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Clara Ursitti Eau Claire (1993)
In 1993, the Italian-Canadian artist Clara Ursitti had the novel idea of creating an olfactory self-portrait. Instead of the visual supremacy used until then, Clara presented the unusual Eau Claire. A concoction of molecules combined in such a way that it mimics the artist’s body odor–vaginal secretions and menstrual fluids, specifically. Eau Claire is a precious piece, on its way to evaporation, so it’s not possible for visitors to smell the small drops of scented liquid inside. However, the minimalist look of it and the aura of the piece makes this moment seem solemn and unique.
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Paul Vanouse Labor (2019)
If you’re thinking that this exhibit will be a bunch of sweaty laborers standing around in a room, you’re wrong. It might smell that way, but the odors that you’re smelling will be “formed by bacteria procreating in three industrial fermenters in the middle of the Burchfield Art Center’s project space. Each fermenter incubates a unique species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweat: Staphylococcus epidermis, Coryne and Propionibacterium. As these bacteria digest simple sugars and fats, they create the distinct smells associated with human exertion, stress and anxiety. Their scents will combine in the central chamber in which a sweatshop icon, the white t-shirt, is infused as scents disseminate. This odor is expected to grow stronger throughout the exhibition.
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Camilla Nicklaus-Maurer olFACTORY (2021)
olFACTORY, an immersive multisensory experience by Camilla Nicklaus-Maurer, will be presented from March 25 to April 17 2021 at Olfactory Art Keller. It is Nicklaus-Maurer’s first solo exhibition in New York. A tribute to Andy Warhol’s conception of perfume as a way of taking up more space, olFACTORY takes up the gallery space as a smell that contrasts brash, cold, silver metal with soft, creamy, sweet banana. The smell’s metalic aspects are echoed by the tin foil that cover the gallery’s wall as they covered the walls of Warhol’s Silver Factory.
Visitors will experience olFACTORY alone or in small groups in the darkened gallery where their focus will be drawn to the smell and the low-light visual experience, experiencing an escape into a smell-filled cave in the heart of New York City. The experience will be complemented by the odor-induced associations and memories in the visitors. While Warhol’s “Permanent Smell Collection” remains unsmelled in the archives of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, olFACTORY unfolds the full power of the past as only olfactory art can.
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Sean Raspet Residuals (2014)
The show includes Micro-encapsulated Surface Coating, an installation, which invites the viewer to scratch and sniff a custom-made emulsion. The work starts with a process in which the air of Jessica Silverman Gallery is analyzed using a “SUMMA canister.” The stainless steel vessel initially contains a vacuum and collects air from the surrounding environment over the course of a week. Raspet then sends the accumulated air to a lab to determine its molecular composition and then creates a liquid mixture that is a many thousand-fold condensation of the chemical signature of the gallery’s air. The artist then sends this liquid to be “micro- encapsulated” into a “scratch-and-sniff” emulsion that is spray coated on the gallery’s surfaces. The background smell of most interior environments often comes from their construction and cleaning materials. This chemical signature corresponds to the gallery’s ambient scent profile, a kind of condensed olfactory background noise.
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Peter de Cupere The Paintbrush of Gustave Courbet (2014)
‘The Paintbrush of Gustave Courbet’ is a paintbrush made of pubic hair and as paint the scent of vagina. It’s a reference to L’Origine du Monde by Gustave Courbet.
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Anicka Yi You Can Call Me F (2015)
For ‘You Can Call Me F’ at The Kitchen, New York, this spring, Yi filled the space with the scent of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery – ‘the ultimate patriarchal-model network in the art world’. This mixed with the smell of another, less defined, less mobilized network: the women of the New York art world. To produce Grabbing At Newer Vegetables (2015), Yi and a synthetic biologist from MIT, Tal Danino, cultivated bacteria donated by one hundred female artists, collectors, dealers and curators on a bed of agar. The smell was bad and, unlike the smell of Gagosian, overpowering. It described the threat of a body that refuses to smell ‘clean’ and ‘pure’: to smell of nothing, like a gallery space, fresh air or clean water.
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Joseph Beuys Geruchsplastik (Odor Sculpture) (1978)
Glass canning jar with printed information, ethereal oils and clorophyl, height 33 cm. Signed and numbered 8/30 on a paper label on the lower margin.
