Exile, from The World's Racers series (N32) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes 1888

Curator: Let’s take a look at “Exile, from The World's Racers series (N32) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes,” dating to 1888. This little piece of ephemera, currently held at the Met, is a coloured-pencil drawing and print meant to be included in packs of cigarettes. It seems… utilitarian. Editor: There's a strange energy to this. "Exile," the name beneath the horse, makes me imagine this creature, radiant and muscled, escaping something awful… or being forced to carry someone escaping! Is it me, or can you almost feel the leather reins digging into the horse's mouth? Curator: The prints were, in effect, advertisements—meant to create demand and aspiration. Each card offered visual, sometimes exotic, capital for the collector and consumer. Editor: You say exotic—the horse looks American, to me! Sure, it is like, the height of equine aesthetic refinement, but it also makes me think of the hard-ridden horses out West and grueling races. A pure conjecture— Curator: Yes, I agree it’s conjecture! Still, we can see a narrative of aspiration through material culture—cheap, mass produced, but vividly coloured—offering stories of glory and speed to those who maybe never knew either. Notice also the artist’s impressionist rendering of landscape to suggest vast space and depth for the subjects! Editor: Right—they didn't just pop these images onto cheap cardboard, and what are effectively cigarette inserts, to be entirely basic and bland! I like the visual suggestion that we're both seeing everything so vividly in these images and… also maybe succumbing to a marketing illusion? Clever trick if so, huh? Curator: I think both are operating at the same time here. Material realities don't preclude our imaginations and fantasies—the horse, and its imagined escape from the world it inhabits for even an idle collector, speaks to this tension beautifully. Editor: In its way, then, an image for our dreams, anxieties and everyday fleeting realities as well as that simple nicotine craving. Not a bad piece, overall. Curator: Quite. Art that does work…even small art used to encourage larger economic activity, speaks powerfully.