Jon Reilly, Bob Watt (standing/seated), Milwaukee (1.23.2010)
Bob Watt's friend, publisher and DPOA, Jon Reilly taped a note to the front door of Bob's Dousman Street house the day before New Year's Eve. It said Bob had been taken to hospice in Mequon, but welcomed visitors. Hours later, we learned Bob soon would "cash in his chips"--a slogan Bob used often in his letters when reporting that another of his friends had passed on. Bob's heart was failing and a morphine drip eased him out. He died on January 2, 2012. It took awhile before an official obituary ran in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the daily paper Bob and his friends (known collectively as the Breakfast Club) read religiously. They'd gather at McDonalds, the only place in Milwaukee that hadn't kicked them out for loitering, for coffee and discussion before heading out on a "rummage run". First came the blog accounts of Bob's passing. Matt Wild wrote "Watt leaves behind a thorny but colorful legacy, as well as friends and loved ones to make sense of it all" in the Onion'sA.V. Club Milwaukee (1.4.2012); Michael Horne called Watt "A true character" in his InsideMilwaukee.com post (1.5.2012); Molly Snyder wrote "Watt helped keep Milwaukee weird and for that, I will always appreciate him" for OnMilwaukee.com (1.6.2012); and finally Tom Tolan's obituary summed up Bob's "outrageous persona when he was a Beat poet and mainstay of 1960s Milwaukee counterculture" for the MJS (1.8.2012). Since 2004, Bob wrote us letters sometimes daily filling eight file boxes with his commentary on the Milwaukee art scene, his childhood, global politics, the Packers, the Badgers, as well as a poems, numerous copies of his will (which we always read ase a poem), original 35 mm slides of models, collages, and newspaper clippings passed along from Breakfast Club discussions. We received the last letter from Bob on May 3, 2011 after he'd recovered some from a heart attack that kept him in the hospital a number of days where he dictated a letter that ended with reportage of his hospital stay. While in the hospital recovering, he'd write us, "It's Friday, we missed all the rummages. We don't know how long we'll last. But the bloody vampires have gone crazy with all their needles. I wonder why the IV is so slow? Well, I guess they know what they are doing.." In his last letter he wrote, "We need more people in the arts in Milwaukee, can you send some this way?" After his spring 2010 heart attack, we didn't get around to visiting him until December 23 when we made a digital panorama in his parlor surrounded by paintings. We watched the Playboy Chanel with him and talked about the news. It had been more than 20 years since Dean Olson, co-founder of the Wright Street Gallery first brought us over to Bob's house (1987). We photographed him a few times that day and then in the 1990s before deciding to include him in a 16 mm film we were making about the creative process, progress, and time called "One Million Years is Three Seconds."
Bob Watt excerpt from our One Million Years is Three Seconds film
Fear No Art: Bob Watt segment by Paul Cotter
as aired on MATC/Milwaukee Public Television on February 19, 2012.
Photographer Francis Ford, publisher Jon Reilly, artist David Ruel
among others are interviewed.
Installation of J. Shimon and J. Lindemann prints in Portrait Society Gallery's, Milwaukee, booth at Art Chicago Next Fair's Preview Party, Thursday, April 28, 2011.
Debra Brehmer's Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee, brought a selection of our prints to Art Chicago Next Fair April 28-May 1, 2011 (222 W Merchandise Mart Plaza). We've been doing a lot of photographs about death lately, but it's these self-mocking rural Wisconsin landscapes (below) that seem okay for public viewing at the moment. Perhaps due to what's going on in the world? Also on view are works by Boris Ostrerov and Bernard Gilardi.
Inspired by Weegee's self-portraits--with a heavy dose of Green Acres-ian ethos--we began making these pictures about summers isolated on our rural Wisconsin farm starting in 1996. In between raising most of our own food in a large organic garden and writing syllabi for the next year's courses, we stave off the inevitable decay of our place and ourselves. We stage the photographs in locations around our farm wearing "costumes" accumulated over decades of thrift shopping while reenacting the chores du jour.
