The Plastic Pink Flamingo.” Chap

Home , Flamingo

Full citation: Price, Jennifer. “A Brief Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo.” Chap. 3 in Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature In Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2000. (Adaptation for The American Scholar) http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/6448

JENNIFER PRICE

yearsago, I visitedthe Union Productsfactory, the birthplace of the plasticpink flamingo. It nestlesamong a flockof plastics factoriesin Leominster,Massachusetts, on Route 117 westof Bos- ton. I have come to believe,and would like to persuadeyou, that the blow-moldingdepartment in thebasement, where they still melt polyethylenecrystals with pink dye and extrudethe hot pink plasticinto flamingo-shapedmolds, can be just as usefula place to search for the deepestmeanings of natureas the mostremote wilds of the Rockies, whereI havealso looked. Since then, to plumb my nature-lovinginstincts and the fierce attachmentsto natureharbored by manymembers of mygeneration, I have been tracingthe flamingo'shistory through the annals of landscape architecture,south Florida, middle-class inventions, Las Vegas, fiftiesstyles, sixties rebellions, organic gardening, John Waters mov- ies, Elvis,wilderness areas, Andy Warhol prints, the CultureWars, and myfellow baby boomers' thirty-yearmarch to economic dominance. At some point,I began to listencarefully to the storiespeople told me. Mygraduate-school adviser heard a NationalPublic Radio report on a kidnappedpair of flamingosthat sent back postcardsfrom the EiffelTower. Friends had stolen the birdsoff lawns on drunkenlate-

"■^ JenniferPrice, a freelancewriter in Los Angeles, recentlycompleted a doctoratein historyat Yale University.This essayis adapted fromFlight Maps: Adventures with Nature in ModernAmerica, which is being publishedthis May by Basic Books.

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR night outings in college. A New Yorkereditor had a famous collection. My roommate's travelingpartner had taken a flamingonamed Eudora backpacking, mountain-biking,and cross-countryskiing through the White Mountains, the Arctic,and the Sierras before forgettingit one summerin a cabin at Donner Pass. And so, by degrees, I became cathected to the plastic bird that the naturewriter Terry Tempest Williams has branded "our unnaturallink to the naturalworld."

plastic flamingowas invented at Union Products in 1957 by a young designernamed Don Featherstone,but its provenance- the prehistoryof lawn ornamentation- can be traced back many centuries. I'll begin in mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland. At that time,a revolution- ary English school of landscape architectscreated a "natural"lawn aes- theticthat would rivalthe "artificial"seventeenth-century gardens of Ver- sailles as a paradigm and cast a great shadow forwardonto American landscapes, American lawns,and the do's and don't's of Americanyard art.Led bythe greatlandscape architectLancelot "Capability"Brown, the new designers turned the estates of English aristocratsinto rolling ex- panses of meadows,trees, lakes, and streams.At Versailles, the royalarchi- tects had lined the perfectparterres with quantitiesof dragons, satyrs, swans,wolves, nymphs, and Greek gods. But as Brown and his minions blottedout geometryfrom the Englishcountryside - a near-completefeat by the mid-1800s - theygave lawn ornamentsa tenuous welcome. Their bastions of nature featuredrustic hermitages and a modest handful of stagand dog statues.They much preferredto deploy real animals,such as sheep, cattle,and - best of all- nativedeer. And yet,to turnan estateinto naturerequired greatefforts of human intervention.The architectsbuilt hills and dug lakes. They planted trees by the tens of thousands,chopped down grovesfulof others,added dead trees back in for effect,and cropped vast acreages of new grass. They made rivers bend. They made sunlight dapple. In some cases, they evictedlongtime tenant farmers and razed theirvillages. They set out, as Brown's famous protégé Humphrey Repton enthusiasticallyput it, to "conceal everyinterference of art,however expensive." It is trickyto say whetherthe "nature" theyleft behind contained less artificethan the perfectavenues and precisiontopiary of Versailles, or whetherit required less human labor and capital to maintain. The architectscreated not nature itself,but an idea, a definitionof nature as a place that is free of humansand human artifice. A seedbed of urbanization,industrialization, and modern marketcapi- talism,eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centuryEngland also saw the privatizationand enclosure of once-common agriculturallands. Many people began to definenature as a realm thatwas as yetun transformed -

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ThePlastic Pink Flamingo not the partsof the naturalworld that humans use or change,but the partsthat they do notuse. Naturewas not urbanand had no industrial factories.It wasa place withouteconomic activities. It was a refugefrom social upheaval.As a Place Out There,it was fastcoming to represent everythingthat life in early-modernEngland was not. Above all, people in the throesof becomingmodern appealed to natureas a timelesssource of authority.In the late 1700s and early1800s, Hume and Burkepro- pounded "natural"theories of moral philosophyand politics.Adam Smithdescribed the new market-based economy as a "natural"set of laws. Gainsboroughpainted a "natural"aesthetic. Wordsworth sought aesthetic and spiritualtruths in nature.Even etiquette manuals lauded thevalue of "naturalness"in mannersand posture.And CapabilityBrown made the landscapean idea youcould walk around in. In fact,what could claimthe authority of nature more effectively than ownershipof a vastexpanse of it?Only wealthy squires could enjoythe benefitsof thisdefinition - landed aristocrats who could takeprime agri- culturalacreage out ofproduction and urbanmerchants who could purchase countryretreats. The urban poor and workingclasses couldn't affordto travelout of the cities. And rural peasants could hardly afford to treatthe landscape as a non-farming-or-huntingzone. A Brown-designed estatemade as definitea statementof social poweras Versailles,only it did it bydeclaring that wealth and statuswere natural Of course,no one in England,during that era ofexplosive economic growth, was using and changingnature more thanthe wealthyelites. And muchof the future historyof thisidea would unfoldas a battleamong the more monied socialclasses over exactly who would get to claimthe authority of nature, and forwhat purposes.

