Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance 9780367544751, 9781003092711, 9780367552749

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art
2 Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap: The Smell of Resistance
3 Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell: Orientation, Territory, and the Evidence of Beings
4 The Political Potential of Smoke
5 Olfactory Resistance at the End of the World
6 Eco-olfactory Art: Experiencing the Stories of the Air We Breathe
7 Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond
8 Is There Empathy through Breathing?
9 Olfaction as Radical Collaboration
10 Chrysanthemum Powder and Other Interspecies Scent Rituals
11 Eat Your Makeup: Perfume, Drag, and the Transgressions of Queer Subjects under Capitalism
12 Scented Bodies: Perfuming as Resistance and a Subversive Identity Statement
13 Women’s Smell: Towards a New Representation of the Body
14 Scent and Seduction: The Power of Smell in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield
15 The Olfactory Counter-monument: Active Smelling and the Politics of Wonder in the Contemporary Museum
16 Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation: Toward a New Aesthetics of Smell
17 Malodors and Miasmas: The Political Potential of Working with Smell
18 Enteric Aesthetics
Index

Citation preview

Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance

This book claims a political value for olfactory artworks by situating them squarely in the contemporary moment of various forms of political resistance. Each chapter presents the current research and art practices of an international group of artists and writers from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, ­Switzerland, Thailand, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The book brings together new thinking on the potential for olfactory art to critique and produce modes of engagement that challenge the still-powerful hegemonic realities of the twenty-first century, particularly the dominance of vision as opposed to other sensory modalities. The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, art history, visual culture, olfactory studies, performance studies, and politics of activism. Gwenn-Aël Lynn is a transdisciplinary artist who builds interactive installations that combine scents, sound, and technology to pose questions about identity, culture, and the political. Debra Riley Parr is Associate Professor in the Art and Art History Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her current research concerns olfactory art and design in contemporary culture.

Cover image: Gwenn-Aël Lynn, Untitled 2020

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art Edited by Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship Vered Maimon Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization A Transregional Perspective Edited by Octavian Esanu Art and Merchandise in Keith Haring’s Pop Shop Amy Raffel Art and Nature in the Anthropocene Planetary Aesthetics Susan Ballard Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc Katazyna Murawska-Muthesius Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research Edited by Tiina Seppälä, Melanie Sarantou and Satu Miettinen Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance Edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance

Edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lynn, Gwenn-Aël, editor. | Parr, Debra, 1958– editor. Title: Olfactory art and the political in an age of resistance / edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021000286 (print) | LCCN 2021000287 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367544751 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003092711 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Odors in art. | Art—Political aspects. Classification: LCC N8234.O36 O44 2021 (print) | LCC N8234.O36 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000286 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000287 ISBN: 978-0-367-54475-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-55274-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09271-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

The editors dedicate this book to the memory of Sabina Ott. Gwenn-Aël Lynn dedicates this book to Christiane Barrier Lynn and James Earl Lynn. Debra Riley Parr dedicates this book to her parents.

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xiii xix 1

G W E N N - A Ë L LY N N A N D D E B R A R I L E Y PA R R

1 Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art

10

H S UA N L . H S U

2 Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap: The Smell of Resistance

22

D E B R A R I L E Y PA R R

3 Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell: Orientation, Territory, and the Evidence of Beings

32

P I T C H AYA N G A M C H A RO E N E D I T BY V I N I TA G AT N E A N D B E T H A N Y C ROW F O R D

4 The Political Potential of Smoke

44

G W E N N - A Ë L LY N N

5 Olfactory Resistance at the End of the World

56

E L E O N O R A E D R E VA

6 Eco-olfactory Art: Experiencing the Stories of the Air We Breathe

65

CLARA MULLER

7 Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond

76

J I M D RO B N I C K

8 Is There Empathy through Breathing? D O RO T H É E K I N G

99

viii Contents 9 Olfaction as Radical Collaboration

108

LI N DSEY FR ENCH

10 Chrysanthemum Powder and Other Interspecies Scent Rituals

119

D RO S E N

11 Eat Your Makeup: Perfume, Drag, and the Transgressions of Queer Subjects under Capitalism

131

M AT T M O R R I S

12 Scented Bodies: Perfuming as Resistance and a Subversive Identity Statement

146

V I V EK A KJ ELL M ER

13 Women’s Smell: Towards a New Representation of the Body

157

SA N DR A BA R R É

14 Scent and Seduction: The Power of Smell in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield

169

D O RO T H Y A B R A M

15 The Olfactory Counter-monument: Active Smelling and the Politics of Wonder in the Contemporary Museum

182

B R I A N G O E LT Z E N L E U C H T E R

16 Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation: Toward a New Aesthetics of Smell

195

L AU RY N M A N N I G E L

17 Malodors and Miasmas: The Political Potential of Working with Smell

210

A L A N N A LY N C H

18 Enteric Aesthetics

223

A R N AU D G E R S PAC H E R

Index

235

Illustrations

Figures 1.1 Renée Stout, The Seduction (2010, detail), two-plate etching 15 4.1 View of Oceti Sakowin camp, Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, December 2018 44 4.2 Fire Is Form. Performance. Pine tree scent station, 2018 48 4.3 Fire Is Form. Performance. Crow feather fan for sage cleansing, 2018 48 7.1 Top: Ant Farm, Air Emergency (1970), view of Earth Day performance with Andy Shapiro and Kelly Gloger in front of the Clean Air Pod on the plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. Bottom: Santiago Sierra, 500 Cards with Blattodea Pheromone (2007), detail of postcard with cockroach pheromone, sealed in silver foil, 15 × 21 cm (6 × 8.  in), edition of 500 78 7.2 Top: Peter Hopkins, Perfume Site: Trench #2 (c.1987), olfactory intervention into an empty lot in the East Village, New York City. Bottom: Perfume Performance: Bridge Underpass (c.1987), olfactory intervention under the ­Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, New York City 83 7.3 Top: Michael J. Bramwell, Building Sweeps–Harlem (1995–1996), view of performance. Bottom: Hayley Severns and Angela Rose Voulgarelis Illgen, Meaning Cleaning (2008), view of performance 85 7.4 Top: Caitlin Berrigan and Michael McBean, The Smelling Committee (2006), view of smell tour performance. Bottom: Proboscis, Robotic Feral Public Authoring (2005–2006), prototypes being tested in London Fields 89 7.5 Top: Proboscis, Snout (2007), Mr. Punch and the Plague Doctor, mock carnival in Shoreditch, London. Bottom: Amy Balkin, Public Smog (2004–ongoing), detail, digital image of clean air park over Los Angeles, June 2004, created by purchasing Coastal Reclaim Trading Credits, 24lb. NOX at $4.25/lb 91 8.1 Michael Pinsky, Pollution Pods, Trondheim, 2017 103 9.1 Reconstruction – Smoke (Pittsburgh), David Gissen, 2006 112 9.2 Donora Women’s Club Social Activities Scrapbook, 1948 113 9.3 Hays Woods / Oxygen Bar, Laurie Palmer, 2005 114

x Illustrations 10.1 Nourishment Is a Plinth in Repose, 2019 Plinth of Flock Blocks* Carved by Mice (Seed et al.) 96 × 48 × 8 in. *Donated to the Chicago Chicken Rescue at the end of the exhibition 123 10.2 IDOLATRY II, 2018 Cast Bronze. Grooming ritual with three Icelandic Sheep over two weeks. (Original Objects: Burrs, Hay, Wax, Wool) 4 × 4 × 4 in. *This work is also pictured on the plinth of flock blocks in Figure 10.1 127 10.3 IDOLATRY III, 2019.  Salt Lick from Farm Sanctuary carved by Goats, Unsealed Cast Bronze Salt Lick touched by Human-Animal Hands, Rituals of Nourishment. 18 × 15 × 4 in. *This work is also pictured on the plinth of flock blocks in Figure 10.1 128 11.1 Man Ray. Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (Beautiful Breath, Veil Water), 1921.  Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 × 3 1/2 inches. © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund and with funds contributed by Alice Saligman, Ann and Donald W. McPhail, and the ARCO Foundation upon the occasion of the 100th birthday of Marcel Duchamp, 1987, 1987-36-2, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 135 11.2  Top: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968.  Film. Berenika Cipkus. Bottom: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968.  Film. Mona Montgomery, Mary Vivian Pearce, Marina Melin. 138 11.3 Top: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968.  Film. Maelcum Soul. Bottom: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968.  Film. Divine and David Lochary 139 12.1 Unboxing Dirty Violet, 2020 147 12.2 Spraying Eau de Protection, 2020 152 12.3 Smelling Poison, 2020 153 13.1 Paola Daniele, Still life with human bodies and menstrual blood, performance Paola Daniele, 2015 162 13.2 Roberto Greco, Œillères, fig. XV, 60 × 75 cm, 2017 165 13.3 Roberto Greco, Œillères, fig. XIX, 20 × 25 cm, 2017 166 15.1 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters ­Museum of Art, 2016 184 15.2 Documentation of building demolition in Baltimore, 2016 186 15.3 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters Museum of Art, 2016 188 15.4 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters Museum of Art, 2016 189 15.5 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters Museum of Art, 2016 192 16.1 Love Sweat Love, Mediamatic, 2016 200 16.2 Lauryn Mannigel’s design of the GEOS 202 17.1 Concealed and Contained, since 2009.  Performance in 2016 at Tempting Failure Biennial of International Performance Art and Noise, London, UK 211

Illustrations  xi 17.2 Show of Strength / The Lively Vessel and the Contaminated State, 2015/2018.  Installation, Berlin Art Prize Exhibition, Berlin, Germany 213 17.3 Gut Feelings, 2016.  Performance as part of the exhibition Fraud, Fake and Fame – Goldrausch 2016, St. Johannes-Evangelist, Berlin, Germany 215 17.4 Emotional Labour, 2018.  Installation, La Central Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal, Canada 217 17.5 Gut Feelings, 2017.  Performance at Art Laboratory Berlin as part of the Nonhuman Agents Series, Berlin, Germany 220 18.1 Mathias Kessler (b. 1968) The Taste of Discovery, 2009.  Kunstraum Dornbirn, Installation view 229 18.2 Mathias Kessler (b. 1968) The Taste of Discovery, 2009.  Kunstraum Dornbirn, Installation view 229 18.3 Maja Smrekar (b. 1978) K-9_topology: Ecce canis, 2014.  Kapelica Gallery, Kersnikova Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia 231

Tables 16.1 Feeling responses by participants of Love Sweat Love (2016) toward others’ body scents 203 16.2 Feeling responses by participants of Love Sweat Love (2016) toward others’ body scents that were difficult to place 205

Contributors

Dorothy Abram (Ed.D., Harvard University) is Professor of Psychology and Sociology at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. In her book, SEVEN SCENTS: Healing and the Aromatic Imagination, Abram identifies aromatic plants with specific psychoactive properties and their impact on healing and spiritual practices in Hindu, Greek, and biblical traditions and legends. She has traveled and researched aromatic plant traditions in diverse cultures, including the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, Nepal, and with newly arrived refugees to the United States. Her current study of Katherine Mansfield’s writings is part of a larger academic project to focus and amplify the role of the aromatic in literature and culture, and to bring the study of smell into the realm of the academy. When she isn’t lecturing, teaching classes, and grading papers, she takes pleasure in the practice of aromatherapy and planting aromatic gardens. Sandra Barré, after obtaining a degree in Aesthetics where she focused on dissecting the mechanisms of fascination, continues her academic research by specializing in the history of olfactory art. She studies the way in which women artists have seized odors to represent their bodies and is currently writing a survey of contemporary olfactory production. She is also a cultural journalist and curator. Jim Drobnick is a critic, curator, and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at OCAD University, Toronto. He has published on the visual arts, performance, the senses, and post-media practices in recent anthologies such as Designing with Smell (2017), Food and Museums (2017), L’Art Olfactif Contemporain (2015), The Multisensory Museum (2014), Senses and the City (2011), and Art, History and the Senses (2010). His books include the anthologies Aural Cultures (2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (2006), and he has guest-edited special thematic issues of Performance Research (Under the Influence, 2017), PUBLIC (Civic Spectacle, 2012), and The Senses & Society (Sensory Aesthetics, 2012). He cofounded the Journal of Curatorial Studies, an academic journal that explores the increasing relevance of curating and exhibitions and their impact on institutions, audiences, aesthetics, and display culture. His curatorial collaborative, DisplayCult, organizes art exhibitions that foreground performative and multisensory projects. Eleonora Edreva is an artist, researcher, smeller, educator, collaborator, co-producer, worker, renter, and mischief-maker born in Bulgaria and currently living on the occupied Tiwa land now referred to as Albuquerque. Edreva strongly believes that

xiv Contributors our senses contain skills and ways of knowing the world that systems of power have been devaluing for centuries as part of their ongoing efforts to disconnect people (especially people at the margins of power) from their bodies and capacities for pleasure and embodied learning. Their artistic work orients around the ideas that intentional sensory learning can bring people more fully into individual and collective strength, and that connection, ritual, and play are strategies for creating more abundant love and liberation as we attend to the unjust conditions of living under capitalism and white supremacy. To that end, they create relational, participatory, and play-based tools for navigating and engaging the world as our most whole selves, as well as actively orienting toward healing in our human, morethan-human, and land-based relationships. Edreva holds a BA in English from the University of Chicago and is currently working toward an MFA in Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico. Lindsey French is an artist and educator whose work engages in gestures of sensual and mediated communication with landscapes and the nonhuman. She has shared her work in places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), and in conjunction with the International Symposium of Electronics Arts (Albuquerque and Vancouver). Publications include chapters for Botanical Speculations, Why Look at Plants, and Becoming-Botanical, and poetry for the journal Forty-Five. She currently teaches as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Arnaud Gerspacher is an art historian and critical animal studies scholar specializing in issues pertaining to animality in art since 1960. He holds a PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Art Department at City College CUNY. He is at work on two forthcoming book projects—Artist as Ethologist and The Animal Readymade. Brian Goeltzenleuchter is a post-media artist who employs interdisciplinary research in the creation of designed environments, scripted and improvised performances, images, and objects. Through an artistic practice that uses analog and digital technologies to mediate the senses of sight, sound, touch, and smell, Goeltzenleuchter’s current work involves situations that explore the dynamics between individuals and the cities and institutions that shape those relationships. His artwork considers the way in which personal and cultural narratives can be expressed through the sense of smell. He earned his MFA in 2001 at the University of California, San Diego. From 2002 to 2008 he was Associate Professor and Director of MFA Studies in Art at Central Washington University. He has held residencies at the Institute for Art and Olfaction, Los Angeles; Banff Centre, Canada; Sculpture Space, New York; and Centrum Beeldende Kunst, The Netherlands. He is Research Fellow at the Institute for Public and Urban Affairs, San Diego State University. He also serves on the faculty of Eureka Institute for Translational Medicine, a nonprofit foundation with educational and research objectives in the field of International Translational Medicine. Hsuan L. Hsu is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis and the author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics

Contributors  xv (NYU Press, 2020) as well as several articles on race, environmental risk, and olfaction in literature and conceptual art. Dorothée King is professor and head of the Arts and Design Education Department and the Learning Lab Arts and Design at Basel Academy for Art and Design. After studying art, design, and media in Denmark, Germany, and England, she earned her PhD from the College of Fine Arts at Berlin University of the Arts. There she served as a researcher and lecturer in the Graduate School and the Art Education Department. She has also lectured at Rhode Island School of Design; Providence College; the Interface Cultures program at the University for Art and Industrial Design Linz, Austria; and the Banff New Media Institute, Canada. She was a consultant for the TransArt Institute in New York and has been working as a freelance educator, communicator, and coach since 2000. Her transdisciplinary teaching reflects an ongoing interest in creating intersections in arts, media, making, and self-realization. Her areas of specialization and competence include ephemeral materials in modern and contemporary art, multisensory aesthetic experience, the histories and futures of global art school education, participatory initiatives, curatorial studies, and contemporary and modern art history. Viveka Kjellmer is a senior lecturer in art history and visual studies at the University of Gothenburg. She has written about advertising and the image of scent, fashion exhibitions, and visual consumption. Her current research concerns costume, body, and identity, as well as olfactory communication and the agency of scent. Alanna Lynch is a Canadian artist and independent researcher based in Berlin. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology (Queen’s University), a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Concordia University), a Master of Library and Information Studies (McGill University), and a Master of Fine Arts (University of Gothenburg, Sweden). Her work is the result of transdisciplinary processes combining this formal background, additional studies in biology and textiles, and experiences in activism, with her own subjective, embodied experiences. She has exhibited and performed internationally. She is a founding member of Scent Club Berlin, an artist collective producing experiments and exhibitions around smell. She was awarded the Berlin Art Prize in 2018 and has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Gwenn-Aël Lynn is a transdisciplinary artist who builds interactive installations that combine scents, sound, and technology to pose questions about identity, culture, and the political. He also performs with food to investigate the tongue as the interface between language and the sense of taste. He situates his current work at the intersection of environmental activism and art. He has exhibited internationally in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Lauryn Mannigel is a Berlin-based artist researcher holding an MA in Contemporary Art and New Media (Paris 8, FR). Inspired by narratives of empowerment and resistance, her experimental media practice is situated at the nodal intersection of art, science, and the humanities. Since 2005, she has been challenging the Western cultural dominance of visual epistemology by exploring the perception of the senses of smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Since 2016, she has been working on the series entitled The Aesthetic and Political Potential of Body Scents, which explores people’s perceptual olfactory judgment of others’ body scents. In this context,

xvi Contributors she recently presented the following performative experiments: Love Sweat Love (2016) at Mediamatic (NL); Eat Me (2018) at Creative innovation: Art Meets Science, Wageningen University (NL); Smell Feel Match (2019) at Kunsthalle Rostock (DE) and the experimental performance festival VIVA! Art Action, Montreal (CA); I Smell a Rat (2019) at the feminist artist-run space StudioXX, Montreal (CA); and the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore (IN). For her new project which investigates the social perception of women’s body scents in India, she collaborates with chemical ecologist Dr Shannon Olsson from the National Center for Biological Sciences (IN). Matt Morris is an artist, writer, educator, and curator based in Chicago. His paintings, installations, and perfume-based projects have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. He is a contributor to Artforum.com, Art Papers, Fragrantica.com, ARTnews, Flash Art, Newcity, Sculpture, The Seen and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly; and his writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. He is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. In 2017 he earned a Certification in Fairyology from Doreen Virtue, PhD. Morris is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Clara Muller is a French curator, critic, and art historian pursuing research on the ­politics of breathing in contemporary art, as well as on the diversity of practices using scent as a medium. An editor for the olfactory magazine NEZ—­published twice a year in French, English, and ­Italian—she writes extensively about ­fragrance-related subjects and the presence of smells in the visual arts, literature, and cinema. She has contributed to various exhibition catalogs, artists’ monographs, and academic publications, such as the anthology Les Dispositifs olfactifs au musée (2018), and has given several talks worldwide about the crossroads of art and olfaction. She holds degrees in Literature, Art History, and Curating from the Sorbonne, and completed her education as an exchange graduate student at New York University in 2018 and Columbia University in 2020. Pitchaya Ngamcharoen is an artist based in Rotterdam. Her work focuses on shared living spaces, among humans, mice, ants, and other species, and how the sense of smell plays a crucial role in these spaces. Her research concerns the olfactory investigation of community formations and transmissions through acts of orientation, disorientation, marking territory, and being deterritorialized. She writes, In Western society, hegemony of vision and hearing is evidential. To release myself from the despotic reign of the eyes, I refuse to give the visual a priority in my writing, however, never turning a blind eye. By bringing my nose to the forefront, I claim that smells play a crucial role in orienting oneself, claim the space in time (territory) and communities’ formation and transmission. My artistic and life practice lie at the intersection of a cook and an artist, with a strong, constant stand for my belief in ‘pluriversality,’ that is the universal can only be plural, a world in which many worlds coexist.

Contributors  xvii Debra Riley Parr  is Associate Professor in the Art and Art History Department at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches courses in the history and theory of modern and contemporary art and design. Her current research concerns olfactory art and design in contemporary culture. She has curated an exhibition on scent and poetry at the Poetry Foundation, published and presented several papers on scent, and conducted olfactory workshops designed to reveal the meaning and politics of scent in a predominantly visual culture. D Rosen is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work is shown nationally and internationally. They operate from the position that questions of animality are not binary but rather a tangle of ecologies and richly complicated identities, framed by culture. Recent projects include a brutalist web zine titled A Trace of Fashioned Violence (fashionedviolence.com), made with the support of the Nordic Summer University in collaboration with Ruth K. Burke, KT Duffy, Ishan Chakrabarti, Catherine Feliz, J. Kent, Kassy / Kasem Kydd, Yvette Mayorga, D. Rosen, Falak Vasa, and Kat Zagaria (Aalborg, Denmark). In 2020, Rosen will be collaborating with Marcela Torres on a project that centralizes touch at Recess (Brooklyn, NY) and exhibiting with Soo Shin and Catherine Sullivan at Chicago Manual Style in a show curated by Ruslana Lichtzier (Chicago, IL).

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we acknowledge the collective effort this book represents. We thank the College Art Association for hosting our panel, “Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance,” at their national convention held in Los Angeles in February 2018. The participants on that panel—Lydia Brawner, Jim Drobnick, Dorothée King, and Matt Morris—all enthusiastically agreed that the papers presented had the makings of a book. All but Lydia, who was busy with a new job, have essays in this collection, and we thank them for their support throughout the work of bringing this project together. We also owe a debt of gratitude to all of the authors who labored tirelessly to write and rewrite their essays. Several individuals were vital in making the book a reality: Meg Santisi, Bess Williamson, Annika Marie, all listened to initial ideas about this collection of essays. Columbia College Chicago supported the indexing of the volume with a faculty grant. Anonymous reviewers at Routledge offered very helpful critique of the proposal and initial chapters. Editors Isabella Vitti and Katie Armstrong graciously answered a myriad of questions about a whole range of issues. Most importantly, we want to give thanks to Joan Giroux, who read all the chapters and subjected them to her keen eye for detail. Her friendship and proofreading skills have kept us going, and we value her help during the final stages of pulling the manuscript together. Finally, we are enormously grateful to Mark Zumwalt for his patience and love during the project.

Introduction Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr

Despite the fact that many artists have been working with scents for over a century, olfactory art is not as well-known as other forms of art, given the persistent dominance of visual experience, not to mention the obstacles contemporary artists face in exhibiting works that exude odors into an exhibition space. Nonetheless, as curator and critic Jim Drobnick notes in The Smell Culture Reader, artists haven’t waited for permission to investigate odors, and “fragrant art works, in fact, have appeared in such numbers that it is now possible to conduct investigations into their unique characteristics” (Drobnick 2006, 328). This collection of essays begins to take on that work, building on the scholarship and art practices of the past. Olfactory art demands a consideration of the interdisciplinary ground out of which it emerges. In this introduction we briefly sketch out a section of this ground as it appears to us now, recognizing that our project is not to write a history of olfactory art but to present contemporary international research and art projects directed toward understanding and realizing its political power and potential for resistance. We also offer in this introduction a definition of the key terms that have shaped this project: “olfactory art,” “the political,” and “resistance.”

Olfactory Art: A Definition We define olfactory art as art that utilizes scent as its primary, or intentional, medium. That is, olfactory art uses olfactory materials—herbs, flowers, perfumes, molecules, and other redolent substances—that can be experienced primarily through the olfactory system, inhaled and smelled. This emphasis on the materiality of olfactory art is critical to our understanding of works that resist received forms of representation, which for us brings forward questions about the political. There are artworks that have a smell to them that may not necessarily fall into the category of olfactory art—but are important precedents to the contemporary turn toward scent. Premises for a Needed Olfactory Art History As evident in these essays, the discourse on smell serves as a shared platform for artists working with odors and for scholars writing about olfactory art. This discourse ranges across fields, including sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, literature, perfumery, and environmental studies. Jacques Vignaud’s book Sentir, published in 1982, establishes a precedent for an interdisciplinary discussion of scent, and notably, begins with a critique of Kant’s and Hegel’s denigration of the sense of smell. The work of the

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Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr

Centre for Sensory Studies established at Concordia University, Montreal, in 1988 sets a critical bar for the emerging field of olfactory art and its history (Concordia n.d.). Among numerable publications by the Centre’s faculty, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott lays out the cultural import, from sociological and anthropological perspectives, of the historically overlooked sense of smell. Jim Drobnick extends this scholarship with an overview of the discourse on the sense of smell in his introduction to The Smell Culture Reader. Drobnick notes the importance of Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant, with its focus on the “profound influence of odors upon major social, political and cultural events during France’s modernization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Drobnick 2006, 3). The preface to the book’s section on “Volatile Art” acknowledges the “nascent formation of an olfactory aesthetics and counterpolitics” (Drobnick 2006,  6). Here, Drobnick locates the mid-1980s as the “watershed moment” for publications on the sense of smell, which is not surprising given the impact of postmodern turns away from hegemonic formations, from the grand récits as described by Francois Lyotard (1984). An under-researched aspect of the sensorium, the olfactory presents an opportunity for artists to resist the dominant grand narrative of the visual as well as historically important aesthetic categories such as Kant’s theory of disinterestedness and Hegel’s “privileging of autonomy” (Drobnick 2006, 328). Drobnick’s essay “Towards an Olfactory Art History” also lays the groundwork for a future history of olfactory art by analyzing the references to smell in the writings of artists prior to the 1980s, considering in this essay those of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. Chantal Jaquet’s Philosophie de l’Odorat, published in 2015, constitutes an attempt at delineating a philosophy of olfaction. Of particular interest to us, the book contains two sections delving into olfactory aesthetics and contemporary olfactory art (Jaquet 2015). Any overview of the history and practice of olfactory art also needs to acknowledge generations of perfumers, too numerous to mention individually here, and their considerable expertise about scent and its chemical composition, not to mention their works’ wide influence on contemporary interests in the body and questions of gender. Edmond Roudnitska’s L’ésthétique en question, published in 1977, stands out as being the first book written by a perfumer attempting to bridge the craft of perfumery and art. The éditions Frédérique Malle follow suit by presenting themselves as a publishing house for perfume “authors,” recognized by the trade as historically significant. Also an important resource for anyone working with fragrance, France’s Osmothèque is arguably the world's most extensive perfume archive. Founded in 1990 by Jean Kerléo, Jean Claude Ellena, and several other well-known perfumers, it preserves perfumes gathered from the past two millennia by reproducing their documented formulas; for more recent fragrances of the past three hundred years, the actual perfume is preserved in airtight, lightproof, and temperature-controlled vaults. Based in Versailles with conference centers in New York City and Paris, Osmothéque offers thematic public lectures that feature selected perfumes presented on test strips. We must however acknowledge that this collection of essays does not engage directly with perfumes produced by the perfume industry.1 Nevertheless, our definition does not exclude perfumery as an art form, especially when it is a material employed by artists. In the value system we are building, for a smell to be of any interest to us, it must also possess a political component and potential for resistance, and in some instances, perfume can elicit such content. However, as Constance Classen once wrote, “there is a whole world of vital olfactory imagery and meaning which cannot be, and

Introduction  3 is not meant to be, encompassed in a perfume bottle” (Classen 1998, 151). These practices are evidenced in exhibitions such as Odorama in 2003, and as part of the Soirées Nomades [nomadic evenings] at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, France; Odor Limits, curated by DisplayCult (Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher) at the Esther M. Klein Gallery in Philadelphia in 2008; Volatile! Scent and Poetry, curated by Debra Riley Parr at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in 2015; There’s something in the air! – Scent in Art, curated by Caro Verbeek at Villa Rot in Belgium in 2015; and almost concurrently, Belle Haleine–The Scent of Art, curated by Annja Müller-Alsbach at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. The latter exhibition was extensive and offered important institutional recognition of olfactory art. In a space spanning more than 1,200 m 2 , it featured international artists working with scent from the art historical canon, as well as contemporary artists from the last 30 years. Olfactory Art: A Needed History, Yet to Be Written The history of olfactory art is yet to be written. Two publications have begun outlining that history from a Eurocentric perspective. In 2011, Denys Riout published in the Cahiers National du Museum National d’Art Moderne: “Art et Olfaction: Des Evocations Visuelles à une Présence Réelle.” A couple of years later, Ashraf Osman offered another preliminary history of twentieth-century olfactory art in a seminar paper written for the postgraduate curatorial program at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. In Riout’s words, “the plastic arts have a particular aptitude at expanding their empire by inventing new techniques and annexing other arts.”2 In this case, he is speaking of annexing perfumery techniques. Neither essay pretends to present an exhaustive history of olfactory art, but rather, to quote Riout again, each begins “mapping some of the force lines that underlie the emergence of an artistic olfactoryscape”3 (Riout 2011, 2). This mapping includes Marcel Duchamp’s Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921)— which gave its name to the Museum Tinguely exhibition—the Surrealist exposition of 1938 curated by Duchamp, where surrealist Wolfgang Paalen “carpeted the floor with oak leaves, ferns and grasses, a water-filled pond with water lilies and reeds and the atmosphere was pervaded with the ‘scents of Brazil:’ the aroma of roasting coffee” (Osman 2013, 5). Another point on this map is Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, which, according to photographic documentation, would have included smelly organic material (Riout 2011). More recent forays into scent include Fluxus and Arte Povera, as well as a pioneering aromatic diffuser designed in 1970 by the French painter Gerard ­Titus-Carmel. Riout and Osman venture into more contemporary artifacts that would be too numerous to list here. We would, however, like to mention several olfactory works from the 1990s that these authors do not include, which, coupled with that decade’s scientific and technological innovations, usher in twenty-first-century olfactory art: Laurie Palmer’s Scent (1990), exhibited in The Body at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago in 1991; Clara Ursitti’s Self-portrait in Scent, Sketch no 1 (1994), shown at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, and Aberdeen City Art Gallery, Scotland; and Oswaldo Macia’s Conversation Asphalt and Salt (1996), presented at the Clove Gallery in London, England. In an important non-European contribution to the field, Gaudêncio Fidelis curated Smell as a Criterion. This exhibition was the olfactory component of the Mercosul

4  Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2015. A survey of modern and contemporary Latin American artists working with olfaction, it included artists such as Oswaldo Maciá, Ernesto Neto, Hélio Oiticia, Lygia Pape, and many others.

