S2E9 SMOKE
Transcript
ML = Maren Loveland
TH = Tori Hoover
EV = Emma Vendetta
JG = Jennifer Gutman
LK = Lutz Koepnick
JC = Judy Chicago
DP = Dave Peterson
BF = Bill Fox
INTRODUCTION
ML:
At its core, smoke is a shape-shifting figure, a language whose meaning changes vastly depending on what context we encounter it. Think about it: smoke is a signal of danger. Of burning, of destruction. Or, it’s a floating missive from someone taking a break from work. Of joy, or relaxation. It hovers in the air, latching onto different sensory experiences. Smoke stays with us, like a memory, lingering on our clothes. But it just as easily dissipates into the air, never to be seen again.
Similar to other atmospheric phenomena we’ve featured this season, smoke is difficult to understand because of its many, changing meanings and its fluid nature. So that’s where I’d like us to begin today: to understand smoke, we must realize that it is inherently impossible to pin down. And this can be cause for confusion and frustration, but also wonder and beauty. In today’s episode, we explore how the mysterious qualities of smoke open up possibilities for exploration and better understanding of human relationships with the earth and air.
First, we get to know the multi-colored, pyrotechnic smoke sculptures of esteemed artist Judy Chicago, who began producing these works in the late 1960s as a response to the male-centric land art movement. Then, we hear from Bill Fox, the Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno; he has worked extensively with Chicago’s smoke sculpture archive, currently housed by the museum. Finally, we feature a conversation with Dave Petersen, a scientist who’s devoted his entire career to understanding smoke and wildfires.
PART 1: UP IN SMOKE
ML:
The smokes sculptures of Judy Chicago are larger than life performances that take up space and demand to be seen—much like the artist herself.
JC:
I was told repeatedly that I couldn’t be a woman and artist too, even though from the time I was a little girl and started studying art, I wanted not only to be an artist, but I wanted to make a contribution to art history.
ML:
Chicago is a badass, feminist artist who has fought her entire career to be seen and listened to.
JC:
When I was in graduate school, my painting instructors hated my sense of color. They also hated my imagery, which was very naturally biomorphic and kind of female centered. They used to say, ugh, wombs and breasts! Like, that was the worst thing that could possibly be on a canvas.
ML:
And when you look at her smoke sculptures, it’s pretty hard not to pay attention. Chicago’s smoke sculptures put pyrotechnics to work. They result from placing fireworks on football fields or over bodies of water, which then release brightly-colored smoke into the air. The result is a temporary, larger-than-life dreamlike haze that alters our perception of the world for a brief, but glorious moment. With these sculptures, Chicago pushes the boundaries of how we think about smoke, about gender, and about the air.
Smoke might seem like a strange medium to employ to fight the patriarchy. But for Chicago, it was an effective way to communicate with her peers that she was a force to be reckoned with. She initially became interested in working with smoke in 1968 while collaborating with other artists in Pasadena, California, just outside of Los Angeles, as she recounted here to Philip Kaiser in a conversation at the Nevada Museum of Art.
JC:
Our studio fronted the Colorado Boulevard where the Rose Bowl Parade went. And we decided to do an event on New Year’s Eve for all the people who were like lining the streets. It was called the Raymond Rose Ritual Environment. We stretched like screens across the buildings and projected things. And I lined the street.with fog machines. Because I was working on color systems then, I designed this spectrum color wheel and the Klieg light was picking up. The smoke as it rose and turning it in all these colors because of the Spectral wheel and I looked up at this and I thought I’m gonna do colored smoke.
ML:
After falling in love with the visual and spatial artistic possibilities of smoke, Chicago transitioned from using fog machines to using a wide variety of smoke-releasing tools, including smoke guns, dry ice, and fireworks. She even had an apprenticeship with a local pyrotechnics company. But Chicago was never working on these projects alone. The very nature of her smoke pieces necessitated collaboration, which is something she has always valued in her work.
