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The Image Business: Shop and
Cigar Store Figures in America Museum of American
Folk Art November 8, 1997 - January 11, 1998
By Alan Moore
“There is no document of
civilization which is not at the same time a
document of barbarism.”
Walter Benjamin,
“Theses on the Philosophy of History”
In its title, “The Image
Business,” the recent exhibition of shop and cigar
store figures at the Museum of American Folk Art
in New York evoked a continuity between these
advertising devices of the 19th century city and
the publicity methods of contemporary media
society. These figures first became popular as
antiques during the 1920s, when industrial culture
switched emphases and began to become consumer
culture, and advertising began the social
discipline of desire in earnest using the methods
of social psychology. Curator Ralph Sessions’
title flatters contemporary viewers that they are
`wise’ to the functions of advertising. As
well-schooled and canny participants in a
full-blown consumer culture, this exhibition
invites us to witness a kind of origin story, the
personalized beginnings of modern commercial
representation as embodied in these figures which
once stood in front of shop doors.
Trade figures, as they are
called, were carved for urban businesses by
artisans, many of whom had also carved figureheads
for sailing ships. The figures are conceived in a
vernacular tradition which parallels in wood the
works in marble of European academic sculpture.
The noble bearing, the grandeur of some of these
figures signals the aspirations of their makers to
emulate high art. This comportment and the
strategic nudity of mid-century figures like Chief
Blackhawk (ca. 1848-1855) recalls the Greco-Roman
lineage of the noble savage. This classicized
cigar store Indian might have worked uptown, as a
bright polychromed participant in the dramatis
personae of the beaux arts city, a different
figure, the warm painted wood of commerce ever
contingent among the cold white marble corps of
architectural decorations signifying enduring
civic virtues.
The exhibition traces the lineage
of these figures, which evolved in part from 18th
century personifications of continents and
colonies bearing their trade goods as attributes
of the New World’s “gifts” to the Old. Today these
figures from the era before modern brand
identities signify the bulk commodity, its growth,
its transport, its historical origin. Since the
figures fronting shops were often carved by the
same artisans whose figureheads fronted ships,
they have also come to seem the very embodiments
of pre-industrial enterprise: emblems of transport
and retail, the effigy attendants of 19th century
getting and spending.
The figures were not
product-identified in the sense of modern brand
identities, rather they were place-identified. As
residents of commercial enterprises, they gave a
kind of constancy to the changing cityscape, or a
claim to constancy that borrowed authority from
the claim to eternality of the beaux art
sculpture. These figures bespeak an era of sacral
advertising; as a vernacular tradition parallel to
high cultural traditions of sculpture, they
devolve in part from the cult figures of
antiquity, standing up everywhere to signify the
power of deities in cultic places. Together with
the neo-classical nudes signifying values and
qualities, these minor wooden deities of commerce
cast their aegis over the city-scape of shops and
clubs, saloons, theaters, and places of public
exhibition, the spectacular culture of advertising
display built on the recreated ruins of ancient
cultic practice.
Like the figures of antiquity,
chief among the mysteries that gather around these
trade figures are the behaviors they signify. They
are relics of earlier systems of consumption,
principally, of course, intoxicants like tobacco
and liquor. The figures embody somehow a pretext,
an explanation. They usher the consumer into an
experience and a social environment connected with
the use of the sot-weed and the grape.
Unlike the introverted carefully
cultivated field of hyper-self-consciousness
underlying the rationalized 20th century
consumption, the 19th century rituals of an
extrovert consumption were disciplined by
morality. Among the forest of figures in the 19th
century city these of commerce were sirens of
pleasure, street voices amidst a chorus now
stilled, both admonishing and alluring, mixing
with memory shards of Bible, classic texts, and
sermons. I imagine these figures on every street
corner, standing for a circuit of consumption,
standing for inebriation, and the social valences
of tobacco use, its boldness, elegance,
emancipation, contentment. The Indian is a guide
for the smoker who embraces an addiction of the
lively, the man found with others in the saloon,
the pool hall, the barber shop, theater and
clubroom, the social spots men gathered. These
figures of fun stood mute before the tobacco shop,
outside the saloon, that the drunken might
converse with them after leaving the banquet. . .
A principal problem that this
exhibition confronted, both in its installation
and at a museum symposium, was that most of these
ushers of inebriate experience are stereotypes.
Many are racial caricatures, most notoriously the
cigar store Indian warrior, the tobacco counter
blackamoor, the tea shop Chinaman, and the
bare-breasted Indian maid, Pocahontas, the brown
body offered to the white conqueror, present as
symbol of America since the continent’s discovery
as Rayna Green (Smithsonian Institution) pointed
out at the museum symposium. Africans and Indians
were initially united in bondage as plantation
labor. So the shop figures were really literal:
they depict the subject peoples who worked
conquered lands to bring forth the New World’s
“gifts.” As well as commemorating labor, the
Indians are also classic capitalist totems of the
great socio-economic reversal colonialism entails;
an image purporting to represent the spirit of the
gift is appropriated to an iconography of
money-based commerce.
These figures, said Richard Long
(Emory University), are “overwhelmingly the
creation of white entrepreneurs.” “Buying into
these figures,” said John Kuo Wei Tchen (New York
University), was part of the Americanization
process for new European immigrants. Just so does
subscribing to racist attitudes `construct
whiteness’; this “constitution of the self by
consumption of the Other” as Tchen put it, remains
at the heart of advertising psychology. Today
these figures pop out, stick up, and bespeak a
commercial culture founded on stereotypes. They
remind us that white American solidarity, the
melding of ethnicities and nationalities into the
uniform category “American,” was achieved through
leverage both social and economic against people
of color. These shop figures worked within a
structure of functional bigotry inscribed within
consumer culture; they are part of the technic,
the visual culture of racism, the foul oil that
lubricates the American social order.
Richard Long briefly recounted
the caricatural tradition that began on the stage
with the minstrel show, then was reproduced in
visual images on sheet music for performance in
the home. Minstrelsy, this “paradoxical form of
entertainment,” began before the Civil War as
whites imitating blacks, and finished (on the
stage) early in this century as blacks imitating
whites imitating blacks. In fact it continued and
continues, both explicit and subducted in the
comedy of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, in the
singing of Mick Jagger and Janis Joplin.
The continual regard of
difference, linked to music, theater, and
consumption of intoxicants, is essential to the
constitution of American culture. The trade
figures offer muted evidence of how this regard
worked in American business. It was surely
opportunistic, seizing upon incidents of the
moment, trading on news, fads, magazines, and
popular shows. The spectacle of commerce borrowed
from the stage, from the circuit of official
imagery, from whatever image system was out there
working, to make a shop sign that would move those
cigars. The process of figuring out a shop carving
was of a piece with the same alchemy of
advertising that surrounds the selection of the
ideal manniken today. These enjoyers, the human
image of “beauty-in-surroundings” that sells
today’s restaurant, hotel, or gated community,
that images peace and contentment as outward
prettiness, is our surrogate “shop figure.” Rarely
today is caricature used, based upon the
particular, the image determined to be itself.
Urban life is no longer a novelty, its grit and
grotesquerie no commercial enticement. We are very
significantly removed from understanding of what
19th century urban consumers found, in the very
19th century words of museum director Gerard
Wertkin, “appropriately exciting” in a shop figure
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