The Political For us, the most compelling unique characteristic of olfactory art lies in its political potential. We operate with a distinction between the political and politics. Politics constitutes the strategies deployed by individuals, political parties, and governments to obtain power; by contrast, the political is an inquiry into how to be together, how to co-exist. If politics is about governing, then the political is the philosophy of politics, as originally founded by Plato in his dialogue The Statesman (Πολιτικός, Politikós in the original text). However, closer to us in time, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a nuanced understanding of this difference by stating (in his Communauté Désoeuvré from 1986) that the political is the space for the contestation of the very basis of power: “the political designates not the organization of society but the disposition of community as such.” Many of the contributors to this volume engage with this contestation of power in overt or subtle ways. In order to make a distinction between politics and a philosophical engagement with the definition of politics, Jean-Luc Nancy broke French grammatical rules by switching the gender of la politique [politics] to le politique [the political]). His translators, in order to render this distinction in English, turned what is commonly accepted as a modifier, “political,” into a noun, “the political.” Western representative democracies are one of several possible political forms, and they align themselves with visuality. In her essay, “Archive: Performance Remains,” performance studies theorist Rebecca Schneider argues that in Western culture, artifacts must remain visible in order to be considered valuable.4 From that perspective, scents, much like performance art, pose a serious problem because they are transient, and do not remain visible, if they ever were. Schneider points out the “ocular hegemony” of the artifact. The artifact and the archive are valuable because they are “permanently” visible. Schneider contests the ocular hegemony of the archive on the basis that performative practices do remain, “[do] leave residue in the body and the memory of its practitioners, and viewers” (Schneider 2001, 102). Those remnants are intangible, and therefore a challenge to the hegemonic visual. Western culture denigrates the sense of smell, precisely because it cannot be archived, because it is intangible. Hence, Schneider's work indicates a clear relationship between power and the sense of sight. Other authors such as Jim Drobnick in his Smell Culture Reader (2006) and Jacques Vignaud in Sentir (1982) similarly discuss visual hegemony. For us, this visual hegemony leads to the political problem of representation. Under a hegemonic visual regime, the question of representation emerges at the intersection of the olfactory and the political. While the practice of political representation may be well understood, given the particulars of olfactory art we feel the term “representation” must be carefully analyzed and contextualized. When one smells something, the scent enters the body through the nose and lungs and limbic system of the brain, becoming a body–mind experience. Smelling is, thus, an unmediated sensation, an embodied experience. The olfactory constitutes a completely different scenario from the visual depiction of something, where symbolizing or representing mediates the experience. Hence, scents cannot be said to “represent” in the same way that images can.5 The notion of representation is rooted in the discourse and the ideology of visuality. Questions

Introduction  5 arise: how can multiple identities with multiple locations be represented? How can a multi-racial, multicultural, non-gender-conforming society represent itself? The recent political landscape has revealed the deep inadequacies of the politics of representation. Many voices have denounced a political crisis of representation over the years.6 One of the possible solutions to this conundrum, perhaps, is to no longer worry so much about representing, but instead focus on how to foster participation and direct engagement.

Resistance Resistance, a word often heard in relation to the political, specifies a particular positioning in opposition to regimes of power, be they aesthetic, national, gendered, or racial. What exactly do we mean by the last part of our title, An Age of Resistance? We could point to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in which he analyzes the effects of reproductive technologies on art and optical experience, not just of the modernist period but on all art. Benjamin’s method informs our thinking here, but we also recognize our personal reactions to the current global political climate as a factor in shaping a rhetoric of resistance. We want to situate olfactory art as a form of resistance in our current moment, but like Benjamin with his historical survey of the modes of reproduction, we wish to acknowledge that the history of resistance has a long arc, dotted by moments that may contribute to any contemporary acts of resistance. Resistance studies scholars make the case for “the temporal aspect of resistance” as an analytical category (Baaz, Lilja, Schulz, and Vinthagen 2016, 10). In their analysis, Mikael Baaz et al. find that most resistance scholarship focuses on spatial relationships, particularly when studying civil society-based resistance, but fail to account for temporal relations “to people of the past as well as the future” (Baaz et al. 2016, 11). This failure is certainly true when dealing with climate change resistance, as our actions condition our descendants’ future world. Baaz et al. have found that some resistance strategies create multiple temporalities (i.e. creating alternative futures), and queer time and space as ways to resist nihilistic agendas—for instance fascist nihilism—and bridge the future with the now while fostering empathy for the future when dealing with climate change. Olfactory experience obviously also has a temporal aspect to it, with scents unfolding over time and constantly shifting in their chemical compositions. We find this shared relationship to time suggestive and warranting further thought and analysis. For us, it prompts speculation that olfaction may be particularly suited to acts of resistance. Methodologically, we choose to embrace a fluid notion of time rather than using firm boundaries such as particular dates to frame what we mean by “an age of resistance.” We acknowledge that for us the notion of “an age of resistance” functions like a cursor in time that can slide in many directions depending on the olfactory topic. For instance, Futurist dinners, which had olfactory components, could be located at one point, while the olfactory references in poetic texts or the fragrant qualities of installations and performances may occupy overlapping or different situations of resistance. The questions then become, how does olfactory art resist in any specific age, and is there something particular about our own contemporary age of resistance that affords us a vantage point, is there something now that demands more thinking about the possible relations of olfactory art and resistance? What are the various olfactory forms of resistance? And more broadly, how does olfactory art take up its position in an age of resistance, alongside many other acts of resistance?

6  Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr Baaz et al. caution, however, “that it is important not to dichotomize resisters and dominators since that would mean ignoring the multiple systems of hierarchy and that individuals can be simultaneously powerful and powerless within different systems” (Baaz et  al. 2016, 6). This suggestion echoes French theorist Gilles Deleuze who, during a lecture, on March 17, 1987 (Deleuze 1987), on the “Society of Control” at the FEMIS (a film school in Paris), drew important distinctions between art and communication, insisting that art is implicitly an act of resistance unlike communication, which is, more often than not, propaganda, and therefore complicit with power. Furthermore, by extension, we acknowledge that much of the art of the twentieth century could be considered to be forms of resistance, and indeed the very formation of art history as a field proceeds from a theory of dialectical swings from one generation to the next in terms of style and other concerns. Following Deleuze, we say that if art constitutes an act of resistance, then olfactory art is also an act of resistance, with a difference, or an intensity, since it already operates within the sphere of art, but at the margins. More specifically, as it has been established elsewhere (Vignaud 1982; Nancy 2002, 146; Drobnick 2006), olfaction opposes the power of visual hegemony. In thinking through these forms of resistance, we find this observation by Baaz et al. useful: Resistance could then, to summarize, be understood as a response to power from below—a subaltern practice that could challenge, negotiate, and undermine power, or such a practice performed on behalf of and/or in solidarity with a subaltern position (proxy resistance). Irrespective of intent or interest, we view resistance as (i) an act, (ii) performed by someone upholding a subaltern position or someone acting on behalf of and/or in solidarity with someone in a subaltern position, and (iii) (most often) responding to power. (Baaz et al. 2016, 6) This analysis of resistance in relation to power begs the following question: does olfactory art occupy a subaltern position? Are artists producing olfactory art situated in a subaltern position? If so, is it because of the olfactory’s position in relation to the visually hegemonic regime we live under? Is it because of its conspicuous absence from the market as soon as it leaves the perfumery domain, except, perhaps in the art market valuation of Ernesto Neto’s scented work? Is this absence from the art market, at least for now, its political strength, thus enabling olfactory art to avoid cooptation? Will olfactory art lose its capacity to resist if it becomes subsumed into a commodity? We see resistance on the rise in a variety of arenas, including within the art industry, where there is a long tradition of artists situating their practice in opposition to the art market, to the hegemony of the visual, and to the commodification of art. We see olfactory art in a constructive, expansive role, although we are all admiration at oppositional practices such as the Sister Serpents stink bombs and Clara Ursitti’s Poison action.

Methodologies Echoing our fluid definition of time in our section on resistance, we view the field of olfactory studies as having, at least at this moment, porous and blurry boundaries. It is fundamentally interdisciplinary, traversing many fields that intersect and overlap. We are therefore interested in various methodologies, including the phenomenological

Introduction  7 and practice-oriented. However, the contemporary state of the field supports methods as diverse as historical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, social and formal aesthetic analysis among others. Many contributors to this volume frame the works under consideration with queer and gender scholarship, environmental studies, animal studies, and institutional critique, while others theorize the race and class implications of olfactory art. With this diversity in mind, we have not divided the chapters into clearly demarcated sections. Rather, the ordering of the chapters follows a trajectory that often circles back on itself, and picks up ideas that wend their way through the texts presented. We invite readers to make their way through the essays, perhaps forming connections that speak to their own interests and practice. As a guide, here we offer a brief summary of each chapter. Hsuan Hsu develops a framework for understanding smell in Black diasporic aesthetic practices, drawing on scholars who have been rethinking race in atmospheric terms. Debra Riley Parr posits that artists, coming from the Black experience, and working with fragrant materials demand a re-consideration of systemic racist structures, including alternatives to a racialized sense of smell. Pitchaya Ngamcharoen relates her personal experience, as a displaced cultural producer, following her own sense of smell in order to navigate lines of history, bodies, and societies. Gwenn-Aël Lynn weaves in and out of performance and activism to pose the problem of allyship: can good olfactory intentions inadvertently spill into neocolonial cultural appropriation? Eleonora Edreva shows us how to sharpen our sense of smell in order to resist immediate environmental dangers and how to protect ourselves against the growing olfactory surveillance infrastructure, thus enabling a powerful skillset for our collective survival. Clara Muller draws from environmental psychology literature and environmentalist theories to focus on artworks that raise awareness about air pollution. She posits that such works can efficiently participate in a new narrative, weaving together bodies and ecologies in a world where breathing has become a relentless struggle. Jim Drobnick introduces his concept of olfactivism, where artworks exemplify a genre of progressive artistic practice focusing attention on the risks percolating in the air, while employing that very air as the medium for critical interrogation. Through her investigation of Teresa Margolles’ Vaporización and Michael Pinsky’s Pollution Pods, Dorothée King poses the following question: “could breathing in art create more empathy for other human beings when visual impact is simply not enough?” Through her analysis of four artistic projects, Lindsey French traces an undercurrent suggestive of olfaction as the site of radical exchange and enduring potency. She asserts olfaction as a site for radical collaboration, centering the interspecies dynamics of plant defense strategies as models of olfaction as communication, where airborne chemical exchange forms the site for resistance and coalition. D. Rosen investigates scent as a form of poetic interspecies communication. Olfactory communication between species opens up broader conversations about the radical possibilities of care to build less violent, more cooperative kin-networks. Matt Morris’s chapter is perfume. The author investigates how the performance of drag in works by Marcel Duchamp, RuPaul, and Divine resists gender normativities, as well as the conditions of commodification, exchange, and circulation under which such conventions are developed within culture.

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Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr

Viveka Kjellmer argues that, through the active and deliberate wearing of scents as a statement of self-invention, perfume can make powerful claims about alternative identities and bodily presence, and can thus be subversive and political. Sandra Barré examines artistic projects that support a revaluation of the “feminine” and offers an analysis of gender and other representational systems, which are heir to feminist and queer theories. Dorothy Abram analyzes the innovative use of olfaction in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories of the post-World War I period, with the sensory rivalry between Virginia Woolf and Mansfield as a back drop. Brian Goeltzenleuchter argues that olfactory artworks, and specifically his work Sillage, have the power to transform the otherwise odorless space of the art museum into a platform for olfactory experiences of neighborhood smells and informal conversations about the politics of urbanism. Lauryn Manigel presents data she gathered about reactions to body scents in her project Love Sweat Love, a performative olfactory dating experiment that fostered a new aesthetic approach to smell. Alanna Lynch thinks through the complexity of human responses to abject smells, testing the limits of these in her artistic research with malodorous materials such as urine, kombucha, and stink bombs. In a wide-ranging discussion of power, identity, and the body, she establishes that these challenging smells can function as resistance from below. Arnaud Gerspacher develops a theory of art and spectatorship that takes into account current knowledge about our microbiomes. He offers an analysis of artists who, as they explore the power of the olfactory, take into account neocolonial dynamics, environmental crises, and the constitutive role of human and nonhuman animality. He demonstrates how internal microbiotic realities are enmeshed in and conditioned by external ideological and eco-political realities.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Except for the chapters written by Viveka Kjellmer and Matt Morris. Translation from the French by the editors. Idem. See note 2. By Western we mean the culture that arose out of the Greco-Roman peoples and which, through colonialism and other expansive strategies, now covers Europe and the Americas. Through its expansion, it also embedded itself in post-colonial cultures, such that it now forms a sort of “global” culture (all the while containing internal tensions between the various cultures composing this “global” culture). 5 That being said, two of our contributors deviate from this assessment. Sandra Barré, in her chapter, clearly affirms that olfactory art can and does in some instances “represent” and disrupt gender expectations, while Viveka Kjellmer, with her notion of “embodied presence” in her chapter, has a more performative approach. 6 Here is one instance, but there are many others: Blaž Vrečko Ilc, Racism and the Crises of Political Representation in the American Republic – From Its Constitution to the Trump Phenomenon.

Bibliography Baaz, Mikael, Mona Lilia, Michael Schulz, and Stellan Vinthagen. 2016. “Defining and Analyzing ‘Resistance’: Possible Entrances to the Study of Subversive Practices.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 41, no. 3: 137–153.

Introduction 9 Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Translated by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books. Classen, Constance. 1998. The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetics Imagination. London: Routledge. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. New York: Routledge. Concordia University. Centre for Sensory Studies. http://centreforsensorystudies.org/a-briefhistory/. Accessed 11/29/2020 Corbin, Alain. 1986. Le miasme et la jonquille: L’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIe-XIXe siècles. Paris: Flammarion. Deleuze, Gilles. 1987. “l’Art et les sociétés de contrôle.” Lecture on March 17th 1987 at the FEMIS (école nationale supérieure des métiers de l’image et du son), Paris, France. YouTube video, 15:34. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ybvyj_Pk7M&feature=youtu.be&t=433 Drobnick, Jim, ed. 2006. The Smell Culture Reader. New York: Berg. Fidelis, Gaudêncio. 2015. O Cheiro Como Critério: em Direção a uma Política Olfatória em Curadoria [Smell as a Criterion: Towards a Politics of Olfactory Curating]. Chapecó: Argos. Jaquet, Chantal. 2015. Philosophie de l’Odorat. Paris: PUF. Lyotard, François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean Luc. 2002. La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation. Paris: Editions Galilée. Osman, Ashraf. 2013. “Historical Overview of Olfactory Art in the 20th Century.” www. academia.edu/4608919/Historical_Overview_of_Olfactory_Art_in_the_20th_Century Riout, Denys. 2011. “Art et Olfaction: Des Evocations Visuelles à une Présence Réelle.” Cahiers National du Museum National d’Art Moderne, 116 (été): 84–109. Roudnitska, Edmond. 1977. L’ésthétique en question: Introduction à une ésthétique de l’odorat. Paris: P.U.F. Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. “Archive: Performance Remains.” Performance Research 6, no. 2: 100–108. Vignaud, Jacques. 1982. Sentir. Paris: Éditions Universitaires. Vrečko Ilc, Blaž. 2017. “Racism and the Crises of Political Representation in the American Republic – From Its Constitution to the Trump Phenomenon.” Teorija in Praksa 54, no. 1: 17–37. www.dlib.si/details/URN:NBN:SI:DOC-TQAEHTYQ?&language=eng

1

Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art Hsuan L. Hsu

Why are Black artists absent from most critical accounts of “olfactory art”? Part of the answer lies in the whiteness of powerful art institutions, critics, and funding agencies and the fact that certain olfactory technologies and infrastructures are concentrated in Europe and the United States. But the exclusion of Black aesthetic practices is also a product of how critics conceive of olfactory art in the first place. Is olfactory art distinguished by chemically synthesized scents, conceptual deployments of scent, the irruption of scent into the deodorized spaces of Western art exhibition, or efforts to reshape everyday sensory experiences and environments? Recognizing the olfactory experiments of Black artists requires reframing olfactory aesthetics not only as a conceptual practice whose interventions target the deodorized Western art world but also as a struggle over everyday encounters with smells that have profound cultural and biochemical consequences. Rather than simply adding “diversity” to existing accounts of olfactory art, the olfactory interventions of Black diasporic artists draw attention to vital political experiments whose stakes include suppressed modes of environmental knowledge, airborne contributors to environmental health, and the legibility of modernity’s differentiated atmospheres. Black olfactory projects underscore the importance of connecting conceptual art that incorporates smell with aesthetic practices that—especially among populations who have been marginalized and denigrated by the deodorized culture of Western modernity—have long offered tools for shaping the “weather” of the everyday (Sharpe 2016, 104). This chapter contextualizes Black olfactory practices as everyday political contestations over racial atmospheres. After establishing some theoretical and historical points of reference for thinking about the racial politics of olfaction, I turn to three aesthetic projects—syncretic Hoodoo practices and contemporary installations by Renée Stout and Rashid Johnson—that exemplify Black people’s efforts to transform everyday, racialized smellscapes.

Smell and Racial Atmospherics Historical accounts of modernization as a teleological process of deodorization occlude the unprecedented odor of the slave ship’s hold—an odor situated at the origins of racial capitalism and its subsequent spatial arrangements (plantation, factory, city, prison). In his widely circulated account of the Middle Passage, Olaudah Equiano writes, The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo

Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art  11 were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on sickness among the slaves, of which many died. (Equiano 2003, 58) Stowed as “chattel,” enslaved people became both victims and unwitting producers of “loathsome,” suffocating smells. In the hold, air was not just a medium of bodily subjugation but a tool of abjection: the enslaved were suffocated by their own perspirations, by “the stench of the necessary tubs.” The hold—where both slavery and racial capitalism were created—deployed air as a tool for inscribing racial difference in both symbolic and biochemical terms. In his play Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967), Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) included “Smell effects: incense … dirt/filth smells/bodies” to convey the smell of the hold: the play opens with a series of scents (“the sea … Pee. Shit. Death … n a total atmos-feeling…”) in “Black darkness,” punctuated by the sounds of screams and drum (Baraka 1978, 132). The stench of the hold is a paradigmatic instance of racial capitalism’s atmospheric engineering—its production and manipulation of what Renisa Mawani calls “racial atmospheres” (Mawani n.d.). Building on Frantz Fanon’s provocative discussions of “atmosphere” and breath, Mawani pushes conversations about racialization beyond frameworks that emphasize bodily representation and biological essentialism. “How might we … reconceptualize race as a dynamic, mutable, and charged field that permeates and entangles humans, nonhumans, and things?” (Ibid.) Whether in the hold, the “slave quarters,” the tenement, the factory, or the penitentiary, Black bodies have been held in close quarters even when health experts believed that bodily “miasmas” were a major cause of disease. This atmospheric engineering of racial difference persists in the everyday, disproportionately polluted spaces in which Black people live, work, play, and worship. Nineteenth-century racial pseudo-science naturalized these associations between Black bodies and noxious odors: whereas Equiano found the hold’s stench to be “intolerably loathsome,” white commentators—especially when confronted with the possibility of racial integration—maintained that the smell of Black bodies themselves was not only distinct from that of whites, but “intolerable” (see Smith 2006, 31). Thus, the structural (and infrastructural) causes of malodor in Black spaces—which, like the stench of the hold, associated Blackness with misery, sickness, and death—were disingenuously attributed to putative racial traits such as poor hygiene and queer domestic habits. Christina Sharpe’s influential theorization of the antiblack “weather” elaborates this connection between race and atmosphere: “the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (Sharpe 2016, 104). At once a cultural and material atmosphere, the weather draws attention “To the necessity of breath, to breathing space, to the breathtaking spaces in the wake in which we live; and to the ways we respond” (Ibid., 109). Sharpe’s concept invokes a continuum spanning spectacular deaths such as Eric Garner’s suffocation by police as well as “gradual strangulation and asphyxiation” occurring in “those quotidian experiences of unbreathability where really the ability to fully live in a Black body is continually curtailed, foreclosed” (Sharpe 2017, 52).

12  Hsuan L. Hsu Mawani’s and Sharpe’s work attunes us to the ways in which material atmospheres sustain racial boundaries through breath’s affective and biochemical effects. How have Black breathers responded to such toxic atmospheres? Is it possible to transform an unbreathable atmosphere? Is it possible not to? Sharpe introduces the concept of “Black microclimates” to gloss a range of actions that endeavor to produce more livable spaces within antiblackness: “certain kinds of acts can shift something so that you are not only being acted upon but you are also shifting something about what’s possible to sustain life in that place. You are creating microclimates” (Ibid., 53). These atmospheric modifications do not rely on the fantasy of pure, deodorized air: after all, campaigns for deodorization and “purity” have frequently displaced noxious air to poor, Black neighborhoods and stigmatized the idea of “Black” odors as health threats. Instead, producers of Black microclimates circulate atmospheric materials that support the (interconnected) health and collective memory of Black breathers. In affirming the smells of Black bodies and botanical products, these practices resonate with the embodied philosophy of “funk”—a term that derives from the Kikongo lufuki (“bad body odor”) but connotes “praise…for the integrity [of a person’s] art, for having ‘worked out’ to achieve aims” (Thompson 1983, 104). Framing funk as a Black epistemology grounded in embodied sensation, LaMonda Horton-Stallings writes that funk is “a rewriting of smell and scene away from nineteenth-century ordering and socialization of corporeal power that represses what stinks, but that does not mean it lacks intelligence or spirituality; rather, it provides other paradigms of intellect and spirit” (Horton-Stallings 2015, 6). Tanwi Nandini Islam’s MALA podcast and perfume project—in which she creates perfumes that evoke the olfactory memories of formerly incarcerated women— conveys scent’s efficacy in producing both carceral atmospheres and Black microclimates. Drawing on her background as a novelist and perfumer, Islam provides a forum for these women to “retell their stories of survival & reimagine them as scents.” For example, Tasha describes the smell of prison as “dark” and “dry,” and reports that scents sustained her emotional and mental well-being: It made you feel good to have something scented … it just made you feel like kind of free in the moment … because that’s what you do in the world: you find scents that agree with your chemistry and it makes you feel good [like] you didn’t lose everything you still have a little piece of … who you are. (Islam 2018, Episode 1) After spending 25 years in prison for a crime she did not commit, Claude now wears a variety of scents—including some inherited from her mother, a Vodun practitioner who created her own perfumes (Ibid., Episode 5). The women interviewed by Islam—along with the perfumes they create to materialize their memories of sustaining smells—underscore how olfaction’s powerful connections across space and time (its evocation of other times and places, inheritance, and even the cross-generational circum-Atlantic connections held in Vodun) help produce microclimates both within and in the wake of the prison’s alternately inodorate and noxious atmospheres. Amid the manifold forms of atmospheric violence propagated by slave traders, slaveholders, urban planners, landlords, corporations, and the state, Black microclimates sustain breath, health, and well-being. Frequently unfolding in mundane scenarios of slow violence and atmospheric adjustment, racial atmospherics and Black microclimates provide vital points of reference for understanding Black olfactory

Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art  13 aesthetics. Whereas genealogies of olfactory art tend to emphasize the olfactory irruptions introduced by Decadence, Surrealism, Futurism, and synthetic perfuming (see Burr 2012; Verbeek 2015), many Black olfactory projects are oriented by the history and continued reality of atmospheric racism, as well as the urgent need to breathe “otherwise air” (Crawley 2017, 1). Black olfactory aesthetics emerge not from the deodorized spaces of Western art galleries but amid racial capitalism’s varied and suppressed “archives of breathlessness” (Sharpe 2017, 109).

Olfactory Aesthetics and Black Microclimates Because antiblackness has consigned Black populations to unbreathable and/or noxious atmospheres, Black olfactory projects frequently manifest as everyday practices of resistance and life support. As Andrew Kettler has shown, enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world incorporated odor into a range of syncretic traditions including obeah, conjure, and rootwork (Kettler 2020). Whereas slaveholders employed bloodhounds to track fugitives by smell, conjure or Hoodoo practitioners provided “powders designed to aid runaways by throwing tracking dogs off their scent” (Anderson 2005, 84). Instead of simply serving as an atmospheric tool of racial abjection, smells could be material agents of protection and support. Although, to some extent, these syncretic practices became deracinated and commodified in the twentieth century, Black urban communities continued to access Hoodoo through a variety of media. As Carolyn Morrow Long has documented, scented products—including perfumes, incense, powder sachets, candles, fumigants, room cleaners, roots, and oils—circulated through mail-order catalogs and spiritual supply stores beginning in the 1920s and 1930s (Long 2001, 99–126). Consumers associated these materials with magical powers including the capacity to enhance charisma, improve health, ward off enemies, purge harmful spirits, inspire love, and even influence legal outcomes through the practice of “dusting the courtroom” (Ibid., 106). The “magic” of Hoodoo commodities, Long suggests, “resides in the color and scent of the products … In the early days of the spiritual business, preparations for ‘bad work’ had an offensive odor; now all products, regardless of their purpose, are highly perfumed” (Ibid., 103). Although commentators frequently dismiss these beliefs as superstition, the olfactory elements of conjure promised recent Black migrants to the city some degree of control over the disproportionately polluted, poorly ventilated atmospheres they inhabited and inhaled. Subjected to noxious air, olfactory stigma, and hygienic discourses of deodorization, consumers of conjure products transformed the air they breathed by connecting it with syncretic traditions that span Black diasporic geographies throughout the Atlantic world. For example, Van Van Oil—a mixture of lemongrass oil and alcohol that Zora Neale Hurston identified as “the most popular conjure drug in Louisiana” (Hurston 1969, 336)—features the scent of a grass native to Africa (as well as Asia) and cultivated in tropical or sub-tropical regions such as Louisiana. If the oil was “used for luck and power of all kinds,” its fragrance also evoked senses of place and diasporic longings far removed from the city’s noxious and deodorized spaces. Another popular product, High John the Conqueror Root, frequently emitted a “spicy” scent; in many cases, practitioners were directed to periodically treat the root with perfume to maintain its powers. This “most famous of African American charms” is carried in the pocket and rubbed when needed; kept in the house as an amulet; ‘fed’ or ‘dressed’ with various substances; boiled to make baths and floor wash;

14  Hsuan L. Hsu soaked in whiskey, oils, and perfumes for an anointing substance; or incorporated into mojo bags and lucky hands. (Long 2001, 221) Hurston affirms the root’s African origins, framing it as a folkloric embodiment of laughter, trickery, song, and resilience: “High John de Conquer went back to Africa, but he left his power here, and placed his American dwelling in the root of a certain plant. Only possess that root, and he can be summoned at any time” (Hurston 1981, 71–72). The powers attributed to Hoodoo products may not have been entirely unfounded. Tracing Hoodoo’s influences in the African American health practices of root doctors, midwives, and treaters, Katrina Hazzard-Donald writes, “Hoodoo drugstores were a significant component in urban folk medicine and home remedies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Hazzard-Donald 2012, 154–155). Theophus Smith notes that framing conjure as superstition has the effect of obscuring its role as a set of traditional “medicinal and quasimedicinal” materials and practices: “conjure as folk pharmacy” (Smith 1994, 5). Many Hoodoo practitioners were outlawed beginning in the late nineteenth century, when the medical establishment lobbied for legal regulations to expunge competing health practices (Roberts 2015, 158). The tensions between Hoodoo and biomedicine are evident in their diametrically opposed approaches to olfaction: whereas Hoodoo deploys scents to modify the material and spiritual interface between body and environment, biomedicine demands deodorization as a means of upholding the fiction of a fortified body immunologically sealed off from its surroundings (Cohen 2009). For Hoodoo practitioners, smell’s capacities to evoke collective and individual memories and to alter mood and behavior may exert considerable (though not easily measurable) effects on physical and mental health. These connections between material atmospheres, spirituality, and health figure prominently in Renée Stout’s Hoodoo-inspired installations. Stout has devoted much of her practice to developing exhibitions that explore African and African syncretic spiritual practices. She traces this interest to visiting a spiritual supply store in 1986 and to her encounters with spiritual practices in New Orleans starting in 1989 (Ed. Sloan 2013, 121). While conjure, Hoodoo, and related practices have long been suppressed—both within and outside Black communities—by secular institutions, bourgeois morality, and Christianity, Stout frames her work as a “way of honoring the ancestors and asserting that, as an African American woman, I owe it to them and myself to keep the door open” (Ibid., 122). In centering Black women’s everyday spiritual practices, Stout is inspired by Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1972), which documents “how generations of black women were creative even when they had little or no access to conventional art-making materials” (Brownlee 2013, 10). Over the years, Stout has taken on two artistic personae, Madame Ching (based on “a black fortune-teller from Stout’s hometown of Pittsburgh”) and Fatima Mayfield (“based on a local purveyor of healing herbs and potions”), whom she stages as the “descendants” of “old Southern Hoodoo spiritualists” (Greene 2013, 72). Stout approaches Hoodoo not as a fixed tradition but as a living practice that might contribute to Black futurity and liberation: for example, she characterizes Fatima as “a mysterious seer/herbalist/root worker, who can best be described as Zora Neale Hurston meets the science fiction writer Octavia Butler in the Matrix” (Rowell 2015, 880).

Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art  15 Stout’s traveling exhibition Tales of the Conjure Woman (2013) presents a mysterious, multisensory assemblage of works unified by the persona of Fatima Mayfield. The exhibition spans a range of media: a poster advertising Fatima’s services, glass sculptures of Hoodoo roots, a vending machine that appears to dispense roots and herbs, an etching of a recipe for seduction, drawings of figures Fatima saw in dreams, and multimedia installations that include scented materials such as organic materials and perfume bottles. The exhibition includes a number of embedded plots: a Hoodoo seduction, a pilgrimage to the tomb of Marie Laveau, a Christian minister’s opposition to Hoodoo reported on a church wall, and an encounter in which Fatima seduces and dominates a misogynist. These embedded stories frame the conjure woman as a threat to both patriarchal hierarchies and the church’s efforts to monopolize spiritual authority. Fatima flips the patriarchal script of seduction, deploying the redolent materials of Hoodoo to enhance the erotic agency of Black women. Stout’s work frequently alludes to the material and spiritual importance of scent in Hoodoo practices. An etching titled The Seduction (see Figure 1.1), for example, presents a set of “Notes for the Seduction of Sterling Rochambeau” that focuses on the qualities of perfumes. After noting that “Perfume is very important. […] A hard choice,” the work lists and reflects on ten possible perfume choices: “Hmm … TABU is a good one—it has that sexy/‘skanky’ factor (wink)”; “Also BAT-SHEBA! it’s perfect for this seduction of ‘Biblical’ proportions” (Ed. Sloan 2013, 75). The Rootworker’s Worktable (2011) includes (on a board displayed above an assortment of bottles) a similar list of “Things I’ll need for the seduction of Sterling Rochambeau: Adam &

Figure 1.1  Renée Stout, The Seduction (2010, detail), two-plate etching.