plasticpink flamingo was stilltwo centuries away. Meanwhile, in thelate 1700s,French landowners were hiring English architects to converttheir exquisite gardens into Nature. Across the Atlantic, Ameri- can landownerssuch as ThomasJefferson took to the Englishaesthetic likebirds to thesky. Americans, after all, have always embraced a visionof natureboth as countermodernand as a source of social and political authority- from Jefferson's pastoral ideal, whichwed ruralroots to re- publicanindependence and virtue,to Thoreau'sfaith in wildernessas an antidoteto overcivilization.From the Puritans' "city on a hill"to mythsof theAmerican West to theremarkably literal Mount Rushmore, Americans have made naturemeaningful as a powerfulsource of authorityfor na- tionalidentity. The Englishschool found its great American apostle in AndrewJack- son Downing,a nurserymanin upstateNew York. In the 1840s,he made meadowsroll, streams meander, and treesclump irregularly on country estatesthroughout the Hudson Valley, where the Hudson River school of

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR landscape painters committed similar visions to canvas. And he ap- proached the quest* η of lawn ornamentscircumspectly. "Vases," "rustic baskets,"and "other harmonious accessories": Downing deployed these only near the manor. A bit fartheraway, he planted "rockwork"and wooden "moss houses." However,on the fartherreaches of one's lands, human artificehad to vanish entirely.A vase way out there,he admon- ished, "[does] violence to our reason or taste."At his own residence in Newburgh,Downing instructedhis all-too-visiblegrounds staff to use "in- visiblehands" to mow the lawnsat night. His real passion, however,was to downsize the English principlesfor smallerestates. In the democraticUnited States,a growingmiddle class owned property,too, and Downing was froma middle-classbackground himself.How should Americanswith less land- he recommendedat least fiftyacres but consented to workwith ten or twenty- "rendertheir places tastefuland agreeable?" "We answer,"he said, "fryattempting only the simple and natural;and the unfailingway to secure this, is by employingas leading featuresonly trees and grass."Downing preached restraintand naturalnessabove all else. He generallyreferred to them as "taste.""An humblecottage with sculptured vases," for example, "would be in bad taste." What is "taste"?You can have taste in clothes, wine, furniture,art, decor- almostanything you purchase. The concept emerged witha ven- geance in the early1800s, as spreadingwealth and new mass-production technologiesequipped the growingnumbers of urban middle-classcon- sumerswith the resources and tools to decorate and accessorize. Taste, - you could say,is a styleof consumerism.It is also a statementof identity and it's exactlyin this era that American identitybecame inextricably connected withconsumerism. Taste was, to some degree, an upper-class injunctionof restraintthat cautioned the new consumersnot to presume to be trulywealthy. And yet the middle classes rapidlymade taste their own and counterdeployedit to reject the showyexcesses of the rich. If you consumed tastefully,you advertisedthat, unlike the workingclasses, you had abundant resources to buy things- but that you exercised the middle-classAmerican virtue, and the admirable market-economyethic, of self-control. But is good tastesupposed to be a middle-classstyle of consumerism? No, itjust is: a universallysuperior sensibility (or so goes the assumption) thatwould logicallyturn to nature,that bedrock of Americanidentity, to legitimizeits aestheticof simplicity.And whatbetter place to prove one's good tastethan on the bit of nature thatwas closestat hand- one's own frontlawn? The yard-artwars escalated exactlyas fastas the suburbs spread out- ward.After the CivilWar, Downing's student Frederick Law Olmsted- the legendaryarchitect of New York'sCentral Park who fiercelypromulgated parksand lawnsas refugesfrom urban stress- retrofittedDowning's prin-

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The PlasticPink Flamingo ciples to the scale of the largishlawn. He convertedNature into the rolling,tree-dotted, upper-middle-class neighborhood. In the 1880s, FrankJesup Scott, yet another Downing student, adapted the guidelines formedium-sized lawns. In hisdo-it-yourself manual, The Art of Beautifying HomeGrounds of Small Extent, he advisedcallow landownersto "avoid spottingyour lawn with . . . plasteror marbleimages of any kind, or those lilliputiancaricatures." His rulesleft space forgrass, a treeor two,and a fewflowers close to thedoor. This remainsthe archetypalvision for the middle-classsuburban front lawn. The homeowners,however, were gettingrestless. In the 1920s they boughtcast-aluminum animals. In the 1930sdo-it-yourselfers made deer, rabbits,and frogsout ofcement, the Depression material of choice. Each new decade broughtmore suburbs, more lawns, and cheapermass-pro- ducedornaments. The down-classingof lawnart was well under way.

