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click here to see the photos and captions for this article However silver their branches, these specimens of aluminum arbor stand for simple joy. One well-known, round-faced antihero was among the first to publicly scorn them: When Charlie Brown went to buy a tree in the 1965 classic A Charlie Brown Christmas, Lucy bossed, "Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find... maybe painted pink." But Chuck couldn't find meaning in cold metal. Instead, he dragged home a sorry, bent fir. In Manitowoc, Wisconsin, far from where the Peanuts gang lives, artists Julie Lindemann and John Shimon side with Lucy in embracing the artificial icons. "They are as beautiful as the greatest Modernist sculpture," says Lindemann about these shiny artifacts of the early 1960s. "They were so new. They carried this feeling of optimism, that humans could come up with better solutions than nature." Whether aluminum is superior to fir for conveying the holiday spirit is debatable, but the artificial trees are certainly simpler in structure and design than the forest variety. "The tree engineers' concern was to manufacture these things in the cheapest, easiest way," says Shimon. "The straightforwardness ended up creating beautiful objects." Lindemann and Shimon rediscovered the aluminum trees of their childhood when they moved to Manitowoc in 1989 and began seeing them at rummage sales and thrift stores. Says Shimon, "At some point it occurred to me that maybe if a person had enough of these to set them together in kind of a forest, it would be an interesting display." Since then, the collaborators have amassed almost 40 trees, ranging from one-foot-tall "seedlings" to majestic seven-footers, as well as many of the accompanying rotating color projectors. "Oh my God, to experience these trees!" Lindemann exclaims. "It's 50-below outside, and you come downstairs with a glass of champagne, and the lights are going, and the trees are creaking. The coldness of the aluminum and the white space and the howling wind late at night are very hypnotic." In December 1958, Tom Gannon, a sales manager for the Aluminum Specialty Company, returned home to Manitowoc from a Ben Franklin store in Chicago with news of a hand-built metal tree. The small industrial city known as the Aluminum Cookware Capital of the World rose to the challenge, and Aluminum Specialty had a model ready for the next Christmas season. Soon thereafter, the company perfected the Evergleam, its most successful artificial tree. (Though Gannon insists, "We never sold artificial trees. We sold permanent trees.") The search for trees has led Lindemann and Shimon to some of the Aluminum Specialty employees who originally hand-tufted the metallic branches. "We went over to this woman's house to buy what might have been one of the earliest trees," Lindemann recalls, "and her mother [who used to work in the factory] was there, in her late eighties, hunched over in a chair. The sun was setting and they plugged the rotating light in, and the rest of the room was dark. This little old woman was telling us about making branches while the colored light twirled around." |
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