There are many facets to the phenomenon of the Christmas tree.
            On one level, you have the facts: Christmas trees have been sold commercially in the United States since 1851. There are 30-35 million trees sold in the country each year, 98 percent of them grown on farms. There are more than 21,000 growers in the United States, employing around 100,000 people. There are growers in every state. It takes an average of seven to ten years for a tree to mature to the standard retail height of six feet. For every tree harvested, there are two to three seedlings planted the following Spring. There are about 500,000 acres in America currently producing Christmas trees. Each acre produces the daily oxygen requirements of 18 people.
            Behind the facts, the origin stories: Ancient Egyptians mounted green date palm leaves inside their homes on the occasion of the winter solstice to symbolize the triumph of life over death. The Romans decorated their homes with greens and exchanged gifts on the solstice in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Druids hung evergreen branches over doors to ward off evil spirits. St. Boniface, patron saint of Germany, felled a massive oak tree that was the object of worship among pagans and a young fir sprouted from its center, symbolizing the birth of a new faith and the promise of eternal life. Martin Luther adorned his tree with candles to recreate for his children the spectacle of moonlight filtering through the snow-covered woods, purportedly pioneering the tradition of tree lighting. (It was Thomas Edison's assistant, Edward Johnson, who came up with the notion of electric lights in 1882.)
            On another level, there are the popular images: a tearful George Bailey, Zuzu on his back, receiving the bounty of his adoring community; a twinkling Clara clutching her Nutcracker prince as her family's enchanted tree stretches magnificently skyward; a grimacing Scrooge; a sneering Grinch; and the annual parade of less memorable heroes: saucer-eyed children warming their parents' hardened hearts just in time for Christmas morning; thwarted lovers coming together at last in the romantic glow of Rockefeller Center; and the ad industry's steady supply of beer-bellied Santas, crawling out of chimneys to hawk everything from diamonds to soda pop to personal electronics.
            And then there is the element of personal memory: the chilly hours at mom or dad's side in the makeshift forests of Christmas tree sales lots; the unfamiliar look of a familiar living room in the soft glow of a lit tree; popsicle stick ornaments dated in the handwriting of long-forgotten elementary school teachers; the camaraderie of siblings weighing and analyzing each colorfully wrapped box; the agonizing anticipation. Or maybe for you they are less heartening memories: maybe there were arguments in those chilly sales lots, over price or size or the proper placement of the tree atop the car; maybe the glow of Christmas lights brought with it the less wholesome glow of excessive inebriation, or underscored shortages beneath the dipping boughs. Maybe there were no siblings; maybe there was no tree.
            With all this baggage, it's difficult to imagine an artist finding anything new to say about the Christmas tree, or crafting a depiction that wasn't lost on the rocks of sarcasm, sentiment, or kitsch—but that's precisely what Meg Madison has done in the work you'll find on the following pages. She does it, in part, by coming at her subject from the backside. Our culture is filled with images of Christmas trees going into houses; Madison opts instead to follow them out, charting a virtually symmetrical process of degeneration: back to another converted lot, this one more like a scrap yard than a forest—she concentrates on sites in Union Square Park, Washington Square Park, Griffith Park, and the Hollywood Bowl—through a maze of machinery not unlike that which brought the trees into the city, and finally back into the earth.
            It is, in one sense, a horrific process, akin to the sight of a cherished pet—a calf or a chick or a rabbit, say, that you were given to raise as a child—sent to the slaughter house. On some level, you may have known it was coming, but in your affection for the animal you let yourself forget. Nor does Madison flinch from these uncomfortable associations. The few human beings who appear in the work are small and distant, incidental; the machines, however, loom large: tractors, bulldozers, mulchers, trucks, and massive steel containers. They have a cold, ruthless air, like hardened prison guards, immune to the sentimental dimension of their victims' history. When, in one photograph, a giant claw seizes three or four trees at once in its monstrous grip, you can almost hear a chorus of children wailing. Another image depicting several trees suspended by such a claw over the dreaded mulcher is distanced and blurry, as if Madison herself could hardly bear to look, or her view was obscured by tears. The largest photograph in the series, printed at four by six feet, depicts a cluster of two or three trees huddled at the back of a long, otherwise empty container, and one can almost see them quivering with fear.
            Several other works have the grisly feel of forensic photographs. A pile of discarded tree stands—each consisting of a base of perpendicular wood planks, a green plastic water bucket, and the razed stump of one now-incinerated tree—suggests a pile of severed limbs. A watery mess of rain and mulch dust, eerily green in the glow of a street lamp, resembles the blood-soaked site of a crime scene. A dusting of pine needles on the pavement of Washington Square suggests the fur of an animal shed in the tumult of some terrible fight, the duration of which one gathers from the length of the afternoon shadows.
            That said, this is also a wholesome, efficient, and widely beneficial process, and Madison's photographs reflect that more auspicious dimension as well. The overcast skies and cool, gray atmosphere capture all the quiet and stillness of January, which can come as a relief after the ceaseless bustle of December, and there's something soothing to the abundance of muted green tones. In the labor of the city workers, sweeping and shoveling and driving these machines, one finds the comforting assurance of life moving on. The trees that produced all that oxygen on the farm, that drew the smell of nature into so many urban homes, delighting children and bringing families together—happily, one hopes—is being transformed into fertilizer to help other trees in the much-loved parks of New York and Los Angeles to produce more oxygen, delight more children, and so on. From that point of view, the dull, green-brown pile of holiday remains in Madison's austere Christmas Tree Mulch, Randall's Island, NY, cleverly presented against a back drop of bare deciduous trees, is as full of life as it is of death, as full of beginning as it is of end.
            Americans are notoriously loathe to think too much about where their disposable objects go when they're disposed of. We love crowded lots of fresh trees with their buoyant boughs and fragrant, glistening needles. We love the promise of things that sparkle and glow, the assurance that not everything dies come winter, and the illusion of nature conquered and contained for our pleasure. Ninety-three percent of us do recycle our trees every year, whether through community programs or in our own backyards, but even so, the banal sort of doom embodied in the figure of a giant tree mulcher is not something we necessarily want to look at. Look Madison does, however with steady, impartial curiosity. Like the child who's willing to follow that poor calf all the way through to the chopping block, not out of coldness or cruelty, but so as to better understand the system to which, for better or worse, he belongs, she follows this icon out the back door to mark the point where it sinks back into the soil of our culture.

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