What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [103]
Artists have a hard time incorporating smell into the traditionally visual arts. Scent hangs awkwardly in the air and strikes viewers as an afterthought. (Jackson Pollock—now with peppermint!) Visual artists may have a hard time putting into practice the smells they create in their imagination; one solution is to work with someone who has the know-how. In 2004 SoHo’s Visionaire gallery paired celebrity photographers with perfumers and exhibited the results in a pitch-black gallery. Next to each backlit color photo was a nozzle and a button; pressing it released a puff of scent. In Karl Lagerfeld’s photo, titled Hunger, a naked guy holds a round loaf of bread in front of his groin. The accompanying fragrance, by Sandrine Mali, was rather mundane—neither yeasty nor beastly. Another entry, by celebrichef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and perfumer Loc Dong, called Strange, was a photo of a durian fruit split open to emphasize its resemblance to the female anatomy. The subtext was clear: “We double-dog dare you to sniff it.” I did, and found that the highly abstract scent didn’t carry through on the visual metaphor.
Olfactory art as performance art has the potential for embarrassing pretension. Mark Lewis’s Une Odeur de luxe (1989), for example, sounds like a pretty good junior-high-school prank that was taken seriously by the grownups, including Jim Drobnick. Here’s his account of it:
Lewis’s dialectical odours…attempt to expose and corrupt the ideology of sexual difference and what Lacan terms “urinary segregation.” By atomizing women’s perfume in the men’s bathroom and men’s cologne in the women’s, Lewis interrogates the politics of identity construction and its performative maintenance. These transgendered diffusions of odour, rendering each space (and each person within it) olfactorily hermaphroditic, forces a confrontation with architecture’s role in naturalizing sexual difference as an unproblematic binary opposition.
That’s a tad more interpretation than Une Odeur de luxe can bear. I prefer to think of Mark Lewis as an art school Bart Simpson. Someone should make him write one hundred times on the blackboard, “I will not spray cologne in the girls bathroom.”
Freak Show
While museum directors ponder whether olfactory art deserves gallery space, one smell has proven to be box-office gold: the stench of rotting flesh. This putrid but profitable aroma is emitted by a giant flower stalk, which people are willing to stand in line to see and smell up close. It’s become the Lobster Boy of the olfactory sideshow.
The plant, Amorphophallus titanum, was discovered on the island of Sumatra in 1878. It spends most of its life underground as a large tuber weighing up to 170 pounds. Every two or three years it sends up a three-to-nine-foot-tall flower stalk called a spadex. Its Latin name means “huge shapeless penis,” which gives you a fair idea of what it looks like. The fast-growing flower stalk lasts about three days and smells of dead meat; in nature the scent attracts blowflies, flesh flies, and carrion beetles. After these creatures pollinate the blossom, it stops producing scent and quickly shrivels.
A. titanum emerged from obscure, humid greenhouses to become a celebrity tuber. Dubbed the corpse-flower (allegedly the translation of its Sumatran name), it had limited exposure to the public before botanical gardens shared seedlings and made it into the porn star of the vegetable world. Its United States debut was at the New York Botanical Garden in 1937, but its big break came when a blossom at Kew Gardens in London drew 50,000 visitors in 1996. Four television crews reported on the specimen at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in 1998. Intense media coverage raised public expectations to unsustainable levels: “‘It smells a little like dirty socks,’ said John Allison of Marietta, who dropped by to see the bloom Monday with his wife, Joan. ‘We expected rotting human flesh.’” Charming folks, the Allisons. I guess they