Our YouTube video documenting the process of making the photographs, titled Too Big, has gotten quite a few views thanks to a shout out on The Online Photographer. Julie's 2006 digital snapshot of John posing with the home-made "big camera" is posted on flickr and has been oft "favorited" (geek out). Prints from this ongoing series, Self-Portrait in the Garden at Dusk (see below), and Making Hay While the Sun is Shining were included in Facing the Lens: Portraits of Photographers (January 21 through August 28, 2011) and Wide-Eyed: Panoramic Photographs (September 15, 2011-January 29, 2012) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Lucy was game to learn digital photography and bought a Canon point-and-shoot to take pictures of her life and to bring along on her travels. But before she could start making new photos, she had a legacy of snapshots to reconcile. In particular where the prints that told the story of her brother who died more than 50 years ago of cancer. Recently diagnosed with cancer herself, Lucy remembered her brother's attitude about the disease and how he faced death saying "Life is Beautiful" moments before his death. We met Lucy working on the cancer survivorship project at the Kohler Art Center in July 2010. Staff at the Kohler helped Lucy scan and post her old snapshots on Flickr. Without captions, we read one of the black-and-white square snapshots on flickr as a portrait of a mother figure clad in apron removing a turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving day not realizing it was Lucy's mother preparing the last family holiday supper for her brother. We made a video of Lucy telling the stories of her photographs.
Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Sr., 1922,
photographed by J. Lindemann's great uncle
John Glander at Glander Studio, Manitowoc, WI.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
By the time the Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait exhibition opened on February 18, 2011 at the James Watrous Gallery in Madison, the political landscape had completely changed in Wisconsin and the nation. The Wisconsin State Journal covered the show and its uncanny timing and its focus on individual workers in the work place. Thousands of teachers, municipal works, moms, dads and kids had begun gathering at the state capitol building to protest the public union busting scheme of newly elected Scott Walker. Walker appeared to be the antithesis of everything about Wisconsin and the liberalism of people like "Fighting Bob" La Follette that many admired.
The Wisconsin Labor project was commissioned through a Wisconsin Arts Board Percent for the Arts grant in 2007 for the Wisconsin Department of Work Force Development building on East Washington Street in Madison. It's the place unemployed people go for help. Like us, most of the photographers were academics perhaps somewhat sheltered in the ivory tower. Dick Blau teaches at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Tim Abler at Cardinal Stritch College in Milwaukee, David Heberlein at University of Wisconsin River Falls and we at Lawrence University. Jamie Young left Madison after he finished work on the project for Syracuse, NY where he is a freelancer and his wife Harriet teaches at Syracuse University. The seven of us were selected by a panel of experts and work began on the project. Such a commission to photograph Wisconsin workers seemed a rare opportunity in 2007, a throw back to Roy Styker's Farm Securities Administration photo projects. We photographed throughout the summer and fall of 2007 and by the time our prints were made, framed and delivered in 2008, Barak Obama had been newly elected but the illusion of prosperity burst. Friends lost their jobs, real estate values tumbled and so did the value of stocks. The people we'd photographed experienced the downturn. The pizza place Amber worked at closed, Richie turned his liquor store into Wenzel's Perfect World, a night club because he couldn't compete with all the new franchise liquor stores, the yacht company laid off Dylan due to lack of sales of luxury yachts and so on. The exhibition opened first in Appleton in October 2010 to an ambivalent audience, but by the time it opened in Madison, the Wisconsin Arts Board's Percent For Arts Program that funded the project was on the verge of extinction and the capitol building was teeming with protesters spending days and nights rallying and inhabiting the capitol rotunda with hilarious signs expressing their views. We ran into friends handing out "Recall Scott Walker" bumper stickers and put one on our office door. It seemed the public once again cared about the lives of everyday people rather than the celebrities with ostentatious wealth displayed on high-def full color displays. Hummers and diamonds seemed vulgar and wasteful as they had during similarly challenging times during the Great Depression and World War II when the average person struggled just to get by. A selection of the photographs made for the project are housed at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. We presented a well-attended lecture on the photographs that influenced our approach to the Labor project on April 3 at the Watrous Gallery as documented by Martha Glowacki for the academy and Troy Freund on his blog.
