Ciggie(2)

from : Didier Nourrisson, Cigarette; histoire d’une allumeuse, Payot, 2010.

All is representation of, all is publicity (publicity and propaganda). ‘All objective judgement, be it esthetic judgement or moral judgement, is based on representation’, wrote Jean Beaudrillard. Neither esthetician nor moralist, the historian is taken upwith decrypting the representations which a society gives of itself.

The consumer society became the communication society after the Second World War.Commercial publicity is the underpinning to one and the other. Publicity ‘is the characterof a crime committed to the view and knowledge of all’, proclaimed the Dictionnairede l’Académie française of 1694. Publicity has become a kind of «expandeable belly» capable of digesting everything and in particular all forms of artistic expression : the adult comic-strip, avant-garde painting, the picture-story, the suspense thriller which now takes the form of publicity scenarios and «teasing». Publicity becomes ‘the last scene in representation, that in which all others are abolished : social, political and cultural’.

Magritte’s famous painting (the pipe «This is not a pipe») is at the cross-roads of all of these publicity venues. It shows in finality that :
- a certain usage of tobacco can mask another;

- if tobacco has finally disappeared from public space, it is still very much in consciousness;
- smoking then takes on a sexual connotation, a provocative allure, it is thus a form of exhibition, it is attrative. Smoke, tactility, mouvement, are so many emotions, agitations of the senses, motricities, ambiguous advances.

Society smokes as it breathes. The cigarette imposes its presence on us. Ot it is imposed. And then it goes up in smoke. The history of representations could not ignore the allures of this «provocative lady».