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Oswaldo Maciá Ten Notes for a Human Symphony (2009)
In 2009 artist Oswaldo Maciá created Ten Notes for a Human Symphony, a smell sculpture presented at the II Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece. For the production of this work, Maciá collected the hair of people from across the world. The hair samples were then taken to a perfume lab in Paris, where they were analyzed using a technique known as Head-space. Based on the Head-space results, an expert perfumer interpreted the smell sample from each country, crafting ten singular scents. Ten Notes for a Human Symphony presents these scents on hanging curtains arranged in a circular composition. The scent is released through motorized atomizers on top of each curtain. The movement of the fabric, therefore, disperses the odors in what the artist calls a symphony of human smells.
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Sissel Tolaas RE_________ (2022)
For Norwegian-born Sissel Tolaas, smell is a vital yet often overlooked tool for communication, and one she has been exploring through her work for more than three decades. She has devoted her research-based artistic practice to the olfactory rather than the visual or the auditory, thereby appealing to a different type of sensory experience with her projects. As Tolaas has noted, “My nose is more advanced than my eyes.”
The exhibition RE_________, as in remember, reveal, revive, regrowth, etc., is the largest presentation to date of Tolaas’s work. It exemplifies the breadth of her complex yet highly direct and intuitive artistic practice. All of the works on display are site-specific, developed or reworked especially for this exhibition. The ICA’s architecture, its physical setting, and geographical context are all closely scrutinized, raising questions large and small in the process: What is change? What is hidden beneath the building’s surface? How do scared people smell? How do we capture a single breath? What smells characterize a nation?
Sissel Tolaas stops to smell a wall imbedded with the recorded and replicated sweat of anxious men.
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Sands Murray-Wassink It’s Still Materialistic, Even If It’s Liquid (From Me To You) (2013)
In 2013, Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art saw Sands Murray-Wassink in the nude, standing before a pair of glass cabinets packed with perfume bottles of varied sizes, designs, and vintages. He was performing his work It’s Still Materialistic, Even If It’s Liquid (From Me To You) (2013) at the invitation of artist-publisher-mystic AA Bronson as part of a sprawling exhibition of queer and feminist artworks Bronson had curated. Across his bare torso, the words “ACCEPT–ANCE ART” were painted in blue. Throughout the piece, Murray-Wassink offered perfume consultations to gallery passerby, fashioned like an empathic variation on the typical perfume counter clerk. As in much of Murray-Wassink’s work, this interactive performance was expressive of an emotional potential for connection. The artist considers this a form of sociality, “When I sniff with other people, be they salespeople or perfume friends, I find myself reveling in the fact of being human and sharing an open secret that we are all organic and ‘smelly’ as people. It is a bit abject, and also something I am thinking a lot about, because much of my work is blunt and gross and messy and not meant to be beautiful at all, and then there is this counterpoint of beauty in perfume. Because blinding floral beauty is usually what sweeps me off my feet.”
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Martynka Wawrzyniak Smell Me (2012)
Smell Me presented at a solo exhibition at envoy enterprises, consisted of a scent chamber and art object installation that derived from my year long investigation capturing my biological essence.
Working with a research team of Hunter College Chemistry students under the guidance of Professor Donna McGregor, I underwent multiple experiments to collect aromatic elements from my body. I was subject to rigorous sessions to extract the concentrated essence of my sweat, tears, and hair, in order to create an purely olfactory self-portrait that engages visitors in a visceral form of communication, without visuality as primary form.
In order to fully immerse the installation space with the scent of my bodily aromas, I collaborated with the re-known professional perfumer Yann Vasnier of Givaudan and scent director Dawn Goldworm of 12.29 on synthetically reconstituting the organic essences for diffusion. These aromas were released inside a specially designed scent chamber into which visitors could enter and partake in a solitary experience.
A selection of ten original organic essences were displayed in tear shaped chemistry vials, which rested in hand-blown glass stands. Three candles, made of paraffin that was scraped off my body and melted into 250 ml chemistry beakers, were also exhibited. As bottled performances of my biological functions, these art objects challenged the devaluation of the body and the cultural denial of complex, corporal communication.
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Brian Goeltzenleuchter Odophonics: A performance for scent and chamber ensemble (2016)
Odophonics, a performance for scent and musicians, is an ongoing collaboration between Sean Francis Conway and Brian Goeltzenleuchter. The performance is a jumping off point to explore Piesse’s Odophone to test new propositions about how one experiences smell, particularly in relation to sound. The musical component in Odophonics uses Minimalist structures such as consonant harmony, drones and polyrhythms to create gradual chord transformations. All the notes in this ambient soundscape can be found on Piesse’s scale. As the performers play the composition, Goeltzenleuchter releases the corresponding scent notes in time. Each scent is faithfully derived from Piesse’s scale. Together, the musical and olfactory harmonics gradually shift. Specific to the performance is the question: What relationships exist between concurrent perceptions of smell and sound?
