Connections/Smoke

My name is Ian Alteveer and I work here in the department of nineteenth-century, modern and contemporary art.

Smoke connotes so many different changing and fluid meanings. At once

it's terrible, it's really bad for you, but it also has such meaning

in terms of progress, of that movement, of that evanescence of the quickness of history.

I'm a little obsessed with smoke at the moment, being an ex-smoker who has tried many times to quit

unsuccessfully and if my mother's hearing this right now I apologize 'cause she would absolutely be appalled, and so in thinking through my own process I've been looking for smoke.

And smoke is such a leitmotif that represents industrial progress and

new modernity, symbolized by factories and everything they make. But then the other side of the coin with that of course is

pollution and darkness and new directions that are unclear, and so the fog, the steam, the smoke that train engines make, that factories make, represents both sides of this. And photographs abound of

just the shapes of those buildings. Images that were actually commissioned by magazines and by companies to show progress. This one for example showing just this diagonally thrusting smokestack with that wonderful white plume pouring out almost as if you were looking down the end of a cigarette and seeing the smoke coming off of it.

I'm also struck by images of smoking and glamour. It's hard to look at now because we know how terrible it is, yet it's also sometimes so hard to separate the badness of smoking from how

amazing some of the images of it are. In an early twentieth-century photograph of the act of a man smoking, lighting his cigarette, putting it up to his mouth, it's recorded on the surface of the photograph. The sweep of his arm, the action towards the mouth, which you know reminds me what is smoking but a kind of sexy thing that draws your, that draws yours and someone else's attention to your mouth.

Smoking as an embodiment of a kind of libertine lifestyle is something that comes up in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. And of course the Dutch--I should know, my father is Dutch--are great

great moralizers about many things. To see a young gentleman disporting himself with his friends in a tavern scene was a certain symbol. And there's

so many images where smoke comes in front of a visage, and we have trouble seeing through it. And that in particular goes for an amazing manuscript illumination. You see a dark wizard

unleashing a cloud upon the Iranian army to confuse them. The wizard, whose name is Bazur, is a man from the East and embodies all of the sort of mystery that has been associated through time with the so-called Orient.

I was struck by something someone told me recently, that smoke is an offering of sorts. That it drifts from the ground towards heaven.

Smoke is able to symbolize both something absolutely immaterial, but also sometimes has such body. It takes forms. It creates shapes in pictures

that it doesn't in real life.