point to the First World War, the same one made at the time by the brothers André and Édouard Michelin, the shift from tyres and cars to airplanes. Wilbur Wright won the first Michelin Cup after he broke the record for long-distance flight without stops. Greatly simplifying the story, the grenade storms endured by the soldiers was the price of that future floating in the air. In August 22, 1911, these brothers advertised a projectile launching contest sponsored by them; they wanted to verify the possibilities of the military airplane as a “terrible engine of war: can it make the bridges and the railroad junctions impassable, cut the mobilisation of a nation in two, annihilate a fortress, blow up a battleship, destroy the arsenals, the supply centres and powder kegs of the enemy and render his canons and rifles useless”2. In this context, smoke and explosions are signs of victory. To promote the award, the Michelin brothers published a set of postcards where Bibendum — the company symbol, a manlike character made from tyres — executes all the possibilities listed above and smokes a cigar while performing some of these feats. The smoke blows in more smoke and always accompanies the action. The war did nothing but open the door to a process of metamorphosis, relays and new synecdoches in regard to smoke that had only been announced in the previous century. For example, the energy sources and in particular the electrification of the media. The equation that Lenin had envisioned to victoriously achieve the revolution in a country as extensive as Russia was based on the sum of electricity with the implementation of Fordism. By way of a hinge or epiphany, in 1933 Ernst Jünger published the book “The Transformed World. A Picture Album of our time”. The chapters’ titles surpass eloquence and prove the strength enclosed in an illustrated book of these characteristics, leaning on the power of photography as a politic and propagandistic instrument. The chapter entitled “The Economy” includes an aerial view of an industrial plant with chimneys expelling long and dense columns of smoke with the following caption: “Old-fashioned industrial landscape”; and the heading “Organised work represents the attempt to shape life in a new and constructive way” accompanies it with a photograph of an annular housing development in Leipzig3. A few pages ahead, captioning photographs taken in Soviet scenarios (tanks, tractors, the trial of labour saboteurs), one reads: “Work as a war effort”.
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From here, the messages, faces and smoke are accelerated. “The electrification is the foundation of the new economy based on energy. The normalization and specialization of the work process has found its most significant expression in the concept of mass production”. Evidently there is a picture of a car assembly line at the Ford factory in Detroit. The following image is entitled “The aroma of the offering”, where Benito Mussolini is seen at the Altare della Patria “burning receipts worth more than 147 million lire given to the State by the Italian people”. Sacred smoke of paper money in the sacrificial pyre … This sequence of images compiled and ordered by Jünger constitutes the most reliable visual atlas of a new world order that is revealed — as the author recognises — in a multitude of signs that are enunciated with the slogans “The physiognomy of the streets acquires a warlike nature” or “Revolutions all over the world”4. Revolution, war. Different manifestations of smoke move indifferently from modes of transport to the streets or factories. The chapter entitled “Nationalism” includes a photograph that shows a crowd swimming in a lake or urban pool; the background shows a factory skyline with eight smoky chimneys. “A town without space”. There is barely any distance (compositional, formal or conceptual) or a conquered space by the people between that photo and the series by Boris Mikhailov entitled Salt Lake (1986). Smoke occupies its place as an intrinsic component of the working class’ identity landscape. In short, the lesson in Jünger’s book is that lingering smoke comes from riots. Paradoxically, its publication coincides with the rise to power of the National Socialism in Germany and also with the creation of the smoke machine for strategic-military purposes and for musical shows. “Smoke gets in your eyes” is a song composed in 1933 for the musical Roberta by Jerome Kern and with lyrics by Otto Harbach. Since then, it has been adapted and recorded multiple times. Following the lyrics, smoke appears in the eyes as the result of the internal combustion process of a burning heart. Fire, ergo smoke, where the eye sockets behave like the body’s chimneys. The following year, Harold Arlen composed “Ill Wind”, with music by Ted Koehler, for Adelaide Hall and her show at the Cotton Club. Hall sang this song full of wind letting herself fly on a stage flooded with “fake smoke”: it was the first time that a nitrogen smoke machine was used in a musical show in order
Sonja Brass. Blizzard.The quiet of dissolution, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
2. Antoine Campeaux, “Bebendum et les débuts de l´aviation (1908-1914)”, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, Presses Universitaries de France, 2003/1 (n° 209), p. 32. 3. Ernst Jünger, The Transformed World, followed by On Danger. Edition by Nicolás Sánchez Dura, Madrid, Pre-Textos, 2005, pp.230-231. 4. Ernst Jünger, Opus. cit., p. 218 and p. 222.