16  Hsuan L. Hsu Eve Roots, Buckeye, Five Finger Grass, Ginseng, Ginger, Lady’s Slipper Orchid, Orris Root, Saffron, Vanilla, Vetiver, Patchouli” and “*Shalimar Perfume” (Ed. Sloan 2013, 48). In addition to depicting scented roots, herbs, and perfumes, several pieces include scented powders and perfume bottles: “There are scents. If I open up these cabinets that have the roots and soaps, perfume-like smells come out. There’s incense” (Collins 2012, 50). Noting that “There’s even a display of perfume bottles that you can uncork and sniff,” one critic reports, “The scents of musk and flowers may dominate, but just as symbolically important is the aroma of earth—from graveyards and, ultimately, Africa” (Jenkins 2016). Scented materials materialize the atmosphere of conjure, making Stout’s exhibition not only a representation but an immersive performance: the work is not just operating on a visual level, as my creative process often becomes a literal ritual with candle and incense burning and the gathering of special herbs, etc., to insert into the work in an effort to promote healing and evoke the protective energies of ancestral spirits (Rowell 2015, 881) Stout wears scents while she works, and “If the perfume has a particular resonance with the artwork, she will record the scents she wore on the back of the completed piece. When the work is eventually purchased, its owner can interpret the piece with another sense” (Unsigned 2013). Through the scents of roots and perfumes, Fatima’s magic permeates, penetrates, and transforms the bodies and psyches of visitors. Scent plays a more personal role in Rashid Johnson’s multimedia installations. Like Stout, Johnson is not generally viewed as an “olfactory artist.” His installations blend eclectic historical and personal references with abstract grids, surfaces, and markings. Within Our Gates (2016), for example, takes the form of a labyrinthine, gridded structure adorned with plants, rolled-up rugs, sculpted clumps of shea butter weighing a total of 2,640 pounds, and multiple copies of books—such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s collected writings, Richard Wright’s Native Son, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice—that have been important to Johnson’s intellectual development (Fowle 2016, 27). Johnson’s works regularly feature a range of materials—incense, black soap, and shea butter—that are as fragrant as they are visually striking. One critic notes that a powerful smell was the first sensation he felt when encountering one of Johnson’s installations: “As you walk [in], a creamy, nutty smell wallops you—the unmistakable scent of raw shea butter” (Williams 2014). Like many other elements of Johnson’s work, these fragrant materials reference the material cultures of Black nationalism. Johnson was a middle-class child of the 1980s whose parents raised him in the waning years of the popular 1970s Afrocentric movement … In hindsight, Johnson finds humor in the idea that one can attempt to apply ‘Africanism’ to one’s body by using African black soap or shea butter … To some extent, Johnson’s work satirizes the superficiality of such Afrocentric signifiers: after all, he says his parents “abandoned” him among 1970s Afrocentric paraphernalia when they moved on to other fashions in the 1980s (Widholm 2012, 29). Thus, The New Escapist Promised Land Garden and Recreation Center (2008) presents “what appear[s] to be an exclusive black gentlemen’s recreation center …

Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art  17 enveloped in clouds of burning incense.” Here, incense as a vacuous sign of “African” (or, more generally “exotic”) culture is belied by the installation’s atmosphere of privilege and escapism (Grabner 2008, 358). However, Johnson’s “Post-Black” (see Touré 2012) aesthetic encompasses far more than a satirical awareness of the emptiness of Africanist signs. For the artist, shea butter is not only a “humorous” sign but also a substance he encountered (along with its associated cultural practices) when visiting West Africa: When I was younger, I would see shea butter being sold on the street, and I was interested how people were still coating themselves in the theater of Africanism  … It’s an interpretation of Africa without a tremendous knowledge of the complexity of the cultural identity of the continent … I think of it as humorous and also complex in its negotiation of how I began to form an identity. I went to West Africa and found all these shea trees, and was talking to people about how they used shea butter. It isn’t as spiritually [revered as it is by African Americans], but they talked a lot about its healing qualities. (Johnson 2014) The rupture between shea’s cultural significance among the African diaspora and its traditional medicinal uses in West Africa is a product of the Middle Passage, which shattered and remade the sensorium of enslaved people amid the stench of the hold. Both visually and aromatically salient in Johnson’s installations, shea butter confronts visitors with the hold’s atmospheric legacy: although “In traditional Nigerian medicine it is employed [to treat] scabies, ulcers, nasal stuffiness and other conditions” (Tella 1979, 495), Johnson notes that its healing qualities are not widely known among African Americans (instead, they’re sublimated into a vague spiritual reverence); not to mention that the therapeutic capacities of shea may be incommensurate with the ubiquitous and multivalent force of antiblackness (Johnson 2014). Shea butter also embodies the obscured spatial and economic inequities constitutive of the contemporary global market. A multipurpose material produced by West African women for use in cooking, soap-making, crafts, illumination, anointing, tempering, medicine production, and topical application, shea butter was marketed first as a cheaper substitute for cocoa butter and, since the 1980s, as an ingredient featured in luxury cosmetics (Chalfin 2004, 8–9). A late-industrialist wave of “tropical commoditization” brought exotic materials like shea to the attention of global elites: Marketed as much for their curative properties as for the promise of self-renewal they offer, cosmetics made from shea are presented to consumers as embodying the essential qualities of a faraway and wholly natural landscape along with the labor power of those who inhabit it. (Ibid., 16) Johnson is well aware of this tendency toward cultural appropriation: Shea butter comes from a West African nut that’s … often put in a lot of skin products and lotions we use today—even Jergens and other popular brands use it. So everybody is using shea butter and engaging in a relationship with Africa—but they may not be aware that they are. (Johnson 2018)

18  Hsuan L. Hsu In juxtaposing shea butter’s appearance and aroma with books, soul and jazz records, sculptures, and films referencing African American history and cultural identity, Johnson forces audiences to confront shea butter’s suppressed “relationship with Africa”—not only its often-obscured presence in skin products but also the ways in which the global market has reshaped West African social and economic relations oriented around shea production. Johnson also works with black soap—another fragrant product originating in western Africa. Often described as earthy in scent, black soap consists of burnt plant matter (often cocoa pods) combined with palm oil. Made by Yoruba and other West African societies for centuries, black soap exposes the racial fictions underlying discourses that associate blackness with malodor and whiteness with hygiene. Johnson amasses black soap into a kind of canvas—“melted black soap that’s been smoothed into gorgeous patterns to create deliciously textured abstract paintings that resemble topographical maps” (Touré 2018, 55). Yet beneath these “deliciously textured” surfaces lie intense anxieties called forth by antiblackness. Johnson’s experiments with black soap originated in discussing the facts of antiblack police brutality with his son: It gave me a tremendous amount of anxiety, you know? That I was going to have to tell someone else how to negotiate these same pitfalls, I was just dumbfounded by it. So, I started making these scrawled drawings in black soap and wax. Black soap is this kind of healing material that you can find in West Africa, but you also find it on the streets of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Chicago. It becomes this signifier, a symbol for cleansing material. It’s for people with sensitive skin, so I’m talking about a sensitive issue, about sensitive people … (Touré 2018) Like shea butter, black soap circulates in Afrocentric and spiritual supply markets as a product with both healing properties and African cultural associations. Its soothing and cleansing qualities enable Johnson to address both the “cosmic” proportions of antiblack violence and the idealistic deployment of blackness in abstract expressionist black paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Clyfford Still. Johnson’s monochromatic black soap pieces refuse to detach blackness from texture, skin, and smell. For example, Antibiotic (2011) explicitly addresses historical entanglements of race and medicalization: if the work’s title invokes white anxieties about racial contagion, its blend of “violent swirling gauges,” monolithic austerity, and earthy scent remind us that black soap has its own antimicrobial properties (Wu 2015). Whereas Stout’s Hoodoo practice deploys smells as material and spiritual forces, Johnson is more interested in the affective qualities of smell. Incense, black soap, and shea butter produce Black respiratory microclimates. The smell of these materials invokes the healing qualities of substances refined and used by African societies. More broadly, these scents evoke the indirect health effects of collective memory and cultural affirmation for Black diasporic breathers. The fact that some nonblack visitors experience these smells as “pungent” and “confrontational” (Maxwell)1 only underscores how atmospheric manipulation—even when it involves everyday materials like shea butter that are widely used by middle-class consumers of all races—can sustain or overturn racial hierarchies. The scents, perfumes, roots, soap slabs, and shea butter sculptures discussed in this chapter derive from everyday tactics for “keeping and putting breath in the

Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art  19 Black body” (Sharpe 2016, 132). If these scents play a diffuse, atmospheric role in the artworks of Renée Stout and Rashid Johnson, they nevertheless introduce substances associated with physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation directly into breathers’ bodies. These works stage Black microclimates that transform the racial atmospheres that have disproportionately exposed Black breathers to conditions of atmospheric violence such as overcrowding, poor ventilation, air pollution, and olfactory stigma. At the same time, they reframe olfactory aesthetics not as the exclusive concern of (previously) deodorized galleries and avant-garde artists but as a set of tools and strategies that civilizations throughout the world have been engaged in for centuries. Understanding the political stakes of olfactory art today will require an extensive engagement with the production and contestation of racial atmospheres as staged in the work of Black artists.

Note 1 One collector comments on one of Johnson’s pieces, “I am supposed to continually keep the incense lit, but I don’t particularly like the smell. When Rashid visits he always puts some in and lights it, and he always takes a little Shea butter and puts it on” (Shapiro 2014).

References Anderson, Jeffrey. 2005. Conjure in African American Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Baraka, Amiri. 1978. Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant. In The Motion of History and Other Plays, 131–150. New York: William Morrow & Co. Brownlee, Andrea Barnwell. 2013. “Foreword.” In Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman, edited by Mark Sloan, 10–11. Charleston: Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Burr, Chandler. 2012. The Art of Scent 1889–2012. New York: Museum of Art and Design. Chalfin, Brenda. 2004. Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets, and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity. London: Routledge. Cohen, Ed. 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham: Duke University Press. Collins, Lisa Gail. 2012. “‘The Evidence of the Process.’” Interview with Renée Stout. Transition 109, 45–61. Crawley, Ashon. 2017. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press. Equiano, Olaudah. 2003. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin. Fowle, Kate. 2016. “Introduction.” In Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates, edited by Kate Fowle, 27–28. Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Arts. Grabner, Michelle. 2008. “Rashid Johnson.” ArtForum 47:3 (Nov), 358. Greene, Nikki. 2013. “The Feminist Funk Power of Betty Davis and Renée Stout.” American Studies 52:4, 57–76. Hazzard-Donald, Katrina. 2012. Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Horton-Stallings, LaMonda. 2015. Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1969. Mules and Men. New York: Negro Universities Press. ———. 1981. “High John De Conquer.” In The Sanctified Church, 69–78. New York: Marlowe & Co.

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Islam, Tanwi Nandini. 2018. MALA: Blooms & Bad Women. Season 1. 5 Episodes. https:// www.malapodcast.com Jenkins, Mark. 2016. “Women’s Work Is Never Done.” Washington Post (Feb 25) https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/museums/womens-artwork-is-neverdone/2016/02/25/1e423d50-d690-11e5-b195-2e29a4e13425_story.html?noredirect=on. Johnson, Rashid. 2014. “The Accumulation of Self.” Interview with Maxwell Williams. Art in America (Oct 8) https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/ the-accumulation-of-self-how-rashid-johnsonrsquos-art-adds-up/ ———. 2011. Antibiotic. Black soap and wax on board. 108 5/8 x 144 ¾ x 4”. Collection of the artist and Evan Boris. ———. 2018. “Artist Rashid Johnson.” Interview with Anne Strainchamps, To the Best of Our Knowledge (Oct 8) www.ttbook.org/interview/artist-rashid-johnson-exploresrace-yearning-and-escape. ———. 2008. The New Escapist Promised Land Garden and Recreation Center. Mixed media installation. Chicago: Monique Meloche Gallery. Kettler, Andrew. 2020. The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, Carolyn Morrow. 2001. Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Mawani, Renisa. n.d. “Atmospheric Pressures: On Race and Affect” (unpublished MS cited with permission). Roberts, Kodi. 2015. Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans 1881– 1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Rowell, Charles. 2015. “Renée Stout.” Callaloo 38:4, 875–881. Shapiro, Deborah. 2014. “At Home with Monique Meloche, Chicago Gallerist.” Sight Unseen (May) https://www.sightunseen.com/2014/05/monique-meloche-chicago-gallerist Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. “Antiblack Weather vs. Black Microclimates.” Interview with Léopold Lambert. Funambulist 14:Nov-Dec, 48–53. Sloan, Mark (Ed.). 2013. Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman. Charleston: Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Smith, Mark. 2006. How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Theophus. 1994. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press. Stout, Renée. 2011. The Rootworker’s Worktable. Mixed media installation. ———. 2010. The Seduction. Two-plate etching, 7” x 5”. Tella, A. 1979. “Preliminary Studies on Nasal Decongestant Activity from the Seed of the Shea Butter Tree, Butyrospermum Parkii.” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 7:5 (May), 495–497. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House. Touré. 2012. “The Rashid Gaze.” In Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, edited by Julie Widholm, 51–55. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. ———. 2018. “Artist Rashid Johnson Loves Being Black.” L’Officiel Art (Feb 15) www.lofficielusa. com/art/rashid-johnson Unsigned. 2013. Exhibition Description for Tales of the Conjure Woman: Renée Stout. Charleston: Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Verbeek, Caro. 2015. Something in the Air—Scent in Art. Amsterdam: Stefanie Dathe & Hoehnes Stiftung.

Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art

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Walker, Alice. 1994. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” In Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, 401-409.ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press. Widholm, Julie Rodrigues. 2012. “The Moment of Creation.” In Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, edited by Julie Widholm, 27–43. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Williams, Maxwell. 2014. “The Accumulation of Self: How Rashid Johnson’s Art Adds Up.” Art in America (Oct 8) www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/ the-accumulation-of-self-how-rashid-johnsonrsquos-art-adds-up/ Wu, Danielle. 2015. “The Medicalization of Blackness: Rashid Johnson and the Diseased Connotations of Race.” Inquiries Journal 7:4. www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1025/themedicalization-of-blackness-rashid-johnson-and-the-diseased-connotations-of-race

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Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap The Smell of Resistance Debra Riley Parr

When presidential candidate Joe Biden stated in 2007 that Barack Obama was a “clean and nice-looking guy,” it seemed an odd, insulting way of attesting to the top of the US presidential ticket’s character, a strange description of a law graduate from Yale University (Horowitz 2007). Odd and strange, but far from irrelevant, Biden’s comment reveals deeply embedded racist assumptions about Black bodies and the hierarchies of race governing the thinking and conscious, or unconscious, actions of white people and others in the United States.1 Indeed, for many white people who heard Biden’s assessment, it resonated, also in conscious and unconscious ways, as a statement affirming Obama’s education and ability to pass the “smell test” of certain white communities. Biden supposed implication: Obama couldn’t or shouldn’t be dismissed based on race. He smells just fine. And the racist logic at work: Obama smelled fine because he didn’t smell Black. But what does that mean? The difficult work of resisting and undoing racism might begin and advance with an understanding of the olfactory signifiers marking bodies as other. These signifiers powerfully shape the standards by which people are maligned, discriminated against, and treated as other. What are the smells associated with Blackness, with whiteness? Where do these associations come from? Are they imagined? Projected? Can olfactory difference be challenged and resisted, and to what end? Olfactory difference in terms of binary conceptions of gender is familiar to everyone—indeed, the perfume industry continues to designate most of its products as feminine or masculine. Much has been written about gendered olfactory body odor distinctions, sometimes with special pointedness about disruptive vaginal odors, but also the sweet-smelling breath of lovers, as in the Biblical book of Psalms and Shakespeare’s sonnets, among others. 2 In comparison to odor and gender, olfactory difference in terms of race is less studied, especially its role in underscoring powerful anti-Black sentiments. Much more needs to be written about how these positions are underpinned by the odors whites have historically ascribed to people of color, especially to those who are Black. Despicable childhood songs inculcate these ideas in the very youngest of children. American poet Kenneth Rexroth’s poem, “Discrimination,” ridicules strongly held racist scorn for Blacks, the final line reading, “And you must admit, they smell” (Rexroth 1966). Culturally constructed hierarchies of racial categories preserve and reproduce long-held, but rarely examined, attitudes and dispositions about smells associated with bodies read as different within a white supremacist context. Jack Halberstam writes, As discourses of civilization sought to produce and justify separation between the colonized and the colonizers, the rich and the poor, the educated and the

Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap   23 illiterate, the cultured and the vulgar, smell became one of the many invisible regulators of new biopolitical orders. (Halberstam 2016, 60) Little work, however, has been done to uncover the histories of racially charged olfactory markers, and the semiotic strength they continue to hold in shaping attitudes and expectations. While the construction of racial categories has a long history, histories of “olfactory hierarchies of race,” a phrase used by Hsuan Hsu in his analysis of Black diasporic art, remain sketchy, as are most olfactory aspects of political and cultural life (Hsu 2021). Resisting the racist structures of institutions and the racialized unconscious governing their solidity requires a knowledge and acknowledgment that such historical systems and practices inform all arenas of culture, including the ­under-examined role of olfaction in the construction and persistence of racial categories. Historians Mark Smith (2006), Geraldine Heng (2018), and Andrew Kettler (2020) among others have begun to document this anti-Black olfactory racism. As Hsu notes in his chapter, contemporary artists are also investigating the politics of these hierarchies and the racialized olfactory unconscious as a means of drawing attention to and resisting deeply held assumptions about Black bodies. If olfactory art can truly be considered a practice of resistance, this chapter posits that artists working with fragrant materials at the very least are expanding the field while opening up spaces for alternative material conditions for themselves and others. In our present moment some of the most poignant acts of resistance call for dismantling the structures of systemic racism, in plaintive and angry pleas for the right to breathe. The fragrances and odors in work by artists such as Alan Nakagawa, Sissell Tolaas, Howardena Pindell, Otobong Nkanga, Rashid Johnson, and Joe Lewis invite, require, and indeed demand a re-consideration of these structures, including alternatives to a racialized sense of smell. Their work invites us to breathe in the fragrances of perfumes, soaps, and other materials—some specifically connected to Black cultures—as a mode of resistance. The central question for this chapter concerns how olfactory art might prompt or drive contemporary understandings of a racialized sense of smell and inspire resistances to received notions about race.3 To begin, the work of two artists who investigate the smellscapes of urban environments points to the power of olfaction in establishing associations and memories as well as in maintaining unexamined racial prejudices. Their olfactory art brings the smells of our neighborhoods and those of others to our attention. Alan Nakagawa and Sissel Tolaas each explores the affective quality of odor in the urban landscape including assumptions about neighborhoods and the people living in them. Nakagawa, a sound artist based in Los Angeles, created a series of perfumes available during the summer of 2017, on the street at the city’s Mar Vista, Cintinela Avenue, and Venice Boulevard bus stops. Facilitated by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the fragrances, described by writer John Metcalfe as “hyperlocal,” include one called “Economic Development” (Metcalfe 2017). This perfume—although not meant to be worn—evokes both the energy and the toxicity of urban gentrification and all the displacements that entails as once-impoverished parts of the city become bustling hubs of cafes, art galleries, and boutiques. Tolaas, a Norwegian artist and scientist based in Berlin, works along similar lines but on a global level. Her work in specific urban spaces, however, is less of an intervention into the landscape than a systematic analysis of the odors produced in and infusing that landscape in a distinct fashion.

24  Debra Riley Parr With headspace technology, she and her assistants gather and document the scents of cities around the globe, creating a scan of sorts that is then exhibited in a gallery or available for purchase in perfume bottles.4 The resulting scents, or smells—the term Tolaas prefers—are not an interpretation or commentary on the atmospherics of a place, but rather a register of its actual chemical composition. Tolaas records and preserves smells that might be encountered in the spaces of any city. In comparison, Nakagawa’s project functions more like a prompt or a disruption bringing scent and its possible meanings to the attention of people traveling about the city: his street perfume is an added element to the already present smellscape. Tolaas’s work is more of an aggregation of smells; they are extracted, collected, and then presented in a space where one can experience them detached from their contexts, detached from the specificity of their production in a particular space. Moreover, her compositions are chemical reconstitutions of the actual molecules gathered from a part of the city by means of headspace technology. In its presentation of the hierarchy of smells associated with specific places, specific populations, Tolaas’s study of the urban environment is more confrontational than Nakagawa’s, demanding we face prejudicial dispositions toward actual smells; hers is a process of extraction. Nakagawa, by contrast, adds to the mix of smells of the city—within the context of the city, its streets, its bus stops. The political aspect of each project differs, too, in its encounters and scope. Tolaas’s work is ongoing and expanding; it functions like an archive, a collection of smells that could potentially be used by many other artists who want to investigate current and historical sentiments about race, about immigrants and the smells different peoples might introduce into the places they occupy (Tolaas nd). Tolaas has stated that we have a right to know who we are, and for her this entails facing up to the odors humans emit into the atmospheres around us. Her project offers opportunities for encountering and contemplating the myriad of existing smells in our neighborhoods. Tolaas creates unique portraits of places that resonate with art historian Caro Verbeek’s observation about the smell of individuals: “Everybody has a body odor as unique as a finger print. This means that creating an olfactory portrait is more personal, more close to our identity, more intimate and more realistic then a flat immobile optic copy of someone” (Verbeek 2018). There is a politics of the olfactory in both Nakagawa’s and Tolaas’s projects in their interactions with the smellscapes of cities and particular neighborhoods that might register smells at once familiar and strange. Each artist poses questions: how do we experience and live with the smell of others, and do we truly know the smell of our own space? The political power of the olfactory is perhaps less obvious in the works of Howardena Pindell, an American artist educated at Yale and a member of the curatorial team at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1960s and 1970s before persistent encounters with the racism governing the museum’s exhibitions and programming led her to resign her position to practice art full time (Sayej 2020). Critic Barry Schwabsky in an essay for the 2014 Garth Greenan Gallery exhibition catalog writes that Pindell’s paintings “encourage the eye to overcompensate by refining its perceptions to the point where the minute differences from one moment of color to the next suddenly loom vast” (Rubinstein 2014). In addition to investigating these minute visual differences, Pindell perfumed her paintings in the 1970s, layering them with scent— an invisible, fragrant addition that extended the visual experience of her already complicated, large canvases. Perhaps this scenting bulked up their presence, and insisted on Pindell’s place in art institutions she recognized as overtly racist. Today, only a

Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap   25 mere vestige of this perfume remains in the mix of paint, glitter, talc, and tiny cutout circles painstakingly affixed to the paintings’ surfaces. The Rose Museum interprets these layered materials as “a luxurious display of excess” (Reynolds 2019). I could not detect any fragrance while standing in front of these paintings during the 2018 exhibition What Remains to Be Seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, notably the first major survey of Pindell’s work. The image of Pindell spritzing her finished work—I am speculating here on her technique—sets in motion thoughts of a body, adorned and scented, ready to step out of the space of the studio for a public appearance. Or perhaps just as valid a speculation, this layering of scent might be entirely private and personal, not necessarily meant to be experienced by anyone other than the artist herself, or an invitation to visitors to her studio as the work was freshly finished: “Here, come look closely at my painting,” and as a reward for putting one’s face so close to see the details, the faint whiff of perfume rises up from the surface, delicately extending the visual experience, but also through a gathering of molecules at its surface physically extending the flatness of the painting into the space surrounding it: a projection of, unseen but nonetheless, material substance. Andy Warhol’s idea of wearing perfume as a way to take up more space comes to mind, as does Sojourner Truth’s question at the Women’s Rights Convention of 1851, “Ain’t I a Woman?” The political implications here may be an assertion of gender, a girly or femme thing to dress up the body. Jenevive Nykolak writes of Pindell’s work for the National Gallery of Art that “the sparkling, encrusted surface, rendered in a palette of creamy pastels and including materials such as sequins, glitter, and perfume, also calls to mind traditionally feminine forms of adornment” (Nykolak nd). The question of race, however, is raised as one contemplates the relation between the Black body of the painter and the body of the painting. In an essay from 1984, Pindell explicitly “linked her approach to decoration to her ongoing interest in various African aesthetic practices” (Nykolak nd). Is the perfume anointing the paintings meant to mediate this relation, to make the paintings wear the fragrance worn by the painter, to resist the stultifying white imaginary about Black bodies? The question of race is also raised as one contemplates that perfuming the body augments what is already present, the odor of skin and its attendant particulars, its capacity to signal our identity, and our singularity, to return to Verbeek’s idea about the smell of the body as a unique fingerprint. Even the application of a perfume possibly worn by many other bodies—how many women, regardless of race, of Pindell’s age wore Evening in Paris, or Chanel No. 5?—becomes insistently one’s own as it intermingles with the molecules already present on one’s skin. The question of race is subtly raised by considering the transformation of standardized scent, a commodity democratically available, as it comes into material contact with the skin, morphing into something else, even if ever so slightly, and in many cases becoming an entirely unique olfactory experience, again regardless of race. The skin of the painting—like that of the body—may also interact idiosyncratically with a spray of perfume. If the paint is still wet, the volatility of the perfume may accelerate, or if the surface is dry, the volatility may slow. If the perfume entirely evaporates in a matter of days, if not hours, how should viewers seeing the painting months or years in the future experience the idea of the painting having, at least for a brief time, a scented surface? Is there, in that evaporative material, a yearning, a loss, a suggestion of presence if only ephemeral—something akin to German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s aura, now lost and irretrievably so?

26  Debra Riley Parr The ambiguity of smell in Pindell’s work—is it an assertion of Black identity or a resistance to the racialized notions of Blackness?—contrasts sharply with the deliberate, persistent fragrances in the work of much younger artists such as Otobong Nkanga and Rashid Johnson. These two artists invite us to reconsider the domestic ordinariness of materials in connecting the smells of familiar substances to Black and African experience. A Nigerian-born artist based in Antwerp, Nkanga works to educate or to prompt a remembrance of the value of fragrant everyday things, whose roots in Africa and other colonized spaces are obscured in the global flow of desired goods, and the long, often unknown and under-studied histories of colonialist, enslaving, and extractive practices. In the exhibition To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again, also exhibited at the MCA in Chicago, the artist gathers a sweet-smelling collection of dirt, minerals, herbs, spices, and oils. As the MCA writes, “Nkanga examines how raw minerals from Nigeria and other African countries are transported through various covert economies and transformed into desirable consumer objects” (MCA, Nkanga). Her work Anamnesis is an installation of fragrant materials redolent of colonial trade routes that continue today under late Capital. Coffee, tea, peat, tobacco, cacao, and spices such as cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, pepper, and vanilla fill a long, flowing carved-out space in a starkly white wall. The dichotomy is stunning—reminding one of the whiteness, on so many levels, of the museum space. The artist confronts the viewer with a physical, olfactory experience of fragrant materials that drove the colonial project and still continue in a global flow: the spices included those most commonly imported to Chicago today. Nkanga leads the viewer through a history of origins, (re)claiming a fragrant assertion of Blackness. Notably, all of the materials in Anamnesis are black or dark brown and perfume the gallery space with a heady, complex accord composed of all their various odors. The scent here is not ambiguous, or fleetingly available, as it is in Pindell’s work, but rather openly declarative of its intentions. The word “anamnesis,” comprising the title of the work, has connotations of memory, with Christian, philosophical, and even medical meanings, insisting that the action or experience of remembering the origins of these fragrant materials is not only grounded in a material economy, it is pointedly directed toward spiritual and intellectual experience as well. This tracing of origins extends to the aromatic soap, O8 Black Stone, Nkanga also designed for the exhibition. It is made of butters and oils from across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North and West Africa, evoking a historic trading route connecting Africa to the world economy. During the artist’s performances, visitors could purchase bars of this natural soap for 25 dollars, with the proceeds going to the Carved to Flow Foundation, an organization Nkanga established to fund future iterations of the project while supporting its mission of providing opportunities for the people of her native Nigeria to learn about the value of their land, natural resources, and ancestral knowledge. Like Nkanga, Rashid Johnson works deliberately with fragrant materials that have for him deep associations with Africa and Black cultures. An artist from Chicago, Johnson is now based in New York. In many of his projects, he too works with black soap as well as shea butter, aromatic substances directly tied to the African American community. Both are also of formal interest to him, as materials. Johnson explains that, after heating it, black soap becomes extremely malleable for five to ten minutes. “It’s almost like lava,” he says. “It melts, and as it melts, you can kind of shape it. But

Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap   27 as it hardens, you have almost like a new landscape, right? It’s almost like a volcanic eruption” (Touré 2018). While he likes the way he can manipulate the material, also important to him are the symbolic qualities of the soap: I started making these scrawled drawings in black soap and wax. Black soap is this kind of healing material that you can find in West Africa, but you also find it on the streets of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Chicago. It becomes this signifier, a symbol for cleansing material. It’s for people with sensitive skin, so I’m talking about a sensitive issue, about sensitive people, and using this material that’s meant for sensitive people. It becomes this combination of things that are a puzzle that you put together. (Touré 2018) In the series Cosmic Slop (2008), with its references to a song by the funk music collective Parliament, we see Johnson’s labor of carving into this material for “sensitive people,” a new fragrant landscape. “Dutchman” (2013) takes inspiration from the leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, poet Amira Baraka, and his 1964 play by the same name, which Johnson restaged in bathhouses in New York and Chicago. Apropos of bathing, the artist gave his mother, Cheryl Johnson Odim, one of his black soap sculptures, which she began using as soap, a powerful returning of the material to the everyday in a poignant bathing ritual that prompts all kinds of thoughts about materials, the art market, the body, and the ephemeral, as well as the power of such a fragrant gift from son to mother. Indeed, Johnson remarked in an interview that he wanted “to use something that has utility; it’s something you can take off the wall and wash yourself in” (Wei 2014). The talismanic change in materials, as the artist transforms soap into art, is put in reverse, with art becoming once again part of ordinary life. Johnson also works intensively with shea butter and pulls no punches in its forthright, strong references to Black culture in the United States explicitly and its adoption and adaptation of a material with African roots. The shea tree is indigenous to Africa and grows wild in 21 countries through the midsection of the African continent. It is rarely cultivated. Anthropologists date the use of its seedpods to make oil and butter to 100 AD (Gallagher 2016, 150). As an export, shea butter constitutes a crucial source of income for over 18 million African women, generating $120 million dollars in trade annually. In Ghana and Nigeria, shea butter is a major ingredient for making African black soap, a material favored by Nkanga as well. In “Shea Butter Three Ways” (2019), Johnson loads three tables with shea butter, the first raw and informé, the second shaped into blocks and stacked, the third full of his roughly sculpted busts. In “Shea Butter Irrigation System” (2013), Johnson repurposes an agricultural irrigation rig as curator and critic Tom Morton observes, “to anoint the Texas desert with melting gobbets of shea butter, black soap and wax” (Morton, 2014). “Islands” (2014) presents three geometric tables made of mahogany packed with shea butter. According to Johnson’s gallery, Hauser & Wirth, “Unctuous blocks and rough-hewn busts made of shea butter, an African-sourced balm that has become one of Johnson’s signature materials, serve as an additional sculptural element of his work Antoine’s Organ” (Hauser & Wirth 2018). This installation is a monumental assemblage of black scaffolding filled with books, televisions showing Johnson’s earlier video work,