JC:
Some people lit flares, some people took pictures, some people brought food when we started traveling around. We did them in parks, we did them on the beach, we did them in the National Forest. Can you imagine that?
ML:
Rather than identifying with the male-centric idea of being a solo, genius, artist, Chicago’s smoke sculptures gesture towards how art is all about community. Take, for example, one of Chicago’s most famous smoke pieces, entitled “Smoke Bodies.” The piece features women whose bodies are painted purple, green, and red, the same colors as the billowing clouds of smoke surrounding them in an otherwise empty desert landscape. The bright colors, the scale, and the connection with the landscape all separated Chicago from her male counterparts like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Dennis Oppenheim in the land art movement, signaling a new way of thinking about the world in general.
JC:
You can see my already interest in in trying to have the female experience become a pathway to the universal. We’re talking about a world in which the masculine has been the pathway to the universal. And male art is what is considered the art of humankind. So, I’m already starting to think about how to disrupt that and make a place for the female experience and to understand that it can illuminate the world for us or the landscape for us in a different way.
ML:
Many of Chicago’s smoke pieces are critiques of gender, but others make more environmental critiques, which was pertinent in a rapidly changing Los Angeles landscape in the 1960s and 70s. Rather than destroying or permanently affecting the landscape with her art, Chicago’s smoke sculptures had a softening effect. They were non-toxic and impermanent, but still made strong visual arguments. Chicago was commissioned to create smoke sculptures around buildings. In her piece “Santa Barbara Museum Atmosphere,” a cloud of red and orange smoke surrounds the eponymous art building in an ominous way. It appears as though it is in the midst of its own collapse—a thought-provoking take on permanence, the institutionalization of knowledge, and the art world in general. But many of Chicago’s contemporaries didn’t pick up on her arguments, she explains.
JC:
You have to understand LA was going through this massive urbanization. . . . When I got there and there were still orange groves and, eucalyptus groves at UCLA. And now the freeways are coming, this is the end of the fifties into the sixties, LA is being concreted over.
So there was this art and technology group that I was involved with and they invited us all to do pieces there. I’m watching the commercialization of the mall go up and then plant dry ice and disappear it before it can take over, if only for a moment. But it took 40 years for that work to be understood.
ML:
Only much later in her career that people realized that Chicago was critiquing monumentality in architecture. By surrounding historic institutions and buildings with smoke, she was signaling how temporary these structures really are, perhaps inciting us to rethink our ingrained ideas about their importance and permanence. While many of Chicago’s smoke pieces communicated abstract shapes, her later works were designed to look like particular forms with intentional meanings for the audience.
JC:
I was doing all this research in women’s history. And so I discovered that all early civilizations worshipped goddesses. And so I did these series of images that, had women creating fire. I was beginning to develop the narrative that would become the basis of the “Dinner Party.”
ML:
That’s Chicago’s most well-known piece, permanently housed in the Brooklyn Museum.
JC:
And, reconceiving the history of Western civilization in terms of women’s contributions. And that was definitely the women in smoke images come out of that female empowerment, merger of flesh and landscape,
ML:
In 1974, the Oakland Museum commissioned a smoke sculpture in the shape of a butterfly from Judy, and this was the first time she ever tried making an image with her fireworks. The butterfly was a symbol of feminine empowerment and goddesses that Judy had been researching for the past years. The piece was called, “A Butterfly for Oakland.”
In the 1970s, regulations around pyrotechnics increased dramatically – perhaps rightly so — and Chicago could no longer get enough support to create her smoke sculptures. So until recently, she took a break from making her smoke sculptures entirely—until 2012, when the Pomona College Art Museum commissioned “A Butterfly for Pomona,” staged on the college’s football field.
Since 2012, Chicago has finally received more acclaim and attention and support for her smoke sculptures and has been regularly staging them in cities around the world. The smoke pieces require collaboration and, in a way, softly invite us to see the world anew—even if only temporarily. But this new way of seeing can help us change the world for the better.