trendsculminated (or bottomedout) afterWorld War II in the dual explosionsof suburbsand plastics.In the 1950s developers plowedan averageof threethousand acres of new suburbseach day. Many lower-middle-classand some working-classAmericans earned enoughto buysingle-family houses: ranches, split-levels, Cape Cods,Tu- dors,Colonial revivals. It was the era ofupward mobility, of undreamed-of newlevels of consumerism, and of thebaby boom, when my own parents movedinto a tinyhouse just outsidethe St. Louis citylimits, and four childrenand fiveyears later - in 1960,the year I wasborn - tradedup to a spaciousFrench colonial farther out. The plasticsindustries, energized by wartime technologies, set out to accessorizethe split-levelsinside and out. Nylon,rayon, vinyl, polyester, Lucite,Plexiglas, Saran, polyethylene. The companiescould makealmost anythingcheaply with the new petroleum-based plastics, and did: radios, polyesterpants, Barbie dolls, hula hoops,"walnut" paneling, "leather" car interiors,vinyl wallpaper, Tupperware, Naugahyde lounge chairs. "Better Thingsfor BetterLiving Through Chemistry," a DuPont slogan went. After1946, Union Productsmanufactured "Plastics for the Lawn":dogs, frogs,ducks, and a two-dimensionalflamingo that sold well. In 1956 the companyhired Don Featherstone,a recentart-school graduate,who for the sake of accuracyon his firstproject - a three- dimensionalmolded-polyethylene bird named Charliethe Duck- spent six monthssketching a live model in his studio.In 1957 Featherstone designeda three-dimensionalflamingo, which sold evenbetter than the flatversion. Union Productsretailed its wares at Sears,Woolworth's, and Ben Franklin's."Flamingo pink," said the 1957 Searscatalogue. "Place in garden,lawn, to beautifylandscape." "Lifelike." "Lovely." In the decades ahead, the flamingowould onlyrarely outsell the duck- but it would becomefar more famous.

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

The birdtook up residencein working-classsubdivisions. Middle-class suburbanitesgave it a wideberth. A fiftiestaste literature flourished: Good TasteCosts No More;How GoodIs YourTaste? And on medium-sizedlawns, Nature- and a lawnthat advertised leisure, refuge, and economicinde- pendence- mandatedthe near-total"grass, trees, a fewflowers" ban on artifice.Swing sets, gardens, and barbecuepits were all consignedto the backyard.An absenceof humanlife remains a signaturefeature of the middle-classsuburban front lawn. Of course,a second aspectof these lawnsis thatgreat investments of moneyand labor,and a vastherbicide industry,are requiredto maintainthem. Like a CapabilityBrown master- piece,this no-artifice zone ofnature actively hides much of the abundant humanartifice that the homeowner uses to createit. On a smalllawn, you'd have to scaledown to grassand perhapsa tulip or two.And you had preciouslittle space in whichto exerciserestraint. A plainlawn in frontof a largehouse stated "affluent, but tasteful."But an unadornedswatch in frontof a verysmall house said "inexpensive,and can'tafford more." Below a certainlevel of wealth, taste ceases to operate. Working-classconsumers generally favored more conspicuous strategies to landscapetheir pieces of the AmericanDream. They emphasized, ratherthan underplayed,their human presence.They found ample space forartifice. Many planted their lawns with squirrels, frogs, light- houses,windmills, and flamingos.In Catholicneighborhoods, the plastic creaturesbecame a logicalextension of the religiousfigures that immi- grantsin the citieshad placed on theirporches and in theirwindow boxes (though as second-and third-generationCatholics moved to middle-classenclaves farther out, many would reject their parents' lawn displayswith embarrassment, or at leastmove their own to thebackyard) . Searsdid a briskbusiness in pinkflamingos, at only$2.76 a pair.

the pinkflamingo splashed into the fiftiesmarket, it staked two majorclaims to boldness.First, it was a flamingo.Since the 1930s,vacationing Americans had been flockingto Floridaand returning home withflamingo souvenirs. In the 1910sand 1920s,Miami Beach's firstgrand hotel, the Flamingo,had made the bird synonymouswith wealthand pizzazz.After a 1926 hurricaneleveled Millionaire's Row, developersbuilt hundreds of more modesthotels to caterto an eager middleclass served by new trainlines - and in SouthBeach, especially, architectsemployed the playful Art Deco style,replete with bright pinks and flamingomotifs. This was a littleironic, since Americanshad huntedflamingos to extinctionin Floridain the late 1800s,for plumes and meat. But no matter.In the1950s, the new inters tates would draw working-class tourists down,too. Back in NewJersey, the Union Productsflamingo inscribed one's lawnemphatically with Florida's cachet of leisure and extravagance.

