Scent and Subversion (35 page)

Like an olfactory found-objects artist, Brosius reminds us that there is an enchanted forest of scents right under our noses. His love for the world’s scents is democratic: Floral accords and scents traditionally considered beautiful exist alongside scents that smell like dirt, bubble gum, paperback books, roast beef, an old fur coat (with its stale smells and hints of faded, vintage perfume), and even plastic doll heads. All of these and more are offerings at his CB I Hate Perfume scent gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The eccentric scents can be charmingly specific. Brosius doesn’t just have a scent that smells like mittens, for example, but rather,
wet
mittens. There are even two versions of the scent of gum: chewing gum and Bazooka bubble gum, the 1974 edition!

His scents are both fully realized perfumes—like the one he made to honor actor Alan Cumming—and what he calls “premium accords.” In evocative categories such as Archetype Series, Experience, and Secret History, they blend realism and a novel, explicitly autobiographical approach to perfume. Smelling his perfume Walking in the Air, for example, is to understand that one is smelling a particular person’s reconstruction of a memory, complete, as his website puts it, with “a Field of Untouched New Fallen Snow [one of his accords], handknit woolen mittens covered with frost, a hint of frozen forest and sleeping earth.” In Greenbriar 1968, he tells us, “This scent is a memory of my Grandfather, the sawmill that he owned and the stone house where he lived. It is blended with Sawdust, Fresh Cut Hay, Worn Leather Work Gloves, Pipe Tobacco and a healthy amount of Dirt. There is also a faint whiff of cotton overalls covered in Axle Grease …”

If the world as we know it were going to end, like the sci-fi Paris of Chris Marker’s short film,
La Jetée,
I hope that in our underground bunkers, someone will have a stash of CB I Hate Perfume’s scents to remind us of how our lost world once smelled.

What does a neighborhood, a city, or fear smell like? What does it mean that there are olfactory puns in the world—that a dirty foot can smell like fancy cheese; cat urine, like black currant buds; or body odor, like cumin? For Sissel Tolaas, beginning to ask Westerners who are obsessed with covering up body odors and often fearful of any smells at all to begin thinking about these questions could have personal and political ramifications we cannot foresee. Whether she’s gathering scents representative of cities, collecting the sweat of men with anxiety disorder, or taking bacteria from human sweat and turning it into cheese, Tolaas’s goal is to expand our awareness of smell—to understand how it communicates with us, and how we communicate with each other through smell. She also wants us to see the way in which smell can create prejudice or be a tool in helping us open up to each other.

But none of it can happen until we educate our noses and explore.

In the late 1980s, Sissel Tolaas, who was born in Norway and now lives and works in Berlin, became curious about smell. This polymath—trained in science, art, and languages—realized that not too many people were working in this realm, so she began to train her nose by going out into the world to gather anything she could that caught her fancy, preserving scraps of found objects in sealed, labeled cans for later study.

Among the items in her “smell archive,” which has surely exceeded the 7,000-plus number of objects last recorded in 2008, Tolaas has pieces of stinky dried fish, forty different varieties of stinky socks, and hundreds of samples of dog feces. Tolaas, in other words, takes the dictum that one should “stop and smell the roses” to a whole new level. If Christopher Brosius thinks that the world is already its own perfume, self-described “professional provocateur” Sissel Tolaas takes that one step further by refusing to require that something smells “good” for her to be interested in it. In the West, smell is thought of in aesthetic terms: It smells “good” or it smells “bad.” But Tolaas recognizes that in other cultures, scent is also communication and information, and her work seeks to reopen our connection to scent’s other dimensions and purposes.

Since 2004, Tolaas has worked with the commercial research institution International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), the biggest provider of smells and taste molecules in the world. In exchange for doing conceptual research for them, with clients including IKEA and Adidas, IFF finances her office in Berlin and her use of headspace technology, an expensive process whereby scent molecules are captured, analyzed, and stored for later analysis or to use as a blueprint for reproducing the scent.

Traditionally, headspace technology has been used in perfumery to capture scent molecules from flowers resistant to giving up their fragrance by traditional perfumery methods—like lily of the valley, gardenia, and certain orchids. It’s also allowed perfumers like Christopher Brosius to have a starting point for perfumes that smell like books and leather, scented objects whose smells could not be captured by other means.