JC:
In order to make change, I think one has to have a really long historic view and understand what it takes. People don’t give up power voluntarily. And if we want to get rid of this, it’s going to take men and women working together for a very long time to overcome it. I feel very, very fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to spend six decades in my studio trying to make a contribution and trying to contribute to a really deep and profound change in our culture. We’re just not there yet.
ML:
We live in a world where witnessing plumes of smoke enter the atmosphere, whether from factories or from fires, is a common occurrence that many might not even bat an eye at. Perhaps, to some degree, smoke is becoming more normalized and less noticeable. But what Judy Chicago’s fleeting smoke pieces encourage us to do is to look at it — like, really look at it — and realize how strange and beautiful and wild it is.
Smoke helps us to see the impermanence and smallness of human scales, which can so easily become consumed by it. In this way, Chicago’s smoke work is similar to that of Fujiko Nakaya, whose fog sculptures we covered way back in season one, on our second episode of this show. By blurring our ability to see, Nakaya’s fog and Chicago’s smoke both challenge us to perceive things from a new perspective.
Through Chicago’s art, we begin to better understand how the environment has been gendered and claimed by patriarchal societies, and we have hope that, like smoke, these paradigms will dissolve into air.
INTERFERENCE 1
EV:
We’ve been talking a lot about smoke. Like, the smoke from fireworks or dry ice. But what about the kind of smoke many of us encounter every day?
TH:
What do you mean, Emma?
EV:
I’m talking about smoking!!
TH:
Ohhhh. I feel like a big part of my childhood were those all those aggressive anti-smoking campaigns meant to scare kids out of ever even touching a cigarette.
EV:
Oh yeah, I remember those. Those pictures of the black lungs really got to me. But while the dangers of smoking have become more well known recently, I think it’s important to understand the broader role smoking has played in history. Often in important and meaningful ways.
TH:
So smoking isn’t as evil as those ads made it out to be?
EV:
Smoking can be bad for your health, I don’t want to discount that. But the reality is that smoking is an important cultural act with many layers of meaning and significance. Smoking in Native American cultures has always been really important and sacred, actually.
TH:
I don’t really know that much about that—tell me more!
EV:
It’s super fascinating! For many Native communities, the pipe—often mistakenly referred to as a peace pipe—is a central line of communication between the human and spirit worlds. The Ogala Lakota healer Black Elk identified seven separate rites of the pipe, but overall, the pipe is a facilitator of major life events, transitions, and rites of passage.
TH:
Smoke does seem to be a kind of communicator between worlds—it’s a fusion of the air, our breath, and the earth that we send into the sky, like a message.
EV:
Of course, different indigenous cultures use pipes for different ceremonies and events. Sometimes they’re used individually, sometimes collectively. Often they’re decorated with important symbols and objects. What I mean is, smoking was and is taken seriously and really crucial to indigenous ways of life and understanding the world.
TH:
There are so many cultures that see smoking and smoke as important – I was just talking to someone the other day about the tradition at private boys’ schools of smoking a cigar with your father after graduation. Or, to think in more religious terms again, we could think about Catholicism, where burning incense is important — and, of course, you have the iconic white plumes of smoke that signal the selection of new pope.
EV:
I think for a lot of people, taking smoke breaks and connecting with people that way is an important cultural practice, too.
TH:
Oscar Wilde did call the cigarette “a perfect pleasure.”
EV:
Well, I think I’ll have to take his word on that.
PART 2: SMOKE SCIENCE
ML:
Smoke is notoriously difficult to manage, and even harder to understand. Which is why I sat down to talk with Dave Petersen, a smoke scientist—yes, a smoke scientist!–to see if he could help illuminate a few burning questions we had about smoke, what it is, and what we need to know about it in a world where smoke seems to be a constant part of our atmospheres.
