Dissecting a major American cultural icon that has outlived its usefulness, Meg Madison's "12.26" takes a rather surgical approach to the contemporary sublime. At Kristi Engle's downtown gallery, Madison shows photographs of day-old Christmas trees abandoned on suburban streets, rotting in dumpsters, battling with lobster-clawed leaf mulchers, or lying about in vacant recycling lots on Randall's Island waiting to be interred. Originally drawn to Christmas trees because of their inherent emotional and symbolic content, over time Madison has shifted from standard Hallmark shots to these despoiled harbingers of obsolescence, imbuing the once-fabled trees with whimsical hope and compassion. Though her renderings could be dismissed as bittersweet one-liners, there's always the chance that viewers may be cajoled into taking their civic duties more seriously. These "12.26" exhibits range from an oversized, vertically segmented photograph of a solitary tree thrown into a Griffith Park dumpster, a crime-scene-inspired cluster of sepia-toned snapshots of assorted abandoned trees, to a stark diptych showing the after-effects of a holiday spent building monuments to defunct mythologies only to wipe the slate clean and blindly start over again. Aptly, these paradigmatic "green victims" are unable to speak to their own petty conundrum, but they easily evoke larger notions of a society now apparently inured to the future consequences of its past and present actions. Like all those caught up in such seasonal festivities, people today seem transfixed by the mystique of transient existence, having become incapable of accepting accountability for anything solid or real.
Can any advanced nation continue to exist in effigy of one of its principal icons? The annual fate of Christmas trees itself makes a prickly comment on somewhat incongruous religious beliefs and rituals, whose ancient socio-cultural rationale has long since been shed. Indeed, Madison's homily can offer genuine catharsis to those searching for a convenient emblem of America's sliding living standards and its recent moral or judicial torpor. But these trees go much further, triggering an edgy, Seuss-like assault on conservative social values with high Hegelian overtones of the Fall of Man. Such stubbornly regenerative acts seem a premonition of heavier, less festive vicissitudes to come.
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