Tolaas thinks that Westerners are “smell-blinded,” disconnected from our most intimate sense and encouraged to cover our own smells with deodorant and scented products. What her projects all have in common is to remove smell from its original context so that we might think about it without prejudice, or at least with the acknowledgment that we have a filter around what we smell and how we’re reacting to it. All of her noncommercial projects work toward this end, to expand our senses of smell in the hopes that we will create a better world and be more tolerant of one another. This might sound like a tall order for stinky socks, but you might rethink their power after reading some of her fascinating projects.

In 2006, MIT commissioned Tolaas to do a project with a new microencapsulation technology. At the time, there was still a discourse in the United States around terror, fear, and paranoia. She was curious about whether or not fear could be smelled by people, so she found a group of men around the world with panic disorder who agreed to collect their sweat during panic attacks and overnight the collection to her, so she could reproduce those scent molecules. The molecules were then microencapsulated into paint and applied to walls. One night in 2006, at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, an art gallery full of blank walls introduced Tolaas’s “The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR” exhibit.

For Tolaas, paint served as a metaphor for skin. When a visitor approached one part of the wall, touching it, it would break open the capsules, releasing the scent of one of the twelve panicky men. Some visitors, knowing what was in store for them, refused to enter the gallery, or refused to touch the walls. Others, released from the original context of the smell (a phobic man’s armpit!), were able to approach the scents with curiosity and wonder. One woman became enamored of Guy No. 9, whose sweat was particularly pungent, and was seen visiting his scent every day until the exhibit ended.

Although I didn’t attend this show, I was able to get a sense of its power through
mono.kultur’s
Issue No. 23, which used the same microencapsulation on its pages, reproducing the same twelve men’s sweat.
PLEASE RUB THE PAGE
, I was instructed, and I did. I, too, was strangely drawn to Guy No. 9, smelling in his reproduced sweat, so far from its origin and context, the scent of Germaine Cellier’s Bandit perfume from the 1940s. Fascinating that a woman’s perfume that drew its energies from bodily smells and a kind of masculine energy (bandits, pirates, and violent imagery) would be similar to the sweat of scared men seventy-something years later.

Sweat is of particular fascination to Tolaas, and if you think about it, sweat is our human perfume. Tolaas, in fact, has worn some of this panic sweat out to parties as if it were perfume just to see what jamming the olfactory lines of communication would do. Answer: People stepped away from her instinctively, whether because she smelled “bad,” or because her smell communicated fear, we can’t know. The closest she’s gotten to creating a line of perfume has been to discuss how interesting it would be to create a bespoke scent based on your own inimitable scent molecules as the base.

So much of culture is about its relationship to smells and cleanliness. “People manipulate their olfactory identity and surroundings to establish or to maintain their class identity—to fit in,” she observes. “With sweat, it’s the same—they’re difficult smells for a lot of people. If you see a person and smell his sweat up front, you back off. But if I position the same smell in an aesthetic displacement, you approach it differently: You come back and you’re fascinated!” Her work, she argues, is mainly about tolerance.

For the 2004 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, she and perfumer Geza Schoen created two maps of Berlin, one geographic and the other olfactory. They went to each corner of Berlin and gathered over 7,000 scents, and Schoen created scents that represented each one for east, west, south, and north, culminating in one final Berlin scent that blended them all together.

In a project she did with the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University called “Synthetic Aesthetics,” bacteria and microorganisms become metaphors for culture and community. In order to explore how differences often separate us from “other” cultures, she worked with scientists to cultivate cheese from human sweat. Many intense-smelling cheeses have similar bacterial components as those found in stinky feet and armpits, and by creating cheese whose smell was similar, the question becomes, What happens when differences between us collapse—when the way we separate things in the world begins to seem arbitrary? In this instance, it is similarity in smells that bridges the gap.

Ultimately, Sissel Tolaas’s project is to take the scent out of context so that we can reorient ourselves toward smell in an open way. There are evolutionary reasons, of course, why we don’t like the smell of decay or sulfur or excrement, but there are also ways of recognizing that many of our biases about scent are not only culturally determined, but also injurious to our relationships with others and with our own bodies, ultimately dampening our curiosity about the world.