DP:
I’m Dave Peterson and I am a professor of Forest Biology at the University of Washington. I am also an emeritus senior scientist with the U.S Forest Service. My research over the years has focused primarily on two things, which is fire science, and climate change. Sometimes with a lot of overlap between those.
ML:
What I wanted to understand, first of all, is what smoke actually is. As it turns out, it’s not a simple answer.
DP:
Smoke is a very diverse chemical-physical mixture, and it always varies depending on what is causing the smoke, what is on fire, what the temperature is, what the atmospheric conditions are, what the wind is like, and so forth. But in general, smoke is made up of tiny particles, gases, and water vapor.
Water vapor usually makes up the majority of smoke, and the remainder includes chemicals like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide nitrogen oxide. These things called volatile organic compounds. Those are carbon containing compounds, usually quite a few toxic chemicals and lots of very tiny particles, and it’s those tiny particles that are usually the most important in terms of causing harmful effects on people and their respiratory system.
ML:
We’ve talked a lot about volatile organic compounds this season – it’s come up in episodes on smog and CO2, too. But these can feel like very abstract concepts. We’re talking about tiny particles, invisible on their own, but collectively impactful. So it might be helpful, Dave explains, to think about smoke as a kind of fluid.
DP:
So you pour in some compound into a bowl of water. You stir it up and you can see that kind of swirling around and mixing. Air is also a fluid. And so the smoke is part of that fluid combination. And we tend to focus on the toxic components of smoke because that’s what harms people. But there are also a lot of things that are fairly benign as well, particularly like the volatile organic compounds are, or organic chemistry of smoke is very diverse depending on which plants are burning, what time of year it is. What kinds of chemicals those plants have in them inherently. So it’s, it can be very complex. You might have up to a hundred different compounds in any particular smoke plume.
ML:
And this strange, fluid mixture acts as a kind of messaging system. Like I explained at the beginning of this episode: smoke is a language which we must continually decipher. The same is true not only for humans, but for all kinds of other beings.
DP:
Smoke is sensed by some insects, particularly bark beetles, and they’re thinking, okay, there’s a fire somewhere. That means we’re gonna have weakened trees that we can feed on. And so they will come in fairly quickly after smoke exposure and start attacking the trees. And then the insects themselves create pheromones that attract other beetles to come into the area. So smoke does seem to be a bit of a signal.
There’s also some indication that some plant seeds seem to be stimulated by smoke, and there are certainly many plant seeds that are stimulated by fire and heating. So they’re cued into that disturbance. So we we tend often in our minds to have a negative perception of things like fire, but there are things that have evolved over, millions of years to develop adaptations and take advantage of that situation as well.
ML:
But smoke isn’t just a language of danger or biology, smoke is also a language of beauty and aesthetics.
DP:
And people take lots of, when they, people are looking at fires, they take lots of photos of the smoke plume because it’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also terrifying at the same time.
So you have that combination. I think art, good art that is passionate and can evoke some kind of response, can also be beautiful, but maybe even disturbing at the same time. So I think there is that sort of parallel between those two phenomena. The other thing about smoke is it’s always changing.
ML:
One of the biggest challenges that scientists have while studying smoke is that it’s not static. In fact, it’s incredibly difficult to predict, and therefore it’s constantly shifting and posing a problem to those who seek to understand it.
DP:
There’s all kinds of different forms. It evolves over time and over space, different colors, different shapes and so forth. And although we can use things like computer models to project the dispersal of these smoke plumes and we’re getting better at that.
By the way although we can do that, there’s a certain chaotic behavior that we can’t predict mathematically. And so that’s always humbling and it tells us that we still have some things that we need to learn or maybe just accept that we can’t capture that mathematically like we can a lot of other things.
ML:
And that’s something that brought us back to Judy’s work. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that a smoke scientist was familiar with her!
DP:
So I think that’s really one of the big parallels perhaps with Judy Chicago’s smoke sculptures. It’s the same phenomenon, beauty maybe some disturbing aspects, some predictability, some unpredictability. Different colors. Just lots of parallels there.