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Irina Adam Scentless Apprentice: Kurt Cobain at MTV unplugged (2022)
An olfactory portrait of Kurt Cobain that captures the intangible (or is it the invisible?) that eludes photographs and videos of him. His essence has been reduced to mixtures of volatile molecules.
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Koo Jeong A Before the Rain (2011)
A visitor stepping into Koo Jeong A’s installation for the Dia Art Foundation at the Hispanic Society of America may be overwhelmed by an unexpected assault on the senses. Like a cedar closet, the almost empty gallery has its own distinct aroma, in this case an olfactory artwork, entitled Before the Rain, which is meant to capture the atmosphere of an Asian city on a steamy day. Over a three-month period, the Korean artist worked with perfumer Bruno Jovanovic of International Flavors & Fragrances, a leading company in the design of synthetic scents, who distilled her memories and impressions into an amalgam of smells—dry woods, minerals, fern, musk, tars, and lichens—to summon the sensation the artist remembered.
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Federico Diaz LacrimAu (2010)
LacrimAu directly reacts to the emotional state of individual visors. The testing room with a monumental sculpture in the shape of a human tear cast of pure gold serves as a basic interface. The shape of the reference point of the human tear has been selected due to a large scope of connotations in meaning with which it is wrapped up. On the basal level, the tear can represent the dichotomy of joy and sadness. The visitor himself sits in the glass cube and is equipped with EEG sensors registering his brain activity. Experienced emotions, provoked by hectic surroundings are intensified and concentrated through the reference point of the golden tear and through the data flow they become bio signals. Each signal frequency then has actual essence of various plants assigned. The test results then form a material state consisting of individually mixed fragrance. The smell as one of the primary human senses mediates the emotional recording of the moment and fixes it in the memory. Thus, it is much easier to recall the situation when smelling it again.
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Kristoffer Myskja Smoking Machine (2007)
The Norwegian artist Kristoffer Myskja creates complex kinetic sculptures that operate like a perpetuum mobile. With his Smoking Machine, we are presented with the absurd idea of a machine that smokes cigarettes and produces a fume that is thoroughly detrimental to health – human death.
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David Seth Moltz JESUS’ FEET (2022)
Alabaster jar of finest nard, Mary’s tears, house filled with anointed feet. Spikenard, holy rose, alabaster flesh.
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Wolfgang Georgsdorf Smeller 2.0 (2012)
SMELLER is a genuine organ, an olfactokinetic art device for composing, producing, interpreting, programming, recording, storing and playing back compositions made up of scents and scent chords. With the scent organ, thousands of scents can be played in place of music notes. They exude pure music for the nose, abstract or narrative, besides offering further possibilities to combine scents and commingle them with sound, image, film, theater or dance.
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Hannah Marie Marcus August 23, 1970 (2022)
It’s the last recording of Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground; he quit the band after one of the Max’s shows. Max’s was a steakhouse and performance space on Park Avenue South that became a magnet for New York seventies glam. The recording was made on a tabletop cassette deck by Warhol Factory regular Brigid Berlin, and lots of tidbits of stray conversation can be heard above the music. There’s a tension between the in-crowd casual chatter and the performance of the songs, played with a glimmer of defeat to a small audience that was barely listening.
The scent project started out as an archaeological dig into that summer night, but became more of a tribute to Lou Reed himself, who drew his inspiration from the oozing palimpsest of New York – a city that still peels away from itself relentlessly. You’ve gotta take both boots, the salt and the pepper.
The left boot scent is an accord of fresh pickles and black pepper, overheated vacuum tubes, a trampled mylar balloon, something you can’t quite place – and honeysuckle.
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DSR Scent Card Dispenser (2013)
DSR’s installation for “The Art of the Scent” embraces the ephemeral purity of olfactory art itself. Their minimalist exhibition is, like any good minimalist work, more complex than it first appears. The architects lined three walls of the nearly empty gallery space with a row of gently sloping, almost organic “dimples.” Each identical dimple is a card dispenser that shoots out a card as a visitor approaches. When the card is withdrawn its holder is met with an automatic burst of fragrance released by a hidden diffusion machine. I was told the burst doesn’t represent the scents’ “top notes” as one might expect, but more closely resembles the lingering trail of each commercial fragrance—as if a woman had recently walked through the room wearing the perfume. The scent hovers in the air for a few seconds then disappears completely. And no one has to worry about leaving the exhibition smelling like a perfume sample sale because every exhibited fragrance has been specially modified to resist sticking on skin or clothes. The ephemerality of perfume is reinforced by the illuminated wall texts explaining each scent, which periodically disappear completely, leaving the gallery devoid of anything but pure olfactory art.