28  Debra Riley Parr live plants in ceramic vessels that Johnson hand built and decorated, and mounds of shea butter—all signifying objects inspired by the African diaspora. But it is the smell of shea butter that one breathes in as it floods the space with its distinctive fragrance. As historian and artist Sampada Aranke writes, “Johnson’s quietly rigorous approach to materiality unfolds affective and sensorial possibilities that allow for an encounter with the various feelings of being Black” (Aranke 2018). Johnson makes clear his attraction to shea butter as a potent marker of race and identity: My mother was an African history professor and my stepfather was Nigerian. It wasn’t so much [an upbringing of] “Africanism,” but a consciousness of the separation that you have from an African identity […] [The use of shea butter] consistently returns through the waves of Afrocentrist movements. It was reborn with Kwanzaa and again with a generation of neoblack beat poets. I think of it as humorous and also complex in its negotiation of how I began to form an identity. I went to West Africa and found all these shea trees, and was talking to people about how they used shea butter. It isn’t as spiritually [revered as it is by African Americans]. (Williams 2014) And yet, unlike Nkanga, Johnson does not overtly recognize the labor of the African women who actually make the butter copiously present in this work. However, he does see the work of artists such as Joseph Beuys and Jackson Pollock as critical references for his art, situating his practice clearly within the received history of art and opening up other possible positions for it. As critic Liam Otten notes on the Kemper Art Museum website, “Johnson's frequent use of shea butter, derived from the African shea tree, obliquely recalls Joseph Beuys’ use of animal fats but also alludes to the lapsed Afrocentrist of his parents, humorously questioning the application of ‘Africanism’ to one’s body” (Otten 2013). The scrawls and scratches on the surface of the black soap works call to mind the orthographic qualities of the abstract expressionists as well as Cy Twombly’s paintings. The olfactory power of the fragrant materials marks out a space in contemporary art practice that is recognized as distinctly Johnson’s, even as it insistently calls out attention to a smell that beautifully signifies Black and African cultures. In contrast to Nkanga’s and Johnson’s valuation and revaluation of specific African and Black odors, Joe Lewis, an artist based in Los Angeles and former Dean at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, works with scent to push against the smells of the dominant culture in his project The Pathology of Excess. In the 1970s and 1980s, he directed Fashion Moda, a gallery in the South Bronx that showed the work of Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring as well as graffiti artists such as Daze and Koor. Lewis’s olfactory project investigates how scent works as a masquerade of sorts, signaling and marking a claim to authority and dominance. If the project is not a critique of the smell of whiteness, it does tackle the fragrance of power and the noxious underbelly of privilege. He is designing his own perfumes and prototyping his own perfume bottles. He describes his work as an attempt to follow Roland Barthes’s impulse to “interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society uses them to assert its values upon itself and others.”5 He is interested “in particular

Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap   29 fragrances and accessories as a form of social intervention, the semiotics of which can encourage a false sense of attractiveness, perfection, and cultural superiority.” Lewis recalls being astonished that Britney Spears actually had her own fragrance, and admits to that being a catalyst to produce his own line of perfumes. He refers to the project as “a blunderbuss social design experiment focusing on contemporary notions of beauty, excess, and consumption.” Lewis sees this project as a weapon of sorts—the blunderbuss is a short, muzzle-loading shoulder weapon—and takes aim at his intended target—the privileged gatekeepers of celebrity culture. The project is a collection of six perfumes: Blackout–A Complete Escape; Restless, Irritable, Discontent–A Fragrance Trilogy; Ornery–A New Cologne for Men and Women; Spun–Been Up for Seven Days and Nights? No One Will Ever Know. Lewis’s perfumes are at once funny and deadly serious as critique, and unlike Nakagawa’s street perfumes, they are meant to be worn! Ideally, according to Lewis, the collection will debut in a boutique rather than what he refers to as a deodorized, white-walled gallery or museum space. The desire to blur the lines between art and commodity suggests a critique of the seductive pull of the fashion and perfume industries and their ability to re-inscribe smell and other hierarchies firmly in place. These artists constitute a growing demand to question olfactory experience and the histories of racialized bodies, including long-held and unexamined assumptions that lead to comments like those Biden made about Obama, as well as to the persistent idea of whiteness as a default position against which other bodies are judged. It remains significant to this questioning of such deeply held and often-unconscious connections of race and smell, that the olfactory bulb feeds directly into the limbic system, the seat of both long-term memory and emotions. The results of smelling are processed here, and loaded with associations, before they reach the upper cortex, where language is composed. In a peculiar way, smelling short-circuits conscious thoughts. It bonds to memory and emotion before it subjects itself to concepts and emerges as already a part of the bodily unconscious. So we have artists pushing against received notions of olfactory difference, resisting culturally embedded racist practices of reading smell as an index of race, of the other. Pindell spritzes her paintings with widely available perfumes (she says she used cheap drugstore perfumes); Nkanga fragrances the museum with black and brown spices, African black soap and oils; and Johnson re-inscribes the smell of Blackness by packing his installations with the sweetness of shea butter and black soap: all gorgeous smells, redolent of care of the body, and positioned directly in resistance to widely held assumptions about the Black body. Nakagawa, Tolaas, and Lewis, too, understand scent to be both personal and culturally alive with powerful, specific meanings, some latent and unconscious—needing to be brought to our attention. This attention—whether to the smells associated with specific neighborhoods, with power, or with a revaluation of the Black body by Black artists—is critical to the tasks of resisting and undoing racism, deeply embedded in cultural memories. As scientists are beginning to understand, reactions to smells can be indicators of deep-seated prejudices. The olfactory artist and the artist who includes a fragrant material in their work insist that art be odorous as well as visual, that it expand the field of materials. These artists build on that insistence: they model an attention to questions about race and smell and present a method for attacking and resisting assumptions that persistently keep racist structures of oppression in place.

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Debra Riley Parr

Notes 1 For the record, Biden immediately apologized to Obama for these remarks. 2 See for example the work of artists such as Judy Chicago, Matt Morris, Clara Ursitti, and Anicka Yi among others. 3 Research by scientists Marta Zakrzewska et al. (2019), indicates, Results show that body odor disgust sensitivity is associated with xenophobia: BODS was positively associated with negative attitudes towards the fictive group. This relationship was partially mediated by perceived dissimilarities of the group in terms of hygiene and food preparation. Our finding suggests prejudice might be rooted in sensory mechanisms. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938418307571 4 Headspace technology is used to sample odors by placing an airtight dome over the material to be analyzed. The air surrounding the material is then pumped into a machine, which reads the chemical composition of the odor. 5 Joe Lewis, all quotations taken from correspondence with the author.

References Aranke, Sampada. 2018. “Rashid Johnson’s (Black) Collective Attachment.” https:// static1.squarespace.com/static/5be4e74431d4df4cfa86f9e0/t/5bf2e18b352f534af4f55fdf/ 1542644117601/AMC_Catalogue_draft_3_high+res.pdf Gallagher, Daphne E., Dueppen, Stephen A., and Walsh, Rory. 2016. “The Archaeology of Shea Butter (Vitellaria paradoxa) in Burkina Faso, West Africa.” Journal of Ethnobiology, 36 (1). DOI: 10.2993/0278-0771-36.1.150 Halberstam, Jack. 2016. “What’s That Smell?” Paradise Paradoxe, Elodie Pong, ed., Helmhaus Zürich, Edition Patrick Frey No. 201. Hauser & Wirth. 2018. “Rashid Johnson at Unlimited.” www.hauserwirth.com/ stories/16996-rashid-johnson-unlimited Heng, Geraldine. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horowitz, Jason. 2007. “Biden Unbound: Lays into Clinton, Obama, Edwards.” New York Observer. https://observer.com/2007/02/biden-unbound-lays-into-clinton-obama-edwards/ Hsu, Hsuan. 2021. “Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art.” Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance. Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr, eds. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Rashid. 2014. “The Accumulation of Self.” Interview with Maxwell Williams. Art in America (Oct 8). www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/ the-accumulation-of-self-how-rashid-johnsonrsquos-art-adds-up/ Kettler, Andrew. 2020. The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Metcalfe, John. 2017. “How One L.A. Bus Stop Became a Depot for Experimental Perfumes.” Bloomberg CityLab. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-28/l-a-streetart-gets-weird-with-bus-stop-perfumes Morton, Tom. 2014. “Rashid Johnson Talks to Tom Morton about Fiction, Humour and Homage.” Frieze Magazine. https://frieze.com/article/history-man Museum of Contemporary Art. 2018. “Otobong Nkanga at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago”. https://artviewer.org/otobong-nkanga-at-museum-of-contemporary-art-chicago/ Nykolak, Jenevive. nd. National Gallery of Art. www.nga.gov/features/exhibitions/outliersand-american-vanguard-artist-biographies/howardena-pindell.html Otten, Liam. 2013. “Rashid Johnson Exhibition.” Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. www. kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/news/9297 Rexroth, Kenneth. 1966. “Discrimination.” The Collected Shorter Poems. San Francisco: New Directions Publishing Corporation, p. 210.

Perfumes, Shea Butter, and Black Soap   31 Reynolds, Pamela. 2019. “At the Rose, Howardena Pindell’s Retrospective ‘What Remains to be seen’ is a Must See.” NPR. www.wbur.org/artery/2019/01/30/the-rosemuseum-howardena-pindell-retrospective Rubinstein, Raphael. 2014. “The Hole Truth.” Art in America. www.artnews.com/ art-in-america/features/the-hole-truth-63041/ Sayej, Nadja. 2020. “Artist Howardena Pindell on Understanding the Trauma of Racism.” The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/nov/02/howardena-pindell-art-racism Smith, Mark M. 2006. How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tolaas, Sissel. nd. “An Alphabet for the Nose.” www.researchcatalogue.net/view/7344/ 7350/40/40 Touré. 2018. “Artist Rashid Johnson Loves Being Black.” L’Officiel Art. www.lofficielusa. com/art/rashid-johnson Verbeek, Caro. 2018. Quoted in Miguel Matos, “The Perfume Shop: Olfactory Art at the Ryder Projects, London.” Fragrantica. www.fragrantica.com/news/The-Perfume-ShopOlfactory-Art-at-The-Ryder-Projects-London-11731.html Wei, Lilly. 2014. “Rashid Johnson: Magic Numbers.” Studio International. www.studiointernational.com/index.php/rashid-johnson-magic-numbers-afrocentrism-new-black-yoga Williams, Maxwell. 2014. “The Accumulation of Self: How Rashid Johnson’s Art Adds Up.” Art in America. www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/the-accumulationof-self-how-rashid-johnsonrsquos-art-adds-up-56425/ Zakrzewska, Marta, et al. 2019. “Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity Is Associated with Prejudice Towards a Fictive Group of Immigrants.” Physiology & Behavior. www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/abs/pii/S0031938418307571

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Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell Orientation, Territory, and the Evidence of Beings Pitchaya Ngamcharoen Edit by Vinita Gatne and Bethany Crowford

This chapter is an investigation of the capabilities of smell in its relationship to bodies and societies, tracing how smell functions as a sense that orients us through lines of history and participates in the act of becoming “civilized.” The form of this writing is inspired by the scholar and author Christina Sharpe’s method of reassembling theories through her own autobiography In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. I use my own narratives as a starting point to theorize and analyze forces behind the “lines of direction” as the method for this writing. The narratives are selected within three key themes; smells that orient, smells that displace or disorientate, and smells as evidence. These narratives guide the text from the sociology of smell through to group orientation negated by smells, how smells act as an invisible boundary that dissolves territory lines, how deodorization is used as a method of colonization, and smells as evidence of a being.

Reoriented through Smell (of Noodle Soup) I lived in a place where there were no street names and some roads did not yet exist on Google Maps. But when we wanted to go somewhere—even if it was for the first time, we knew how to get there. I was not sure if it was a natural compass, instinct, or intuition, because when we got lost, we always found our way. I had one favorite noodle shop, where the owners were from the southern part of Thailand. The place was decorated in a very unique style, with collections of items from their hometown—whiskey bottles, leather shadow puppets, very old cutlery covered with bright red or blue paint, and photos of famous actors and actresses from five decades ago. Bunches of garlic hung from the ceiling. So, while eating noodles, and enjoying big sips of the broth, I always smelled the mild scent of garlic mixing with the smell of their dusty vintage collections. The soup itself was unforgettable. The sweetness of long boiled bones with herbs lingered on your tongue for minutes and juicy pork melted in your mouth without resistance.

Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell  33 I told a friend from New York about how amazing the noodle shop was and she wanted to go there by herself. She asked “just tell me the name of the shop and I can ‘Google’ it.” I hesitated “errrr … you won’t find it on Google …” She continued “then send me the address,” but that was not possible either because there were no street names or house numbers. Giving directions to the noodle shop became a challenging task. It occurred to me that it is difficult for her to understand that this place is not where she can drop a tiny pin in Google Maps and have a street view of the area. Instead, I sketched out a map, wrote down the shop’s name in Thai and suggested that she ask around. I jokingly told her, “just go ahead, then you sniff out the smell of the soup.” Unfortunately, her nose was not well-enough trained to find the shop. To remember where we are as a “starting point” requires knowledge that is gained through contact with others. I refer to the “starting point” as a position and not a location.1 To find a position, one may rely on their experiences and memories and attempt to compare or incorporate those with new ones. We rely on memory to position ourselves, to be conscious of who we are. I stopped going to the noodle shop for a few months and when I returned, it had disappeared. I was so disappointed. I assumed that the shop had closed due to financial issues. This was becoming more common with the city growing and the rapidly increasing number of tourists—new investors from big cities had their eye on this area. Many local shops had to close down—markets were being replaced by supermarkets. Then one day, I was walking down the street and suddenly I felt something, something very familiar. I did not know exactly what it was but I decided to follow it. I turned onto a small street that I had never been to before. Then I realized that it was the smell of long-boiled broth with coriander and celery leaves, a bit of white pepper, and the mild smell of dry garlic. Before I realized, I found myself standing in front of a restaurant. It was the noodle shop that I thought had closed down. In order to become oriented, one must first experience disorientation. One’s orientation becomes apparent when the concept fails to be put into action, making orientation a subject to think about instead. When one is oriented, one might not recognize oneself as being so. On the other hand, when one is disoriented, orientation is something that feels out of reach. It’s in this mode that one might begin to wonder, what does it mean to be oriented? (Ahmed 2006, 5–6). Through what sense are we drawn toward the next position? What functions as an orientation device? Orientation often takes distance into consideration, and this distance is often measured through sight and sound; therefore, these two senses become dominant without actual contact or knowledge. It is the knowledge that is generated by our bodily senses that strongly influences where we think we are. By placing a greater emphasis on smell, which has been underappreciated, I am attempting to orient myself from an alternative “position.” I thought for a short time that I just knew, but I realized that it was an accumulation of tiny clues and traces that led me there. I went inside, sat at a table in the restaurant and waited for my noodles. I began to notice many new and unfamiliar smells. I looked around but couldn’t find the source. I closed my eyes, then I figured that there is a big tree right next to the shop; it is called ต น ้ ปป ี (ton-peep)—and it was flowering. A bunch of tiny white flowers had fallen on the roof and ground, and it smelt really sweet but soft—so sweet that I felt like I could taste it. Then I realized that this shop is not and never will be the same, but the only thing that remains, and traveled with the shop, that moved with the shop, is the smell.

34  Pitchaya Ngamcharoen Smell plays a crucial role in deciphering one’s position because it is closely connected to memory. One’s memory, or body knowledge, is embedded from wherever one grew up, a place one may claim as their territory. This body knowledge is stimulated through senses, especially sound, taste, and smell. However, like the character of smell, these ways of knowing are often not acknowledged until one is separated from the environment where the knowledge was created. In other words, one might not smell their own place, body, culture, or position while they are present in it. Implicit perception and memory refer to an unawareness of either perceiving something or having a memory of it. Whereas, in everyday life our explicit conscious perception and memory only cover a small part of what goes on around us. Memory is largely based on incidental learning which takes place without any conscious intention to memorize (Köster, Møller and Mojet 2014, 3). The memory of smells helps us not to notice the familiar smells in our everyday surroundings but to react immediately to the unexpected ones. At the same time, it provides a feeling of security when our expectations for smell are met (Ibid., 3–4). Smells, when perceived unconsciously, can be used as a mode of orientation to locate one’s position depending on where the smell originates, and where it invites us to go. When I arrived, I could not see anything but white. Everything was completely white and clean—completely sterilized. When I arrived, I could not hear anything—it was silent and still. I was struck by how disconnected one can be—a disconnected body. When I arrived, it was between autumn and winter. I was wondering why nothing smelled. I began doubting my nose, but it seemed to be fine. However, food did not smell; carrots, eggs, onions, oranges, garlic didn’t smell the same way. By relying on my nose, I wasn’t able to cook, nor understand what kind of shop I could walk into, nor get a sniff of what they sold in the shop: whether the meat was still good to eat, whether my clothes were clean, whether the food was cooked properly, whether the place welcomed me. Smell represents many things for me. It not only fulfills my need to have an appetite for food or to feel clean and fresh in a space, but it is also a crucial element that helps me understand spaces and situations in dimensions, not just as bland and flat information. When a person is used to having to navigate spaces through the implicit memory of senses, moving to a place which is well sterilized can have an unsettling impact on that person’s navigation system. In this situation, the feeling of disorientation can be very strong, even brutal. It can cause one to feel as if one is losing their position and grounding, which can lead to the loss of their sense of gravity. When falling, it is common that one instinctually reaches out to grab something stable which may provide another ground or potentially grant a return to familiar ground. The notion of familiarity is something to consider—does using the senses to orient ourselves direct us toward the familiar? What constructs familiarity—a line of direction? What are the forces within the body, skin, and culture that create these lines of direction? If we use our own senses as an orienting device, what is behind our understanding and history of the body? Here I would like to consider the “familiar” as that which is constructed throughout history as the norm. Norms are generally presented as innate and preconceived. However, they may be composed through points or events that are being followed and connected by the repetition of action and reproduction. This reproduction creates a line of history.

Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell  35

Reorienting—Smelling through Lines of History of Bodies, Culture, Noses, and Skins Every particular body has its own history, which leads that body through the world differently. From a social aspect, smell is used symbolically to define classes related to culture, race, gender, and prejudice, and as a result it is used to discriminate against those that are considered “different.” Unconsciously, smell, as a mode of orientation, stages one’s position where one stands, leading toward who to approach and what to avoid. In every step of the history of public health measures, encouraging personal hygiene has always been a form of political hegemony. Distinct odors are attributed to hated ethnic groups, foreigners, the poor, or homosexuals (Corbin 1986, 125–148). Environments, culinary choices, and cosmetic practices are factors accounting for differences in smell between races. Recognizing this encourages us to see race as a bundle of traits through which difference might be inscribed, traits that have their own divergent histories (Tullett 2016, 308). Smell has long been used as a cultural symbol to express the concept of “oneness” and “otherness.” Smell expresses itself as both a subjective and social identity. Because smell is perceived in relation to culture, food, clothing, religion, and even race, it is a psychological weapon used successfully for discrimination and racism, both consciously and unconsciously. I argue that recognizing smell as a symbolic border line opens up the possibility for blurring the lines that direct and divide “us” from “them.” Smell has the ability to transgress boundaries and seep through the smallest gaps. The cultural historian Constance Classen writes in The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories that “odor need not always serve as a mark of separation, however, for the transition quality of odor, which makes it a dangerous transgressor of barriers, also renders it an apt medium for interchange and integration with others” (Classen 1992, 156). By inhaling a smell, it becomes clear why one feels and thinks in a specific direction. Through the act of smelling, one fills oneself with the presence of the other, which may unconsciously perform a force behind the movement. To be able to determine direction, one must have a standing point. Then from that point, one can begin to orient oneself. The “point” then becomes a center, which defines direction and departure. Proximity also plays a crucial role in this, binding or shrinking the perceived gap of that which is “other” or “out of reach.” The proximity of a smell that reaches another subject may define something invisible and personal, a bridging or gap.

When the Smell Arrives, Settles, and Re-Conquers A friend of mine brought back a vegetable he didn’t recognize from a shop. It was a kind of root, white and in the shape of a carrot, but was triple the size. His assumption was that it was a huge carrot. I smelled it; “Nooo,” I replied, “I don’t know what it is either, but this vegetable smells like everything but carrot.” It reminded me of a soup I had in Japan a few years before. The broth was dark, in contrast with the vegetable, which was white-light brown and a bit transparent. Sometimes this vegetable was served as a side dish. “Smell it. It’s not a carrot,” I tried to convince my friend. He sniffed, paused. I could see the hesitation in his expression because it didn’t smell like a carrot but it looked like one. “No, it’s a huge carrot,” he insisted. It took me a while to figure out the name of that vegetable. It was daikon. The only way to convince my

36  Pitchaya Ngamcharoen friend was to “Google” its name and photo. Only then, he started to believe that this vegetable was a daikon. But to me, if I couldn’t confirm it by smell, it was not real. The concept of territory and identity, in relation to smell, can be understood as a representative trace of existence: “Indeed, to encounter a scent was to encounter proof of a material presence, a trail of existence which could be traced to its source” (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994, 205). I understand territory as a space that has been divided, or delimited, by fixed or solid borders. The border separates the space inside from the space outside; therefore, it becomes a fixed sign of distinction between the inside and the outside. The scholar Cæmeron Crain notes in his article “What Is a Territory?” that the concept of territory responds to the problem of identity, whether this be of a person, a place, or something else (Crain 2013). A similar feature of one group of identifications may define a territory or border which distinguishes itself from others. Another set of identifications, through simple contrast with the first, is how a territory can be said to produce identity and labeling to determine a group of elements (Aurora 2014, 1–26). To claim territory is to deny it to others. Territory is not given but constituted, and this constitution corresponds to the organization of the individuals in it (Crain 2013). Territory undeniably depends on identifying both the individual and the group. However, many approaches to understanding identity consider it only as a fluid position, both as form and concept. Identities are points of temporary attachments to the subject’s positions and often change throughout the development of self (Howard 2000, 386). The cultural theorist Stuart Hall argues in Questions of Cultural Identity that identities are often the combination of multiple differences intercrossing, merging, dividing and are invariably in transformation in an increasingly fragmented way in the postmodern time: “They are subject to a radical historicization and are constantly in the process of change and transformation” (Hall and du Gay 2011). Identity is fluid and can be adapted. Identity can be understood as a way to depart, re-depart, or drift apart from its own combined qualities. To be denied the heritage of one’s identity is to be given a chance to double, triple, and weave multiple roots into one’s own identity instead of adopting a readymade one. But then again, perhaps, comes the time to depart again and again. Identity, as a plural, may express its multiplicity without repressing its singularity (Minh-Ha 1991, 14–15). If it is understood that there can be no such thing as a solid identity, then how can we fix concepts of borders and territory? As previously highlighted, lines are created and aligned when dots or events connect through moments of following the familiar, sharing of likeness, and reproduction (Ahmed 2006, 122). Every individual and collective leave traces. On a small scale, we leave footsteps where we have walked, breadcrumbs on the table where we have eaten a sandwich, hairs that have fallen on the floor, the trace of heat left on a window after we touch it, or a smell of food that lingers in the kitchen after we cook. If we consider smell as a trace of existence, then we can maybe slowly try to understand lines of habitation, not that of occupation. To be and to live, not to take over or conquer. The theoretician and author Sara Ahmed notes in Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others that when dots are joined together closely in one direction, they create a line, and many lines combined together construct a surface (Ahmed 2006, 39). What if traces of smell are lines, lines that bind and weave together into a surface, zone, landscape, map, or territory? The author Rudy Wiebe in Playing Dead offers an analysis of the Inuit culture’s understanding of movement and travel, that when a motionless spot—a person—moves, they create and become a line. When hunting, hunters may seek out a line of tracks

Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell  37 across the area, looking for a clue of lines indicating another motionless spot. Therefore, the land is understood as a mass network of interwoven lines instead of a continuous surface (Wiebe 1989, 16). Every body produces a particular smell as a trace of gestures. Lines are created and leave traces alongside, or behind, the movements, while moving—while flowing. In this sense, we can understand a surface—or territory—as intertwined lines of smell. However, lines of smell cannot be contained, shaped, or grounded. They are lines that flow, that resist containment in discrete units, cross borders, link disparate categories, and confuse boundaries (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994, 204). They flow. They grow. Most of the time smells provide little information about the origin of their source. Especially in this era where products have been shipped and shifted from their origin to external places—people are roaming, both locally and globally. However, what we smell in a split moment is a combination of many smells. The smell indicates its origin, humidity, air current, and distance from the sources (Drobnick 2006, 91). Smells also show the materiality of a space, who is living there and what kind of activities take place there; therefore, space becomes a landscape of intertwined lines of smell woven together. A friend and I went to a laundry shop on a busy street. There were a few people waiting for their clean clothes. We exchanged coins and started the washing process, then we sat on the bench in the shop, waiting. Not long after, a family—a mother, a  father, and son—appeared with a huge basket full of dirty clothes. They were dressed in an unusual style. Their clothes showed signs of frequent use and time spent in a dusty environment. The mother carried her son and sat him on the bench right next to me; then she turned to help her husband put their clothes in the machine. They wanted to clean as many clothes as possible at one time. The shop owner got angry because it was too much for the machine to handle. They had an intense conversation in a language that I didn’t understand. Their son reached his hand out toward me with a big smile on his face. We started to play with silly faces and funny hand gestures. His mother gave him a serious look from time to time whenever he made a loud noise. The conversation between the parents and the laundry owner started to get heated, they started to raise their voices. I continued playing with the boy. Suddenly the mother quickly grabbed her son from the bench and they left. The shop owner was still grumpy. He immediately grabbed some cleaning products and sprayed everywhere that they had touched—the bench that the son sat on, the floor, the washing machine handle, and the door. He wiped off all their traces. My friend mentioned to me later that “the family were migrants.” To wash oneself with cleaning products is to reduce one’s body odor to the point where it’s socially acceptable. To wash clothes is to erase the evidence that the cloth has been worn. The French historian Alain Corbin writes in The Foul and the Fragrant that there is a strong relationship between absence of odor and the surveillance of behavior patterns (Corbin 1986, 95). To reject one’s body odor, in an attempt to control and neutralize it, makes one form a new relationship to their own body and to surrounding bodies. To abolish traces of existence, such as smells, is to erase part of one’s history—to deny one’s existence, and some traces tend to be erased more than others.

So Clean, So Bright, So White, So Right? Within Europe, the idea of “deodorization” started in the Middle Ages and continues to this day. The fear of epidemics, since the Black Death, led the public health-care

38  Pitchaya Ngamcharoen system to revise their practice of hygiene. In France, the public health policies were based on practices from ancient sciences, but from the fourteenth century onward it included knowledge created in the disciplines of chemistry and biology. Up until the sixteenth century, the authorities sent orders to slaughterhouses that any animals that may cause human infection were to be killed, and for all households to dig a latrine. Cleaning the streets of Paris was made the subject of competition in 1779. Later on, it was required for every household to remove their excrement barrel daily. By the eighteenth century, tactics such as paving streets and building better drains and ventilation systems were employed in the increased interest of improving public health. Each of these tactics involved a process of developing methods to get rid of corrupted air and unpurified fluids by disinfection. Corbin notes that this form of deodorization was “a utopian plan to conceal the evidence of organic time” (Ibid., 89–90). In England, particularly in London, there was a similar concern for hygiene in public spaces throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was expressed with widespread street cleaning and sweeping. To prevent an epidemic, sponges were soaked with camphor and white wine vinegar to ward off the infection of the plague, and houses were perfumed with juniper, rosemary, bay leaves, and vinegar. Smells were understood to have a direct effect upon the body (Jenner 2000, 132). It was, for some time, believed that corrupted air or foul smells caused sickness that infected the brain, and that perfumes and smells in the category of “fragrance” were associated with positive air flow and cleaning the air. After all, the term deodorization refers to a replacement of odor. One point to note about the policies around public health is that it encroached on the private space of the home and the intimate space of personal hygiene. Codes were drawn to enforce habits such as toilet training, weekly sweeping, regular laundry cleaning, and so on. Hygiene codes and rules relate to a particular context, history, culture, and time; however, when these rules flow and land in another context, zone, or moment, they become a “matter out of place.”2 Smell is highly subjective and culturally relevant. The attributes of smell are justified by a particular nose. When the nose is “out of place,” new smells appear stronger, especially when one arrives in another place. Remember when you arrive by flight to an unfamiliar city? The moment the automatic glass door opens and the wind blows on your face. The temperature, the air, and the smell hit your skin and nose without permission. No hiding, no resistance. But then, it smells less and less strong as we become part of it and it becomes a part of us. Smells are perceived at their strongest when they make initial contact with the nose. Among other things, intersubjective odor impression helps to define broad and extensive geographical territories and their smellscapes. We may say that odor description is mostly a work of the “outsiders” (Porteous 2006, 94). However, some smells never become a part of us. In the modern odorless world with the big waves and circulation of migrants, immigrants, expatriates, and newcomers, it seems that the initial contact scents are associated with food. Therefore, one may seek for the source of the smell— the people. It’s quite a common assumption made by travelers, since ancient times, that one’s own social group is inodorate—without smell—while those encountered on distant journeys and recognized as foreign simply seem to stink. Moreover, it’s likely that an unfamiliar smell is associated with things out of place, which quickly turns into an unpleasant or foul smell, representing the threats of alien cultures. Smells

Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell  39 are no minor trait, but an essential part of identity (Reinarz 2014, 88–89). Here the uncontainable and the disrespectful character of smell is seen as a threat, which may turn and harm its own subject as a weapon.

