Every January for 45 years, the hard winter in Harbin, China, has been softened by a festival that presents a virtual amusement park created entirely of giant ice sculptures. Some of the structures are figurative, depicting creatures such as roosters and horses. Many more are of architectural wonders such as St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Great Wall of China. Nearly all are illuminated from within like lanterns, bringing a grand show of light and color into the bleakest time of the year.
This month a little bit of Harbin comes to Chicago. But as befits the upscale carnival that is Millennium Park, the spectacle is more high-toned, caused by abstract ice paintings that have behind them such monuments of contemporary art as Color Field paintings and impermanent outdoor installations from the 1970s as well as today’s issue of global warming.
“Paintings Below Zero” are two immense works in ice by Canadian painter Gordon Halloran. The one that has attracted all the attention, standing upright just east of Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture, is (at 12 feet high and 95 feet long) the largest and possibly most complex piece of Halloran’s career. But the other one, embedded beneath the surface of the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink, also carries forward his vision of a populist art that generated an unexpected form appropriate to an artist from Canada.
Halloran, a former magazine illustrator, is no stranger to Chicago. In the 1980s he did a painting and group of drawings for the Board of Trade and Mercantile Exchange. They were figurative, depicting, as he said, “traders and trading circumstances.” He long had done that kind of representational painting in tandem with commercial work. But his facility did not satisfy him, and he was always looking for a different direction.
“My heroes in art college in Canada were people like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler,” Halloran said. “Louis was floating and pouring color, so he really was tricking himself into a new form, responding in the moment freshly. I didn’t want to copy the form of these painters but wanted to find a new form that would take me in a direction I couldn’t have imagined. I thought if I looked back far enough, I’d find a time in my life when I was doing something that I might consider painting or sculpture that wouldn’t be intellectually informed. I would just be simply doing it, like growing a garden or doing something as a kid.”
The act Halloran thought of dated, in fact, from childhood, when he had made back-yard ice rinks in Ontario for him and five younger brothers to play hockey. He recalled the moon shining on layers of water and how the marks of skates were like a kind of drawing. Decades later, such images still holding him, he grew to think they were perhaps central to a Canadian’s experience.
“Canadians are so influenced by American and European artists that it’s really hard for us sometimes to find a way [of our own],” he said. “As artists, we think, ‘How do I approach this?’ Well, in Canada, an ice arena is like a center for identity. And arriving early once to watch a game, I was struck by how the huge white expanse of ice seemed like a canvas to me. The medium seemed a tremendous vehicle for expressing color. I saw in the corner the Zamboni, and thought, the brush is already there.”
That was in the early 1990s, when Halloran first gained permission to experiment, painting and scraping the ice rink. Temporary projects created outside galleries had been part of contemporary art for more than 20 years. They were not a matter of placing sculpture in the landscape. They often were made of the landscape. So when Halloran proposed working directly in ice, the City of Vancouver did not resist, and the Canada Council put up money for research. Fifteen years of it have brought him here.
During that time, many artists in many media have spoken of work that never reached completion, always evolving. Halloran has incorporated the idea as well. He and his team will continue adding to the wall of ice shards for the entire month as it subtly changes shape through melting and shifts in color as pigments run. One day the piece can be substantially different from the next, as I witnessed on consecutive afternoons before the unveiling. Halloran is not an artist more interested in process than results, but he likes that the spectacle he creates is not static and holds the possibility of offering new faces on each of one’s repeated visits.
The form of the wall is four long panels, progressing from warm colors to cool, south to north. Each panel resembles a mosaic of giant colored tiles irregular in shape and different in crystalline pattern. On the west side, facing “Cloud Gate,” the wall is mostly flat but occasionally imbricated, with sections irregularly overlapping. In front of it are free-standing ice pieces, which add to the sensation of layering. On the east side, shards are attached to the support perpendicularly, jutting out from it, so the color is experienced not in plates but vertical blades.
The first afternoon was warm and the surface of the piece had frosted over, dulling the color. The second afternoon was cold None of the 33 hanging lamps — 575 watts each — was lit, though all will be from morning till night every day. Such illumination is, I think, as crucial to the dazzle of the piece as the colors themselves.
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“It becomes partial spectacle because I love the idea that many, many people can come and explore the work,” Halloran said. “In these colder climates, people have their own ideas about ice and the mystery of it in the dark side of the year. They bring a lot of the magic to it.
“The ephemeral nature of the work has a parallel for me in Buddhist sand painting. And I’ll give you one larger concept. It’s obvious. It’s in the general environment: the conversation about climate change and global warming. This is a precious medium for me, these jewel-like pieces that I’m creating. They seem so precious, yet they’re within a degree of total collapse. They work as a metaphor for having something in your hand that has to be sustained.”
Such a metaphor comes across with difficulty from pieces that strive toward seduction. And Halloran’s rink piece does not even extend the modest snow paintings created in Grant Park by Turkish artist Yucel Donmez in 1993. It’s not a bad thing to popularize ideas present in contemporary art for decades. But in Millennium Park popularizing mainly means softening. Of all the pieces to appear apart from the Kapoor, just the sculptures by Mark di Suvero have succeeded in being tough and appealing. The rest attract and brighten and please, which certainly is not to be gainsaid during shorter days of the year. But to provide a brief thrill does not seem enough. Don’t we want more residue than the memory of instant pleasure?
“Museum of Modern Ice: Paintings Below Zero” continues at Millennium Park, between Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive at Washington Street, through Feb. 29. 1-877-CHICAGO.
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IN THE WEB EDITION: Watch a video of the making of “Paintings Below Zero” at chicagotribune.com/iceart.