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The PlasticPink Flamingo

The birdacquired an extrafillip of boldness,too, from the directionof Las Vegas- theflamboyant oasis of instantriches that the gangsterBen- jamin "Bugsy"Siegel had conjuredfrom the desertin 1946 withhis FlamingoHotel. Anyone who has seen Las Vegasknows that a flamingo standsout in a deserteven more strikingly than on a lawn.In the 1950s, namesakeFlamingo motels, restaurants, and loungescropped up across thecountry like a lineof semiotic sprouts. And the flamingowas pink- a second and commensurateclaim to boldness.The plasticsindustries of the fifties favored flashy colors, which TomWolfe called "the new electrochemical pastels of theFlorida littoral: tangerine,broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby,methyl green." The hues wereforward-looking rather than old-fashioned,just rightfor a generation,raised in the Depression,that was readyto celebrateits new affluence. And as KaralAnn Marlinghas written,the "sassy pinks" were "the hottest color of thedecade." Washing machines,cars, and kitchencounters proliferated in passionpink, sunset pink,and Bermudapink. In 1956,right after he signedhis first recording contract,Elvis Presley bought a pinkCadillac. Why,after all, call thebirds "pink flamingos" - as ifthey could be blue or green?The plasticflamingo is a hotterpink than a realflamingo, and evena real flamingois brighterthan anything else aroundit. There are fivespecies, all ofwhich feed in flockson algae and invertebratesin saline and alkalinelakes in mostlywarm habitats around the world. The people whohave lived near these places have always singled out theflamingo as special.Early Christians associated it withthe red phoenix.In ancient Egypt,it symbolizedthe sun god Ra. In Mexico and the Caribbean,it remainsa majormotif in art,dance, and literature.No wonderthat the subtropicalspecies stood out so loudlywhen Americansin temperate NewEngland reproduced it, brightened it, and sentit wadingacross an inlandsea ofgrass.

was bound to get noticed.Flamingos and lawn art ran afoulvery quicklyof thearbiters of culture.Art critics launched the most direct attacks.In Kitsch:The World of Bad Taste,Gillo Dorfles singled out thenew lawn-and-gardencreatures as the"archetypal image" of bad taste.Dorfles tookhis cue fromClement Greenberg's 1939 diatribeagainst kitsch as "thedebased . . . simulacraof genuineCulture." Kitsch, Greenberg had warned,"[drew] its lifeblood" fromreal Culture,and Dorflesagreed: "vampirekitsch" had evolvedinto "one of the crucialproblems in the historyof art." Americancritics had been assailingthe mass-producedarts for many decades.But in the1950s, the evils were multiplying as fast as plastics,and postwarintellectuals responded aggressively."Mass culture,"Dwight Macdonaldcharged in 1953,"is ... a cancerousgrowth on High Cul-

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR ture.""The epitomeof all thatis spuriousin the life of our times," Greenberghad warned.Dorfles agreed: it "killedall abilityto distinguish betweenart and life." Reality:in the 1950s,it emergedwith full force in dialogueson Ameri- can society.And just as tastewas fortifiedby the idea of natureand a countermodernsensibility, Reality often expressed a setof risingworries aboutthe modern mediation of experienceand aboutreplication. Many Americansdefined whatever seemed enduring, unique, and absoluteas real. ř/n-Reality,by contrast, was humanartifice run amok.What more logicalauthority to appeal to thannature? And plasticlawn creatures - whetherflamingos, madonnas, or UnionProducts' new lines of mice and ladybugs- emergedas theepitomization of the inauthentic. Mass tourismcame under attack,too, as the dire proliferationof ersatzexperience. South Floridaand Las Vegas- whereworking-class Americanspresumed to extravaganceat cheap Frenchprovincial motels withVersailles-like parterre gardens - meritedspecial attention(from TomWolfe, among others) as centersfor tastelessness and blackholes of the ungenuine.In the geographyof un-Reality,the suburbsattracted theirown set of critics.In the 1956 sociologicalstudy The Organization Man,William Whyte characterized the suburbs as a culturelessvoid that negatedthe very individualism that so manyAmericans had movedthere to pursue.Suburbs were mass housing for the massconsumers. As the 1963song went, "Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. . . littleboxes, all the same." Nothingsymbolized the suburbsmore visiblythan the regulation lawn,which also came underattack from a verydifferent set of reality advocates.In the 1960s,the natural-lawnand organic-gardeningmove- mentsrejected the lawn as an alien plantingof non-nativespecies whose survivaldepended on an industryled byChemLawn and Techniturf.The eco-advocatescalled thelawn not just a bastionof toxicity,but also "life- less [and] artificial."The lawnwas anti-nature.In otherwords, natural- lawn advocatesand ChemLawnclients adhered to the same countermoderndefinition of nature as anti-artifice.But the anti-lawn camp pitted thegaining embrace of reality against the traditional canons of taste. The eco-advocatespromoted more naturalplanting strategies, from native grassesand a moratoriumon mowingto wildflowergardens, wetlands, vegetablegardens, and burn-your-ownprairies. The conflictsgrew heated."Are you or haveyou everbeen," a prosecutingattorney in Wis- consinasked one suburbanitewhose grass had exceededthe legal twelve- inch limitin the Sun ShadowsWest subdivision, "a memberof any of thosegroups interested in preservingall typesof plants?" By the mid-sixties,these battalions of postwarcritics had all raised director indirectobjections to lawnflamingos. Gillo Dorfles, Tom Wolfe, and thehome-prairie advocates weren't exactly bowling buddies. But by

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The PlasticPink Flamingo

1970,even Searshad withdrawnthe Union Productsflamingos from its catalogueand replacedthem with fiberglass waterfalls whose "uneven layering. . . resemblesthe natural, rugged beauty of authentic slate."