Deodorizing/Colonizing Which smells stay and which smells get replaced? One step toward colonization is to convert all matters and being into a subject within reach, to be consumed. To colonize is not only to enforce a powerful matrix of economics, race, religion, education, aesthetics and morality but also in that process to tear apart, rip open, and take over another’s matrix of thought, belief, and way of being. More effective than taking over the physical body is to take over someone’s concept of their being. Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the beholder. Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsensitized History The idea of deodorization spread across the seas, aiming to turn the foul-smelling sewers into clean-smelling, civilized ones. In Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution, the writer and historian Warwick Anderson shows how the United States forced its sensibilities onto Filipinos in the early twentieth century by “training” them to behave as “meticulously” as themselves. Filipino bodies were not admired, and US physicians advised against much physical contact with native bodies and their products, claiming that a high percentage of Filipinos had parasites in their stool.3 Laying their gloved hands on the natives, the United States seems to have succeeded in promoting sanitation in the Philippines. This was evident in 1920 when the government offered money to anyone who could make the most effort to clean their household; within two years, the Clean-Up Week was established. The scholar Xuelei Huang writes in Deodorizing China: Odour, Ordure and Colonial (Dis)order in Shanghai that between the 1840s and 1940s, “among the efforts made to turn this area into a vanguard of modernity, sanitation… deodorization was high on the colonizers’ agenda.” While the Chinese found the odor of urine, garlic, onion, and dirty canals to be part of their daily life, China was considered filthy, extremely unpleasant, and stinky to the Western nose. There were many attempts by Europeans to push the Chinese to clean up, until 1898 when the Public Health Department was established by British physician Edward Henderson, the first Health Officer of China, marking a new era of public health administration aimed at enforcing rules, discipline, and punishment (Huang 2016, 1092). The authors Paul Rae and Low Kee Hong give a vivid image of deodorized Singapore in Nosing Around: A Singapore Scent Trail, where they map the changing scents in Changi Airport in Singapore. They write that the flawless and odorless orchids are so clean that they look fake and that the cleaners wander around with nothing to do, saying “Changi is too clean.” They see the overeager efficacy and erasure of smell as a manifestation of environmental control and the performance of cleaning itself as an example of the shared conditions between Changi Airport and Singapore itself (Rae and Kee Hong 2003, 45). After 1965, when Singapore gained independence from Britain, the city was overcrowded, diseased, and smelled. But after over 40 years, the national economy and infrastructure rapidly grew, and so they were able

40  Pitchaya Ngamcharoen to erase odors, even in such a hot, humid, and densely populated place. When Lee Kuan Yew, who served as the first prime minister of Singapore, was asked by the Wall Street Journal for his opinion on what was the most outstanding invention of the last ten centuries, he named the air conditioner (Ibid., 46). In the book S, M, L, XL, architect Rem Koolhaas vividly describes his childhood experience of smelling the overwhelming sweet and rotting stench of Singapore harbor that was evident from the boat even when it was still at sea. Long after, when he visited Singapore again and the old buildings had been destroyed and rebuilt, he described that Singapore was gone, along with its smells (Koolhaas 1995, 1011). In the case of contemporary Singapore, the population developed perceptions and practices of cleanliness and sterilization to get acceptance from others. This cleaning was not necessarily a direct imposition by the West but was the cultural imperialism of the notion of cleanliness that has been embedded in the Singaporean thought and being in a way that unalterably changed their way of living. Deodorization, to capitalist ends, is inevitably followed by the controlled reintroduction of scent into the environment, as scent that performs (Ibid., 47). Although the change comes with the promise of a “better” world, the power that is imposed onto others in enforcing a hegemonic sensibility of cleanliness and hygiene, becomes an insidious practice of imposing ideas, concepts, agendas, and theories under the term “modernity” (Huang 2016, 1092). It is the continuation of colonial practice, which is not being imposed directly by the colonizer onto the colonized but by the people onto themselves, to erase their own smell. Replacing one’s smell is to erase the existence of being.

Smelly Evidences in the (Art)Work of Living We usually gather in the living room of our residence. It’s a big room on the ground floor separated into two spaces by a thin, dark-red curtain. The kitchen and bedroom share the same area with a big bookshelf, which separates beds from the stove, cutlery, plates, jams, peanut butter, and all the spices that we use for cooking. There is a bed, a bunkbed, and two spare mattresses in the room. The living room has bookshelves and working desks. The lighting here is very poor and there is only one huge window in the front part of the living room, separating the living space from the street. We call this lovely place the cave. My best friend and I return to the Netherlands after a short visit to our own countries. During the same period, a new student from India, and another one from China, experienced their first contact with the Netherlands. All three of them stayed with me in the cave during the first months of their arrival. There is an undeniable attraction to shared space, shared moments, and activities. Here, it is uncommon to have a kitchen and beds in the same room without a ventilator; it is uncommon not to have my own room and to share time together with three other people 24/7. Non-solid separation, no boundary for any smells. We can smell each other’s activities, cosmetic choices, clothes, and food. I came to understand that what is called common sense is not common at all. And maybe, just maybe, what is uncommon is the common among us. Common sense is the name the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci gave to human's conception of the world (Keeling 2007, 20). It’s a shared set of memory-images that occurs through familiar or routine behaviors. However, presenting the notion of common sense as something that is the human’s conception of the world seems to impose a presumption of common sense as a singular. There is not just one common

Common Scents, a Social Sense of Smell

41

sense but various common senses—as many as there are groups of living beings with brains (Ibid., 23). Common sense is a survival mode produced from history, a suggestion of ways from the past that have allowed humans to survive. I would like to refer to common sense as a communal set of mentalities that have formed throughout time. By Western standards, the architecture of our cave was not built to be a residential place; however, it has been home to a few. The uncommon structure and the uncommon smells and tastes were common to these few. It occurs to me that this situation and this gathering is not a readymade group but a group that gathered under similar needs. This situation is what the scholars Him Chung and Kai-chi Leung call “heterogeneous social agents,” in The Migrant as a Nexus of Social Relation—a phrase that refers to the group formations of similar agencies that form and reform as a continuation or departure. Chung and Leung further write that “it is not so much the characteristics of the migrants per se that explain the nature of their insertion into the landscape of the territory, but their connections with other agents” (Low 2013, 223–224). I want to expand upon this explanation of group formation analysis, together with Danielle Goldman’s notion of contact improvisation and philosopher Michel Foucault’s strategies of the “Technologies of The Self,” as an art of living. The critical dance theoretician Danielle Goldman brought up the notion of contact improvisation in I Want to Be Ready, proposing that by moving through and according to an unstable landscape, one molds oneself into a shape (Goldman 2010, 5). Foucault further insists that care of self is necessary for the practice of freedom. In thinking of a technology of the self as an art of living, Foucault, quoted by Goldman, writes, What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? (Ibid., 145) Taking these concepts into account and through embracing life itself as a dance practice that moves toward, among, around, away, or as an orientation for oneself, through the unknown land, can the act of diaspora gathering, struggling, being, living, cooking, and eating together, when entering a new space, also be understood as a collective contact improvisation? (Ngamcharoen 2018, 23) And how does smell play a crucial role in its creation of agency for a group formation, by acting as matter that leads to, and leaves the traces behind, the movement?

Notes 1 As Neil Smith and Cindi Katz state, In geographical terms, ‘location’ fixes a point in space, usually by reference to some abstract coordinate systems such as latitude and longitude, while ‘Position’ by contrast, implies location vis-à-vis other locations and incorporates a sense of perspective on other places. (Smith and Katz 1993, 66–81) 2 I follow this term from Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, where she explains dirt as matter out of place as when things are not in order or being put outside of its own context (Douglas 2002).

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3 Anderson further notes that the Americans used their own body’s orifice to measure social boundaries and create social and bodily control that supposedly enforced firm colonial boundaries.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology Orientation: Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Anderson, Warwick. 2006. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Aurora, Simone. 2014. “Territory and Subjectivity: The Philosophical Nomadism of Deleuze and Canetti.” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 18: 1–26. Classen, Constance. 1992. “The Odour of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories.” Ethos, vol. 20, no. 2: 156. Classen, Constance, David Howes and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London, New York: Routledge. Corbin, Alain. 1986. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Crain, Cæmeron. “What Is a Territory?” June 22, 2013 www.mantlethought.org/philosophy/ what-territory. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An analysis of concept of pollution and taboo. New York: Routledge. Drobnick, Jim, ed. 2006. The Smell Culture Reader. New York: Berg Publisher. Goldman, Danielle. 2010. I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Hall, Stuart and Paul du Gay, eds. 2011. Questions of Cultural Identity. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Howard, Judith. 2000. “Social Psychology of Identities.” Annual Reviews Journal, vol. 26: 386. Huang, Xuelei. 2016. “Deodorizing China: Odour, ordure, and colonial (dis)order in Shanghai, 1840s–1940s.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 3: 1092–1122. Jenner, Mark S.R. 2000. “Civilisation and Deodorisation? Smell in Early Modern English Culture.” In Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, edited by Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack, 132. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keeling, Kara. 2007. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 1995. “Singapore Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis Songlines…or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa.” In S, M, L, XL, edited by Jennifer Sigler, 1009–1089. New York: The Monacelli Press. Köster, Egon, Per Møller and Jozina Mojet. 2014. “A Misfit Theory of Spontaneous Conscious Odor Perception (MITSCOP): Reflections on the Role and Function of Odor Memory in Everyday Life.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5: 1–12. Low, Kelvin E.Y. 2013. “Sensing Cities: The Politics of Migrant Sensescapes.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, vol. 19, no. 2: 223–224. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 1991. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. Ngamcharoen, Pitchaya. 2018. “Common Scents A Social Sense of Smell: Orientation, Territory and the Evidence of Beings” M.A. diss., ArtEZ University of Arts. Porteous, Douglas. 2006. “Smellscape.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, 89–106. New York: Berg Publisher. Rae, Paul and Low Kee Hong. 2003. “Nosing Around: A Singapore Scent Trail.” Performance Research, vol. 8, no. 3: 44–54.

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Reinarz, Jonathan. 2014. Past Scents Historical Perspectives on Smell. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Neil and Cindi Katz. 1993. “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics.” In Place and The Politics of Identity, edited by Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 66–81. New York: Routledge. Tullett, William. 2016. “Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in Eighteenth-Century English Culture.” Cultural and Social History, vol. 13, no. 3: 308. Wiebe, Rudy. 1989. Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. Edmonton: NeWest Press.

4

The Political Potential of Smoke Gwenn-Aël Lynn

Figure 4.1 View of Oceti Sakowin camp, Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, December 2018. Source: Photo by the author.

At Standing Rock, water protectors rose before dawn every morning. While a pipe bearer was calling the spirits during sunrise, an attendant would smudge, with sage, every person standing in a circle around the sacred fire. This smudging was a cleansing for the day, and protection for the actions we were about to perform. #NoDAPL was a ten-month-long occupation protesting the construction of an oil pipeline by Energy Transfer in 2016. Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota worried that any leak in the proposed pipeline would contaminate their drinking and fishing waters. They thus called on activists to converge at the site where the pipeline crossed the Missouri River to stop construction. An historically unprecedented solidarity alliance of 400 Indigenous tribes, and allies, responded. For ten months they set up camp (see Figure 4.1), facing off with hostile police and a private security firm, TigerSwan, hired by Energy Transfer.1 While I was at Standing Rock, we practiced a strategy of attrition against the police and TigerSwan. 2 Every delay or distraction that our actions caused translated into

The Political Potential of Smoke  45 costs for the builders. Some tactics we used included blocking roads, locking onto construction equipment, and shutting down access roads. Our goal, in the absence of government legislation, was to drive the cost of building the pipeline so high as to impede the project. What happened at Standing Rock was much more than a mere protest. Like Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the ZAD, 3 or the 1870 Paris Commune,4 Standing Rock was a social experiment in how to be together. Standing Rock demonstrated how communities from different corners of the world, sometimes from opposite sides of history, and race, could co-exist and work together toward the common goal of defeating “the Black Snake,” as the Native Americans called the pipeline. Many cultures converged, not all tribal. Movements such as Black Lives Matter, Iraq War Veterans for Peace, the Brown Berets, Red Warriors, American Indian Movement, and others manifested their solidarity. Community and tactical decisions were made collectively; no representatives or single authority figure governed the protest. Nevertheless, everyone was expected to adhere to the Standing Rock tribal government recommendation, but this adherence was very elastic. Leaning on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which grants Indigenous people the right to practice their spirituality in public places, Indigenous groups deployed their ancestral spiritual ways as resistance tactics. For instance, slowing down construction by praying over the pipeline was one tactical action in place. Sage smudging signaled the beginning of the day, before breakfast, before we prepared for actions. Many more smudging moments occurred throughout the day. The ancient Native American practice of smudging consists of burning a bundle of sage leaves bound together and presenting its smoke to a guest, a place, or an object. The smoke bestows protection and removes “negative energy” from the guest, place, or object being smudged. The smoke communicates with spirits. Depending on the tribe’s traditions, the sage ashes are collected in an abalone or a turtle shell, and eventually dispersed onto the earth. When smudged, the guest performs a protocol. The protocol I’ve witnessed at the American Indian Center in Chicago, and at powwows in New Mexico, consists of scooping up the smoke over one’s head with both hands, then fanning it onto one’s side. While at Standing Rock, I witnessed other protocols. For instance, in a morning circle once, I saw a woman do the scooping motion, and spin in the smoke (so as to immerse her entire body in the smoke). Hence, as with the abalone or turtle shell, there is a diversity of rituals as to how to accept the smoke.5 At Standing Rock, smudging formed an integral part of the political process. Groups of protestors smudged when safely returning from actions, in the evening around the campfire, and as a way of simply welcoming each other into a circle. I cannot remember precisely when I was first introduced to smudging. It may have been at a powwow in California in the early 1990s. In 2015 at the D12 Red Line protest in Paris during the Conference on the Planet 21 (COP 21), I noticed a non-Native smudging sage.6 It struck me as odd. Until then, I knew only of Native Americans practicing this gesture. At first, I was enthralled, having never seen a European smudge. I swiftly enticed my comrades to go toward this person, and we basked in the smoke he kindly bestowed upon us. Later, I wondered what it meant that a Native American practice had crossed the Atlantic and was now being performed by someone who did not belong to the culture that had developed it. I wondered how seriously this person engaged with sage smudging. Did he practice regularly, and with whom?

46  Gwenn-Aël Lynn At Standing Rock, non-Natives were smudging at times, but I understood this differently than what I experienced in Paris. We were in a Native-centered place, immersed among Native Americans. In Paris, though some Indigenous communities had been invited to lead marches, we were mostly among Europeans, who, to this day, are not very acquainted with smudging, and have no history of smudging with sage. Oddly, in 2018, the French multinational personal care and beauty chain Sephora produced a “Witch Kit” including a bundle of sage designed to be burned. This product clearly sought to appeal to those interested in hypothetical European pagan practices of sage smudging (Native Appropriation 2018). After protests from Wicca groups, among others, who noted the cultural appropriation of smudging, it was quickly withdrawn from the market. To my knowledge, no historical records show that pre-Christian and pre-colonial Europeans smudged sage. Though Sephora’s commodification of smudging was blatant cultural appropriation for profit, it did make me reflect more on what I saw at the COP 21. The problems enunciated above prompted me to consider my own relationship to sage. I love the scent of sage. Basking in its smoke feels at once acrid, aromatic, and a little acidic. It has a southwestern US “after the rain” note, although this obviously varies with the kinds of sage being smudged: white sage, blue sage, prairie sage, etc. The next part of this chapter may seem problematic, and I will come back to this problem later. For the sake of clarity, I follow this naming convention for the rest of the chapter: Native Americans smudge with sage, while non-Natives cleanse with sage. For example, as a non-Native person, I cleanse my home with sage. From time to time, when hiking, I cleanse my vehicle and my sleeping bag. I have even cleansed my computer! The smoke from the burning sage makes its scent visible. One knows through experience that smoke may carry a smell, but more importantly, how do we feel while being present in smoke? I can only speak for myself. Though over the years I have learned some ritual gestures associated with receiving a smudge, I find that the sensation of being enveloped by a cloud is always first apprehension, then comfort. Once enshrined I feel safe. It feels important. And then I revel in the scent. Smoke from burning firewood is always harder to experience because the smoke is extremely acrid. The olfactory component of the sensation, moreover, happens before being enveloped. My instinct is to hold my breath once ensconced in firewood smoke, but I know it to be a very good bug repellent, and probably the first perfume mankind ever wore. On the other hand, when I cleanse others with sage, I concentrate on the task at hand, and this focus puts me in a meditative state, if only briefly. I momentarily pause the smoke narrative to provide some theoretical underpinnings for this inquiry, then I will return to performing with smoke. Building from the Ultra-Red sound collective, a group of sound artists rooted in militancy (Ultra-Red, 2000), that performance art history could be rewritten from a militant perspective rather than from the anthropological perspective favored by Performance Studies theoreticians such as Richard Schechner (2003) and Victor Turner (1988), I investigate the circularity between activists and artists.7 Ultra-Red’s approach compels me to keep in mind artists who, when times require, drop the artistic mantle to put on an activist hat. And conversely, as exemplified by organizations such as Greenpeace (among many others), activists who do not identify as artists, yet deploy compelling performances. For a very good history of such practices, see Tactical Performance by L.M. Bogad (2016).

The Political Potential of Smoke  47 This militant perspective, combined with Stephen Wright’s concept of visual skills deployed outside of what is commonly accepted as the art world (galleries, museum, etc.) (Wright 2006), and the notion that everyday life offers a rich terrain for creativity, as demonstrated in The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau (1990), undergirds this chapter. I restrain myself to performance art because I discuss a performance later on, but this militant approach to the arts can be applied to other genres as well. For instance, the role of autonomous media in amplifying and archiving activist performances is undeniable. Painting can be found in protest sign making. While I was still reflecting on problems of cultural appropriation with regard to sage smudging, I responded to a call for an artist residency at the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania. In the text framing the residency, the following keywords were used: Roots, neopagan, traditional knowledges, ethno-futurism, digital shamanism, eco-sex, ethno-appropriation, authenticity, contemporary pantheism, (re)constructed pasts, indigenous futures, northern ecologies, pagan anthropocene, feminist pedagogies, engineered indigeneity, seasonal sensibility, xenophobic rootedness, cyber-paganism. (Nida Art Colony 2018) After my experience at Standing Rock and with questions concerning cultural appropriation, I picked up on the root “indigenous” in the semantic field used in this set of keywords. Some time after my participation in the Standing Rock struggles, I had organized a panel at “La Colonie,” Kader Attia’s café / cultural center in Paris’s 10th arrondissement: Nouvelles de Standing Rock et d’ailleurs: or noire, colonialisme et écologie.8 Thus, by the time of the call from the Nida Art Colony, I was still deeply involved with the Standing Rock legacy. For the residency in Nida, I proposed a performance including sage cleansing as one of its olfactory components. The residency culminated with the Interformat Symposium, a yearly event that combines the formats of conference and art festival. The 2018 edition was titled “On Rites and Terrabytes.” My contribution resulted in the five smells performance, Fire Is Form. I contextualized the sage scent against the backdrop of a video of an Indigenous woman being harassed by Denver police for smudging on the street during an anti-Trump protest (YouTube 2016). The opening aroma, pine tree, established the local olfactoryscape, and then I cleansed the audience with sage while the video played in the background. A third scent, birch tar, aimed at bridging the Curonian Spit (formerly a subsistence fishing economy in Lithuania where tar was used to waterproof fishing boats, nets, and clothes) with sites of Indigenous contemporary struggles in the Americas, especially Standing Rock. As the fourth smell, I wore dill, extensively used in local Lithuanian cooking; and as we experienced the fifth smell, “campfire,” I raised questions about how “indigeneity” had been framed by the symposium curators. The first part of the performance occurred in silence, while “campfire” was the time in the performance to bring up language. Campfire is also a universal smell, as every society on Earth has sat around a fire. I also used the residency facilities to design and build three scent stations for “pine tree” (see Figure 4.2), as well as a cleansing fan from crow feathers (see Figure 4.3). Crows abound in Nida and have a long history associated with human settlements in the region. Nida Art Colony curator Jogintė

48  Gwenn-Aël Lynn

Figure 4.2 Fire Is Form. Performance. Pine tree scent station, 2018. Source: Photo by the author.

Figure 4.3 Fire Is Form. Performance. Crow feather fan for sage cleansing, 2018. Source: Photo by the author.

The Political Potential of Smoke  49 Bučinskaitė wrote in an email after the symposium: “One of the main purposes was to talk about archaic non-verbal layers through the very basic senses – smell (… Fire Is Form by Gwenn-Aël Lynn)….” I would argue that this statement applies to the first part of the performance, because during the smell of campfire, language emerged. This connection between smell and language is one of the key aspects of my practice: although olfaction has been described as non-semantic by scientists (Vincent 2003), I claim it is actually conducive to speaking. I have observed on many occasions that, when a group of people perceives a scent, it induces conversation. Thus, it may be that a non-semantic sensation fosters language. During the campfire, the audience asked me a few questions pertaining to the scents, but I used this speaking moment to delineate some of the problems around the concept of “indigeneity” at the symposium. I asked of the audience: “Are you colonized?” This elicited a number of mixed responses, some with strong emotional content. Someone from Brazil replied that she was colonized because she came from a colonized country. The UK contingent of the audience was upset that no officially recognized Indigenous people had been included among the presenters, asking “How can we be speaking of those who are not here?” The Sami people of Finland, geographically the closest to Lithuania, could have been invited by the curators.9 But the answer that surprised me the most came from members of the former Soviet bloc. Indeed Lithuanians, Latvians, Slovenians, and Poles all felt that they had been colonized by the Russians during the Soviet era, and even prior to this period, for those who had been under the czarist boot. From that experience, they considered themselves indigenous to their land. This was definitely how the Balts perceived themselves. I pushed back a bit on that claim, because most of Europe (including the Baltic nations) have been invaded multiple times over their long history and therefore their modern population descends from a mix of these invaders. The person in charge of photographing the symposium acknowledged that, although a Lithuanian national, he was of mixed Russian and Tatar descent. One Lithuanian curator was an ethnic Russian. One of the key differences between Indigenous people, as defined by the United Nations Organization (UNO), and the Balts is the existence of the nation state. The Balts have their own nation states: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Indigenous people from the rest of the world do not: There is no universally accepted definition for “Indigenous,” though there are characteristics that tend to be common among Indigenous Peoples: Indigenous People are distinct populations relative to the dominant postcolonial culture of their country. They are often minority populations within the current post-colonial nations states [sic]. (Cultural Survival 2020) Furthermore, in subsequent discussions during the symposium, a new keyword emerged: “creolization.” It was noticeably absent from the original call, yet several participants felt like it belonged to this symposium. Creolization is used here as a concept developed by the Antillean poet Edouard Glissant and could be summarized as a process of embodying multiplicity for people of mixed ancestry (Glissant 1981, 1990). Hence if we think of identity along a spectrum going from “creolized” to “indigenous,” we can think that some places have Indigenous peoples still living on their ancestral land, and other places are “creolized,” as their inhabitants descend from the racial

50  Gwenn-Aël Lynn and cultural mix resulting from colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean. However, this process is found (albeit with some differences) in other regions as well: Brazil is an obvious example, but also the Mediterranean basin or India.10 When it comes to the Baltic states, it is difficult not to see a little bit of creolization at work. What emerged from this discussion and the symposium is that there is a striking difference in how we frame “indigeneity” based on whether we come from a Western or Eastern European background. Indeed, Eastern Europeans did not participate in the colonization of the planet, whereas most Western European nations were the colonizers of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. If we think of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the myth of the “good savage,” we can see how colonialism has actually formed the conception of “indigeneity.” For actual Natives (particularly those recognized by the UNO) their indigeneity is tied to their land, language, and recent history. Some of the Balts at the Nida Art Colony were frustrated because they felt that because of this Western colonial history, they were denied the recognition of being “indigenous” (this, despite the fact that, as I have pointed out, they had been subject to numerous mixings over the years).11 This discussion in the smoke of our campfire prompted more conversation over the ensuing days, and then more dialogs via email and Facebook once we had all returned to our respective homes (Michelkevičius, Vytautas and Andrew Gryf Paterson 2019). I should also point out that, although my thoughts and narration may appear somewhat organized here, during the symposium everything was much more confused and chaotic. Much of this content emerged unexpectedly and sometimes elicited strong emotional reactions. After this experience in Lithuania, I reached out to Buck Romero, a Standing Rock comrade and choreographer of Cherokee descent based in Los Angeles. At Standing Rock, Buck was part of the “auntie brigade,” ensuring that traditions be respected, and that both youth and non-Natives be mindful of the spirituality inherent in the Water Protector movement. After my experience in Nida and my intuition that smudging outside of a Native context was problematic, I wanted to hear what Buck had to say. Granted she does not have authority over smudging, but nevertheless I respect her vision. Buck felt that non-Natives who smudge, even with good intentions, participate in a long history of colonial appropriation, thanks to their racial privilege. Because of the power dynamics we live under, and the economy we live in, settlers dominate the economy and the government; therefore it is very easy for them to appropriate rituals developed by “the other” without much consequences for this appropriation. However, for the Indigenous peoples who have developed this ritual over centuries, it feels like one more layer of colonial oppression as another cultural practice is taken from them (oftentimes profited from12), along with the theft of land, displacement, and pillaged artifacts, as most indigenous objects in ethnographic museum collections were stolen.13 It just keeps adding up. However, Buck dampened this assessment by adding that if a non-Native person uses sage in the privacy of their home, they are cleansing, not smudging. She advised further, however, that non-Natives should not burn sage in public. Hence, it is not forbidden to cleanse with sage for non-Natives, but they must be mindful of actions in public lest they reproduce gestures of cultural appropriation, which translate as (re)iterations of colonial oppression. A well-intentioned gesture, a simple scent, sage smudge, carries enormous significance, which goes far beyond its apparent simplicity. Even though we may love the scent of sage, it is not easy to be in it. Are we honoring this gesture? Are we doing it mindfully?

The Political Potential of Smoke  51 It is ironic that environmental activists who are present to support indigenous struggles against the oil industry unwillingly reproduce colonial appropriation by reenacting a ritual that does not belong to their culture. Furthermore, within the climate movement, and particularly within the pipeline resistance section of that movement, or even more pressing, with the Amazon rainforest on fire, many struggles are led by Indigenous communities (Georgiades 2017; Grable 2019). These struggles, as we remember from the display of police violence at Standing Rock, are operating not under a post-colonial predicament, or even a neo-colonial one, but under strict colonial extraction of natural resources, with blatant disregard for human life. As has been mentioned numerous times by Indigenous people, the theft of land, the extraction of natural resources, and broken treaties have never ceased. It has been going on for over five hundred years. Once again, if allies unwittingly reproduce colonial gestures of cultural appropriation, it negates their good intention and purpose for joining these struggles. If the ritual had been shared under circumstances of equality rather than under a dominant / resistance paradigm, perhaps it would be acceptable for non-Natives to smudge. However, the circumstances are not those of equality given the colonial history and the current political context. Although it seems appropriate to smudge while among Natives, non-Natives operating outside of Native circles should consider, as Buck suggests, cleansing in the privacy of their home rather than in public spaces. I transgressed this protocol by actively cleansing in public while in Nida, in order to raise the issue, not so much of smudging in foreign lands, but of addressing how the term “indigenous” had been framed (or misinterpreted, at least from a Western perspective) within the symposium, but I acknowledge that this method may have been problematic, and, at times, I felt like I was walking on the razor’s edge. Going back to the performance and the anti-Trump protest footage in Denver, it implied the following question: why do I, as a non-Native, get to cleanse—even in an art performance—without anyone interfering, while Indigenous people, who invented smudging, cannot? Under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, Native Americans have the right to practice their spirituality in public places. Yet, in the video, we see the Denver police contravening that law, arresting an Indigenous woman for smudging in public. This injustice underscores the power dynamic that makes the question of smudging contentious. Within the climate movement (and intersecting struggles), cleansing with sage poses the question of allyship. At Standing Rock, particularly, the problem of how to be a good ally emerged. If non-Native allies inadvertently reproduce colonial gestures, through neglect or ignorance or privilege, their actions become counter-productive. Thus, when we see a non-Native smudging at a climate march, it may be that good olfactory intentions spill into neo-colonial behavior when cross-examined through an intercultural filter. Though it does not originate from a profit motive such as Sephora’s “Witch Kit” or myriad other online retailers of sage and other “medicinal herbs,” any appropriation of Native American ritual gestures generates the same affect for Natives who see, once more, their cultural and spiritual practices stolen from them. It also comes as a shock, as this theft is performed by allies. In this chapter, I have focused on the scent of sage smudging, as it was the most loaded and least local of the five scents I chose for my performance Fire Is Form. Sage is often perceived and appreciated as a healthy scent, with healing properties. It makes us feel good. In the performance, as the second smell in the sequence, but also the first

52  Gwenn-Aël Lynn scent where I took the time to relate, silently, to each visitor, by cleansing them one by one, it established a meditative mood. The other three scents (pine tree, birch tar, and dill) were tied to the locality, and perhaps less loaded, with the exception of birch tar, whose smoky aroma I used as a bridge between the Baltic region and anti-pipeline struggle at Standing Rock—it was accompanied by Myron Dewey’s silent drone footage of DAPL under construction (Dewey 2016). The first scent was diffused in three scent stations distributed around the performance space. Thus, the audience engaged with it at its own pace. Unlike with sage cleansing, I did not act as mediator. The last scent, campfire, was a collective scent, the time to unpack some of what had been experienced. Some of the problems I have raised here were mentioned, and percolated, in the ensuing weeks. I am not suggesting that all the thoughts related to indigeneity and cultural appropriation raced through the minds of those who attended the performance. Rather, these ideas emerged subsequently at the campfire over the following days. During the performance, visitors were fully immersed in the olfactory sensation at an “archaic non-verbal layer,” to quote Jogintė Bučinskaitė. The intellectual engagement came later, after the performance. It is paradoxical that a scent, like sage, which makes most people feel well, is loaded with such colonial baggage. This baggage accrues once the scent is displaced from its cultural sphere of origin. I think, here, we can speak of abstraction. As Toni Negri and Michael Hardt describe, “The first great analyses of finance capital highlighted its fundamentally abstract nature and thus the increased distance between those who produce and those who control production” (Hardt and Negri 2017, 162). Once Sephora, and other retailers, ship bundles of sage and essential oils worldwide, it becomes a commodity stripped from its cultural significance. The retailers are rarely the foragers. Smoke, with its acrid sensation, may seem apt at invoking revolt, yet in this performance, it had a soothing effect. Within the performance, sage smoke was key to bringing up the question of indigeneity, whereas the smoke of the campfire was where we began examining how this concept had been framed within the symposium. Thus, I will end by suggesting that the political potential of smoke is a double-edged sword. Cleansing with sage is a good way of preparing for political action, but if it reproduces colonial behavior it will cause pain to some. The smell of a campfire, on the other hand, may scare authorities (fire after all is often associated with insurrection and danger), but it will not alienate our comrades. It is also conducive to discussions and examining our actions within the safety of an art performance.

Conclusion With this chapter, I have shown that a scent is never “just a scent.” It is not only an olfactory sensation; it comes with deep cultural meanings and significance, and also with historical baggage that can be very complex. Cleansing with smoke produces content by having somatic effects but also spurring inner reflections and discussions. Through the use of one of the most archaic forms of scent diffusion, smoke, I was able to generate political content, and foster deep conversations around difficult issues of our time. These issues traverse time, since the question of indigeneity goes back at least 500 years with the advent of Western colonialism and Russian territorial

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expansion. Looking forward, Indigenous communities, by leading the climate struggle, are at the forefront of twenty-first-century ecological issues. Hence, smoke, be it from a fire, or from Indigenous smudging rituals, as an olfactory propellant, can be an example of resistance that fosters cultural, aesthetic, and political content. Because it is not merely a political action per se, Fire Is Form exists in the space between art and activism. However, it was fathomed as a result of political actions and reflections. It would not exist without a particular political context. Nevertheless, I intentionally performed outside of an activist situation (albeit in the politicized environment of the Interformat Symposium on Rites and Terrabytes) in order to reflect upon the larger social and political contexts of cultural appropriation and to examine my own problematic relation with sage.

