Olfactory Art: Coffee, Pollution, Extinct Flowers and Memories
Photography by Saskia Wilson-Brown for The Institute for Art and Olfaction
The audio-visual has taken center stage in the history of art, but throughout the years, there have been sparks of exploring with the other senses. Olfactory art is a movement that wants to experiment with the sense of smell, playing with our personal and incommunicable experiences of odors.
Marcel Duchamp was probably one of the first to experiment with smells. During the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition he organized, he an electric brazier placed behind a screen to roast coffee throughout the event, filling the halls and engulfing the visitors with the “smell of Brazil”.
Scents have been incorporated in installations, such as Edward Kienholz’s The Beanery (1965), on display at the Stedelijk Museum. The art piece is the reproduction of the artist’s local bar, including its sound and odors: the art piece smells of cigarette ash, beer, urine, and fatty food. Peter De Cupere is another artist who integrates smells in his installations, wanting to force visitors to react to the art. He explains that when faced with a tough, disagreeable odor, it is impossible to stop the body from reacting. Among other installations, he built a cloud filled with the scents of air pollution, a bathroom fully covered in toothpaste, and a room made of 750’000 cigarette buds. For the 57th Venice Biennial, the artist worked with Spazio Thetis Gardens to manipulate some flowers into emitting small dashes of smoke – nature taking its revenge on humans for pollution.
Peter de Cupere, Smoke Cloud, part of the exhibition “The Importance of Being” at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Buenos Aires (2015).
Olfactory works by Japanese artist Takako Saito are smaller in scale. In Spice Chess (1965), the chess pieces are replaced by little wooden boxes containing spices, while in Smell Chess (1965) each figurine is represented by a vial containing different perfumed liquids. Activist and artist Lisa Kirk on the other hand wanted to capture the smell of revolution. The art piece Revolution Pipe Bomb (2008) wanted to evoke the scents of tear gas, blood, urine, smoke, and burning rubber, which were reproduced by a mixture of birch tar, ambergris, leather, musk, vetiver, wood, and civet that gave off a smoky, metallic smell.
Takako Saiko, Chess Spice, 1977, MoMA.
The role of odors in cities is another connection that artists have been exploring. Sillage was an olfactory public artwork launched by Brian Goeltzenleuchter with the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2014 with the objective of tracing the “scent scapes” of Los Angeles. Through online surveys, residents were asked to describe the smells they associate with the different neighborhoods and these were synthesized in a collection of 11 aromas, each representing a different area of the city. The scent of Downtown for example is described as “hot asphalt penetrates traffic exhaust” while that of Hollywood is “an old lady wearing cheap perfume, a kid sticky with cotton candy, and a hipster redolent of sweet tobacco”.
One of the strongest promoters of the art of smells is Norwegian artist Sissel Tolaas. Her interest in fragrances stems from her curiosity for the invisible dimension of our lives, asking herself if the air that surrounds us is “just abstract nothingness or does it potentially contain information we don’t see”. Carrying around a small device to vacuum the air anytime she wants to capture the smells of a moment, she has built, in her 30-year-long carrier, an archive of 7000 odors. Her works go from being pleasant, for example, she recreated the scent of flowers that have gone extinct, to more disturbing, producing cheeses from David Beckham’s sweat, Olafur Eliasson’s tears, and bacteria from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s nose. She has also captured the smells of over 50 cities, including Berlin, Istanbul, Shanghai, and Mexico City. For New York, she tried to specifically capture the decay-like smell of Central Park in October, “malodorous, yet beautiful”.
The particular effectiveness of smells in triggering memories has also been an object of her work. One of her most recent projects is the Smell Memory Kit, a commercially available tool to help us capture memories in “smell snapshots”. Tolaas has concocted from her collection a series of abstract smells – scents we could not have been exposed to before and therefore cannot have internally connected them to many moments of our past – and inserted them in wearable ampules. When the bearer is ready to capture a moment, the ampule has to be broken to release the abstract smell, which will be from then on stored in the brain in connection with that event. When there is a want to reminisce, one of the extra ampules the kit comes with has to be broken to release in the air the smell, conjuring up the memory.
Sissel Tolaas with part of her collection of scents.