‘The Wonders of the Dells’ at the Museum of Wisconsin Art

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Photo Credit: Wisconsin Dells Visitor & Convention Bureau

Mt. Olympus Water & Theme Park

One can learn a lot about a society by examining its patterns of leisure. Every place I’ve ever resided has had its own complex local vacation system that only made sense with prolonged habitation. New York had the Hamptons; Kansas City had Lake of the Ozarks. The nature of these destinations eventually revealed much about those places’ histories, geographies, cultures and class structures. “Among the Wonders of the Dells” at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (which has been extended through Sept. 15) considers how the history of one of our own region’s vacation spots came to be—from geological formations, to picturesque landscapes, to rustic getaways and, finally, to “waterpark capital of the world.” 

“Wonders” is broken into two parts, starting in the darkened Hyde Gallery with a chronological photographic history and concluding with interpretations by three contemporary Wisconsin artists—Mark Brautigam, Kevin Miyazaki and Tom Jones—in an adjacent gallery. The history begins with the stories of Leroy J. Gates and H. H. Bennett, the latter a man who the catalog notes was the “right man in the right place at the right time.” 

This set of coincidences refers to how the entrepreneur (Gates) sold the disabled carpenter (Bennett) his photographic equipment in 1865. But it also suggests a more momentous collision of fates. During the second half of the 19th century, the Western world was obsessed with domesticating the wild and, inasmuch as it did, nature suddenly seemed a beautiful and majestic subject. Bennett’s photographs reflect this attitude crisply, as we see in a 1906 tinted panorama called Narrows, as well as in Ravine Bridge to Black Hawk Island. The latter work features a tourist boat and a railway bridge interrupting the arcadian vista, announcing the conflict to come as if opening the second act of a Shakespearean tragedy. Later photographs from Bennett’s studio like Dell View Hotel (1965) feature shiny slices of glittering post-war Americana—this one of a neon motel sign—that will signify, somewhat ironically, a kind of vintage-y, untouched, rose-colored past to many.

Obviously, “untouched” is relative; the Dells have been many things to many people over the years—certainly to Native Americans, who knew it long before the first Westerners ever laid eyes on it in the 17th century. “Wonders” goes a long way to account for this fugitive metamorphosis. Photographs by John A. Trumble and Dennis Darmek trace the Dells into their decadent mature phase where any notion of geology and place becomes interchangeable with spectacle and entertainment. This is gloriously, almost comically depicted in Trumble’s Tommy Bartlett Pyramid of Waterskiers, where the most temporary formation of balanced human bodies and timeless natural outcroppings merge into a single bizarre event.

The contemporary photographers in the show, as if in perfect step with the aching geo-homo timeline, address the contradictions and complications overlooked in the historical photos, when terms like ecology and imperialism weren’t in most imagemakers’ lexica. Kevin Miyazaki’s powerful, empathetic black-and-white portraits of the region’s locals—guest workers, lifers and Native Americans—chip away at any idealized notion of “The Dells.” Ho Chunk native Tom Jones poignantly exposes contradictory histories between Native American and modern industrial tourism through photos of pedestrian and folksy attractions that draw their thematic content from cultural stereotypes. 

Mark Brautigam circles back to Bennett, probably unintentionally, by depicting the Dells’ natural splendor alongside conspicuous human presences. His photos tend to dwarf their human subjects in the manner Thomas Cole and Jasper Cropsey did in the first half of the 19th century. They, too, often paired soaring natural scenes and humbled human actors. Those early Hudson River School paintings were among the last to subordinate man with respect to nature, just before the triumphant machine of the Industrial Revolution started rolling along. So, maybe we’ve come full circle with Brautigam’s work, though hopefully we’re wiser the second time around. 

Brautigam’s Overlook puts a fine punctuation mark on the show. It’s a black-and-white photo of a teenage couple sitting on a picturesque ledge, enrapt, amorous maybe, almost oblivious to the ancient rocks and water before them. They don’t notice the issues the artist seems to be aware of as he frames the composition. In spite of this, Brautigam emphasizes their youthful hopefulness rather than foolishness. As much as this photo, and the exhibition in general, unravel the myths of a complicated and synthetically constructed place called “The Dells,” it is ultimately buoyant, humane and reflective, with modern society’s maturation and potential represented in a landscape which was, itself, honed by eons of passing time.