Notes 1 #NoDAPL stands for No Dakota Access Pipeline. For further information on the Water Protector movement, see for instance, Rebecca Hersher: “Key Moments in the Dakota Access Pipeline Fight” on NPR.org; and the Intercept article by Alleen Brown (Brown 2017). For the documentary-minded, Unicorn Riot has an entire archive of short videos filmed on location (Unicorn Riot, n.d.). There is also the film Awake by Josh Fox, which chronicles the struggle until November 2016. 2 I stayed at Standing Rock twice: in early November 2016 and early December 2016, for two weeks each time. 3 Commonly referred in the press and activist by its acronym, ZAD stands for Zone à Défendre [Zone to be Defended]. 4 The Paris Commune was an insurrection in Paris that benefited from the defeat of the Second Empire by the Prussians in 1870. It was a radical socialist autonomous commune that ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. Its members governed themselves through General Assemblies. It was short-lived, as eventually the old powers regrouped and executed all the members. There is a wall, “le mur des communards,” in the Lachaise Cemetery in Paris that marks the site of their execution and commemorates their names. 5 Natives would recommend learning about smudging through in-person experience rather than through written descriptions, hence I am not describing a full protocol here. This text is not anthropological. 6 The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the formal meeting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference. They assess progress in dealing with climate change (or lack of thereof). They have convened every year since the mid-1990s to establish legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The D12 Red Line protest took place on the last day of COP 21 over the insufficiency of the Paris Agreement (the COP 21 culminated with the signing of these agreements) to meet the challenge of climate change. Activists deemed the agreements insufficient because they are non-binding. As we saw with the Trump administration pulling out of these accords, there is no penalty for members not honoring the agreements. 7 Some of the ensuing thoughts are from a talk I gave at the Arts in Society Conference at the American University of Paris, France, in June 2017. It was titled “Performance and Activism” for the “Performance as Public Dialogue.” 8 “News from Standing Rock and Elsewhere: Black Gold, Colonialism and Ecology.” 9 The unanswered question, of course, is, who has the authority to define who is Indigenous and who is not? Elements of a possible answer can be found in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/ (accessed on 9/23/2019). Then again, the ensuing question, what are the criteria to become part of this forum? www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/unpfii-sessions-2. html (accessed on 9/23/2019). 10 For further discussion of this theme, see for instance, Dictionnaire des Métissages by Alexis Nouss and Frédérique Laplantine; the annual conference Critical Mixed-Race Studies; or my project Audiolfactory Creolization.

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11 For those who would further engage with the question of colonial Russia and postcoloniality in the Soviet regions, see Gerasimov, Glebov, and Mogilner (2013) and Claire Mouradian (2003). 12 All one has to do is try to buy bundles of sage online. Most of the retailers are non-Natives. According to Native protocol, sage is collected on Native land and is not for sale. When foraging, Natives make offers of sacred tobacco to the land before taking the sage. The sage sold online, in some cases, has dubious origins, and is most likely not respectfully harvested, and none of the proceeds from the sales return to the tribes. 13 See for example, the case of the Hopi altar at the Field Museum in Chicago, as narrated by Don C. Talayesva in Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. This is also reflected in the ongoing “Decolonize This Place” movement.

Bibliography Bogad, L. M. 2016. Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play. London & New York: Routledge. Brown, Alleen, Will Parrish and Alice Speri. 2017. “As Standing Rock Camps Cleared Out, TigerSwan Expanded Surveillance to Array of Progressive Causes.” The Intercept. June 21 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/06/21/as-standing-rock-camps-cleared-out-tigerswanexpanded-surveillance-to-array-of-progressive-causes/ Cultural Survival. 2020. The Issues. www.culturalsurvival.org/issues de Certeau, Michel. 1990. L’invention du quotidien I, II. Paris: Gallimard. Dewey, Myron. 2016. “Journalist Footage of DAPL Pipeline Nov 8th.” Posted on You Tube, November 9, 2016. Video, 09:20. https://youtu.be/SOwBS02xHaM Fox, Josh. 2017. Awake. A Dream from Standing Rock. Film, 01:21:45. https://awake thefilm.org/ Gerasimov, Ilya, Sergey Glebov and Marina Mogilner. 2013. “The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Russian Historical Experience and the Postcolonial Moment.” Ab Imperio, no. 2: 97–135. Project Muse 10.1353/imp.2013.0058. Georgiades, Niko. 2017. “Indigenous-Led Pipeline Resistance Camps Spread Across the USA.” Unicorn Riot, January 15, 2017. https://unicornriot.ninja/2017/indigenousled-pipeline-resistance-camps-spread-across-usa/ Glissant, Edouard. 1981. Le Discours Antillais. Paris: Seuil. 1990. Poétique de la relation, Poétique III. Paris: Gallimard. Grable, Kaitlin. 2019. “Celebrating Indigenous Resistance around the World.” Greenpeace, August 9, 2019. www.greenpeace.org/international/story/23725/celebratingindigenous-resistance-around-the-world/ Hardt, Michael and Toni Negri. 2017. Assembly, Heretical Thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Hersher, Rebecca. 2017. “Key Moments in the Dakota Access Pipeline Fight.” NPR, February 22, 2017. www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/22/514988040/key-moments-inthe-dakota-access-pipeline-fight?t=1568819827549 Laplantine, Frédérique et Alexis Nouss. 2001. Dictionnaire des Métissages. Paris: Pauvert. Michelkevičius, Vytautas and Andrew Gryf Paterson. 2019. “Post-symposium Conversation.” Nida Art Colony, March 11, 2019. http://nidacolony.lt/en/projects/inter-pagan/ post-symposium-conversation Mouradian, Claire. 2003. “Les Russes du Caucase.” In Le livre noir du colonialisme, edited by Marc Ferro, 392–406. Paris: Robert Laffont. Native Appropriation. 2018. “Sephora’s ‘Starter Witch Kit’ and Spiritual Theft.” Native Appropriation, September 5, 2018. https://nativeappropriations.com/2018/09/sephorasstarter-witch-kit-and-spiritual-theft.html Nida Art Colony. 2018. “Open Call for Contributions to the 8th Inter-Format Symposium on Rites and Terrabytes.” January 16, 2018. www.nidacolony.lt/en/1054-open-call-forcontributions-to-the-8th-inter-format-symposium-on-rites-and-terrabytes

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Schechner, Richard. 2003. Performance Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Talayesva, Don C. 1942. Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Turner, Victor. 1988. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Books. Ultra-Red. 2000. “Introduction, Noise and Public Space Three Years Later.” www.ultrared. org/lm_intro.html Unicorn Riot. n.d. “Sacred Stone Camp Archive.” https://unicornriot.ninja/tag/sacred-stone/ Accessed 11/7/2020. Vincent, Jean-Didier. 2003. “Nez mode d’emploi.” Beaux-Arts Magazine numéro 235 (Décembre): 82. Wright, Stephen. 2006. “Regarder de près: visibilité artistique et implication dérobée.” In L’Art et le politique interloquées, edited by Jacques Cohen, 477–484. Paris: L’Harmattan. YouTube. 2016. “Indigenous Woman Arrested for Burning Sage at Trump Rally.” Posted by Black Powder. July 4 2016. Video, 00:49. https://youtu.be/OmxJlxa7tC0

5

Olfactory Resistance at the End of the World Eleonora Edreva

Our historical moment is one of anxiety and grief, of learning to cope with environmental realities that even those the most shielded from climate disaster, thus far, would struggle to avoid acknowledging. For some, it's also a moment of rallying around a sense of preparedness, as people manifest their anxiety into learning self-sufficiency, bringing the previously fringe practices of “doomsday prepping” into the mainstream (Riederer 2018). Though prepping has a history saturated in fringe conservative values, the political and environmental turmoil of the past few years has seen a de-stigmatization around survival anxiety, with interest steadily growing in knowledge such as outdoor skills, canning and preserving food, and urban gardening. The survival supply industry has also seen a massive uptick in revenue, as folks from throughout the political spectrum invest in supply kits that are easy to grab and go in an emergency situation (Sedacca 2017). These pre-made kits range from around $100 to several thousand, with options for political and aesthetic preferences ranging from a $6,000 Costco kit containing a year’s worth of freeze-dried food for a family of four, to a $5,000, monogrammed, 72-hour emergency bag for two people, including a full set of luxury skincare products, a Malin+Goetz tobacco-scented room candle, and gourmet chocolate from the Los Angeles-based company Preppi (Akhtar 2018; Riederer 2018). While supplies are an essential facet of preparedness, it is noteworthy that the first survival tactic many people gravitate toward involves spending money to acquire objects that assuage anxiety rather than investing these resources into cultivating skills that would better prepare themselves and their communities in the long term. These are sneaky examples of disaster capitalism, a framework in which corporations profit big off of misery, anxiety, and misfortune, tricking us into thinking that spending money will insure our (own, individual) survival while discouraging us from finding the empowerment of knowing we already hold skills for survival within our bodies and communities (Fraser 2013). Climate anxiety isn’t exclusively a contemporary phenomenon and relying on a sense of smell was a strategy that many nineteenth-century Americans used to help them through it. Rapidly growing industries without regulation created cities where noxious smells abounded, and urban residents understood these bad odors to be a sign of environmental pollution and, consequently, a harbinger of ill health. City residents knew their air was being polluted because everyone could smell it and— often successfully—could fight against the pollution, rallying against industrialists and city officials on the basis of smell alone. “The equation of olfactory experience with environmental knowledge” was legitimized to the point that when folks were “called to testify about the health effects of a stench in the nineteenth century, individuals

Olfactory Resistance  57 referred to their own experience as expertise” (Kiechle 2017, 10). There were not yet calcified distinctions in authority between everyday city residents and health officials or scientists, which began to change when physicians and scientists realized that they would need to position themselves as experts in order to gain the political power to enact environmental change. As a result, sensory, embodied knowledge (and its potential for collective action) began losing its power, as scientific knowledge, attainable only through formal education, became hegemonic, creating a hierarchy between trained, educated professionals and everyone else, and rendering the power of collective bodily experience as no longer legitimate. Our senses are powerful tools for survival that systems of power have long sought to undermine—this delegitimization of bodily knowledge was just one moment along a historical continuum eroding the power of our sense of smell. There’s a well-documented lineage of scholarship that traces olfactory denigration back to Enlightenment-era rankings of the senses, which rendered vision and hearing as the “rational” senses, with smell falling below as one of the “lower senses.” What less often makes its way into the narrative is how explicitly this sensory hierarchy formed not only as a ranking of perception but as a ranking of people—European male intellectuals distinguishing between themselves and women, lower-class folks, and racialized people they viewed as either sources of malodor or bodies less capable of intelligence, who navigate the world through embodied knowledge rather than intellectual (Reinarz 2014).1 But as usual, those at the top of the sociopolitical order were acting not only out of a sense of superiority but also out of a sense of fear, feeling their power threatened by the potentialities for individual and collective power that smell can bring. This holds true for the political and corporate leaders of today, who are still maintaining the triviality of smell while simultaneously profiting billions from our sensory experiences and developing technology for olfactory surveillance and control. Smell’s historical denigration is part of what gives it its potential for resistance today since there are many possibilities for using scent that haven’t yet been exploited by state and corporate interests. This chapter will present a couple of potential directions for olfactory resistance, laying out how and why historical and contemporary uses of scent by both systems of power and their opponents have brought it to its current capacity for disruption in this moment of political and environmental precarity.

Smell Technology in the Hands of Power Another result of Western intellectual and political authorities’ historical undermining of sensory and embodied knowledge is a much lower rate of scientific investment into research about smell as opposed to the other senses (McGann 2017), leaving a lot of the research that has been done in the domain of high-level governmental and private interests. There is a long history of olfactory technology used in the name of “security” by both police and military forces. An arm of this research focuses on developing and using non-lethal scent weapons, and another investigates olfactory surveillance— historically by training dogs and other animals to sniff out illicit bodies and substances, with more recent investment into “electronic noses” capable of enhancing these abilities. The US military’s interest in scent weaponry goes back to World War II, resulting in the development (but not deployment) of an incredibly foul scent, made with the intention mainly to embarrass German and Japanese military

58  Eleonora Edreva officers. 2 Though the US military has continued investing in the creation of vulgar smells, the most high-profile global example of a scent-based weapon is more sinister—the “skunk water” used by the Israeli Defense Force against Palestinian protestors and civilians. Skunk is produced by a private Israeli company called Odortec, which has marketed it to police and military all over the world—several US police departments, including the St. Louis Metropolitan Police, are reported to have bought it (BBC 2015). Skunk is noteworthy because it takes scent weapons outside of the realm of war—which historically has been a container of time with a beginning and end, fought by identifiable opponents on a regional or nationwide scale—and brings it into the disproportional relationship of government against civilians, in a space-time without firm boundaries. Skunk stays on skin for several days despite repeated washings, lingers on clothes for up to five years, and has been described by Palestinians who’ve experienced it as “a mixture of excrement, noxious gas, and a decomposing donkey” (BBC 2015). While weapons like this are touted as a preferable alternative to other means of crowd dispersal (tear gas, rubber bullets), there is a large discrepancy against the way Skunk is said to be used—sprayed from a distance as a method of crowd control—and the way it’s abused as a tool by authorities—used only against Palestinians, and often going beyond breaking up protests into a controlled (and often close-range) targeting of Palestinian neighborhoods, homes, and businesses (BBC 2015). It thus becomes a tool of humiliation, probing at historical designations of racial groups as malodorous, as well as a tool of surveillance since the scent’s staying power can be used to identify or track Palestinians who were at the site of a protest days later, making them targets for further aggression from Israeli authorities. Even without the explicit marking that Skunk enables, olfactory surveillance technology surrounds us constantly—we’ve all seen police K9 units sniffing bags at airports or large public gatherings. These dogs are the current face of a lineage that stretches back to the nineteenth-century bloodhounds tracking the scents of escaped enslaved people, and will likely soon develop into the military’s in-progress Identification Based on Individual Scent (IBIS) project, which uses “e-noses” to track down and identify targeted individuals based on their specific body smell (Drummond 2010; Reinarz 2014). These types of projects have long utilized the olfactory labor of animals, with governmental authorities training dogs, rats, bees, and dolphins to aid them in a variety of smell-related goals including searching for banned substances and detecting mines in areas of past warfare (U.S. Army Research Laboratory 2013). E-nose technology is studying these abilities and pushing them further—with the IBIS project, the military will be able to track a person’s movements and whereabouts based on their specific bodily odor type, which can linger and be detected in a space for several hours or days after the person has inhabited it (Drummond 2010). Olfactory research has also expanded its focus beyond the identification or dispersion of odors into their active capture. Headspace technology—a technique for enclosing an object in an airtight device in order to capture and analyze the odor compounds present in the air around it—has been used by both governmental and corporate bodies to analyze the scents of “various locations and environments, from coffeeshops to battlefields” (Parr 2018, 263). This technology is already embedded into our lives in ways we probably don’t recognize—its most encountered application is the breathalyzer technology used by police to determine blood alcohol content in the breath of people suspected to be drunk.

Olfactory Resistance  59 Each of the high-ranking flavor and fragrance companies also has their own patented headspace technology, used mostly to study and capture the scents of flowers that are rare or hard to extract by traditional methods (Parr 2018). The technology has been lauded as allowing for the preservation of the scents of plants and places going extinct. Givaudan, for example, raved about having used it to preserve the scent of the “super-bloom” flowers at Death Valley National Park (Givaudan 2019). However, when you consider that the formula for the flowers’ scent compositions is now in the hands of a company worth billions, a company that, alongside a handful of other flavor and fragrance corporations, creates and controls the olfactory and gustatory experiences of a large portion of the world’s consumers, we better believe that if we want to smell those Mojave Pincushions, we should be prepared for the experience to be sold back to us. There have been attempts over the years to create more accessible versions of the technology, but all of these products remain commercially unavailable (Parr 2018). DIY rigs are incredibly expensive to produce, and require skills beyond the level of an everyday olfactory learner or enthusiast. There is a reason for this—it would take just one DIY scent enthusiast to capture and replicate a scent formula and the industry’s entire multi-billion-dollar business model would come crashing down.

Protection = Awareness Following that thread, a lot of what we need to be prepared for in our near-term olfactory futures is the further manipulation and commodification of our sense of smell. While scent at the bodily level has been a huge industry for nearly a century (hygiene, beauty, etc.), new directions in corporate olfactory research have shown that there’s a lot more value that can be extracted from us through our sense of smell, whether that’s our heightened productivity in workplaces or more of our money in spaces of commerce (Warren and Riach 2018). Any time that we’re in a space (particularly an indoor space) and detect a smell that isn’t being produced from an identifiable, naturally fragrant element of our surroundings (plant, animal, trash bin, food, etc.), we should train ourselves to think about who has released this olfactory communication into the air, and what stakes that entity has in the reaction we will have to it. Smell management, the “deliberate introduction, choreography and manipulation of smell as a resource which will achieve ends beyond the smell itself,” has its history in systems of public sanitation (Warren and Riach 2018, 149). This early smellscape management had near complete success at removing the noxious odors associated with the normal functioning of our bodies, public spaces, and societal systems; and this is likely why we rarely interrogate the power structures that go into scent management—if we don’t smell anything bad, we don’t think much about scent. This leaves us vulnerable to subconscious olfactory manipulations, a vulnerability that people in economic power are not oblivious to. There have been many noted interventions on the part of workplaces to introduce ambient environmental scents that could lead to heightened productivity—some examples include employers introducing smells invoking tropical destinations to raise employee morale, or schools introducing low levels of peppermint essential oil in order to improve student focus and attention span (Warren and Riach 2018). There are also many noted examples of scent being strategically introduced in commercial spaces in order to manipulate consumer responses, with major retailers like Nike reporting that the addition of scent to their stores could increase customers’ intent to purchase by up to 80% (White 2011). If

60  Eleonora Edreva we don’t want to fall victim to this subconscious manipulation, we need to get in the habit of interrogating our olfactory environments. On the opposite end of the pleasure spectrum, scent manipulation using foul smells has been used as a protest tactic by folks throughout the political spectrum, from economic justice activists planting dead fish in the vaults of major banks to antiabortionists spraying butyric acid (a molecule smelling of vomit) at the entrances and in the ventilation systems of abortion clinics (Drobnick 2018). While the aims of these manipulations to render entire institutions inoperable are impossible to ignore, less overt bad odors deserve closer scrutiny, as research has shown that people in the presence of a foul ambient smell report more conservative beliefs than those to whom the odor has not been administered. A study found that across all demographics, people in a room with a foul ambient odor reported more negative beliefs about gay men than people in an environment without this olfactory stimulus (Liberman and Pizarro 2010). Olfactory disgust is evolutionarily intertwined with close-minded opinions of people we view as different from us, a response cultivated by long-ago ancestors who feared that diseases they didn’t have immunity to could be brought in by outsider groups. But in our globalized world, where non-stop human travel renders the concept of “outsider groups” obsolete, do these inherited tendencies toward xenophobia and disgust still hold any evolutionary purpose? With Liberman and Pizarro citing research finding that people with conservative politics tend to be more easily disgusted in general than left-of-center folks, is moving away from the good-bad (or pleasant-unpleasant) binary as our only tool for categorizing smells also a political move toward greater acceptance of the complexity of human bodies and experiences? How can we retrain our sensoria away from disgust and toward curiosity when encountering smells we perceive as unfamiliar or unpleasant? Ultimately, in a world facing a recent rise of far-right regimes, can being aware of scent protect us from succumbing to olfactory manipulations aiming to stir hatred and division?

Expanding toward Action Once we establish an awareness of scent that allows for protection from olfactory manipulation, we can move beyond reaction, expanding the use of smell into active resistance strategies to help address various challenges of communities in crisis. Navigation and communication are two daily activities that we've outsourced more and more into digital devices, made and controlled largely by a handful of the most powerful companies in the world. Our dependency on digitally mediated visual and auditory cues to help us make our way through the world causes us to miss out on a whole layer of potential information to be gleaned and utilized through olfaction. This concept is, of course, not new—there are, and have always been, peoples who use scent as a primary method of navigating and gathering information from their surroundings. Some very commonly cited examples are the Umeda people of New Guinea, who live in dense rainforest terrain and rely on their sense of smell to gather information about their surroundings when there isn’t enough light coming through the rainforest’s canopy, and the Indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, who mark time through an “olfactory calendar” of fragrant flowers in bloom at different times, their year becoming “a cycle of odors” (Classen et al. 1994, 95).3 In the case of disaster or surveillance, we might need to be ready to navigate terrain without the aid of digital maps, or at night. Smell could be crucial in helping to lead us

Olfactory Resistance  61 around, but only if we have done the preparation work of learning the smellscape of our surroundings. It’s also important to attend to the seasonality in our smellscapes, paying attention to the different smells that occur throughout the year—just as with the Andaman Islanders, olfactory navigation takes on a temporal component here in addition to a spatial one, particularly in the event of an extreme scenario in which our relied-upon methods of telling time are no longer accessible to us. Smell can also be used as a method of covert communication. As noted earlier, olfactory surveillance has become much more prominent over the past several decades, but it is nowhere near as embedded into our infrastructure as visual and auditory surveillance. In addition, the olfactory surveillance systems (dogs, e-noses) currently in place are trained to look only for specific scented cues of illegality—drugs, bombs, cash—leaving millions of other aromatic compounds that would remain under the radar of this surveillance. This leaves much potential for resistance groups to internally create and train their members on a variety of olfactory communications, using smell to convey codes, messages, instructions, or directions. The infinite permutability of aromatic compounds (combining materials to create different blends) can create a complex and nuanced olfactory language, with the options for different odors to serve as signifiers for words, people, numbers, places, etc. In addition to spatial communication possibilities such as announcing which members of the group have been in a certain place or leaving scent trails that can be tracked by members to a secret location, scents have the benefit of a temporal component of communication as well, as a scent sprayed on a surface changes over time, thus enabling group members to gauge how long it’s been since the message was deposited. These communications can be activated without registering on CCTV cameras or being recorded by microphones on smartphones or smart home devices, as a person can be dispersing the scent and not appear at all suspicious visually or auditorily. Even if authorities eventually “crack” certain codes, there is simply so much raw scent material to work with that they’d forever be in a game of catch-up, leaving the power always in the hands of the resistance groups. In this way, olfactory communication traces a historical groove of people fighting systems of power using traditionally trivialized (and often feminized) mediums to create new systems of coded communication one step ahead of, and illegible to, power. Some famous historical examples—specifically chosen because they’re known in the mainstream, in the interest of not compromising communication methods used by current or less publicized movements—are the hidden navigation messages in quilts and songs used by escaping enslaved folks along the Underground Railroad,4 and the “hanky code” used by gay men to covertly cruise in the late twentieth century, and currently (with less secrecy and more playfulness) used throughout the queer community (Bryant 2019).

Potential Directions for Olfactory Education In order for any of these interventions to be taken up or expanded upon, we need to begin prioritizing the strengthening of our sense of smell. When I talk about olfactory education, I’m referring to any concerted and intentional effort to train one’s nose to become stronger at detecting and identifying odors in the air around them. I want to particularly center and uplift attempts that are DIY in nature, which I view as an important alternative to formal, mastery-oriented avenues of olfactory learning, namely perfumery and its history of elitism and exclusion (Reinarz 2014). While there

62  Eleonora Edreva are many amazing artists and practitioners working with scent in various capacities and settings, I also want to concentrate on projects that invite more active participation from their audience than simply consuming or intellectually thinking through a piece of olfactory artwork in a gallery or museum space. The projects I’m focusing on in this brief section ask not for an audience but for participants who are actively co-building their knowledge of olfaction, whether by practicing the verbalization of a reaction to a scent, by engaging the olfactory dimension of their surroundings, or by engaging with each other in a game setting. There is an expansive, well-documented lineage of olfactory artists and researchers using the practices of “smell-mapping” and “smell walks” to encourage people to spend more time engaging their surroundings through their noses. Participants walk around outside and are either guided through olfactory cues by the walk’s leader or explore on their own, with the entire group frequently discussing their observations and experiences (McLean 2018). A format with similar engagement but a slightly more structured process is olfactory games. Much has been written recently about “game thinking” and its potential when it comes to facilitating learning experiences, but only a limited amount of work has been done around scent-based games specifically. There are a few notable historical examples, such as the Japanese incense identification game kodo, or the Fluxus artist Takako Saito’s Spice Chess, in which the chess pieces are replaced with identical vessels containing different aromatic spices, which players must study and remember prior to playing (Niedenthal 2012). Following these two examples, the basic objective for many smell games is to distinguish between different odors, thus working on the rarely done activity of sharpening your sense of smell—meaning that “as they involve a radically novel mode of interaction— smell games are inherently pedagogical games” (Niedenthal 2012, 115). Some exciting contemporary examples include the work of Maki Ueda, including an entire university-level arts course she taught on olfactory games, and “Guilty Smells,” a dystopian digital game about a near future in which “un-American” food has been made illegal—players play as a police dog tasked with sniffing out the food, tying neatly into our discussion of olfactory surveillance (Ueda 2018; Molleindustria 2019). My own artistic work in the past few years has followed in this tradition, with my olfactory board game Eau Doom serving as the artistic manifestation of the ideas presented in this chapter—it presents a speculative future in which widespread ecological collapse puts players in a position to work cooperatively at identifying plants by their scents in order to preserve them before they disappear, with the aim of encouraging players to train their noses as one solution to environmental anxiety and hopelessness (Edreva 2020). The game is modifiable, meaning players can work with any scent materials they have on hand (perfume samples, essential oils, scented objects found around the house), and open-source, meaning that it’s online in its entirety, with indepth instructions on how to replicate it at home. Players can, and are encouraged to, create their own versions of the game, and maybe even share them back with me.5

Conclusion Our sense of smell holds immense possibility and, if we attend to it, can serve as a tool of resistance in ways that stretch far beyond the sampling of ideas I’ve fit into these pages. Human olfaction is highly sensitive and able to pick up “virtually all volatile chemicals larger than an atom or two, […] with an estimated ability to discriminate

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more than 1 trillion potential compounds” (McGann 2017). In just the past few years, medical researchers have found that the body odor of people with early-stage Parkinson’s disease or various types of cancer changes in a detectable way, which could lead to an earlier diagnosis and, thus, higher chance of recovery. Though researchers are training dogs to be able to detect this, it is fully possible for a human to do it as well, as in the case of Joy Milne, a woman who noticed a change in her husband’s body odor years before he got a Parkinson’s diagnosis, and who can now, with nearly 100% accuracy, detect the presence of the disease in someone based on their smell alone (King 2020). Several months into the COVID-19 global pandemic, it is coming to light that odor compounds in the exhaled breath of people infected with the virus are detectable before almost any other symptoms, making a smell test potentially the quickest, earliest, and most noninvasive way to test for the virus going forward (King 2020). It is entirely feasible for people who train their noses to learn these olfactory disease detection skills and use them in their communities, creating possibilities for healthcare autonomy outside of the medical industrial complex’s unequal implementation of findings and resources along racial and class lines. This global pandemic is just the most recent large-scale illumination of the unsustainability of our global systems, but a closer look at any major political or environmental event will more than likely show entry points for olfactory engagement. As we inch toward the end of the world, or at least the edge of this iteration of it, finding these possibilities for olfactory resistance reminds us that our bodies already have the skills we need, and that the most resilience can be generated when we relearn how to use them together.

Notes 1 The racist, classist, sexist, and xenophobic histories of scent fell just beyond the scope of this piece, but they are important and well-documented throughout the literature. I would recommend perusing Jonathan Reinarz’s Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell as a companion to this chapter. 2 For a thorough, accessible, and humorous history of the US military’s usage of scent-based weapons, see chapter 10, “What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Reek,” in Mary Roach’s Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. 3 It’s important to keep in mind that this is anthropological research, fraught with all the tensions and problematic aspects that field brings up. The information we’re trafficking in was collected through Western, predominantly white, academics, whose cultural lenses may have led them to exoticize the information, which may not match up to or accurately represent the olfactory lived experience of these Indigenous peoples. 4 The actual existence of this quilt code is debated among historians but I am of the opinion that any historical story with such a pervasive cultural impact speaks to a truth of some kind and is worth putting some trust in. 5 For more information, see: https://eleonora.xyz/eau-doom.

References Akhtar, Allana. 2018. “Costco Is Selling a $6,000 Doomsday Preparation Kit That Can Feed a Family of 4 for a Year.” Money, March 9, 2018. http://money.com/money/5193154/ costco-doomsday-preparation-emergency-food-kit/ BBC. 2015. “Who, What, Why: What is Skunk Water?” BBC, September 12, 2015. www.bbc. com/news/magazine-34227609 Bryant, Marie Claire. 2019. “Underground Railroad Quilt Codes: What We Know, What We Believe, and What Inspires Us.” Folklife, May 3, 2019. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/ underground-railroad-quilt-codes

64 Eleonora Edreva Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. New York: Routledge. Drobnick, Jim. 2018. “Smell, Terrorism, and Performance.” Performance Research 23(4–5), 355–361. Drummond, Katie. 2010. “Army Wants Sensors to Nab Sweaty, Smelly Security Threats.” Wired, April 26, 2010. www.wired.com/2010/04/army-wants-sensors-to-nab-sweatysmelly-security-threats/ Edreva, Eleonora. 2020. “Eau Doom.” Last modified June 10, 2020. https://eleonora.xyz/ eau-doom Fraser, Steve. 2013. “A History of Disaster Capitalism.” Mother Jones, April 4, 2013. www. motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/history-disaster-capitalism/ Givaudan. 2019. “Once-in-a Decade Super Bloom.” Givaudan, 2019. www.givaudan.com/ fragrances/super-bloom Kiechle, Melanie. 2017. Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. Seattle: University of Washington Press. King, Georgia Frances. 2020. “Sniffing Out Diseases.” NEO.LIFE, August 27, 2020. https:// neo.life/2020/08/sniffing-out-diseases/ Liberman, Peter, and David Pizarro. 2010. “All Politics Is Olfactory.” The New York Times, October 23, 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24pizarro.html McGann, John. 2017. “Poor Human Olfaction Is a 19th-Century Myth.” Science, 356(6338). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6338/eaam7263.full McLean, Kate. 2018. “Communicating and Mediating Smellscapes: The Design and Exposition of Olfactory Mappings.” In Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques, and Challenges, edited by Victoria Henshaw, Kate McLean, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins, and Gary Warnaby, 67–77. New York: Routledge. Molleindustria. “Guilty Smells.” September 6, 2019. www.molleindustria.org/blog/ guilty-smells/ Niedenthal, Simon. 2012. “Skin Games: Fragrant Play, Scented Media and the Stench of Digital Games.” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, 6(1), 101–131. Parr, Debra Riley. 2018. “Indeterminate Ecologies of Scent.” In Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques, and Challenges, edited by Victoria Henshaw, Kate McLean, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins, and Gary Warnaby, 259–269. New York: Routledge. Reinarz, Jonathan. 2014. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Riederer, Rachel. 2018. “Doomsday Goes Mainstream.” Dissent, Spring 2018. www. dissentmagazine.org/article/doomsday-goes-mainstream-liberal-preppers-silicon-valley Sedacca, Matthew. 2017. “The New Doomsayers Taking up arms and Preparing for Catastrophe: American Liberals.” Quartz, May 7, 2017. https://qz.com/973095/the-newdoomsayers-taking-up-arms-and-preparing-for-catastrophe-american-liberals/ Ueda, Maki. 2018. “Overview of Olfactory Games 2009–2018.” Smell and Art - Olfactory Games (blog), April 21, 2018. http://smellart.blogspot.com/2018/04/overview-ofgames.html U.S. Army Research Laboratory. 2013. Olfaction Warfare: Odor as Sword and Shield, edited by Elmar Schmeisser, Kimberly A. Pollard, and Tomasz Letowski. ARL-SR-0258, Maryland: Army Research Laboratory. Warren, Samantha, and Kathleen Riach. 2018. “Olfactory Control, Aroma Power and Organizational Smellscapes.” In Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques, and Challenges, edited by Victoria Henshaw, Kate McLean, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins, and Gary Warnaby, 148–155. New York: Routledge. White, Christopher. 2011. “The Smell of Commerce: How Companies Use Scents to Sell Their Products.” Independent, August 16, 2011. www.independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/ the-smell-of-commerce-how-companies-use-scents-to-sell-their-products-2338142.html

6

Eco-olfactory Art Experiencing the Stories of the Air We Breathe Clara Muller

As Franco Berardi notes in his essay Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, our times are defined by a “physical and psychological breathlessness everywhere, in the megacities choked by pollution, in the precarious social condition of the majority of exploited workers, in the pervading fear or violence, war, and aggression” (Berardi 2018, 15). In many ways, we are suffocating. Air pollution in particular has disrupted the quality of atmosphere and affected the entire Earth ecosystem. While it took billions of years for the atmosphere to allow for aerobic life, it took humans only a couple hundred years to make it nearly unbreathable. From a medium of life, air has become a medium for all sorts of lethal toxins, as well as a major player in global warming. In the practice of a few artists, air has also become a medium for an art made of airborne odorous molecules, primarily meant to be inhaled. Building on a re-interpretation of Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964), some of these olfactory artworks directly address the dramatic shift in air quality. This chapter intends to understand how, within the properties of their form and medium, such artworks might contribute to a form of resistance in a world where breathing has become a relentless struggle.

