Odor

 

Clara Ursitti
Paul Vanouse
Sean Raspet
Peter de Cupere
Anicka Yi
Joseph Beuys
Oswaldo Maciá
Sissel Tolaas
Sands Murray-Wassink
Martynka Wawrzyniak
Brian Goeltzenleuchter
Koo Jeong A
Federico Díaz
Kristoffer Myskja
Wolfgang Georgsdorf
DSR
Lygia Clark

 

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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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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 Smell Memory Kit (2015)
With over 400 receptors in the nose, humans distinguish an estimated thousands, millions, or even up to a trillion scents, and scent memory. Scent memory also, for better or worse, lasts for what seems like forever. “Visual memory remains 30 percent after three months, smell memory remains 100 percent after one year,” says Berlin-based scent artist Sissel Tolaas. “Why not use that?”In the near future, we will. Tolaas, working with Vienna’s Supersense Lab, recently created the Smell Memory Kit, the first commercial product that takes “smell snapshots.” So now, along with posting a selfie on Instagram to commemorate that amazing vacation, you will be able to make memories with your nose. “The intention is to give that thing you want to remember—a wedding, a trip—a smell,” says Tolaas.The first 200 limited-edition kits, now available for sale at the online Supersense store, have 26 main categories, from Air, Business and City to XXL, Yes and Zoo. There are subcategories too; in total, 1,000 smells are in the kit’s archive. The starter pack ($109) includes a metal capsule and three sample smells in sealed ampoules—tiny glass vials.

 

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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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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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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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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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