NYC-based visual artist Martynka Wawrzyniak is no stranger to visceral experiences. For her video, “Chocolate,” the photographer and video performance artist endured having chocolate poured onto her face for nine minutes while submerged in a tub. In the ten-minute video, “Ketchup,” she’s the target of squirting ketchup bottles wielded by young boys. And in “Lipstick,” she and three friends smear lipstick over their faces in a grotesque parody of women’s beautification rituals.

Last year, the Warsaw-born Wawrzyniak decided to take that interest in visceral experiences a step further by creating a work that combined her interest in self-portraiture with her lifelong interest in smells. Like Christopher Brosius, Martynka Wawrzyniak hates perfume. None of the products she uses are scented, and she’s never worn perfume. Yet scent has always intrigued her—from the abject smells of strangers on buses in her childhood memories of Poland, to the warm smells of her lover’s body odor.

Over the space of a year, Wawrzyniak and a team of undergraduate chemistry students from Hunter College became benevolent versions of Patrick Süskind’s antihero Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
, who wanted to extract the scent of murdered girls for his macabre perfume. Under the aegis of chemistry professor Donna McGregor, they extracted essences from Wawrzyniak’s hair, sweat, and tears using perfumery techniques. Through a friend, she met some people from the perfume world who agreed to help her re-create those extracted bodily smells into scents. Scent director and self-described synesthete Dawn Goldworm of 12.29 (who worked on Lady Gaga’s recent fragrance, Fame) and award-winning Givaudan perfumer Yann Vasnier worked together to synthesize these essences into the four “perfumes” that would greet the visitor of Wawrzyniak’s installation: the smell of her hair, tears, night sweat, and Bikram yoga sweat.

In the installation entitled “Smell Me” at Envoy Enterprises on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which ran for one month in 2012, visitors were invited to walk into a specially constructed scent chamber that dispensed Wawrzyniak’s four “perfumes.” In place of a visual self-portrait, as the installation’s name spells out, there was an olfactory one. Outside of the scent chamber, visitors were invited to buy the actual extracted Wawrzyniak essences displayed in chemistry vials, essences she reminds me are parts of her body that contain her DNA. (These cost thousands of dollars.)

“I wanted to create a self-portrait that was completely stripped of the visual prejudice that we usually associate with judging a person,” Wawrzyniak has said, “or judging a woman specifically.” In place of the visual self-portrait, Wawrzyniak added a dimension that
has largely had no place in the art world: the sense of smell. She didn’t want the smell to be about perfume, but rather the body itself, stripped of all perfumes, “like becoming more naked than naked,” she told me. “I was a little nervous at first at how absolutely exposing this was … it’s the ultimate level of exposure, the next level of a nude portrait.”

In
Ways of Seeing
(1972), art critic John Berger says of the history of Western art that “according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but by no means have been overcome—men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” In
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
(1975), film theorist Laura Mulvey extends this critique by theorizing about gendered looking in cinema. In her enormously influential essay, she famously coined the term “the male gaze” to describe the way in which classical Hollywood cinema constructs its viewer—whether male or female—as a heterosexual male, by creating the female object on film as an erotic object to be visually objectified and consumed.

Although Wawrzyniak felt more exposed by revealing herself in a self-portrait through smell, “Smell Me” actually subverts centuries of the kinds of male/female power dynamics in the history of the visual arts described by Berger and Mulvey, and it subverts those dynamics in a couple of powerful ways. Unlike her other art pieces in which her body—and things that are done to it—are visually front and center, in “Smell Me,” Wawrzyniak removes herself as a visual object, subverting the dictum that “men act and women appear.” (Wawrzyniak is, of course, already challenging that dictum by acting or creating, that is—being an artist herself.) And because of the physiology of smell, it is the visitor to the scent chamber of “Smell Me” who becomes the object, in a sense, of Wawrzyniak’s odors, passively penetrated—with all of the sexual and political connotations that verb carries—by her olfactory self-portrait rather than a subject voyeuristically gazing upon her as an object. To echo perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, her scent “goes inside” the gallery visitor.