The Invisible Risk Often perceived as an abstraction, air is usually unnoticeable and hard to conceive as a material object. It is nonetheless the stuff in which we dwell: an enveloping pool of weightless, imperceptible chemical matter in which all aerobic organisms constantly bathe and breathe. It circulates in our bodies and constitutes our very first habitation. But this habitation of ours has been submitted to radical changes as a consequence of human activities. “Be it in the form of pollution or rising levels of greenhouse gases, the changing composition of air is […] one of the biggest environmental problems we face,” making air “a highly contentious object of political debate and human decision-making,” writes Eva Horn (2018, 7). In Risk Society, sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) discusses manufactured risks that remain unperceived by the naked eye. This is evidently true for air pollution: the absence of visible smog, smoke, or soot is no indication of air purity. But unless the landscape is obscured by alarmingly high amounts of particulate matter, the issue posed by air pollution remains mostly imperceptible. This “invisible killer,” as the World Health Organization (WHO) designates pollution, slips unnoticed yet has deadly consequences. The health disorders it brings range from smell impairment, asthma, and other chronic pulmonary diseases, to premature birth, autism, dementia, various types

66  Clara Muller of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, etc. It represents 4.2 million premature deaths every year—seven if you add household air pollution (WHO 2017a). And when the Earth’s temperature rises to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the exacerbated air pollution is forecast to cause no fewer than 150 million deaths (Wallace-Wells 2019). In 2005, to try and offer global guidance on air pollution thresholds, WHO has set Air Quality Guidelines—updated in 2020—concerning six main harmful pollutants: carbon monoxide, nitrogen and sulfur dioxide, lead, ozone, and particulate matter.1 Each country also has its own standards for acceptable levels of pollution, weighing health risks against costs, life against profits, for these standards are under constant debate between health professionals and industrialists, policy-makers and corporate lobbying. The problem is political and economic, both in terms of causes and potential solutions. Very much responsible for most environmental issues, the globalized system of capitalist consumerism is asphyxiating the Earth and its inhabitants at a tragically high rate.

The Soft Power of (Experiential) Art Art is a crucial channel through which people encounter these issues and an increasingly relevant soft power in this context of crisis. Studies conducted by environmental psychologists have demonstrated that art is impactful for climate communication where scientific reports, data, and images fail. Not only does art take people out of their routine, but it also “requires parts of the brain that are not normally accessed by typical communications about climate change” (Roosen, Klöckner, and Swim 2017). Art demands attention, fosters imagination, triggers emotional responses, and creates moments of reflection (Van Geffen, Hollup, and Klöckner 2016). Additionally, it participates in creating stories, which are essential to a shift in paradigms: stories help us learn and assimilate facts and values; they shape our beliefs, our thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams; they create intersubjective realities, and form the basis of civilizations (Marshall 2014). Art is thus a means to contribute to the advent of a much-needed new narrative, based not only on awareness but also on projections of what a better future could be, and how to achieve it. But one of the major roles of art, more than just telling the story of climate change or air pollution, could actually be to let people personally experience these narratives, which, psychologists have found, “can be more moving and ultimately might trigger a process of change on a personal level” (Roosen, Klöckner, and Swim 2017). Personal experience is key. People now tend to think in abstractions and mediated content, and no longer from their own experience, which can result in ignoring serious issues. As researcher Julien Knebusch (2008, 243) notes, The divide is growing in our consumer societies between our extended knowledge of climate change and our relatively limited experience of the phenomenon. […] We need to get a deeper and more comprehensive experience of the phenomenon. It cannot remain out of our sphere of experience. All this adds up to the fact that people are not equipped with the mental and emotional capacity to fathom such dramatic, complex, large-scale, yet still largely invisible phenomena (Latour 2014). One option to remediate this gap in experience is, what McLuhan calls, “anti-environments.” As he posited, environments tend to elude

Eco-olfactory Art  67 perception: fish cannot understand water in the same way humans cannot really grasp air—and its pollution. Art, however, can provide “anti-environments” allowing people to perceive and relate to what otherwise remains imperceptible. In the case of air pollution, the solution to bring it into people’s sphere of experience could be to make air artistically “explicit,” to slightly misuse Peter Sloterdijk’s (2009) expression. As a means of achieving that, Eva Horn suggests adopting “an aesthetic of air” that would “first render air sensible by being an aesthesis of air,” which would mean “bringing air (back) to the foreground of our perception as both object and condition of perception” (Horn 2018, 22–23). This chapter demonstrates that smells prove particularly effective in creating this aesthesis 2 and let us experience the many stories of the air we breathe.

Air as Medium, Smell as Metaphor The Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency (n.d.) recommends using smells in school workshops to make the dynamics of air pollution available to the children’s experience. Smells are relevant in serving as a material metaphor for air pollution: they need air to travel and be perceived, and in return they make air noticeable. Maybe more importantly, both are inescapable and incorporated through a common, inevitable act: breathing. By the very nature of their medium and modality of perception, olfactory artworks addressing the issue of air pollution are particularly on point, as they engage “with environmental risk in material as well as representational terms,” writes Hsuan L. Hsu (2016, 87). Images are distanced, detached from one’s corporeal experience and sense of interconnectedness with the world. A snapshot of Beijing’s smog isn’t going to make you cough. But inhale it and your whole body will instantly be engaged. As neuroscientist Andreas Keller (2014, 172) exemplifies, The power of smells to elicit stronger responses than visual stimuli is easily demonstrated. It is difficult to make a movie that will reliably induce vomiting in the audience, but filling a movie theater with the smell of rotting corpses will have this effect. Importantly, informing the audience that the smell of rotting corpses is not ‘real’ […] will not alter the response to the smell. By engaging the body and the mind in very specific ways, olfactory artworks encompass several key elements for an impactful climate communication. Probably the most ambitious artwork undertaking this endeavor is Pollution Pods, first exhibited in 2017, and commissioned by Climart, a research project led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology to study the underlying psychological mechanisms involved in the reception of climate change–related art. The team chose to collaborate with British artist Michael Pinsky to develop a piece that would target climate change through the related issue of air pollution. Driven by the idea of creating a concrete, emotional, and personal experience, Pollution Pods consists of five penetrable interconnected geodesic domes. Arranged in a circle, each dome contains a replica of the specific air quality of four major cities—Beijing (China), New Delhi (India), São Paulo (Brazil), and London (UK)—while a fifth dome welcomes visitors into the still remarkably pure air of the Norwegian peninsula of Tautra. In each pod, computer screens balance the experience with informational content about the major pollutants to be found in each city. While the installation is an assault on the senses, exposing

68  Clara Muller visitors to the actual chemicals present in the cities’ atmospheres would have faced immediate interdiction from health authorities. How ironic, when billions of people inhale them every second of their lives. To simulate each city’s atmosphere while avoiding health hazards and yet still provoking strong physical impressions, the team created a simulation of each city’s pollution through temperature settings, fog, and scents, based on empirical (olfactive) observations and scientific data. This resulted in the successful illusion of experiencing “the real thing.”3

Environmental Justice in the Capitalocene The most obvious story told by Pollution Pods, through its circular structure and the nature of its materials, is one of both global interconnectedness and disparities. Even if it is urgent to think about air as globally shared, each localized pollution is its own deadly cocktail. London’s chilly air is mostly polluted by diesel combustion, while São Paulo’s pollution is caused by ozone and the ethanol used as a fuel. In Beijing, industries and heating are burning massive amounts of coal, obscuring the sky and people’s lungs, while New Delhi’s air is filled with noxious gases, soot, and other particles coming from crops and plastic waste burning. According to WHO, nine out of ten people were breathing contaminated air in 2016 (WHO 2017a). Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Western Pacific, however, remain the most severely affected areas (WHO 2017b). Such an unequal distribution partly stems from the delocalization of polluting industries in the global South in the frantic race for production of Western capitalism (Demos 2009). Contemplating air pollution issues thus necessitates engaging with economical, colonial, and neocolonial realities. Rob Nixon (2011) coined the expression “slow violence” to think about how environmental inequalities perpetuate and exacerbate antagonisms between the global North and the global South. An example of how soft power can start to oppose slow violence, Pollution Pods successfully captures these geopolitical dynamics, and allows this pervasive but elusive violence to be experienced by the people most likely to be spared by it while unknowingly participating the most in it.4 By challenging people’s sense of safety and letting them experience what others are experiencing, the installation raises a form of embodied empathy toward the ones who are most affected by air pollution, while also mobilizing major reflections regarding urbanization, industrial societies, global neoliberal economy, and Western domination. Environmental inequalities are also prevalent locally, within countries, regions, and cities where some communities—namely, people of color, immigrant, Indigenous, working class, and overall impoverished populations—are disproportionately subjected to environmental risks. As Ulrich Beck (1992, 35) notes, risks not only follow class inequalities and discriminations, they intensify them. Kinder COC1=C(C(=CC=C1)OC) OCC1=CC(=C(C=C1)C(C)C)OCC1=C(C=C(C=C1)C(C)C)O (2016), a smaller-scale work by American artist Amy Yao, implicitly addresses such disparities. Composed in collaboration with artist Sean Raspet, an intoxicating aroma emanating from an industrial diffuser on the floor filled up the clean white cube space of Amy Yao’s solo show Bay of Smokes, at the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires. The scent was inspired by Yao’s memories of scratch-and-sniff stickers from the 1970s and 1980s, bearing pictures and smells of garbage and car exhausts. These childhood memories merged with more recent experiences of the artist in the vicinity of her studio, then located in San Pedro Bay, between Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors, one of the

Eco-olfactory Art  69 most polluted areas in the United States. Unsurprisingly, the people living and working in the area are mostly Latino and African Americans, and the first victims of the local pollution. Through the olfactive contamination of the physical and ideological white cube gallery space—which has been built on various systems of symbolic, cultural, and economic modernist hierarchies—Kinder symbolically brings this air pollution that prevalently affects underprivileged people into the salubrious elites’ territory. While unveiling mechanisms of environmental racism and spreading a call for environmental justice, the smell infiltrating the space also suggests the failure of the gallery space’s air conditioning—real as well as symbolic—that usually prevents the exterior world from penetrating it. “I didn’t want people to forget the stink that enables modern life as we know it,5” explained Yao: the discriminatory stink of the Capitalocene.6

Inhalation and Trans-corporeality What ensures the efficiency of these works is the specific immersion of the audience, achieved not only by surrounding visitors but through physical interpenetration. As much as the story of Earth as a shared ecology, a work like Pollution Pods lets people experience their own place in this ecology. The idea of the divide between Nature and Culture, as well as subject and object, led to a faulty conception of nature as exterior to us. Such a premise has to be challenged by the realization that we are Nature and fully embrace the idea that all bodies are porous. This permeability of bodies means that there is a “dependence of the self for wholeness upon its surroundings” (Dewey 1934, 59). Stacy Alaimo, a researcher in the field of environmental humanities, has coined the concept of “trans-corporeality” to explain the ways “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (Alaimo 2010, 61) including “non-human creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents and other actors” (Alaimo 2010, 2). The outer world flows within our bodies, which then retains some of it: the good, and the bad—heavy metals in our brain, pesticides in our hair, particles in our lungs. As Gernot Böhme writes, “we always do to ourselves what we do to nature” (Böhme 2017, 112). Such trans-corporeal entanglements, which tend to elude us, should then be rendered obvious by experiential art tackling environmental issues. And what could be more efficient than inhalation to abolish the boundaries between subject and object? Michael Pinsky and Amy Yao are not the first to have sensed the potency of inhalation and smells to achieve such embodiment: one of Belgian artist Peter de Cupere’s most famous installations, Smoke Cloud (2013), offers the delicate image of a fluffy cloud made of white synthetic cotton into which visitors can insert their heads after climbing a ladder. But instead of getting the expected whiff of crisp and clean air, visitors are welcomed by the cringing smell of air pollution—intensity and composition are tailored to the exhibition location. For someone witnessing the installation, the submersion of the head of the visitor into the cloud is a powerful metaphor, as the smeller is visually beheaded by the installation. Its potency, however, resides in the very act of inhalation. For Merleau-Ponty, the process of vision is intrinsically linked to objectifying thought. Breathing, on the contrary, blends the limits. By defying pure opticality and making visitors literally absorb the air pollution problem, works such as Pollution Pods, Kinder, and Smoke Cloud challenge the narrative of an exteriorized environment. By way of an embodied experience, they also uniquely superimpose environment in the ecological sense and environment in the artistic sense:

70  Clara Muller both are as much in us as we are in them, making it impossible to ontologically distinguish the environment and the self. As Kate Rigby puts it, “recovering a sense of our own corporeality, we discover that we are ecological selves” (Rigby 2011, 144).

Deep Ecology, “Global Weirding,” and the Sublime In keeping with Arne Næss’s holistic concept of “deep ecology,” (Næss 1973) the understanding that every part of the ecosystem functions as a whole, several works by Peter de Cupere also stage the alterations of nonhuman entities by human activities: Factory Tree (2015), a fake tree trunk covered with a scratch-and-sniff coating and from which emanates a gray smoke, and Smoke Flowers (2017), uncannily seductive real flowers perfused with a needle to make them give off noxious fumes. The narrative carried by such sculptural artworks differs from more immersive or interactive ones. Visitors are not placed at the center of the piece. Part of an eerie exchange of breaths, they are both witnesses and stakeholders, victims, and oppressors. There’s a reason why de Cupere defines himself as a visual rather than olfactory artist. He excels at deceiving expectations, at contrasting the visual and the olfactory, repulsiveness and attractiveness, which often results in strikingly paradoxical, otherworldly objects and situations. Unfortunately, just like the reality rendered by Smoke Cloud, the image offered by Factory Tree and Smoke Flowers might not be so out of this world. Their story fits in the larger narrative of the Anthropocene, this—still debated—geological epoch framed by Paul Josef Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, in which “human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita” (Steffen et al., 2007, 614). Scientists have indeed shown that the higher temperatures that come with global warming lessen plants' ability to store carbon dioxide (Zhao and Running 2010). Worse, specialists from the Woods Hole Research Center have observed that, because of widespread deforestation, tropical forests are now emitting more carbon than they trap since burnt, pulped, and decomposing trees release the CO2 they had accumulated (Baccini et al. 2017). Bringing to our perception these disruptions that usually defy our understanding and elude our senses, de Cupere’s works quite literally present “what the journalist Thomas Friedman has called ‘global weirding’—not just ‘global warming’ but a transformation and distortion of just about everything we used to call ‘natural’” (Horn 2019, 3). In 1757, Edmund Burke asserted that “no smells or tastes can produce a grand sensation, except excessive bitters, and intolerable stenches,” which could only become sources of the sublime “when they are moderated, as in a description or narrative” (Burke 2013, 78). In the hands of artists, the scents of air pollution meet both requirements, giving way to a new form of post-modernist sublime. The sublime of the Anthropocene is no longer rooted in the romantic contemplation of the terrifying and humbling spectacle of an almighty Nature, but in the fear and astonishment of the unfathomable extent to which human agency has subverted it. What is at stake in de Cupere’s works is the uncanny experience of the universe after humankind, made inhabitable by its own (possibly soon-to-be former) inhabitants. As American philosopher Bonnie Mann (2006, 162–163) explains, A terror of what we are eating, drinking, and breathing, of the lethality of the places in which we live, and on which we depend, is now the mundane, daily

Eco-olfactory Art  71 terror that we feel in relation to nature. Indeed, we are at the mercy of the land, and the air, and the water—and what we’ve made of them. We are at the mercy of the Earth, and its answers to our interventions. What kind of sublime experience speaks to this contemporary terror? […] This sublime experience does not unravel our dependence on the planet but weaves it tighter, until we choke on our own mistakes.

Survival at Stake By abolishing the distance with Nature while also substituting contemplation with rejection, these olfactory artworks convey a feeling of both osmosis and vulnerability. This sense of vulnerability is another major reason why smells seem particularly appropriate to tackle air pollution issues. Breathing and smelling are part of the same fundamental act that enables and sustains the life of aerobic organisms, but the bodily engagement of olfactory artworks goes beyond the act of inhalation. The sense of smell has been shaped by evolution to be a survival tool. Therefore, odors suggesting harmful substances or situations tend to trigger universal rejection. Sulfuric components, for instance, are naturally rejected because they are “synonymous of toxicity and death for living cells” (David, Gurden, and Doré 2016, 90). Smells from combustion are equally avoided because they signal risks of burns and poisoning. If olfactory information travels particularly fast between the epithelium where it is detected, and the limbic system where it is processed, it’s because its messages are urgent in nature. The sense of smell is meant to provoke instinctive reactions and quick decisions to avoid danger. Building on this physiological aspect, olfactory artworks overcome one major obstacle in climate communication, which is to engage people in spite of cultural and individual differences. The threat posited by air pollution and made explicit by these artworks is a universally shared concern, transcending cultures, languages, religions, worldviews, subjectivities, and geographical boundaries. In each instance of presentation, reactions to Pollution Pods have included coughing, crying, scratchy and sore throats, and a tendency to escape the pods as fast as possible.7 Amy Yao also reported that many visitors thought her work was toxic and didn’t want to stay in the space for very long.8 About the irritating smell of Kinder, a review from the Los Angeles Times concluded, “That must be the smell of […] art in the age of cancer” (Mizota 2016). In both examples, instinctive reactions prevailed over reason: although innocuous, the scents were perceived as threatening to the point of inducing involuntary defense mechanisms. The experience actively transformed a distant and conceptualized threat into a concrete one. Studies in environmental psychology have also shown “the importance of emotional engagement for motivating public response” (Lewandowsky and Whitmarsh 2018). Appealing to the experiential and emotional regions of the brain then seems a particularly appropriate way for art to go, while the well-known specificity of olfactive memory allows the emotional component to be almost permanently anchored in the brain. In surveys conducted by the Climart team with several hundreds of Pollution Pods visitors, almost all of them described the experience as having “a strong emotional component,” which “increased the intention to act,”9 reported Dr. Christian A. Klöckner who led the Climart project. Such artworks thus seem to create intellectual, physical, and emotional responses, and to efficiently meet “the exigencies of

72  Clara Muller intercultural communication and the imagining of a common world” (Marchessault 2017, 1) through this new shared narrative indispensable to face the ecological crisis.

Responsibility and Empowerment Ultimately, the main concern regarding such artistic endeavors, although particularly memorable and relatable, is that they might fail to lead to actual behavioral changes. Psychological research has often suggested that scared people tend to be less prone to action. The idea of the airpocalypse10 might then just be too overwhelming to be anything other than paralyzing. “If the external danger […] cannot be controlled (or is not perceived to be controllable), then individuals will attempt to control the internal fear,” (O'Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009, 361) leading to denial and apathy. So “if fear appeals are to be used, the viewers must have feasible coping responses […] in order that barriers to engagement are not encountered” (O’Neill and NicholsonCole 2009, 376). The artistic experience cannot remain remote and enclosed, but must fully assume the blurring of art and life, and provide audience with the tools to transform anxiety into motivation and action. In its different instances, Pollution Pods offered various forms of possible commitments through didactic posters or challenges. Other artworks have dealt a more playful hand. An active interaction was required by Air Polluter (2007), an earlier work by Peter de Cupere made up of four small biospheres connected to a central one. Not only could visitors decide how intensely to pollute the air of the central pod with “bad” or “good” smells, but they could also decide how much smoke was generated by a car exhaust pipe in one of the peripheral pods. “By being able to determine the extent to which the air will be contaminated, visitors may stop and think about air pollution in general,” argued the artist (de Cupere 2016, 304). In such a work, while all the arguments previously put forward to explain the potency of olfactory artworks still stand, the narrative is slightly different: what is mostly at stake is individual agency. Instead of saying “air pollution is real, experience it,” Air Polluter is saying “air pollution is real, you have control over it.” By pointing out car exhausts as one major source of pollution, de Cupere’s installation is reminiscent of a more whimsical work by British artist Simon Lewandowski who, in 2000, created Magic Car, a limited edition paying a cynical tribute to Magic Tree car air fresheners. Shaped as a car, the cardboard print acted as a small air polluter and gave off the smell of petrol to give “the open air that reassuring scent of traffic.” Shedding light on both outdoor and indoor pollution, the edition ironically encouraged people to spread the stink, to “Make Nature Smell like Culture.” Such participatory works, through playful and humorous injunctions placing people in the position of actors rather than spectators, contribute to a causal perception of the air pollution phenomenon. Taking a different approach to acknowledge individual responsibility, Norwegian artist Sissel Tolaas has investigated Mexico City’s highly polluted olfactory urbanscape as part of her long-standing Smellscapes project. Through her usual process, the artist wandered around neighborhoods to sniff out, identify, and capture their distinctive smells using headspace technology. Under the title Talking Nose (2009), two hundred smells were then reproduced and presented on a scratch-and-sniff map alongside film footage of Mexico City residents describing the smells of their city. Rather than betting on complete immersion to achieve physiological and emotional effects, Tolaas’s geographic and didactic rendering of air pollution methodically and

Eco-olfactory Art 73 effectively highlighted some of its sources such as car exhaust, refrigerators, or air conditioners (Todorov 2016). By presenting it as a mappable problem, revealing the local hotspots where pollution originates and concentrates, the artist turned it into a manageable issue over which individuals can claim control. Once again, form and medium come together, not only to heighten awareness about the effects and uneven distribution of air pollution but to tell an action-oriented story of both responsibility and empowerment. This chapter has sought to consider some of the artistic endeavors that a few artists have undertaken to use the properties of scent to address air pollution. Whether immersive, sculptural, humorous, or didactic, whether focusing on health risks, deep ecology, environmental justice, systemic, or individual responsibility, these olfactory artworks make powerful statements. They serve as Trojan horses to inoculate us with impactful narratives, to anchor them in our brain, and to animate us with a search for self-preservation, a will to take a stand and fight for a global, systemic revolution, for a world where everyone and everything could, once again, breathe free.

Notes 1 Solid and liquid particles suspended in the air that can penetrate the lungs when 10 microns or less, and the blood system when 2.5 microns or less. 2 Aesthesis, in the original Greek sense, means “to perceive.” 3 Clara Muller, personal communication with Laura Kim Sommer. September 3, 2019. 4 Between 2017 and 2019, Pollution Pods was exhibited about ten times in different countries of the global North, including Norway, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Slovakia, Australia, Canada, and the United States. 5 Clara Muller, personal communication with Amy Yao. June 7, 2019. 6 Some theorists like Andreas Malm, Jason W. Moore, or Donna Haraway defend the use of the term “Capitalocene” to nuance the concept of the Anthropocene by holding capitalism, rather than humanity as a whole, as responsible for environmental issues. 7 Clara Muller, personal communications with Michael Pinsky and the Climart team. September 2019. 8 Clara Muller, personal communication with Amy Yao. June 7, 2019. 9 Clara Muller, personal communication with Dr. Christian A. Klöckner. September 3, 2019. 10 In 2003, China suffered a particularly dramatic pollution episode that has come to be known as “airpocalypse.”

References Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures. Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baccini, Alessandro, et al. 2017. “Tropical forests are net carbon source based on above grounds measurements of gain and loss.” Science 358, no. 6360 (October): 230–234. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Berardi, Franco. 2018. Breathing. Chaos and Poetry. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Böhme, Gernot. 2017. The Aesthetics of Atmosphere, ed. Jean-Paul Thibaud. London: Routledge. Burke, Edmund. 2013. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: With an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste. North Syracuse, New York: Gegensatz Press.

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David, Olivier Pierre, Hirac Gurden and Jeanne Doré. 2016. “Alchimie de la puanteur.” Nez, the Olfactory Magazine 1, no. 2 (October): 90–91. De Cupere, Peter, ed. 2016. Peter de Cupere: Scent in Context: Olfactory Art. Duffel: Stockmans Publishers. Demos, T. J. 2009. “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology.” In Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, edited by Francesco Manacorda, 16–30. London: Barbican Art Gallery. Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company. Horn, Eva. 2018. “Air as Medium.” GreyRoom 73, no. 73: 6–25. Horn, Eva. 2019. “The Anthropocene Sublime: Justin Guariglia’s artwork.” In Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene, edited by Julie Reiss, 1–8. Wilmington: Vernon Press. Hsu, Hsuan L. 2016. “The Smell of Risk.” In Peter de Cupere: Scent in Context: Olfactory Art, edited by Peter de Cupere, 87–91. Duffel: Stockmans Publishers. Keller, Andreas. 2014. “The Scented Museum.” In The Multisensory Museum: CrossDisciplinary Perspectives on Touch Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, edited by Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, 167–175. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Knebusch, Julien. 2008. “Art and Climate (Change) Perception: Outline of a Phenomenology of Climate.” In Sustainability: A New Frontier for the Arts and Cultures, edited by Sacha Kagan and Volker Kirchber, 242–261. Frankfurt a. Main: Verlag für Akademische Schriften. Latour, Bruno. 2014. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45, no. 1: 1–18. Lewandowsky, Stephan, and Lorraine Whitmarsh. 2018. “Climate Communication for Biologists: When a Picture Can Tell a Thousand Words.” PloS Biology 16, no. 10: e2006004. Mann, Bonnie. 2006. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime. Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment. New York: Oxford University Press. Marchessault, Janine. 2017. Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopia, Ecologies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Marshall, George. 2014. Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. New York: Bloomsbury. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mizota, Sharon. 2016. “Amy Yao’s Art of Contamination: Not Everything Is as Perfect as It Seems.” Los Angeles Times. February, 11, 2016. www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/ la-et-cm-amy-yao-at-various-small-fires-20160201-story.html. Næss, Arne. 1973. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” Inquiry 16, no. 16: 95–100. Nixon, Robert. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Neill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole. 2009. “‘Fear Won’t Do It’: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations.” Science Communication 30, no. 3 (March): 355–379. Rigby, Kate. 2011. “Gernot Böhme’s Ecological Aesthetics of Atmosphere.” In Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press: 139–152. Roosen, Liselotte J., Christian A. Klöckner, and Janet K. Swim. 2017. “Visual Art as a Way to Communicate Climate Change: A Psychological Perspective on Climate Change-Related Art.” World Art 8, no. 1 (October): 85–110. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2009. Terror from the Air. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. South West Ohio Air Quality Agency. n.d. “What Do You Smell?” Accessed July 31, 2019. www.southwestohioair.org/about_us/schools/web_resources/what_do_you_smell. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) 36, no. 8 (December): 614–621.

Eco-olfactory Art 75 Todorov, Jordan. 2016. “This Artist Used Over 6,500 Scents to Recreate the Smell of 35 World Cities.” Atlas Obscura. November 18, 2016. www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ this-artist-used-over-6500-scents-to-recreate-the-smell-of-35-world-cities. Van Geffen, Lisanne E. J., Stig-Arvid Hollup, and Christian A. Klöckner. 2016. “How Do People with Weak and Strong Pro-Environmental Worldviews Process Visual Climate Change Information? An EEG Study.” PsyEcology: Bilingual Journal of Environmental Psychology 7, no. 3: 262–281. Wallace-Wells, David. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth. Life after Warming. London: Allen Lane. World Health Organization. 2017a. “Air Pollution.” Accessed July 31, 2019. www.who.int/ airpollution/en/. World Health Organization. 2017b. “Joint Effects of Air Pollution. Data by WHO Region.” Accessed September 25, 2019. http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main. SDGAIRBODREGv?lang=en. Zhao, Maosheng, and Steven W. Running. 2010. “Drought-Induced Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 through 2009.” Science 329, no. 5994 (August): 940–943.

