“The Esthetics of Smelly Art”, 2007-08-06 (; similar):
The remarkable increase in the number of artworks that foreground scents and odors during recent years suggests the need for an assessment of the esthetic and artistic possibilities of smell. Because there has been so little olfactory art in the past, it is hardly surprising that this area has been largely neglected by philosophical esthetics.
This essay is intended as a survey of theoretical issues raised by olfactory art and as a defense of its practice against traditional skepticism about the esthetic and artistic relevance of scents. Although the complexity of some of the individual issues would be worthy of an entire article, we have chosen to offer an overview in the hope of attracting other philosophers, as well as critics and curators, to consider this fascinating new area for reflection. As interesting as it would be to explore the esthetic aspects of the everyday experience of smells or the use of odors in cultural ceremonies such as Japanese Kodo or even the use of odors to accompany plays and films, we focus on contemporary olfactory art meant to be presented in galleries, museums, or as public installations/performances.2
Because much of this art may be unfamiliar, we begin with several examples of artworks based on odors. Then we examine some traditional objections to smell as a legitimate object of esthetic attention, and finally, we discuss the art status of olfactory artworks, closing with the complex issue of whether or in what sense perfume is art.
…An artist who has made impressive use of natural scents to create olfactory environments intended to transport the audience into a different world is the Brazilian fabric sculptor, Ernesto Neto, who once packed long, diagonal legs of women’s sheer nylon stockings with the scents of spices such as cloves, cumin, and turmeric as part of the exhibition Wonderland at the St. Louis Art Museum in 2000. Some of the stockings stretched from floor to ceiling, others simply lay on the floor like sacks of colored powders. These nettings spread their scents throughout the museum space, creating a dreamy atmosphere that varied for each visitor depending on his or her associations with the odors.
…Other artists use scents in a more confrontational way, often to illustrate political or social ideas. In the project Actual Odor, the artist Angela Ellsworth wore a jersey cocktail dress soaked in her own urine for the duration of the opening reception for the Token City installation (a subway simulation) by artist Muriel Magenta at the Arizona State University Art Museum (199727ya). Ellsworth wanted to demonstrate how smell destroys any social boundaries existent in a subway, as it permeates the space and transcends visual barriers or experiences. While wearing the smelly dress, the artist was fanning herself and spreading the odor with a hand fan, one side of which was lettered with the word ‘actual’ and the other side with the word ‘odor.’ Ellsworth mingled with other museum visitors and for continuous periods of time sat in the projection space of Token City. Most of the visitors could smell the unpleasant odor, yet did not associate the nicely dressed woman with the smell, nor could they find the source of the scent. Ellsworth’s work can be grouped with a number of artists who have created site-specific installations involving smells or have taken their performance into the streets.
…One of the most prolific olfactory artists today is the Belgian, Peter de Cupere, whose scent sculptures, scent installations, perfumes, and olfactory performances seek to engage audiences through all the senses, but primarily through scent. Among his scent sculptures is Earthcar (200222ya), a small car covered with earth and fake green plants, emitting the smells of thyme, anise, pine, olive, and grape. Installations have included Blue Skies (199925ya) consisting of a blue-painted room with a thousand yards of fishnet and dried fish along with synthetic fish and coconut smells. A work even more focused on odors was his Black Beauty Smell Happening (199925ya), which teased gallery visitors with a perfume he called “Black Beauty.” During the exhibition, attractive male and female models dressed in black cat suits with cutout patches mingled with the audiences. De Cupere sprayed his perfume, that itself left black traces, on the bare skin showing through the cutouts. For spectators to smell the perfume, they needed to draw their noses close to the “smell zones.”
…Our last example is a work by Helgard Haug, a young performance artist who won a prize in support of a public art piece at the subway station Berlin Alexanderplatz, once the social center of East Berlin. Haug commissioned a distillation of the scents of Berlin Alexanderplatz and put it into little souvenir glass vials that were dispensed in the station during the year 2000. The artist collaborated with Karl-Heinz Burk, a professional from the industrial aroma-producing factory H&R in Braunschweig, to produce her U-deur. The perfumer designed the scent based on his own perception of the station without chemical analysis. U-deur included the smell of bread as one of the primary odors (because there was once a bakery stand in the subway) along with the smells of cleaning agents, oil, and electricity. The public response to the project was extraordinary. People wrote that the little sniff-bottle brought to mind memories and associations with the smells of a divided Berlin, for instance, the “dead” stations that West Berlin subway trains went through after passing the Wall, as well as thoughts about the Stasi archive with its items saturated with the body odor of East German criminals and dissidents.8
Other olfactory artists have done installations evoking the smell of places, such as Sissel Tolaas’s simulation of the odors of Paris, including among other things, the scents of dog droppings, ashtrays, and a slaughterhouse.9
…Although most olfactory artists work with natural odors, the invention of the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer, which together can chart the hundreds of chemical components of any odor, has meant that artists can either use the GC/MS themselves or hire a perfumer or chemist to analyze and reproduce or reshape an existing smell in concentrate.
One artist who has taken the latter route is Clara Ursitti, whose electronically dispensed Eau Claire was based on her own body odor and was released when gallery visitors closed the door of a special booth containing it.42 In another work, Bill, the reconstituted scent was dispensed from a small burner in the center of an empty room.
The lack of ancillary media make these two works more or less “pure” olfactory art, but like most installations and performances, or even painting and sculpture these days, Ursitti’s works were accompanied by an “artist’s statement” that explained her interest in exploring people’s reactions to scents, and noting, in the case of Eau Claire, that the scent was vaginal, and in the case of Bill, that it was sperm (one should add that Bill was first presented during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair). Thus, both these works required the artist’s statement in order to be understood and interpreted. Without the artist’s statement, many gallery visitors may not have been able to identify even the type of smells offered and mistaken it for a weird perfume.43
View PDF: