Why Artists Can’t Quit Cigarettes
NOTES ON THE CULTURE
Why Artists Can’t Quit Cigarettes
A symbol of dirty habits and corporate greed — and an enduring icon of old-school glamour — smoking is making an unlikely comeback in sculpture, design and even food.
By Alexa Brazilian, New York Times T Magazine, September 13, 2023
The designer Lydia Cambron made an ashtray cookie (the ash is ground sugar sprinkles) for a holiday baking swap (middle); the two others here — Love Affair, featuring a heart-shaped sugar cookie ashtray, and Check Please, in which dyed lemon Jell-O stands in for egg yolk and coconut Jell-O for egg whites atop toasted angel food cake — were made exclusively for T.Credit...Photograph by Sharon Radisch. Set design by Yolande Gagnier
This past spring, Andrew Gori, 40, and Ambre Kelly, 44, the founders of the Spring/Break Art Show — a fair for emerging and midcareer artists — decided to pull together a last-minute, salon-style pop-up in New York’s NoLIta based on what their “alums had available in their studios right at that moment,” Gori says. As the submissions rolled in, one trend stood out: “There were so many cigarettes!” So many, in fact, that when their “Secret Show” opened in May, one room was dedicated entirely to cigarette-inspired art: There were nearly three-foot-high versions that resembled shaggy plush toys, made by Thomas Martinez-Pilnik, 29. There were sculptures in a variety of stubbed-out shapes constructed from steel by Mary Gagler, and clay by Emily Marchand. And on a 4-by-5-foot square of AstroTurf, 17 true-to-scale ceramic butts by Taylor Lee Nicholson, 32, were scattered like the contents of an overturned ashtray. “For these artists, cigarettes seem to represent childhood memories of their parents or grandparents smoking, but also a lost human connection,” Gori says. “I think there’s a yearning to return to an analog socialness and a time that cigarettes represent.”
Whether it’s nostalgia, a backlash to wellness culture or a manifestation of existential anxiety, the cigarette is suddenly a pervasive presence in art, design and even food. The collector and curator Beth Rudin DeWoody, 71, says that young artists “are returning to old images of cigarettes in ads and films from the ’60s and ’70s that are so glamorous and striking — if you took away the actual poison of the cigarette.” In December, she curated a cigarette-themed show at her private art space, the Bunker, in West Palm Beach, Fla., including pieces from contemporary artists such as the painters Ana Benaroya and Danielle McKinney, as well as seminal works like Claes Oldenburg’s drawing “Design for a Bowling Alley in the Form of Cigarette and Smoke” (1968).
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Nicholson, whose ceramic butts were also sold at the “Secret Show” for $35 each, is less interested in celebrating the aesthetic appeal of cigarettes than in exploring the evils of the industry behind them. The Charlotte, N.C.-based artist grew up among the tobacco farms of Williamston, where their grandmother worked in the fields. “As she got older, her skin became littered with cancer because of all those years out in the sun,” Nicholson says. “Seeing my grandmother die and not being compensated in any way showed me how disposable people are to Big Tobacco. And since the cigarette is also a disposable item, I thought it would be interesting to discard my art, too.” So this past spring, they took a road trip along Route 66, pulling over at gas stations and truck stops to leave ceramic cigarettes on toilet seats, sinks and stacks of newspapers. “I think my generation can relate more to addiction to the phone than addiction to tobacco,” they say. “But this idea of disposability is still around. To me, cigarettes represent how we treat both things and people now.”