massconformity, false experience. These were fast emerg- Artificiality,ing as the targetsof the 1960s countercultureas well. The baby boomersin theexpanded middle class had grownup in thesuburbs, and as we came of age, we famouslyrejected the pink washing machines and trimmedgreen lawns. We made "Getreal" one of our mostmemorable slogans;we criticizeda wide range of social, economic,and political policiesas "unreal";and we appealed,with the weight of historicallogic behind us, to natureas the counterforce.In fact,we used the terms "reality"and "nature"almost interchangeably, and made natureless a supportingauthority, and morea reigningideal, thanit had everbeen. Somebaby boomers joined back-to-the-landmovements. Many of us went campingand backpacking.But whetheror not we everdonned a five- pound pairof hikingboots and actuallywent to nature, many of us drew on Natureas a metaphor.The Revolution,as RobertGottlieb has re- marked,was definitely"an EarthHappening." The Greeningof America, Charles Reich's best-sellinggenerational manifesto, championed the counterculture'smission to replace"the false culture that goes withfalse consciousness"with a new"culture that rejects the substitution phenom- enon . . . whereinartificiality replaces the natural." Alongsidethe postwarcritics, the baby boomersarmed themselves withReality and Nature,and convergedon theersatz. And in thefifties, sixties,and earlyseventies, all the hostileforces pounced on one target, aboveall others,with unanimous and utmostscorn: PLASTIC. Its produc- tionand use continuedto soar.But plasticcrashed from a metaphoric peak,as theexemplar of "Better Things for Better Living Through Chem- istry,"to thecancer at the core ofAmerica's soul. As Joan Didion put it, America's"most publicized self-doubts [were] Vietnam, Saran Wrap, diet pills,[and] theBomb." Gary Snyder wrote poems against "plastic spoons, plywoodveneer, PVC pipe,vinyl seat covers." A NewLeft manifesto exco- riatedthe "whitehonkie culture . . . handed to us on a plasticplatter." And in 1968,when an affluentwhite honkie suburbanite put his arm aroundDustin Hoffman in TheGraduate and said,"I just wantto sayone wordto you.Just one word. . . plastics,"the line capturedperfectly the disaffectionsof an entiregeneration of middle-classbaby boomers. And whatcould be moreplastic in 1968 thana hot pinkplastic flamingo (for $3.69 a pair) thatstuck out likea UFO on a limegreen suburban lawn in Iowaor NewJersey? When,exactly, did it become the verydefinition of anti-nature- the gewgawto end all gewgaws,the neplus ultra of lawnart? It is hardto say. Butby 1972, when John Waters's movie Pink Flamingos opened with a shot

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR of the eponymousbirds outside the trailerof a three-hundred-pound womanplayed by the transvestiteactor Divine - whovies successfully for thenational title of "filthiestperson alive" by eating dog fecesand mur- deringher competitorsin frontof tabloidand TV reporters- it clearly had happened.

that'swhen people began to laugh.Divine wears garish makeup and printhousedresses. She drivesa '58 Cadillac,urinates on suburban lawns,and has an incestuousrelationship with her son, who himself is fondof dead chickens.Waters advertised the movieas an "exercisein poor taste"and "liked the understatement."The undergroundpress loved PinkFlamingos and crownedWaters the Princeof Puke. "It's like gettinga standingovation," Waters explained, "if someone vomits watch- ingone ofmy films." He enjoyedthe reviews, too: Varietycalled it "one of themost vile, stupid and repulsivefilms ever made." Watershad grownup in an upper-middle-classsuburb. And what more enjoyableand satisfyingway for the rebelbaby boomers to rejecttheir parents'values than to assaultthe middle-class faith in taste- and to use a blatantsymbol of artifice?Still, Waters's cohort itself defined American societyas plastic:his exaggerationof artifice- whichconverted the fla- mingointo a toolfor rebellion and gaveit a second,ironic life - presup- posed thecritique. In his movieDesperate Living, which showcased canni- balism,a sex change,and femalewrestling, the heroineyells, "ALL NATURALFORESTS SHOULD BE TURNED INTO HOUSING DEVEL- OPMENTS! I WANTCEMENT COVERINGEVERY BLADE OF GRASS IN THE NATION!"To "understandbad taste,"Waters has written,"one has to havevery good taste." Led byAndy Warhol, pop artists,too, brazenly sought out thecheap, thefake, the mass-produced, the plastic. Warhol's grids of identical Mona Lisasand Campbell'ssoup cans deliberatelytapped the deepestfears of the standard-bearers."I am forart you can pickyour nose with,"Claes Oldenburgproclaimed in his manifesto,"for the majesticart of dog- turds,""for Kool-art, 7-UP art ... Ex-laxart ... Meat-o-ramaart." Just as Waterstransgressed taste, the pop artistsmocked nature to transgressthe establishedboundaries of bothtaste and art.And likeWaters, they, too, commentedon mass culturein termsthat at once celebratedand cri- tiquedit. As Oldenburgwrote, "I am foran artthat embroils itself with theeveryday crap & stillcomes out on top." Gay men, too, adopted the plasticflamingo in the sixties.Waters plantedhis moviesfirmly in the camp sensibility,in whichtransvestism and drag queens have long playedan especiallyconspicuous part. Gay men waged arguablythe mostcreative celebration of the extremesof artifice- and the mosttransgressive, since forwhat mainstream social standardhave Americansappealed to the absoluteauthority of nature

