Smoke
Pump House Gallery, London, UK
It runs against the current grain for a themed show to be assembled around anything so concise as a single noun. One recent trend has been long, uniformative titles, recent examples being Haunch of Venison’s ‘Peace and Agriculture in a Pre-Romantic Ideal Landscape, Without Sublime Terrors’ (London, 2008) and Museum 52’s ‘When Leaves Fall They Return to The Root, When I Die I’ll Have No Mouth’ (London, 2008). To group together a multifaceted collection of art and artifacts around the notion of ‘smoke’, as the editors of occasional periodical Implicasphere have done at Pump House Gallery, is, then, a relatively innovative endeavour. Much of the publication’s existence has been dedicated to exploring the hidden depths - or ‘implications’ - of everyday words, and the curators of ‘Smoke’ clearly intend their temporary museum to creep beyond the ordinary.
The exhibition shares the spirit of the curiosity shop that, whilst modest in its individual selections, still manages to provide a surprising experience. The academic, thoroughly curated collection of smoke-related paraphernalia brings together engravings, posters, political cartoons and various devices (from pipes to bellows), as well a handful of works by, among others, Pae White and Henry Krokatsis. A range of predictable associations - from cigarettes, volcanoes and explosions to various kinds of chimneys - dominate, but there are some unexpected inclusions. For example, a creepy-yet-camp 1908 film, The Red Spectre, which shows a devil-like magician performing amid billowing red smoke, or an antique tobacco enema pump once used to revive the hapless unconscious.
Intentionally or not, one point ‘Smoke’ ably proves is the way in which one or more audible installations can dominate the atmosphere of an entire exhibition. The audio attention-seekers here, carrying their sound across the four narrow floors of Pump House, are a 1986 video by John Smith (Om) and a British public education film from 1937 that warns of the corrosive power of excessive coal smoke. The link between Smith’s work and the exhibition as a whole is a little tenuous, with the smoke from what is supposedly a cigarette rising upwards as a Buddhist monk has his head shaved by an unseen barber. But it would be a shame to be churlish and miss the simple novelty as the continuous ‘om’ chant of the monk, or the man dressed as a monk, mixes with the voice of the well-spoken narrator from the film on the floor below.
Smoke’s shifting social relevance is the most interesting theme developed by the exhibition. Where it was once upheld as a modern wonder, rising from the furnace of industry, and offering the healing power of an elixir, by the beginning of the 20th century smoke had become synonymous with dirt, a relic from a pre-electrical past. Neither, though, is this path shown to have been straightforwardly linear. Included is an intriguing passage written in 1604 by James I, apparently an anti-smoking campaigner when tobacco had only just made its entrance into western culture. Preceding the English smoking ban by more than 400 years, the king begins his lament with the hope that, ‘the manifolde abuses of this vile custome of tobacco taking, may the better be espied.’
The other key implication premised by the exhibition’s curious collection is that, just like its historical transition, smoke is a physically illusive quantity. In part this is clearly obvious, but a more thoughtful theme emerges to do with smoke’s drifting, dream-like nature, its ability to consume and fill a void, and its magical quality to allow apparitions to appear from other realms - be they the genie emerging from a smoking lamp or the drug-smoked visions of a shaman. While it would be going too far to say that Implicasphere‘s editors have unearthed far-reaching revelations in the everyday with ‘Smoke’, what they have provided is a more pleasingly scenic route than would ordinarily be followed.
Richard Unwin
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