INTERFERENCE 2
JG:
Lutz, do you remember seeing those pictures of New York City last year, the ones where the sky looked completely orange?
LK:
Of course, Jen, how could I forget? What a terrifying sight. Glad I wasn’t there during those days.
JG:
I remember everyone was posting pictures of the city when that happened. The sky was this insane, almost neon orange hue from the Canadian wildfires that were going on last June.
LK:
That recently? It feels like forever ago. You know what’s fascinating—people were calling it “straight out of Blade Runner: 2049,” because it seemed to mimic the same visuals as the film. And it really did look like the set of a sci-fi movie.
JG:
Right. But I wonder if it’s even deeper than that.
LK:
Oh, you mean, like the smoky atmosphere was hearkening back to the smoke-filled rooms of noir and neo-noir films? You probably don’t know that I have a real passion for these films. And it’s very true that those kinds of movies, just think of the The Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity, are so defined by smoke. I’m not a smoker myself, but I have to admit—those movies make smoking look cool.
JG:
No, no. What I mean is this. It’s not that NYC just looked like Blade Runner, it’s that the whole city felt dystopian, it felt like some sort of alternate reality.
LK:
What do you mean?
JG:
Think about it: if a utopia is a non-place, a place that doesn’t exist (u meaning “not,” topos meaning “place,”) then a dystopia is a bad place, a place which does exist but everything has gone wrong. NYC became a world where the air was so affected by smoke it literally turned the sky orange. The impacts of climate change were viscerally clear as the sky became absolutely filled with smoke.
It’s wild that smoke had such an intense impact on the atmosphere.
LK:
Definitely a strange sight to behold. But it doesn’t mean that air pollution isn’t a serious issue. According to the American Lung Association, more than one third of people in the US – are exposed to unhealthy levels of ozone and particle pollution, representing an 11.7 million increase in the last year.
JG:
And I’m sure rampant wildfires don’t help with that.
LK:
Seriously. I guess the sky doesn’t have to be bright orange to feel like we’re living in a dystopian reality. It’s enough, though, to produce tears in the rain.
JG:
Tears in the rain?
LK:
Oh, come on Jen. The original Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer. Time to die.
JG:
Well, hopefully not.
PART 3: SMOKE ECOLOGIES
ML:
Some artists are so expansive and vibrant, that, like smoke, they can be difficult to understand without the help of an expert. So earlier this year I talked with the Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Bill Fox, who’s worked with Judy Chicago and her archives extensively, and understands the artists in a way many people don’t.
BF:
I’m a writer who took a left hand turn and ended up working in museums. My books are basically about human beings encounter place and turn it into space. And how we encounter space and turn it into place.
ML:
Bill’s work seeks to understand how places are created and what art’s influence is in that process. Space, in other words, are environments or landscapes that become places when imprinted upon by human culture and meaning. A field is a space, until someone comes along and builds a fence or a house and turns it into some kind of place.
BF:
What space underlies the place or vice versa and more likely for me is I go to a space and examine the process that people use to make it a place or take a look at terrain attention to territory. It all depends on what your frame of reference is.
ML:
Recently, the Nevada Musem of Art in Reno acquired Judy Chicago’s smoke sculpture archives because of Chicago’s influence on the Land Art Movement. As such, Bill has a deep understanding of her work, especially in the broader context of environmental art.
BF:
Judy Chicago. I grew up in and going to college in Southern California when Judy was just starting her career. So this was in the late 60s. She was already well launched. She was already a force in the region, but I didn’t really know her work. I knew a little bit about the smoke work that she’d been doing in the desert because things happening in the desert interested me. And she doesn’t show up in my life until again until 2019 when, we proposed an exhibition by Judy. And it fits into our kind of scheme of land art, which we’d already been collecting. So we have the Smoke Works and, and we put them out in context as often as possible to show how this works. Judy was doing smoke works in the early 60s. So she’s she’s a little bit ahead of all the guys who are out digging in the desert. Yeah, they’re all using the same dry lake beds, the same pliers. Lots of artists have used them, but Judy was doing something very different
ML:
He explains that what made her work so influential was the collaborative nature.