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The PlasticPink Flamingo morevehemently than for heterosexuality? Versailles emerged as a camp Eden. Drag queens donned pink and plastic.And the pink flamingo settledin to enjoya secureberth in the symbolicarsenal of the gayand campsubcultures.

the early1970s, Union Productsissued a pig in a three-piecesuit. It marketeda "flamingodeluxe," too- withmore natural,yellow legs- but it didn'tsell. Who wouldprefer it? Not theworking-class fans, or thetasteful middle-class homeowners, or (especially)the baby boomer fans.By the late seventies,pink flamingos began to disappearinto the hands of thievesunder coverof night.Having become an established symbolof the insurrectionary- as a markerof the transgressionof the unmovableboundary of nature- thebird became a usefulthing to have around more generallyto mark anythingrebellious, outrageous, or oxymoronic.It becamean effectiveway to posta sign:"Something subver- sive happeninghere." What did pink flamingoshave to do withreal flamingos?Not much. But in the 1970s,we began to use them as a ubiquitoussignpost for crossing the various,overlapping boundaries of class,taste, propriety, art, sexuality, and nature. And thenthe uses and meaningsof the pinkflamingo became really complex.In 1984, MiamiVice splashed a glitzyvision of southFlorida acrossAmerican TV screens.Plastic flamingo sales boomed. In 1986,for the firsttime, Union Productssold more flamingosthan Charlie the Ducks.Soon you could orderthem through a RollingStone ad, or from theflamingo specialty store Cat's Pyjamas,where a box of twobirds cost $9.95,two dollars more than the same pair at Kmart. The 1980shad arrived.As thesixties rebels moved into the economic mainstream,the new thirty-something yuppies still liked to thinkof them- selvesas social criticsand culturalrebels. The early-sixtiesPort Huron manifestofor the New Left had begun,"We are people ofthis generation, bredin at leastmodest comfort . . . lookinguncomfortably to theworld we inherit."In the Reagan eighties,we began uncomfortablyto inherit theworld in immodestcomfort. The crossingof boundariesremained a badge of identity,but it was nowsafer, and veryoften a matterof style. The flamingosat poolsidesand on condo porcheswere like blue jeans in boardroomsand Jeeps in UpperWest Side garages- or theDon Johnson combination,in MiamiVice, of a whiteArmani suit with a two-daybeard and no socks.As the Cat's Pyjamascatalogue advertised, just above a listingfor a pink-flamingovinyl doormat: "On everypage, you'll find just whatyou need to ruinyour neighborhood." In the 1980s,Americans traveled with the birds across the borders of statesand nations.We gave flamingosas birthday,housewarming, and movingpresents. They showed up as weddingdecorations, and we substi- tutedthem for reindeer in Christmaslawn tableaux.In sum,once the

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR flamingobecame a babyboomer signpost for boundary violations in the eighties- afterhaving evolved, in the fifties,sixties, and earlyseventies, intothe metonymy of artificeand anti-nature- we logicallybegan to use it,in an unorchestratedrash of gesturescoast to coast,as a markerfor crossinginto new places,times, eras, stages of life,and even the most sacrosanctreaches of natureitself. At thesame time,the truly transgres- sive crossingshad become less dangerous.Thieves, for example,still snatchedthe birdsat night- but the ownersnow met ransom demands withplay money and pinkchampagne. In theearly seventies, by contrast, such theftshad shared the same reception,and the same nocturnal defiance,as theleftist missions to repaintblack lawn jockeys with African liberationcolors. The boundariesof art,too, had becomesafer to cross.In the 1980s, art galleriesfeatured kitsch exhibits. In 1983, Christowrapped eleven islandsoff the coast of Miamiwith bands of hot pink polypropylene plastic.The projectwas at once a self-conscioustransgression from high art to mass culture- which,like Warhol'ssoup cans, maintainedthe boundariesby commentingon them- and a convincingproof of the erosionof thesesame borders. Inevitably, it also made a statementabout natureand artificein modernAmerican society. The pinkflamingo, of course,made exactlythe same statementfor less than ten dollarsand withouta fleetof boats.In 1987,the governor of Massachusettsissued a proclamationthat the pink flamingowas an essentialcontribution to Americanfolk art. Still,the pink flamingo had graduatedto Artnot so muchbecause of itsaesthetic merits but because of thebaby boomers' ascendance. In the eighties,artifice consolidated its firm place in theadult boomers' identity byat leasttwo routes. First, the thirty-somethings began to waxnostalgic about the 1950s. The pink flamingoeffectively called up a collective childhoodpast - theinnocence, optimism, and exuberantfakeness of the era ofpassion pink kitchens. Flamingos manufactured in thefifties began to appearwith Art Deco bric-a-bracin antiquestores - eventhough these fifty-dollarbirds had been manufacturedfrom essentially the same mold as theones at Kmart.But the fifties children had been sixtiesrebels, too. We'd embracedthe extremes of artifice to rebelagainst taste, but also to showthat the un-Reality of American society could be funto playin. In the 1980s,many middle-class baby boomers would exude a cool, ironic, half-affectionate,half-mocking stance toward TV, lawn ornaments,and the restof whatDwight Macdonald had once labeled the "spreading ooze." Some of us worriedand wrungour hands about mass culture. Someof us enjoyedit. Many of us did both. Ironically,or conveniently,as we fortifieda vision of natureas a Place Apartthat erases people's economic uses of nature, we were consolidating our ownaffluence. And theretail landscape was changing fast to tapinto

