What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [102]
The Hall of Technology would not be complete without an exhibit honoring Gale W. Matson. She was an organic chemist at the 3M company who was looking for new ways to make carbonless copy paper in the early 1960s. She ended up inventing scratch-and-sniff technology instead (both processes encapsulate tiny drops of liquid inside a burstable shell; ink in one, fragrance oil in the other.) Scratch-and-sniff was an immediate hit with children: The Sweet Smell of Christmas (1970) is still in print, along with dozens of smelly baby books. Beginning with a June 1972 ad in McCall’s for Love’s Lemon Fresh, scratch-and-sniff was used for perfume ads until higher-fidelity methods came along.
Scratch-and-sniff excels at bringing out the grosser, masculine side of life. Larry Flynt, the fabulously vulgar publisher of Hustler, was an enthusiast. FIRST TIME EVER SCRATCH ’N’ SNIFF CENTERFOLD, screamed the cover of his August 1977 issue. In smaller print at the bottom: “WARNING: To be smelled in the privacy of your home. Not to be smelled by minors.” (The actual smells were G-rated: banana, rose, and baby powder.) The film director John Waters, of course, gave audiences scratch-and-sniff cards for Polyester, his 1981 homage to Smell-O-Vision. One of the first “adult” computer games—Leather Goddesses of Phobos, released in 1986—came with a seven-item scratch-and-sniff card and a big floppy disk for the Commodore computer. At various points the game instructed the player to sniff location-specific odors: mothballs in the closet, perfume in the harem, leather in the boudoir, etc. Probably the most testosterone-heavy scratch-and-sniff ad was run by the BEI Defense Systems Company in Armed Forces Journal International. With the tag line “The smell of victory,” it touted the “battle-proven, state-of-the-art HYDRA 70 family of rockets” using the scent of burnt cordite.
I think the Hall of Olfactory Technology would be a major attraction, but something tells me it wouldn’t find a happy home at the Osmothèque in Versailles. It might work better in Paris, Texas, where weekend crowds could roll in on Harley-Davidson Fat Boys, and reminisce about the sweet, long-lost smell of leaded gas.
THE ADDITION OF scent to museum exhibits raises a related question: where is the smell in traditional art? Olfactory art has never really taken off. Jim Drobnick suspects the concept is too novel to be accepted by museums and “serious” collectors. I disagree, given that the contemporary art establishment values the revolutionary, the challenging, and the transgressive above all else. Would not Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ—a crucifix submerged in urine—have been even more transgressive if it smelled like stale pee?
Unfortunately, olfactory artwork teeters between banality and pretension. The former was on display in an installation by Alex Sandover in a New York gallery. A video screen showed a woman preparing dinner in a 1950s-style kitchen. As she worked, wall-mounted diffusers released the corresponding scent: sage, apple pie, etc. The see-it/smell-it conceit was literal-minded and certainly not very transgressive. (If his housewife had vomited on camera, with a scent-track to match, Sandover would have been an art-world hero.)
Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian artist who lives in Berlin, gets closer to the mark. She collected underarm sweat from nine men who were in various states of fear and anxiety, chemically extracted their BO, had it microencapsulated, and then spread it onto large colored sheets. She mounts these enormous scratch-and-sniff panels on art gallery walls for visitors to sample. Her 2007 show is called “The Fear of Smell and the Smell of Fear.