O Shopping Cart, O Shopping Cart
Even the most ardent foe of the Christmas-ization of our streets and malls can’t help but stop and wonder a bit at artist Anthony Schmitt’s “Miracle Tree.” At 29 feet tall, it is a sculpture of a Christmas tree made of 57 shopping carts held together with pipe clamps and accessorized with shiny blue and silver ornaments.
The tree is in the central courtyard of the Frank Gehry-designed Edgemar complex on Main Street in Santa Monica, home to Rockenwagner restaurant, the MOCA Store, Peet’s Coffee & Tea and several other businesses. Schmitt has put up the piece every season for the past six years (with an unpopular break last year); it will remain in this spot, surrounded by heavily used cafe tables, until Jan. 8.
Everyone seems to have his or her own idea about what the “Miracle Tree” means, something the 44-year-old Schmitt embraces. “There’s such a spectrum of who it is who deals with shopping carts,” he said. “When you think about your earliest relationship to a shopping cart--your mom putting you in the seat--it’s a vehicle for you at an early age. Kids love shopping carts. For some people, that’s all they have to carry their stuff about. Then there’s the abundance. You see people in the market with two shopping carts.”
Most of the criticism leveled at the piece has to do with its physical integrity. “I worry about an earthquake,” said Mark Epstein, a Venice-based theater director sitting at a nearby table on a recent afternoon. (He probably need not worry. The architectural firm Pugh & Scarpa oversaw the structural engineering.)
“There was one person who went into Peet’s and said, ‘I’m appalled by this monument to capitalism,’” Schmitt recalled. But response otherwise has been positive.
“I like the fact they didn’t kill a tree,” said Joel Morales, a shift leader at Peet’s.
“I think it’s as good as any normal tree,” 10-year-old Myles Nelson pronounced, as his mom sipped coffee. “It’s this neighborhood’s monument, like the Washington memorial.”
Schmitt, a Santa Monica resident, first came up with the idea after Edgemar owner Abby Sher (also the founder of the Santa Monica Museum of Art) commissioned him to do a holiday installation. While walking through a neighborhood park, he spotted two shopping carts on the grass. That evening he headed out with his camera. “I went to the local Lucky’s and asked if I could photograph shopping carts in the parking lot,” he said. Permission received, he began shooting various-sized rings of carts. “The Lucky’s night manager actually came out and looked at me like two or three times thinking, ‘What is this nut doing?’” Cutting and pasting the photos, Schmitt created a two-dimensional photographic model of the piece. With Sher’s enthusiastic approval, he began the next stage.
“I thought it would be neat if Lucky’s would let us borrow shopping carts,” said Schmitt. “But they were like, ‘This is the time we need them most,’” when carts are filled with hams, turkeys, eggnog and pies. Instead the carts are rented from Peggs Co. in Riverside. “So during the course of the year,” Schmitt said, “someone might be using the very shopping cart that was a tree at some point in its life.”