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ThePlastic Pink Flamingo yuppie desires. ForeverFlamingo, Do Wah Diddy,and SarsaparillaDeco Designs catered to the nostalgicembrace of the fifties.A second set of companies, which included Cat's Pyjamas, Poor Taste, and Archie McPhee's Toy Store and Espresso Tiki Hut, marketedWaters-style irony. All these storesprominently featured pink flamingos.On the other side of the divide,The Nature Company,Natural Wonders,and The Natural Selection were strictanti-artifice zones. The St. Louis Zoo giftshop did sell a polyesterflamingo named Laverne and a music box, with two re- volvingflamingos, that played "The WayWe Were." But here, as at other naturestores, the standardplastic flamingo was avis nongrata. By the late 1980s, the flamingohad acquired a greatmeasure of legiti- macy.Other lawn ornamentscame and went- GrannyFannies and fuzzy lawn sheep in 1987-88, a lawn-micerevival in 1989-90. In 1987, flamingo fans nationally- a fewin new clubs such as the InternationalSociety for the Preservationof Pink Lawn Flamingos- celebrated the bird's thirtieth birthday.In reaction,John Waters gave awayevery flamingo he owned. At Union Products,Don Featherstonewas promoted to vice president.He signed withan agent and moved into a large home in Fitchburgwith his wife,their poodle Bourgeois, and a large flamingo collection. And in 1987, Featherstonemade the firstmajor alterationto his original mold: he inscribedhis autograph on the bird's flank,to distinguishhis design from copies marketedby two other companies. "We're trying,"he explained, "to protectits image as the original."From thatpoint on, Kmart shoppers could check to be sure that theywere purchasingthe real and legitimatesymbol of inauthenticityand artificiality.

so the fiftieschildren entered the 1990s- a decade in which we've been obsessed with boundaries, and in which the Internet challenges even the borders of time and space. The culture wars raged fiercelyin the universities,where baby boomers elevated Africanfolk tales,yard art, and Pearl Jam to the same level of culturallegitimacy as Shakespeare, Rodin, and Beethoven. As multiculturalismbecame a watchword,affluent white Americans rifled cultural traditions worldwide, in a sort of global rummagesale, for food, clothes, music, and religion. Sexual borders became roiled in theirown set of battlesin the arts,the courts, the universities,and the military.In 1997, the comedian Ellen DeGeneres's coming out drewas much media scrutinyas a small war. It's not surprisingthat pink flamingosflew off the shelvesin the 1990s, even as concrete "fashiongeese" reigned as the new rage in ornaments that people actually put on their lawns. We continued to travel with flamingos- you don't do thatwith Charlie the Duck or a concrete goose wearinga dress- and a pair showed up at Cape Canaveral beforea rocket launch. We use the birds, in old ways and new, to mark the whizzing trafficacross borders- intact,blurred, safe, dangerous, social, cultural,

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR national,aesthetic, spatial, temporal, sexual, planetary.Campers post flamingosoutside their tents at nationalforest campsites. You can now hire the companyFlamingo Surprise to plantforty-odd flamingos on a friend'slawn the nightbefore his birthday.A flurryof crimenovels - Flamingo,Neon Flamingo, A Morningfor Flamingos - send outsider heroes intoa seedySouthern underworld. And myown fast-growing collection of flamingos?It didn'thappen entirelyon purpose,most of it having been bestowedon me byfriends and relatives,with the exceptionof a specialpair autographedfor me byDon Featherstone.Still, I'm a baby boomer,raised in an affluentsuburb, and at once a onetimescholar and a "natureperson." So perhapsthe birds mark my forays into a topicthat doesn'tseem, on the surface,to be eitherscholarly or natural- tame bordertraffic, really, compared with the "pinkflamingo relay" at the 1994Gay Games in NewYork that featured a combinationswim race and costumepageant. In the nineties,the affluentbaby boomers entered their forties and fiftiesto achievenew heights of status and power;the flamingo swept into its middle-agedyears of gloryand reward.The Annalsof Improbable Re- searchawarded Don Featherstonethe 1996Ig Nobel Prizein Art.In 1997, a new Internetsite on pink flamingosnamed On StagnantPond - a counter-Waldenof anti-Nature- swiftly garnered a raftof awards.In the artscene, lawn ornaments moved from art galleries into museums. The PhilbrookMuseum of Art in Tulsa,housed in an ItalianateRenaissance- stylevilla, posted a plasticflamingo in a pot outsidea 1996 exhibiton MarilynMonroe and Elvis. As baby boomer nostalgia has turned hagiographie- thelast five years have seen Pez conventions,hundredth- anniversarycelebrations of Jell-O, and a newNational Plastics Center and Museumin Leominster- thepink flamingo has reignedinevitably as pa- tronsaint. It's a featuredentry in the 1990 EncyclopediaofBad Tasteand the 1991 WholePop Catalog In 1996,Don Featherstonebought and became presidentof Union Products.In 1997, the bird's fortiethbirthday engendered national hoopla as Featherstonetraveled to flamingosignings around the country.The birthdaycoincided with the twenty-fifthanniversary of PinkFla- mingos,and FineLine rereleasedthe movie nationally, with extra footage thatincluded Waters's justification for killinga chicken:"Well, I eat chickenand I knowthe chickendidn't land on myplate froma heart attack.I thinkwe made thechicken's life better. It gotto be in a movie." Peopleinterviewed Waters's steadfast parents: "We're very proud of John, butwe just don'tsee anypoint in subjectingourselves to thatfilm." Some reviewers,however, lost sight of the movie's rebellious and emeticrole in theannals of postwarculture. "With all theplastic product around," the EntertainmentWeekly reviewer wrote, "[this film is] a nutritiouslyentertain- ingevent."