BF:
I think what I’m most astounded by about Judy’s art overall is collaboration. She doesn’t go out in the desert and hold up a smoke bomb and say that’s a work of art, right? She works with a cadre of women students in the beginning and now long standing friends. She works with a bunch of students to almost dance into being right, the smoke, the smoke works. That is, they are physically interacting with the smoke. Sometimes holding the smoke. And not only that, fireworks itself is a collaborative effort. That was just amazing to realize that this was an artist who didn’t collaborate because it was necessary. Only she collaborated because she loved it. And she, her entire life has been a long series, a chain of connected teamwork, if you will.
ML:
Like we discussed earlier in today’s episode, Chicago’s work was particularly influential because she was working in a completely male-dominated space and changing up the whole art world. But there were, of course, other women who worked with her during that time who were changing how the environment was perceived too.
BF:
It’s Richard Serra and Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson. And then, all the boys, right? And there’s a woman in the mix, her name is Patricia Johansson, and she is a painter becoming a land artist. And she’s dealing with color. So it’s a groundbreaking young artist who ends up painting a series of very long boards laid out on a former railroad track.
ML:
The piece Bill is talking about here is called “Stephen Long,” referring to a nineteenth-century American railroad engineer and explorer. The long, painted boards create a kind of alternative railroad—critiquing infrastructure in similar ways as Chicago’s smoke sculptures, using bright colors and a collaborative atmosphere.
BF:
And they’re colored the colors of the rainbow and they stretch away for, 1500 feet. And it was shocking because the guys are working in monochromatics. They’re not playing with color at all whatsoever. Judy is doing the same thing across the country in a different context entirely.
Going out to the desert, which is not a monochromatic environment, but it’s quieter visually than being in a forest, let’s say. And it’s the kind of environment where when you bring color into it, you are deliberately juxtaposing nature and society. You put the human made into the natural environment, and it’s very apparent. You see this 10 years later when Lita Albuquerque comes along, a Los Angeles artist who starts doing works in the desert again on the same dry lake beds, right that everybody was using, but she’s making colored drawings that then become slightly 3D because she starts using rocks.
ML:
Lita Albaqerque was another environmental artist working in the 70s and 80s who used brightly colored pigments in desert landscapes to create sculptures and installations. For example, in her piece Sol Star, Albaqerque used three tons of blue pigment to make huge, blue circles on the sand of the Giza Plateau, just south of the Great Pyramids, which mirrored the relative brightness of the stars shining directly overhead.
BF:
It’s not just pigment spraying on the ground or scattered on the ground, so she’s making these very geometrical pieces that the wind promptly starts to blow away. So it’s a real collaboration. It’s a contrast with nature, but a collaboration with nature. So this is in the air, but people aren’t yet willing to accept them as land art.
ML:
In other words, Judy was working within an ecology of women environmental artists who were working to collectively change the narrative and who, like so many artists, we feature in this podcast collaborate with the elements as artistic partners, not just as subjects.
BF:
All three of the people I’m thinking of Judy and Patricia and Lita, all women. So coming from a very different aesthetic desire and experience. And color to them is as natural as a piece of steel is to Richard Sarah. They’re they are, committing artistic gestures at scale. They’re coming out of minimalism. They’re really coming from a very different place. What the land artists do as a group, even before they’re calling themselves land art or earthworks or anything. Is there developing a set of tools that can be used by anyone. So you can see the evolution of what happens with the use of those tools as the concerns of the overall arts community change.
ML:
And the work that Judy, Lita, and Patricia did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s continues to have an impact on contemporary environmental art.