"Imperial Walker," Madison Protests, February 18, 2011
Wisconsin Labor opening at Watrous Gallery, February 18, 2011
"Stop the Attack," Madison Protests, February 19, 2011
Lunch at Charlie's Place, Hortonville, WI, Summer 2010.
Kodachrome in the glovebox was not subjected to heat.
When small gauge film expert Toni Treadway of Brodsky & Treadway emailed with an offer of a few rolls of circa 1990s Kodachrome double 8 mm from her freezer, we knew what we'd do with it. While working on the Wisconsin Arts Board Wisconsin Labor Survey in 2007, we photographed a carhop named Elise at Charlie's Place in Hortonville. We wanted to make a short movie about the restaurant and the family that ran it. The owners were a brother and sister team who'd recently taken over from their retired dad who started it after buying an old A&W in 1965. Working together, they kept the place a viable summer business by orchestrating a self-described "shabby" Americana roadside atmosphere and offering up a selection of basic made-from-scratch food. The help of family-members and towns people was also essential. Patrons drink root beer floats out of frosted glasses (not styrofoam cups) and the sandwiches come wrapped in simple paper printed with the word "delicious" rather than the excess of multi-colored corporately-branded boxes. We filmed on classic car night during Elvis death week in August. Carl showed up with bedazzled white jumpsuit and an armful of polyester flower leis he distributed generously as he hugged babies and greeted carloads of customers. Wife Tori, dressed as Marilyn, served sheet cake from the hood of a white Cadillac. We finished shooting by September and shipped it off the exposed Kodachrome Dwayne's in Kansas to beat the processing rush. Not only had the last roll of Kodachrome been produced by Kodak, but K-14 processing was scheduled to cease December 30, 2010 at the family-owned lab in Kansas.
Being on TV is always odd and no less so last week when a Wisconsin Public Television segment on our Real Photo Postcard Survey Project aired. We heard of the solid air date through a newspaper reporter named Suzanne Weiss at the Herald-Times-Reporter. She'd received a press release and wrote a feature story on our project and the upcoming TV coverage.
Television is random as it beams into homes and places sometimes unanticipated. For example, we didn't get around to visiting our friend Nigel at Fox Lake Correctional as we usually do around the holidays. A fan of public media, he anticipated seeing us on TV. After the feature aired on January 6, he wrote us a hand-written letter critiquing our on-camera fashions:
It was fun to see you guys again...one of the early shots showed Johnie while the narrator babbled on and it appeared as though he was wearing a black scarf and I was like Oh no! Pretentious indoor artist scarf. But then later on I saw it was the black camera cloak. So obviously I was relieved...
We received other various responses including an email from a cordial woman named Judith who attached a digital snap capturing her profile. She was at a hockey game wearing wearing pink cat eye glasses and had a pointy chin. She wrote: "Julie...I think we could have been twins...ha ha...I am just 200 pounds larger."
When Liz Koerner (producer/director), Brad Wray (sound engineeer) and Mike Eicher (videographer) visited our studio in June to shoot the segment, we were finishing an intense string of portraits and palladium prints for a project to open in July at Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee. Our studio was cluttered with the stuff of unfinished works-in-progress, yet the crew found order and a visual story. They worked around the sporadic clattering of beer bottles being emptied from a dumpster at the bar across the street and the tangle of lights and cameras only leaving behind one quartz light and stand which we still need to return. We invited our longtime neighbors Ryan Ackley and Rich Bouril to come by for postcard portraits. Ryan owns the Boarding House, a skateboard shop, around the corner from our studio. We've known him since he was nine when we first moved into our studio. Richie owns the Culture Cafe across town and we share rural Wisconsin roots and buy his fresh-roasted coffee. We photographed the crew too.
Liz Koerner (producter/director) interviews John Shimon
in the midst of our cluttered Manitowoc studio while
Mike Eicher shoots video and Brad Wray records sound (6.17.10).