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Lygia Clark Máscaras Sensoriais (1967 – 1968)
Clark’s Máscaras Sensoriais [Sensory Masks], enveloped participants’ heads in sculptural hoods. Tucked into the hood’s folds were sachets of varied textures and aromas (lavender, cloves, a salty seaside odor). Combined with a disorienting reduction of visual stimuli, these sachets would spur participants’ disengagement with their visual surroundings in favor of a rediscovery of bodily experience and an immersive inner world.
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p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Ah, thanks, George. Means a lot. Cool about NYC. Let me just get that completely nailed down and concrete, and I’ll tell you more. xo. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, pal. Yes, the film festival in Hof, Germany is next in a couple of weeks. Then Ghent. Then a bunch of others. It’s going to be a busy next while. Love is taking his sweet time on the jetlag cure, but I’m used to it by now. Love stinking up the place, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. I don’t the know the Burns. I’ll take your cue. ‘Happy Like Murderers’ is a bit of an irresistible title. ** Carsten, Indeed about Ken Jacobs. And you knew him at least a little. The early generation of experimental film pioneers are almost completely gone now. It’s so sad. I liked your poem a lot, of course. Very rich, my man. ‘One Battle After Another’ is the film assignment for my next biweekly book/film Zoom club this weekend, so I’ll be taking a long gender at it in the next few days. I’m definitely expecting overrated. Hopefully not as overrated as ‘Oppenheimer’. ** Steeqhen, Strangely there don’t seem to be a lot of recreations of Grand Guignol. Knowledgeable people say that’s because the originals were pretty silly. Yeah, I mean, if you’re excited, write it. The world is full of potential venues. The world is in the most terrible phase I’ve ever seen in my life. Or parts of it, I guess I mean. All the more reason to make things so people have places to escape to or hide or suggestive ways forward. ** Steve, Me too, thanks. It’s still hanging around du jour. Nice about your cousin not to mention the Mexican food. Maybe I’ll wait for your next show to sample Romeo Poirier then. No surprise about the Guadagnino film. That guy has yet to do anything to deserve his rep IMO. ** Dev, Cool, all the external luck you need for the exam. Pensées Nocturnes … I don’t think I know them. On it. Thanks, D. ** Hugo, The lack of an LA Halloween is very sad indeed, but hey. It seems plausible at least that Krasznahorkai or Pynchon could win. Doubt it, though. Oh my god: your friend. I’m so sorry. ** darbz 🐻, Hey ho. Amazing that you’re close to finishing your book. I’m hardly a typical reader, but my favorite books and art and film and so on always confuse me in some way. When they don’t, I tend to get bored. So … onwards! Everything you say sounds exciting to me. I hope the interview today goes splendidly. Did it? Yeah, you should probably go to the zine event, no? Sounds fruitful, and you can always leave if it isn’t, right? No, I’m still too exhausted and fuzzy for your playlist. I need to get just a little more together so it can help me back to my reality. The locks look totally great on you! What a cool picture. Nice, my pal. ** David, Hi! Yes, for sure you can, and thank you. Let’s see … I guess email it to me? dennicooper72@outlook.com. Look forward to it. ** Malik, Hi, Malik! It was so good meeting you too! I’ so happy the film is staying with you. Yeah, when that person asked about Grand Guignol, the only thing I could thinks was that I had a GG post on the launching pad. Thanks about my jetlag. I’ll use your support to try to wrestle it to the ground or wherever. What’s going on this week for you? ** Eric C., Hi, Eric. I was just telling Carsten I’m going to see ‘OBAA’ in the next couple of days because it’s an assignment for a Zoom club thing I participate in. I’ll pass along my thoughts. Riki: I’ll look for her stuff. I do have a fondness for throwback synthpop. I feel like I should be embarrassed by that, but I’m not. And I’ll definitely get the Patriarchy album. I think I know of them at least. Thanks a lot! ** /harper/, Montmartre was a wild place back then. Still is, relatively speaking, but now it’s just kind of trashy = wild. I used to have no social media on my phone, but then I had to put Instagram on there because it’s friendlier to phones than laptops for certain functions, and I’m already regretting it and scrolling at every boring moment’s notice. Let’s make a vow that we’re both going to have at least somewhat acceptable Halloweens whatever it takes. ** Uday, Thanks. Dude, no matter what your premonition indicates, do not go within a million miles of becoming a junkie or even flirting with said state. Trust me. ** Nicholas., Hi. No, I’m just differently zonked out and bewildered today. I’ll take differently, but being normally awake is still in the offing. Your ideal date literally sounds ideal. I need to be more awake to help you, but give me a day or three. Dinner tonight? Probably just pasta again, the semi-usual. I could get ambitious, I suppose. Maybe I will. More coffee. ** Stil, My last flight situation was so dire that I ended up watching four episodes of some reality TV series called ‘Jungle Dads’. The premise is that they take some dad and a kid they have a bad relationship with into the jungle in Belize and make them eat insects and scale treacherous cliffs and build rafts out of palm leaves and stuff, which is supposed to bring them closer together. And, if you believe the editing techniques of that show, it works! Cool that you’re into the film project. We always storyboard our films. It weirdly really helps. Thanks for the link. I’ll watch that film. It sounds tasty. Big (whatever that entails) day to you. ** Okay. What’s today … oh, right, some smelly art that you can’t actually smell. Sorry about that. See you tomorrow.