BF:
I’ll tell you about Daniel McCormick and Mary O’Brian, two artists from Northern California, who take those tools and the ability to move the environment around, to address environmental problems. And so they will get a community together to weave a sculpture that’s actually part of a weir for a water control plan and give water the ability to move at its own will, let the river meander. Let’s say they weave a weir out of a willow, and they do that by having the community go out and pick willow, which doesn’t hurt the willow at all. It just grows back. It’s so prolific, right? And then we have the sculpture out of this and they take live willow stakes to stake the dam into the ground. So it lasts three years. You walk by and there’s no evidence of the hand of the artists. You don’t know that you’re looking at an artwork. You know that you’re looking at a living, breathing part of a riverbank, and obviously it’s good for biodiversity and, rescues endemic species and so forth. But you don’t know that’s an earthwork. That’s a piece of land art that has been deliberately designed to erase itself back into the natural world. That’s another very selfless kind of gesture, right? So you can see, and you can track this, this kind of work through artists such as Mary, You can track this kind of evolution in Judy’s work herself as she goes on and in many other artists.
ML:
Judy Chicago occupies an important position in art history—she blends practices from the feminist movement with the land art movement, and has deeply influenced contemporary land art methods of leaving no trace and offering strong social and environmental critiques that cause us to reckon with the Anthropocene.
However, in the 1970s, Judy had to take a multi-decade break from creating her smoke sculptures because of increased regulation and lack of support. Even now, people can be a bit skeptical of her works, and if they’re safe and environmentally friendly. I asked Bill what the thought about the stakes of making smoke sculptures in a world where smoke is often perceived as a threat.
BF:
I’ve sat there and sat through a smoke event in that place. And Judy has for decades Constantly been concerned about the effect of smoke on people and been scrupulous about using only the kinds of materials that are harmless to almost everyone. There are obviously people with breathing problems that shouldn’t probably stand in the middle of a smoke event.
ML:
But Bill tells me that a smoke event put on by Judy emits about the same level as a campfire over the course of an evening.
BF:
In the West, of course, the smoke that comes to you comes Often heard of, see the Sierra Nevada, which is right outside my window here. So we’re very familiar with a phenomenon of fire and smoke. What interests me about smoke at that scale, which is horribly toxic, it’s really bad for you is how it manifests volume. And that’s how we as people mostly understand fire, natural fire, wildfire. You might see the flames in the distance and we do here. You can, it’s apparent and those things are flames are very large. And sometimes there are trees that are 100 ft tall that are going up like torches. But what we really see is smoke. And that’s what makes us react more strongly is that the smoke has made the atmosphere visible and it is big. And it catches your attention and it’s like, Whoa, okay. So we’re putting Judy’s work into context of wildfire. She’s not deliberately playing with that so much.
ML:
While we might instinctively associate smoke with fire, Judy helps to expand our understanding and relationship with smoke. Judy befriends the smoke, in a way, and uses it to her advantage. As Bill explains,
BF:
She’s created an allied kind of performance.
ML:
Similar to how artists and art are all located in an ecology together, affecting each other simultaneously, Judy’s work helps us to understand that that’s the human’s place in the world, too. Smoke causes us to actually notice the size of the buildings we look at every day, the immensity of the sky and the world around us, changing our perception of the world. Judy Chicago’s smoke pieces make the atmosphere, and thus our relationship to it, more visible.
BF:
And that’s the hair stands up in my head just as wow. And you really understand what she’s talking about. Yeah. It’s a way of an artist. Allowing us enabling us to experience the world in another way. She might not be reacting directly to wildfire or to natural fire, but their cousins in a way. And she helps us understand that.
PART 4: PREPARATION FOR SMOKY FUTURES
ML: As my conversation with Bill revealed, Chicago’s smoke sculptures have gained more recognition and support than ever within the last ten years and are perhaps more relevant than ever because of our current climate crisis.