Assembling an Evergleam aluminum
Christmas tree, Season's Gleamings, 2004
Last week Franziska Felber called from Hamburg as part of her research on artificial Christmas trees. With our book Season's Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Treenow out of print, we didn't expect much interest in our tree story this year so were surprised. Franziska, a 27-year old journalist apprentice from Berlin, talked with us at length about aluminum tree history in Manitowoc. She ended up focusing on the history for her SPIEGEL ONLINE article titled Holy Tinsel published on Friday, December 17, 2010. It's written in German, which we could not read so my generous and kind cousin Phil Glander, a retired professor of German, provided a translation and we've posted it below. Judith Moriarty also wrote a piece about her memories of aluminum and other Christmas trees for Milwaukee's THIRD COAST DIGEST titled Once upon a time: A Tale of Christmas Trees Past published on December 10, 2010. Prompted by this journalistic interest in the trees, we checked online to see if copies of Season's Gleamings were still available only to find the prices fluctuating wildly from $10 to $100 per copy (original cover price was $16.95) everywhere from Amazon to Ebay. We decided to offer up a few signed copies with an 8x10 glossy inkjet "portrait" print of a gold Evergleam tree through our Etsy Store. We finally mustered up the energy to set up a single aluminum tree in the entryway of our studio. We're grateful the trees haven't been forgotten and that fans continue to surface. Last year, the Wisconsin Historical Society set up a spectacular and didactic exhibition of the trees which seemed their penultimate finest hour! We await their induction into a design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art someday as their sleek geometry and "tree-in-a-box" concept are so stunning that we feel they truly deserve such a treatment.
Self-portrait in Neo-Post-Now Gallery, Manitowoc, Wisconsin,
with aluminum forest installation, December 1996
Holy Tinsel It was pink or gold and as tall as a man - but one thing it wasn't - real. In the 60s millions of Americans in the US set up an aluminum tree at Christmas time in their living room. The artificial tree became an emblem of the Space Age until a figure from the funny papers started its downfall.
By Franziska Felber English translation by Phil Glander
"Get the biggest aluminum Christmas tree you can find and paint it pink!" That's what Lucy, the little black- haired girl, told her comic strip friends, Charlie Brown and Linus, for the first time 45 years ago on American TV. In the "Peanuts" Christmas movie, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Lucy, like many Americans, had fallen for a Christmas fad - an artificial metal Christmas tree.
But what does Charlie Brown do? He ignores Lucy's orders and forgets about the shining pink. violet and red fake Christmas tree and gets the only real tree he can find instead: a crooked little tree which loses its needles at the slightest movement. Charlie disappoints Lucy, but his decision has far reaching consequences for the aluminum tree.
The animated film "A Charlie Brown Christmas" put an end to the biggest Christmas phenomenon of the 60s and gave it the coup de grace at the same time. At first the aluminum tree was so sought after in the USA that the Aluminum Specialty Company alone sold more than a million of the glittering trees with little metal curlicues. The tree fitted perfectly into the "Space Age" when artificial materials were the last word and every day technology the spirit of the age. But Charlie Brown's decision disrupted sales and people threw the colorful metal trees in the garbage. Finally production ended completely.
Manitowoc, Capital of the Aluminum Fad
The story of the aluminum tree, this shining Christmas phenomenon, was not yet over. The spurned fake trees celebrated a brilliant come back thirty years later.
Two photographers were the saviors of the tree. Julie Lindemann and John Shimon both come from a small city, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, which was the capital of the aluminum tree craze in the 60s. The trees were manufactured there and adorned not only living rooms. "In the space age there were these kitschy taverns with neon lights. At Christmas they had these aluminum trees behind the bar. I thought they were very
exotic. It was like they were from another planet." says photographer Lindemann recalling her first encounter with the fake trees.
The special feature of the trees from the Aluminum Specialty Company in Manitowoc was that the roughly hundred branches of a tree six feet tall all were the same length. They were stuck into various places on the trunk and formed the shape of a Christmas tree. The aluminum trees were featured at a toy fair in New York in 1959. In the 60s the model "Evergleam" became the bestseller of the company and sold like crazy in shining colors of silver, green gold and pink. Until Charlie Brown came along. In 1962 sales of the aluminum trees reached their peak, in 1967 they were scarcely in demand, and in 1969 they were removed from production.
