What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [104]
Giant, evil-smelling penis-plants are performing everywhere. Dates and venues read like a rock tour: 1998 Atlanta and Miami, 1999 Sarasota and Los Angeles, 2001 Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, with return shows in Miami and Atlanta. Media-savvy curators have turned up the hype. The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota posted blossom updates on its website. Not to be outdone, the University of Wisconsin put its bloom on a live webcam. As its popularity soared, A. titanum got an image makeover; the term “corpse flower” was quietly dropped and the plants were given personalities. In 2001 Miami named its blossom Mr. Stinky. UC Davis countered with Ted, followed by Tabatha in 2004. Cal State Fullerton trumped Tabatha with Tiffy. Tabatha drew only 4,000 live sniffing visitors, but pulled 52,000 hits on the website and 11,000 visits on the webcam. (This is puzzling: Why stare at Mr. Stinky online when you can’t smell him?) Merchandising tie-ins are only a matter of time: “Hi, my name is Tiffy. You can watch me on my webcam, and buy my fragrance online.”
Mapping the Smellscape
Rudyard Kipling memorialized the transporting power of scent in these widely quoted lines: “Smells are surer than sounds or sights / To make your heart-strings crack—/ They start those awful voices o’ nights / That whisper, ‘Old man, come back!’” Where Proust was concerned with time, Kipling was concerned with space. His theme was homesickness; one smell encountered on two continents. Kipling wasn’t being abstract—he had one particular smell in mind, and it shows up in the next, less quoted, stanza: “That must be why the big things pass / And the little things remain, / Like the smell of the wattle by Lichtenberg, / Riding in, in the rain.” The smell of wattle, which appears in all five verses, is central to the poem. What, you might ask, is wattle and why did it have this profound effect?
“Lichtenberg” is told in the voice of an Australian trooper from New South Wales who is riding his horse in South Africa during the Boer War. Golden wattle is a plant—a small tree in the mimosa family. It is also the floral emblem of Australia. In the spring it develops a spectacular, golden-yellow flower head that throws off a heavy, floral scent with a honeylike sweetness. Kipling’s inspiration was an incident that happened when he was in South Africa: “I saw this Australian trooper pull down a wattle-bough and smell it. So I rode alongside and asked him where he came from. He told me about himself, and added: ‘I didn’t know they had our wattle over here. It smells like home.’ That gave me the general idea for the verses; then all I had to do was to sketch in the background in as few strokes as possible.”
The power of smell to evoke a particular place gives the smell museum a unique opportunity for innovative exhibits. Perhaps something along the lines of a recent presentation by the designer Hilda Kozári and the perfumer Bertrand Duchafour. They linked scent and place in a 2006 artwork called AIR—Urban Olfactory Installation. Kozári suspended three translucent globes from the ceiling, each one large enough for a visitor to step into through a hole in the bottom. Around each globe’s equator, a thin layer of spongy material was moistened with a city-scent composed by Duchafour. Monochrome video images were projected onto the sphere’s surface. By standing inside, one could experience Budapest (Kozári’s hometown), Helsinki (where she works), or Paris (just because).
Great balls of smell is a very cool concept. The light, leafy-green scent in the Helsinki ball was pleasingly matched by the greentinted video. The smells of Budapest and Paris, however, were indistinct, and the three videos, shot from a moving car, made all the cities look the same—an endless loop of roads, bridges, and traffic. I entered the balls with high hopes, but left underwhelmed. I thought of Kipling’s poem and yearned for a Lichtenberg experience; I wanted to smell wattle and watch it rain in Australia on one side of the globe,