Dave Peterson, the smoke scientist I talked to earlier, told me about how climate change is affecting our human relationship with smoke.
While smoke is a language that many of us can try to understand, scientists like Dave understand it a little differently than the average person. So I asked him about what he wants people to know about smoke in an era of unstable climate change. What does it mean for us to be increasingly exposed to smoky atmospheres?
DP:
I think the most important word here is prepare. And so if we are prepared to deal with how things are changing and will continue to change, then it becomes less scary. In a warmer climate, we certainly are expecting that the frequency and the extent of wildfires will increase over time.
And the main thing is that we’re going to have fire happening for a longer period of time, so it’ll be starting earlier in the year. Later in the year, we stretch out the fire season, if you will. We’ll have more days during the summer during what we would call high fire danger days when you could have fires, ignite, escape suppression attempts, and then become large fires. So we’re just amping it up over time. This won’t be necessarily something that happens gradually year to year. We’ll see a lot of variability over time as this occurs.
These things are highly variable depending on what the weather is in any given year. So I really try to encourage people not to think of any particular fire or any particular year being affected by climate change, but we need to look at this over a period of decades. But we, we certainly expecting more fires in the future.
ML:
And with more fires means, of course, more smoke.
DP:
It has to mean more smoke. So pretty clear relationship there. And the ones that are gonna make the biggest impact are the big fires. Now if we look at the fire data in any particular year, ninety-five percent of all the fires that start are put out within twenty-four hours. Excuse me, that’s should be 98.
ML:
98% of fires are put out—but the two percent are highly uncontrollable fires that are essentially impossible to put out. Those are inevitable events that we have to prepare for.
DP:
We don’t have to prepare for the average or the low end. We have to prepare for the rare but highly impactful extremes. And so that’s, it’s a different way of thinking about things ecologically, as well as I think socially and maybe even politically and economically. So that’s, and that includes not just the western U.S where most of the fires occur, but also in the eastern U.S as well.
ML:
Like Judy Chicago’s smoke sculptures, smoke quite literally changes the way we see the world, and as Dave explains here, we need to prepare for those changes that smoke will inevitably bring into our world.
DP:
And then the other part of that, of course, is as fires increase, there’ll be a greater probability that the smoke is gonna go into urban areas. We have big fires. In wilderness areas or big fires in Alaska, you don’t hear anything about it, right? The only time you see anything in a media, it gets near a city, or and so that, and that will happen more often in the future. And so I think the whole issue scientifically as well as politically and socially, we’ll continue to ramp up in future decades.
CONCLUSION
ML:
For a long time, to depict a woman smoking in art was perceived as vulgar and uncouth. In 17th century Dutch paintings, for example, smoking women were symbols of misfortune, meant to be avoided and spurned.
In the 19th century, smoking became more of a common practice for men and women, though women were still shunned from the practice and relegated to smoking in male-dominated spaces like bars and billiard rooms. Smoking, in other words, was one method of creating separation between men and women.
Think about that famous painting by Georges Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte”—you know, the one from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that Cameron stares at in the Art Institute of Chicago. One of my favorite movie scenes ever, by the way. If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s a couple in the right foreground of the painting, and the man very subtly holds out a cigar. It’s a small detail, but it shows how smoking was too often portrayed as a gendered practice. Men smoke, women don’t.
Contrast this historical context with the larger-than-life smoke pieces of Judy Chicago. Women’s bodies are enveloped in billowing, colorful, huge clouds of smoke, she surrounds bridges and buildings with it, makes butterflies out of fireworks, and enfolds desert landscapes and skies in an ethereal, smoky, and alien atmospheres.
Through her feminist, collaborative practice, Chicago subverts hundreds of years of excluding women from the medium of smoke, reclaiming it in the boldest, loudest way possible. She encourages us to blur the boundaries of reality and fantasy, to embrace bright colors and unpredictable shapes, and above all, to consider how our voices, like smoke, might be better listened to as we work to refashion a new world altogether.
