Grafton Arts Mill

• Sweetheart Soiree - A Valentine’s Art Show
• Saturday, February 10, 5–8 p.m.

Saint Kate, the Arts Hotel

• AIR Time, Art & Studio Tour with AIR Anwar Floyd-Pruitt
• Saturday, February 10, 6:30 p.m.