Artificial Forest Causes a Sensation
When the Peanuts movie was shown on TV for the first time Julie Lindemann was only eight years old. But today she still believes that the end of the aluminum trees came with Charlie Brown. "The movie was shown every year and became a kind of fixture." So people wanted a real Christmas tree to decorate their living rooms instead of a colorful tinsel tree.
Lindemann who had seen her first aluminum tree in a tavern returned to her home town as a grown woman. Aluminum trees had been stuck in the attic and the garage for nearly thirty years by then. People watched Lindemann and her partner Shimon in disbelief when they decided in the 90s to collect the remaining trees and build a forest of them for the gallery they owned together.
The two photographers bought the trees for a dollar or so each, and nobody could believe that anyone at all was interested in the discarded kitschy giants. "We had to hear all the time about why anyone wanted to have junk like that." Lindemann says. In 1993 the collection had grown to about 40 trees, all of which Lindemann and Shimon decorated their gallery with. A painful experience for Lindemann because it took days for her to set up the trees. "In the end I was bleeding and crying. The branches are very sharp and they cut my hands and arms. But they were so beautiful that I forgot my pain when I was finished."
Christmas Among the Prototypes
The bigger their collection got, the more Lindemann became interested in the history of the trees. But no matter whom she asked, nobody could remember Manitowoc's days as capital of kitsch. Yet here the "Evergleam" was manufactured - the most popular aluminum tree in the US. Finally chance came to Lindemann's rescue on a winter day in 1996. Shortly before Christmas she was in the gallery. Outside it was icy cold, inside the trees were lighted. Some were revolving every minute and making a slight rustling sound. The doorbell rang. An elderly couple stood in the cold, asked to come in and walked through the shining forest. The man looked around and said, "I designed these trees."
The man in the forest was Richard Thomsen, former chief engineer for the Aluminum Specialty Co., a large manufactured of aluminum cooking untensils. An expert in mass production, in 1958 Thomsen was given the task of copying a hand made aluminum Christmas tree seen in Chicago and getting it ready for mass production - as quick as he could. Thomsen did just that with the help of two colleagues. Since then he had spent every Christmas under a silver colored prototype nearly nine feet tall. When he met the two artists he was touched to see that his achievement had finally been acknowledged.
The local press soon became interested in the forest in Lindemann's gallery- and so were the residents of Manitowoc. They were proud again of the rejected product of their city. Many did the same thing Thomsen did, they came in the gallery and told of their past with "Aluminum Specialty." Some took out their "Evergleam" boxes out, set the glittering giants in living rooms and store windows and thus began the shining renaissance of the aluminum Christmas tree. But after Lindemann and Shimon erected their winter forest five years in a row they'd had enough. They exhibited their trees for the last time in 1998.
Trees on Ebay
Before they packed them away for the last time they took pictures of their favorite trees and made a picture book of them. It appeared in 2004 under the title "Season's Gleamings." Lindemann and Shimon gave some intereviews but they didn't count on what happened next. The biggest American media came to Manitowoc to tell the story of the home of the aluminum trees. They called Manitowoc "Tinsel Town." "We didn't know how powerful Christmas was for the media," Lindemann says.
But they were happy about the attention the city received. "In the US small towns have a bad image. They look real small against the glamour of Hollywood and this whole marketed life style. But suddenly here was something people could be proud of." Glamour was back in Manitowoc. And trees which once could be bought at garage sales for a dollar now were going for a hundred times as much. In 2005 an especially rare pink colored aluminum tree went for the record sum of 2600 Euros on the internet.
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P.S. One of our favorite aluminum Christmas tree stories was by Rachel Manek for Fox 11 TV in Green Bay from 2004. In the space of a day, the reporter and her crew of one interviewed key people throughout Manitowoc County to tell the tree story. The fantastical CBS Sunday Morning crew and Russ Mitchell had already visited Manitowoc by then and we've posted that piece below too. In addition, various bloggers white about Season's Gleamings time and again.