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ThePlastic Pink Flamingo

1995,faced with a dorm-roomshortage, Princeton University rented trailersto house the extrastudents, who promptlyplanted pink flamingosoutside. The boundariesof classand culture,which these birds crossedbut also marked,haven't exactly crumbled into dust In thenine- ties,my generation of midlifehomeowners has spurreda renaissancein upscale garden ornaments,including eighteenth-century English an- tiques.The cataloguesfor Earthmade and otherhigh-end garden-supply outletsfeature $299 rusticcopper herons,$179 ClassicFiberglass urns, even $24.95 stonesharks ("Eats pink flamingos for breakfast!"). Yet the dialoguesof aesthetics have come a verylong way since Capability Brown and AndrewJackson Downing. These borders- and so manyothers - are recognizable.But aren't they under intense negotiation? All exceptone lone boundary:Nature and Artifice.In threedecades, thebaby boomers have broken down borders of everykind. But as we've done so,we've consistently made thewall between nature and not-nature morevisible and powerful,and we'veleft it standing.And thisis thelast secret,so far,of the pinkflamingo. In an age of evermore fluidand negotiableboundaries, an effectiveboundary marker itself has to marka boundarythat is definedas rigidand absolute.The pinkflamingo still worksso beautifullybecause it stakesthe ur-boundary that we haveused to markand challengeall others.The countermoderndefinition of natureas anti-artificehas remainedremarkably unchallenged. We've asked, Whatis art- and can it be a pink flamingo?What is good taste- and shouldwe care?What is good literatureor good musicor good film? What is normalsexuality? But has anyoneever asked whether a pink flamingo is nature?If a fewof us havecalled the plastic creature art, who has calledit nature?And forall who have questionedthe natureof art or tasteor sexualityor moralright and wrongor evenreality, how many of us have askedwhat nature is? The pinkflamingo has toldus verylittle about real flamingosor about the nonhumannatural world. And yet,within each plasticflamingo lies an unquestioneddefinition ofnature - as anti-artifice, not-human,and countermodern. WhenI visitedthe Union Productsfactory in Leominster,I watched two men use a large vacuumtube to suck the polyethylenecrystals, fleckedwith pink dye,from outsize cardboard Mobil and Phillips66 boxes and expel the mixtureinto aluminummolds. Other workers paintedthe billsyellow and black,using petroleum-based paints. They cut lengthsof rolledsteel, made fromiron and otherores, for the legs. Veryliterally, the plastic pink flamingo is whollyreal, and certifiablynatu- ral. It'sjust naturethat's been mined,harvested, sold, heated,boxed, resold,and reshipped.It is naturemixed with human artifice- just like AndrewJackson Downing's lawn, mowed in the moonlightby "invisible hands."The definitionof natureas anti-artificehas alwayserased the humanpresence in our bastionsof Nature,and thedefinition of artifice

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEAMERICANSCHOLAR as anti-naturehas erasedthe natureused to manufactureit. Mygenera- tionand classhave wielded a visionof naturalness that sidesteps our own complicityin theaggressive and unsustainableuses of naturalresources. And we've made it evermore entrenchedas our economicpower has grown.Would you believethat the historyof the pinkflamingo has a moral?The symbolof artifice is actuallynature incarnate. Whatcan a pinkflamingo mean? The gardenwriter Allen Lacy has writtenthat "every garden tempts us to livewithin [the] illusion . . . thatit is somethingnatural, not the creation of artifice." "The plasticflamingo," he observes,"remind [s] us whatgardens are: not the giftsof natureto deservinghuman beings but theproducts of humanbeings cooperating withthe naturalorder to createutility and delight."Signposts every- where,in thevenues of nature and culture:flamingos on lawns,in movie theaters,on skislopes, in thehands of thieves, in artgalleries, and on the snowed-inshores of Hudson Bay.We've read the signs,uprooted them, and reinventedthem. Yet the pinkflamingos seem to me muchlike the Jell-Oat thehundredth-anniversary Jell-O parties. The morevariations we comeup with,the more the plastic birds insist on theiressential nature. As forDon Featherstone,he's ponderedthe historyand stardomof hiscreation with some wistfulness. "I really like how my flamingo looks," he says."But I can'thelp but wonder, why not my duck?" His duck,he adds,is morerealistic. Andin thatlast observation, I suspect, lies the answer.

This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions