FRIDA SMOKED.
with:
Genesis Belanger, Anne Doran, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Ilse Getz,
Irini Miga, and Amanda Nedham
May 13 – June 19, 2016
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
89 ELDRIDGE STREET
NEW YORK, NY, 10002
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| Frida Smoked.Genesis Belanger Installation View INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, 2016 |
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| Irini Miga A Scratch on the Wall, A Moment Embedded In, 2016 Cigarette butt, marble dust, left overs of carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen and nitrogen 2 x .5 x .25 inches | 5 x 1 x 0.5 cm |
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| Celeste Dupuy-Spencer Mark the Floor, 2015 Oil on canvas 12 x 12 inches |
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| Frida Smoked. Installation View INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, 2016 |
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| Frida Smoked. Installation View INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, 2016 |
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| Frida Smoked. Installation View INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, 2016 |
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| Frida Smoked. Installation View INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, 2016 |
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| Amanda Nedham TIBO199502 (serbian volunteer guard/ aka: tigers and german shepherd), 2016 Sculpey, acrylic dimensions variable |
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| Amanda Nedham They burn everything here, 2016 Graphite on paper 12 x 8.5 inches, 15 x 11.625 inch frame (also comes with typewritten letter) |
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| Amanda Nedham Cigarette and soap ark , 2016 Graphite on paper 12 x 8.5 inches, 15 x 11.625 inch frame(also comes with typewritten letter) |
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| Genesis Belanger Best Blue arrangment #1, 2016 Steel, paint, concrete 24 x 8.5 x 6 inches |
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| Anne Doran Tomato Surprise, 1988 Color Photographs, aluminum 55 x 58 x 5 inches |
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| Genesis Belanger Cigarette and Stairs, 2015 Steel, paint, concrete, oak wood 33 x 33 x 9 inches |
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| Genesis Belanger Peter the Last Drag is for You, 2016 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches |
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| Genesis Belanger Back Against the Wall, 2016 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches |
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| ILSE GETZ (1917-1992) Musical Nightmare, 1981 Cigarette collage 10 x 8 inches |
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| ILSE GETZ (1917-1992) Cigarette Collage VII, 1965 Cigarette collage 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches |
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| Genesis Belanger Citrus arrangment #1, 2016 Steel, paint, concrete 13x 12 x 5 inches |
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| Genesis Belanger Bubble Gum arrangment #1, 2016 Steel, paint, concrete 11x 12 x 5 inches |
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is proud to present Frida Smoked, a group exhibition featuring work of women artists and their cigarettes.
The cigarette was a man’s thing, at first—even though it was thin, white, delicate, and cleaner-smoking than brown-leaf cigars and squat puffy pipes. But smoking at all was unladylike, and so, in 17th century painting, cigarettes appeared only in the hands of prostitutes and other “fallen women”; later, the cigarette became an important marker of Victorian erotic photography. When the femme fatale was photographed cigarette-in-hand in Boston, in 1851, it was a scandal, even for a performer who had made her name as a courtesan; as late as 1908 a woman was arrested for smoking a cigarette in New York City.
But with industrialization came the mass production of cigarettes, and with that came their mass marketing—first using women in advertising to entice men to smoke, then targeting women themselves as customers, once they had joined the workforce en masse during the first world war. Philip Morris sponsored lecture series to teach women, assumed to be incompetent smokers, the proper way to inhale. To truly eliminate the taboo, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who consulted psychoanalyst A.A. Brill and was told that women were natural smokers, and therefore manipulate-able customers, because of their enduring oral fixation. “Today the emancipation of women has suppressed many of their feminine desires,” he told Bernays. “More women now do the same work as men do. Many women bear no children; those who do bear have fewer children. Feminine traits are masked. Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.” ‘Torches of Freedom’ became the name of Bernays’ extended campaign, in which, among other efforts, he paid hand-selected women — “while they should be good looking, they should not look too model-y” — to smoke while walking New York’s Easter Sunday parade in 1928. The phrase would be picked up almost 70 years later when American cigarette brands tried to engineer the same gender revolution in emerging markets in Asia and Africa, presenting cigarettes as symbols of freedom, upward mobility, and gender equality.
By then, smoking had long been surpassed as a marker of social ascendency, in America, by something almost like its opposite—a health-and-wellness cult that heralded the purity of women’s bodies even as it insisted that women devote more and more of their own time to remaking and maintaining those bodies for male approval and consumption. And so cigarettes became a different kind of assertive calling card—signaling a different kind of naughty female independence, one made up of disdain for do-gooder nanny-state-ism and self-help mantras peddled in the age of corporate yoga; and driven embrace of youthful indiscretion, downtown depravity, even a sort of sexual nihilism. Of course, all artists smoked—all the good naughty ones anyway.
*All images courtesy the artists and Invisible Exports, NY