New York-based painter Alexis Rockman’s Great Lakes Cycle, currently on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art through May 19, dispenses with any polite ambiguity on the way to his dramatic, cautionary message about the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem. They are as didactically ecological as Giotto di Bondone’s Arena Chapel fresco was didactically biblical.
Commissioned originally by the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, Rockman’s cycle confronts threats to the Great Lakes through monumental narratives, painted with a purposive clarity. We know what everything is about in a general sense pretty quickly; the remaining urge then is to sort out the themes of each painting, and the particular references within, an exercise in symbolic taxonomy that is satisfying, if not transformative.
The painting Cascade is a firehose of visual information, offering a historical synopsis of extracted Great Lakes resources from the Ice Age through the industrialized present. The painting doesn’t have a clear focal point, so left-to-right, like the printed word, wins out. The work features charging caribou in the foreground gliding through crowded waters toward cut logs and rusty tanker ships in the future at stage right. It’s truly an ensemble performance, though, with glaciers, plumes of smoke, beetles and flocks of birds joining in. Rockman’s signature compositional division above and below a waterline reveals native fish, boat wrecks and other debris lurking underneath the forsaken terrestrial landscape, without hardly a square foot of real estate, wet or dry, abstaining from the opportunity to tell us how bleak the ecological situation is.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Walking toward the 12-by-five-foot panoramic paintings in the gallery is a powerful, verging on destabilizing, experience. They are truly cinematic, but the returns tend to diminish from work to work. The scale, messaging and extravagance provides a kind of tent-pole quality; the storylines change slightly, but the structure and process don’t. This is partially due to the nature of the project, to be sure, but nevertheless, it figures into how they’re received. It’s a hazard of the job that Thomas Cole must have thought about when he painted the Course of Empire.
Someone once said that Goodfellas was a movie that looked like it simply happened, until Casino made it look like it was made. In other words, the more we see of the work, sometimes, the more we see of the artist, and the more we see of the artist, the more we notice the wizard than his spell.
Five 72-by-54-inch framed watercolor and acrylic paintings rediscover some of the mystery and ambiguity lost in the Cycle paintings. Two in particular, Ice Fishing and Upper Peninsula, strike a fine balance between field study detachment and artistic eccentricity. Ice Fishing’s composition recalls the famous poster for the movie Jaws, only the figure on top of the waterline is an ice fisher, and the submerged life is native fish. The work is eccentric yet meditative—from lake bottom to the winding green aurora at top.
Upper Peninsula, a fairly simple composition of a moose in a woodsy lake, makes great use of the aqueous medium to build the composition. Rockman relaxes his hand and lets the watercolor do the work, flowing and pooling as naturally as the subject matter itself. These paintings feel slightly off script and allow the viewer to explore the terrain on their own, dipping into each one’s compositional contingencies and material quirks. When the narrator fades into the background, we lose a little of the overt ecological messaging, but sometimes it’s better to be shown than to be told.