In 1897, the French playwright Oscar Metenier, bought a theater at the end of the impasse Chaptal, a cul-de-sac in Paris’ Pigalle district, in which to produce his controversial naturalist plays. The smallest theater in Paris, it was also the most atypical. Two large angels hung above the orchestra and the theater’s neogothic wood paneling; and the boxes, with their iron railings, looked like confessionals (the building had, in fact, once been a chapel). Metenier was himself a frequent target of censorship for having the audacity to depict a milieu which had never before appeared on stage — that of vagrants, street kids, prostitutes, criminals, and “apaches,” as street loafers and con artists were called at the time — and moreover for allowing those characters to express themselves in their own language. One of the Grand-Guignol’s first plays, 
Metenier was succeeded as director in 1898 by Max Maurey, who, from 1898 to 1914, turned the Theatre du Grand-Guignol into a house of horror. He measured the success of a play by the number of people who fainted during its performance, and, to attract publicity, hired a house doctor to treat the more fainthearted spectators. It was also Maurey who discovered the novelist and playwright Andre de Lorde–“the Prince of Terror.” Under the influence of de Lorde (who collaborated on several plays with his therapist, the experimental psychologist Alfred Binet), insanity became the Grand-Guignolesque theme par excellence. At a time when insanity was just beginning to be scientifically studied, the Grand-Guignol repertoire explored countless manias and ‘special tastes’: 
Fear of ‘the other’ appeared at the Grand-Guignol in countless variations: fear of the proletariat, fear of the unknown, fear of the foreign, fear of contagion (for all the blood spilled, sperm ejaculated, and sweat dripped there, the Grand-Guignol had to feel some degree of nostalgia for cleanliness). The heroes of 
Under the direction of Camille Choisy, who directed the theater from 1914 to 1930, staging overtook text. Once he even bought a fully equipped operating room as a pretext for a new play. In 1917, he hired the actress Paula Maxa, who soon became known as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal.” During her career at the Grand-Guignol, Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was subjected to a range of tortures unique in theatrical history: she was shot with a rifle and with a revolver, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses, kissed by a leper, and subjected to a very unusual metamorphosis, which was described by one theater critic: “Two hundred nights in a row, she simply decomposed on stage in front of an audience which wouldn’t have exchanged its seats for all the gold in the Americas. The operation lasted a good two minutes during which the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”
If the Grand-Guignol was a popular theater in both meanings of the word — it was frequented by neighborhood locals as well as the higher-brow audience of the Comedie Francaise — it was not a public affair. Going to the Grand-Guignol was less a social act than a private one and certain audience members preferred not to be seen. Some witnesses reported that the iron-grilled boxes in the back of the theater encouraged a certain ‘extremism.’ The cleaning staff would often find the seats stained. With the arrival of Jack Jouvin, who directed the theater from 1930 to 1937, the repertoire shifted from gore to psychological drama. Wanting to have complete control over the theater, Jouvin ousted Maxa, who, in his opinion, was stealing the spotlight. Jouvin’s lack of talent and his personal ambition triggered the eventual downfall of the Grand-Guignol. Birth, evolution, death: the genre sowed the seed of its own decline when it began to parody itself. The abundance of terrifying elements in the later plays became so overwhelming that they were no longer believable.
By the Second World War, the theater was beginning to vacillate, carried away by its own excess. The war dealt it its final death blow. Reality overtook fiction, and attendance at post-war performances dwindled. In the spring of 1958, Anais Nin commented on its decline in her diary: “I surrendered myself to the Grand-Guignol, to its venerable filth which used to cause such shivers of horror, which used to petrify us with terror. All our nightmares of sadism and perversion were played out on that stage. . . . The theater was empty.” In an interview conducted immediately after the Grand-Guignol closed in 1962, Charles Nonon, its last director, explained: “We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things — and worse — are possible.”
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