7

Olfactivism Scents in the City and Beyond Jim Drobnick

There is no experience quite so jarring as the disconnect between a visually pristine cityscape and an unnerving whiff. Despite centuries of effort to eradicate sources of stench and sanitize the streets, cities still smell. The open sewers and befouling industries of early modern cities may have been replaced by buried pipes and expansive boulevards, yet the effectiveness of urban infrastructure remains imperfect when beset by deferred maintenance and aging waste removal systems, or when confronted by intractable sources of olfactory disturbance, such as air pollution and vehicular fumes. Even as significant accomplishments have reduced the miasmas that plagued previous city planners, complete deodorization is forever elusive, forcing the recognition that, inevitably, smells find a way. Urban areas thus feature olfactory palimpsests – one can never be sure what scent will predominate given the changes in time, weather, season, and type of human conduct. Negative odors, however, attract the most attention. Due to the outsized expectation about deodorization that modernization promised, all smells become stigmatized to a degree. The city’s olfactory palimpsest hints at the mixture of regimes influencing the urban atmosphere, from municipal policies and neighborhood activities to corporate practices and environmental regulations. Smells, then, evidence the broader sphere of political decision-making, social priorities, and varying levels of enforcement and care. The city constitutes a prime battleground for olfactory politics. The large population, the competing interests, the variety of stakeholders, and the dynamic pace of redevelopment all contribute to contestations about the best use of the public commons that is the atmosphere. Whose welfare is to be accommodated when pollution envelops homes, circulates in the water, and saturates the ground – the industries providing jobs and tax revenues, or the people suffering compromised states of health? Because of such questions, artists engaging with olfactory activism tend to base their practice in major cities where dangers jeopardize the greatest number of people. This chapter focuses on artists’ projects that respond to situations in which negative smells portend social and environmental problems.1 These works not only demonstrate the activist potential within olfactory art – olfactivism – but they also exemplify a genre of progressive artistic practice that focuses attention on the risks percolating in the air while employing that very air as the medium for critical interrogation.2 Through performances, community and relational works, landscape interventions, distillations, and technological hacks, artists since the 1970s have adopted a wide range of means to address the challenge of negative smells that are antagonistic to health and well-being. By linking odors to wider issues of power and ethics, I will discuss three main olfactivist strategies used to impact and improve scents in the city – abjection, remediation, and empowerment.3

Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond  77

Mean (Smelling) Streets: The Urban Abject In the contemporary metropolis, acquiescing to the inevitability of bad smells is a rite of passage. People who notice (or comment on) a city’s rankness tend to be newcomers and tourists. For instance, a book of postcards isolates urban olfactory unpleasantries to send to the folks back home. New York Smells, reputedly the city’s “first scratch & sniff guide,” offers images of a sofa abandoned on the sidewalk, traffic congestion in Times Square, and a battered taxi, each enhanced by a label infused with the respective scent of mildew, exhaust, or stale tobacco (McKeldin 1995).4 While such postcards may appear to just document odors found in the streets, they also reinforce negative stereotypes, convert urban filth into a form of entertainment, and manipulate smell as a tool for city-bashing. Residents and long-term visitors, however, develop a habituation to the odors of pungent trash, sweaty mass transit, and other olfactory assaults. Except for unusual spikes, pollution falls into the background; locals toughen up their nostrils and carry on. Detrimental smells represent an annoyance to be endured in exchange for a vibrant urban economy and a dynamic cultural scene. For those considering themselves urban pioneers, stomaching extreme stenches, such as living beside a garbage transfer station for the sake of a cheap apartment, testifies to one’s tenacity and commitment to surviving the worst the city has to offer. Whether the city’s offensive smells are rendered as a joke (by tourists) or ignored (by residents), the resulting effect is the same: disidentification. The olfactory annoyances that comprise the urban abject become subjected to the same psychological distancing attendant to other examples of abject materials, such as bodily excretions. To feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva (1982), the abject represents the unclean and disturbs the symbolic order; maintaining order (and identity) thus requires that abject materials be repudiated and expunged. In the urban context, disidentification with the abject results in a withdrawal of responsibility. A festering heap of garbage filling an empty lot? “Not my problem,” would be a common response. The smells of neglect are particularly intense: not only do they indicate the breakdown of essential infrastructure, they signal the abandonment of human rights for the stricken population (Robbins 2007). For the artists below, the urban abject presents an opportunity for activism. Instead of avoidance, their strategy intensifies and reframes the olfactory nuisance to implicate every citizen’s role in perpetuating the city’s stench. By harnessing disgust, the artists repurpose the repellent. Air pollution has long been tolerated as the by-product of modern industry. Sacrificing clean, fresh air for the sake of jobs formed an unspoken contract between the working and business classes. What happens, though, when the technology that manufactures a population’s wages also threatens their lives? Ant Farm’s Air Emergency (1970) (see Figure 7.1 top) upended the acceptance of the atmosphere’s defilement. The vanguard architectural collaborative engineered a “pollution art” media spectacle and educational performance to highlight the crisis of air’s increasing toxicity. A shrieking siren, harkening back to the alarms of World War II and the nuclear bomb drills of the 1950s and 1960s, compelled passersby to gather at a 50 by 50’ inflatable structure identified as “Clean Air Pod 1500.” Technocrats dressed in lab coats and outfitted with gas masks informed the crowd of an incipient “air failure” in which bystanders would die in 15 minutes unless they entered the ventilated and filtered life-support structure. Anyone refusing the instructions had an emblem affixed to their foreheads so that a satellite could reportedly track their last, dying movements

78  Jim Drobnick

Figure 7.1 Top: Ant Farm, Air Emergency (1970), view of Earth Day performance with Andy Shapiro and Kelly Gloger in front of the Clean Air Pod on the plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. Bottom: Santiago Sierra, 500 Cards with Blattodea Pheromone (2007), detail of postcard with cockroach pheromone, sealed in silver foil, 15 × 21 cm (6 × 8. in), edition of 500. Source: Top: Chip Lord, courtesy of the artist. Bottom: courtesy of Edition Schellmann and the artist.

Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond  79 (Scott 2007, 74–77, 218). Air Emergency resurrected the climate of fear generated by pollution catastrophes such as London’s Great Smog of 1952, which killed 4,000 and sickened tens of thousands, as well as anticipated air quality alerts now regularly warning cities around the world of hazardous levels of particulates and toxins.5 Air Emergency appropriated the trappings of science and the discourse of bureaucracy to stage the increasing abjectness of the atmosphere. Held on the first Earth Day, the event dramatized the vulnerability of air at a time when environmental concerns about acid rain, pesticides, and smog were leading to concrete steps to regulate polluters. Significantly, the term used by Ant Farm, “air failure,” avoids attributing the crisis to a single cause, such as an act of terrorism or industrial accident. Instead, “failure” indicates a general, holistic etiology, one that involves a systemic breakdown in the entire atmosphere. The suburban campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where Air Emergency was performed, may have seemed relatively insulated from the effects of pollution in cities where manufacturing and unchecked emissions had despoiled the air. But as a hotbed of protest in the late 1960s, Berkeley was primed to serve as a locus of resistance. Ant Farm’s interest in creating a zone of “confrontation” and “transformation” aligned the event with a broader project of environmental activism, or what the group called “eco-tripping” (Scott 2007, 74). The lack of olfactory clues such as smoke or odor may have heightened the sensationalistic aspects of the event, implying that even when the pollution is invisible, danger can be present.6 Air Emergency exposed visitors’ complicity in accepting the normality of pollution, and rubbed people’s noses in a mock-rehearsal of the horror that could arise when the atmosphere becomes lethally unbreathable. Like the university campus, the white cube gallery space provides a refuge from the harsher elements of society. The contemporary art gallery, however, serves as an even more exclusive sanctuary, for the neutral walls and pristine geometry assure a reverential milieu in which to contemplate art. Santiago Sierra’s 300 Sheets and Wall Impregnated with Blattodea Pheromone (2007) confronts gallerygoers with an expanse of pheromone patches that, if unleashed, would attract innumerable male cockroaches. The artist, known for provocative actions that expose the power dynamics and economic privilege of the artworld (and his own position within it), here utilizes the scourge of city living, cockroaches, to infiltrate and contaminate the rarified realm of aesthetics. Commercial galleries tend to be situated in tony neighborhoods, and people who purchase art tend to live in enclaves even more upscale. Cockroaches are endemic to urban living of all strata but are mostly associated with low-income public housing and tenements. Bringing such despised pests into the gallery, albeit potentially, ruptures the space’s sanctity and taints it with abjectness. The immunity from the afflictions of poverty afforded by wealth and prestige no longer holds; Sierra compromises the oasis of art by raising the specter of infestation and multiple diseases transmitted by the insects.7 Even more deviously, a mail-art version of the project, 500 Cards with Blattodea Pheromone (2007) (see Figure 7.1 bottom), laced postcards with the pheromone so that it could be sent to unsuspecting recipients anywhere. Besides invoking health perils, 300 Sheets and 500 Cards carry political overtones: the gallery is not a haven separate from the city at large, for it is an integral part of what Marxist geographer Neil Smith (1990) calls “uneven development,” the partitioning of the city by capitalist speculators into two zones: ones that thrive and others that are left to deliberately deteriorate. Art galleries are notorious agents of gentrification, converting underutilized and sometimes dilapidated buildings into paragons of

80  Jim Drobnick blue-chip commerce. Sierra implicates the role that art and moneyed interests play in the creation and maintenance of poverty. The anxiety and disgust raised by the possibility of cockroaches, for instance, rests as much upon their unsanitary habits as their lack of respect for class boundaries and economic distinctions. Cockroaches unsettle the privileged apex of the artworld, much like the foreign workers, displaced persons, and disenfranchised individuals employed in Sierra’s other works in which futile tasks are performed in the gallery to point out structural issues of exploitation (see Sierra n.d.). Such marginalized populations have often been stigmatized in terms equating them to unwanted pests or pollution: “vermin,” “parasites,” etc.8 This rhetoric intentionally dehumanizes and seeks to spark resentment and xenophobia. By bringing the urban abject and its correlates – cockroaches, poverty, economic segregation, racist discourse – into the antiseptic spaces of the gallery, 300 Sheets and 500 Cards conjure a return of the repressed. While the decision to release the pheromone ultimately depends upon the owner, viewers of the work are still compelled to dwell on the abject and the forces that define, shape, and exercise its toxic effects. While my first two examples of the urban abject either had no discernible scent or referred to an odor beyond the ability of humans to sense, Sissel Tolaas’s Dirty No. 1 (2000) confronted the pungent both at its source and through the work itself. Investigating a heavily polluted district of South London, the artist spent several weeks conducting olfactory examinations of a neighborhood she called “one great stinking abomination” (Tolaas n.d.). Deptford High Street, struck by intractable poverty, lack of sanitation, municipal neglect, criminality, and disenfranchisement of a racialized, immigrant community, suffered the reputation of being one of the most hazardous thoroughfares in the metropolis. While some of the factories and tanneries once fouling the region have closed, the effluent from their activities remain to defile the soil and waterways such that some of the descriptors Tolaas obtained during her research included “evil,” “burning,” “sulphurous,” “gas,” “animal fat,” “manure,” “tar,” and “bleach” (Tolaas n.d.). New sources of pollution afflicting the area – diesel ships, construction sites, and heavy commuter traffic – intensify the poisonous taint to the atmosphere to a degree that exceeds the World Health Organization guidelines by a factor of six (Gayle 2019). As historian Jess Steele described, “at Deptford the stench was a fact of life” (quoted in Tolaas 2000). The offensiveness of the street’s smells, then, reinforced a circle of abjectness, where abject smells signified an abject place that in turn rendered the local population abject. To break this circularity, Tolaas faced the abjectness directly. Headspace technology enabled her to isolate and identify the volatile compounds comprising Deptford’s stench, and her skill in fragrance blending created a convincing olfactory portrait.9 Dirty No. 1 featured hints of the locale’s rankest components – “car wrecks, garbage, dog shit, car wheels, chicken bones, dirt, etc.” (Tolaas 2000). Like a haute couture perfume, the piece was launched with a slogan (“although at first it was not pleasant, the girls quickly got used to it”), accompanied by a video (Deptford High Street seen from a dog’s viewpoint), and came bottled in three variations: perfume concentrate, eau de parfum, and eau de toilette.10 Dirty No. 1 also included subtitles on the bottles – “it must be the weather” – a statement no doubt reflective of the fatalistic acceptance by residents about the stench in their midst. Tolaas’s conversion of the wretched into a brand-name fragrance rendered the shifting, mercurial miasma circulating around Deptford into an object of study. By being bottled, the stench was mastered and made presentable beyond the environs of the neighborhood. It could,

Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond  81 for instance, be used to remind residents who had grown habituated to the smell or serve as irrefutable evidence to those who had chosen to ignore the reek and dismiss it as something merely due to peculiar weather conditions. The smell also could be transported to the nostrils of politicians, policymakers, and other bureaucrats who actually possess the decision-making power to remedy the underlying problems causing the stench.11 Deploying the caché of perfume, Dirty No. 1 harnessed the viscerality of disgust to challenge the normalization of pollution as just another “fact of life.” Intensifying the urban abject, as Ant Farm, Sierra, and Tolaas have done, operates as a strategic form of realism. More than just rubbing people’s faces in rank smells, such reflections upon the city’s traumatic scents involves an unsentimental and de-romanticizing objective to recognize the history of polluting activities, the present context of olfactory worries, and the future eventualities of atmospheric demise. As much as these projects point out the failure of modernization to attain the ideal of odorlessness, they also emphasize how modern technology and uneven development have increased pollution in ever more complex and intractable ways.

From Foul to Fresh: Remediating the Metropolis When the urban abject raises a stink, how should one respond? Implementing longterm solutions can require extensive planning, design, consultation, construction, and maintenance – a series of processes that can take years and consume the efforts of many individuals. Even then, questions remain about the viability of the odor management and whose agenda is actually being served. Olfactory nuisance has often provided the justification for razing unkempt neighborhoods and homeless encampments, yet amounted to few benefits for the individuals forcibly removed. Artists seeking to transform the city into a more hospitable place generally wield fewer resources than governments and developers. In the absence of substantive attempts to remediate dirty and foul environments, artists tend to operate through more tactical means, by interventions. These actions use ephemeral practices to enact critique and mobilize attention about the issues affecting overlooked, run-down spaces. Despite the onset of gentrification in New York City’s East Village and Brooklyn during the 1980s, the squatters, abandoned buildings, shooting galleries, burnt-out cars, and accumulated garbage defined many of the areas’ blocks as an urban wasteland. The affect of unredeemability and hopelessness permeated the streets, along with the smells of decay and infestation. To Peter Hopkins, slumlord neglect and political disregard coincided to advance capitalist profiteering at the expense of residents’ lives and their sense of possibility. Remediation, then, not only needed to fix derelict physical conditions, it also had to impact people on psychological and emotional registers. The artist’s method of remediation – empuzzlement – involved diffusing mystifying scents into desolate sites in the neighborhoods he lived and worked. Incongruous smells destabilized the accepted understanding of places and created opportunities for replacing alienation with re-enchantment. Smell’s elusiveness enabled it to be the perfect vehicle for surreptitious, guerrillastyle interventions. Done without seeking permission or making announcements, the remedial actions were experienced by unsuspecting audiences. Even though, as Hopkins remarks, little or no visible change had occurred, the spaces became distinctly othered and strange by the appearance of intense, anomalous odors: people often stopped, looked around, and tried to identify the scents’ source and purpose.12

82  Jim Drobnick For instance, in several empty lots used as shortcuts by residents, the artist dug precise 10- to 15-foot trenches, lined them in clay, and filled them with perfume (see Figure 7.2 top). At an abandoned building used as a crack house, perfume was poured on the ramshackle roof, which dripped down and imbued the space with a concentrated floral smell. In the basement of a shelter, a humidifier circulated the fragrance of mountain mist that wafted throughout the building. And under a bridge of the Brooklyn– Queens Expressway, where drugs were routinely sold and used, the artist positioned a car to diffuse an evergreen odor out of its windows (see Figure 7.2 bottom). Reactions to the interventions varied: some people were happy and appreciative of the curious scents, while others were perplexed and frightened, even considering the fragrances to be akin to a haunting. All of the diffusions defied explanation and some spawned extended conversations by becoming neighborhood mysteries.13 Hopkins’ remediations deliberately unnerved their audiences. Seeking to manufacture estrangement, the surprising, enigmatic scents of nature and perfume in these dilapidated contexts were not meant to dispel or cover up the mildew, rot, smoke, and unsanitary conditions, like an air freshener. The interventions prompted olfactory overlays that brought forth problematic contradictions: between a grungy everyday reality and imaginative possibilities, between despair-laden surroundings and a dreamworld inspired by more positive affects. Influenced by the Situationist’s theorizations of constructed atmospheres and psychogeography, the artist reconfigured the dominant feeling-state of the normal through volatile public interventions. The olfactory reterritorializations may only have lasted a few hours or days, but they dramatically recast the mood at these sites and injected an element of the peculiar to counter low expectations and, subtly, to catalyze change on a conceptual, experiential level.14 Motivating change also informs remediation projects that employ cleaning up filthy situations. The works adopting a service-oriented strategy aim to be utilitarian as well as symbolic. Dirt, grime, and rubbish can appear endemic to urban existence, yet even modest manual labor can make a difference. Michael J. Bramwell’s Building Sweeps-Harlem (1995–1996) and Hayley Severns and Angela Rose Voulgarelis Illgen’s Meaning Cleaning (2008) both ensued in New York City and presciently exemplified the category of performance practice now known as “occupational realism.” Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson (2012) coined this term to describe a genre of artists’ work that collapses the distinction between making art and doing a job. Such endeavors typically leave no permanent trace, de-heroicize the figure of the artist, and use the frame of art to endow mundane tasks with self-consciousness and significance. With respect to the olfactory activism of remediation, cleaning comprises the basic chores of removing dirt, stains, garbage, and adverse smells to rehabilitate neglected spaces. In addition, these works engage city residents and commuters in order to revitalize their personal sense of power to constructively influence their environment. Both cleaning performances operated in public areas unannounced. Michael Bramwell’s year-long project Building Sweeps-Harlem (see Figure 7.3 top) involved searching for tenements in Harlem that were noticeably marked by “filth, urine, graffiti and drug dealing” (Hamilton 1995). Dressed in janitor’s work clothes, the artist humbly set out to sweep the chosen building’s entrance, mop its floors, and remove debris once a week. Residents appreciated the efforts: some offered hot water and helped out, others made suggestions or hectored the delinquent building’s superintendent to follow the artist’s example.15 The title word “sweeps,” interestingly, not only literally conveyed the motions of Bramwell’s self-designated task, it also alluded to the history

Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond  83

Figure 7.2 Top: Peter Hopkins, Perfume Site: Trench #2 (c.1987), olfactory intervention into an empty lot in the East Village, New York City. Bottom: Perfume Performance: Bridge Underpass (c.1987), olfactory intervention under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, New York City. Source: courtesy of the artist.

84  Jim Drobnick of police raids inflicted upon poor, immigrant, minority, and disenfranchised neighborhoods. Building Sweeps-Harlem, then, aimed to improve derelict spaces as well as to transform the broader perception about Harlem being solely inhabited by addicts and criminals (Hamilton 1995; Solomon 2001). Maintaining buildings and enhancing their livability motivated residents to take charge of their environment and, in the process, stave off further decay and the likelihood of hostile redevelopment (Rogers 2013, 15). In all of this, smell served as a notable signifier. After being mopped, the hallways exuded the invigorating scent of pine. This type of olfactory remediation hinted at other domains, such as a forest, a sylvan idyll, or nature generally. Since poverty and adverse living conditions often cause depression, cleaning and reodorizing acted to dispel the clouds of despondency and create a sense of dignity and respect.16 Besides refreshing the nostrils of residents, the scent helped to remove the lingering stigma of the tenement and modified the building’s affective and emotional atmosphere. Scaling up the cleansing mandate from residences to outdoor, public spaces, Severns and Voulgarelis Illgen conducted Meaning Cleaning performances in New York City’s sidewalks, subways, train platforms, and underground passageways (see Figure 7.3 bottom).17 Dressed in professional business apparel, the duo approached zones to be scrubbed without notice or permission. Were it not for the supplies of rubber gloves, masks, mops, buckets, and spray cleansers, they could just be a pair of office workers who happened to stop and attack the stink offending their commute. At times the artists taped off an area to redirect pedestrian traffic as they worked; at other times they entered a site, like a subway car, and started to wash and disinfect; still other times they recruited volunteers and staged large-scale collaborative actions. The application of lavender oil became the signal that their cleaning had been accomplished: the scent was chosen for its proven antibacterial qualities, its therapeutic and calming effects, as well as it being a familiar and pleasing aroma.18 Passersby often stopped to ask questions during the performances, sharing stories about their own engagements with cleaning and thoughts about the distressed state of the city. Many expressed shock that anyone would willingly take on such arduous and dirty work.19 The performances of Meaning Cleaning embodied a variety of intentions for the artists, all centered on the notion of transformation. 20 Besides beautifying the urban environment, turning grubby into spotlessness, the actions sought to convert indifference into ownership. Instead of city residents ignoring the deteriorating conditions in their midst, they would be convinced to voluntarily assume more personal responsibility to maintain public spaces. Cleaning stands as a moral virtue in the domestic sphere, yet when carried out in public, the act is stigmatized as dreary and degrading. Changing the way cleaning is appraised and valued can grant it greater respect. Drawing attention to neglected, shabby public areas also exposes social justice issues: what municipal practices have broken down? What suffering is going unaddressed? City spaces, particularly ones in New York, bear sedimented traumas (9/11, epidemic scares, Hurricane Sandy), and the act of cleaning transforms the lingering psychological aftereffects by removing adverse sensations that may act as unconscious triggers. Like Bramwell, Severns and Voulgarelis Illgen experienced both impactful and discouraging moments. Some days the interactions with bystanders energized and inspired the two artists, on others disappointment ensued when no one seemed to notice their efforts. When attempting to boost a community’s civic pride, managing one’s own expectations has to be taken into account as well.

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Figure 7.3 Top: Michael J. Bramwell, Building Sweeps–Harlem (1995–1996), view of performance. Bottom: Hayley Severns and Angela Rose Voulgarelis Illgen, Meaning Cleaning (2008), view of performance. Source: Top: Carolyn M. Bramwell, courtesy of Creative Time New York and the artist. Bottom: Carla Repice, courtesy of the artists.

86  Jim Drobnick While addressing the grime on the ground and pollution in the air, attending to what artist Jeanine Oleson calls “psychic dirt” becomes a necessity too (2012, 7). Remediating strategies of olfactivism focus overtly on the physical state of the urban environment and the psychological effects of living in distressed circumstances, yet critiques of the politics generating those conditions often remain unarticulated. The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse (2008) sought to explicitly connect toxic pollution with issues of “classism, heterosexism, imperialism, election anxiety, gentrification, ecodestruction and greed” (Oleson 2008). The artist’s intersectional approach combined cleansing performances with collaborations with community activist groups, public talks and information sessions, and celebratory processions and picnics – all in order to create an “absurdist spectacle” interlaced with “moments of joy and strange rebellion” (Oleson 2012, 9; 2020a). The centerpiece of Oleson’s action was the “world’s largest smudge stick,” a ten-foot behemoth made of sage collected during a yearly visit to one of the capitals of New Age thinking, Santa Fe. The burning of herbs and fragrant materials is an ancient practice central to many sacred rites that aid in healing, protecting, purifying, blessing, and empowering. Sage, in particular, carries natural antiseptic properties that help not only to clean the air but also to transmute it, as Oleson explains: “smoke attaches itself to negative energy and as it clears it takes the negative energy with it, releasing it into another space to be regenerated” (2012, 24). For The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse, the artist extended the use of sage from traditional applications treating emotional, personal, and spiritual matters toward remediating broader historical, environmental, and political traumas. Oleson’s action combined visual spectacle with healing actions performed at four sites in Brooklyn and Manhattan where bad energies and forms of toxicity had accumulated over decades. Sporting protest signs, dressed in purple tunics, and carrying the smoking smudge log, the procession first visited Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, where a massive underground spill by Exxon-Mobil had leaked 20–30 million gallons of oil since 1948. While named a superfund site and slated for clean-up, only sporadic work had been done and the neighborhood still suffered from hazardous vapor emissions (benzene, toluene, methane), contaminated water, and increased health risks.21 Pollution also afflicted the second site, the Gowanus Canal. One of the nation’s most degraded waterways, the canal has suffered industrial and sewage dumping for the past 150 years and now hosts a noxious panoply of PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyl), coal tar wastes, heavy metals, lead, VOCs (Volatile Organic Compound), cyanide, mercury, and, remarkably, strains of gonorrhea (Oleson 2012, 37). Timing the smudging procession with Oktoberfest, Oleson’s demonstrators ate, drank, and paddled in the water thanks to the collaboration with the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. A week later, the procession visited Christopher Street, the center of the gay scene in New York City and the site of the famous Stonewall Inn, where a rebellion against police brutality in 1969 sparked the gay rights movement. Protesting the rampant development driving out members of the queer community and, in the process, erasing its radical past, Oleson’s performers read texts from queer activist history and danced to gay pride anthems (2012, 39). The last procession smudged Federal Hall, where George Washington was inaugurated in 1789, which sits astride Wall Street, the iconic heart of international finance. Held on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, the performance occurred at a time of heightened angst about the future leadership of the country and the escalating financial crisis. “Smoke” dancers, tarot card readings, and recitations accompanied the smudging and aimed to dispel the clouds

Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond  87 of negative campaigns and fiscal mismanagement (Oleson 2012, 58, 68). Smells have a way of surpassing boundaries and categories, and Oleson’s project capitalized on this ability to address the links between disparate phenomena such as pollution, economics, and politics. Such a holistic method sniffed out the tangled complicity of governments, corporations, and developers that enabled the continued exploitation of people and the environment. The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse, however, harbors a cautionary note for olfactory activism. Scents such as sage and olfactory practices such as smudging are never culturally neutral, for they exist already infused with significance. Oleson intended her work to be critical of New Age excesses through “an ironic symbol of ‘supersizing’ and coloniality” (2020a; 2012, 25). Even though the artist credits the Indigenous roots of sage smudging, and performed with Indigenous audience members being present, her use of the practice as a settler would be considered cultural appropriation (see Aldred 2000). In the decade since the performance, Oleson’s perspective on this work has shifted; she acknowledges the continuing violence of co-optation and colonial structures afflicting Indigenous communities (Oleson 2020b). For olfactivist artists, then, considering the preexisting cultural and political investments in the smells being used is necessary to productively focus acts of critique and remediation. Overall, remediation involves olfactory actions that combat instances of bad or toxic smells by intervening with puzzling, pleasant, or therapeutic ones. At times these scents interrupt and confound the prevalent stenches; at other times they cleanse or purify the areas targeted. Not just a form of aroma management, similar to what urban planners or real estate gentrifiers might impose, this artistic method works tactically to uplift and compel analysis. Because stenches cause distancing and separation from one’s surroundings, the introduction of pleasurable scents can encourage empathy and connection (Warren and Riach 2018). The positive experiences of remediation, then, not only counteract the presence of deleterious smells, they also rectify the dispiriting psychic effects of malodors. The artworks in this section all employ fragrances to relieve anxiety, elevate mood, and motivate a renewal of pride.

Odor in Numbers: Empowering Citizen Nostrils Often denigrated as an indeterminate sense, smell tends to be relegated to the domain of mere subjectivity, where differences in personal tolerance and sensitivity negate the possibility of hard or factual knowledge. Polluters, either intentionally or by default, rely upon the amorphousness of odor to dispel noxious effluents in defiance of environmental laws. In many cases what is evident to the nose remains invisible to the eye, so the sources of dangerous emissions frequently elude regulators. Complaints about pollution regularly get dismissed because adverse smells defy measurement, cross property lines, and travel erratically with changing wind patterns. The challenge of pinpointing an odor’s origin and quantitatively recording its intensity surpasses the means available to most urban citizens, especially when pollution afflicts neighborhoods that are poor and disadvantaged. Besides the obvious health risks and fatalities caused by pollution, subtler physiological and psychological effects can be induced as well. Inhaling airborne toxins and fine particulate matter, according to epidemiologist Diana Younan, damages neurons and areas of the brain such as the pre-frontal lobe, which then impairs concentration, self-discipline, and rational judgment. Pollution thus becomes a trigger for

88  Jim Drobnick negative cognitive effects and higher incidences of delinquency and reckless behavior, including aggression and criminality (Hogenboom 2019). As journalist Melissa Hogenboom (2019) phrases it, “wherever the cloud of pollution travels, crime increases.” Furthermore, exposure to pollution provokes chronic maladies such as inflammation, headaches, nausea, and anxiety that lie below the threshold of specific diseases but contribute to their eventual formation. Pollutants victimize their populations on just about every level: physical health, mental well-being, and everyday life outcomes. Convincing governments to act, or polluters to stop, can be difficult when facts are few and evidence is anecdotal. Unable to substantiate complaints, those suffering from toxic exposure may know the harmful effects firsthand but lack the tools to convince the experts who assess environmental conditions, or to offer proof of causality that meets legal standards. The situation for residents involves an experience of pollution that is invasive and enveloping yet suffused with a sense of powerlessness to enact any favorable change. For cognitive scientists Fanny Rinck, Moustafa Bensafi, and Catherine Rouby, who have studied the impact of olfactory nuisances, such a predicament elicits “anger at the inertia of the system” of pollution compliance and provokes a “moral crisis” in which the distressed population yearns for a means to validate their suffering (2011, 159, 163). Below, an artist and two collectives have sought ways to enhance agency and reverse the feelings of disempowerment by helping the disadvantaged insert themselves into the sustainable managing of their environments. Besides the clear health risks, pollution also erodes the ability to smell by damaging the olfactory epithelium, where odors are perceived (Arnold n.d.). City dwellers typically respond to the presence of noxious odors by shutting down the desire to smell at all – becoming reluctant to sniff even the pleasurable scents available in the city. To reactivate smell as a source of knowledge and to counteract odorphobia, Caitlin Berrigan and Michael McBean conducted a series of smell tours in 2006 and 2007 as The Smelling Committee (see Figure 7.4 top).22 The performances revived a group originally formed in 1891, the Brooklyn Smelling Committee, that investigated the malodorous stenches emanating from a Brooklyn creek. What they discovered – a poisonous, stinking slurry of effluent from oil refineries, sausage makers, chemical producers, glue factories, and fertilizer manufacturers that resulted in an “ecological wasteland” (Hurley 1994) – continues over a century later in what is still one of the most polluted waterways in the United States. Berrigan and McBean’s tour retained the original Committee’s focus on pollution and ecojustice, but expanded the mandate to encompass other redolent sites in the neighborhood, such as a laundromat, school, subway, meat market, florist, gym, secondhand clothing store, art gallery, church, and garden. Discussions covered odor’s relevance to identity and culture, raised issues about sanitation and industry, and prompted people to share their olfactory memories and emotional attachments to scent. 23 Overall, The Smelling Committee aimed to resensitize the jaded noses of city dwellers and inspire them to rediscover “patterns [between] culture, pollution, cuisine, disarray, weeds and refuse – developing a new natural history of… stench and fragrance” in the twenty-first century (Berrigan and McBean 2008). Victorian attire may be an odd choice for an activist performance, but the deliberately anachronistic top hats, sideburns, and cravats (for men), and long skirts and coiled hairstyles (for women) conveyed a link to the original 1891 Committee and how the pollution of that time continues to haunt the blighted landscape in the present.24 The clothing also signified an otherness that granted permission to act differently from

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Figure 7.4 Top: Caitlin Berrigan and Michael McBean, The Smelling Committee (2006), view of smell tour performance. Bottom: Proboscis, Robotic Feral Public Authoring (2005–2006), prototypes being tested in London Fields. Source: Top: courtesy of the artists. Bottom: Giles Lane, courtesy of and © Proboscis.

90  Jim Drobnick the contemporary norm. The quaintness harkened back to the time of the amateur scientist and Sherlockian sleuth, while the theatricality added a touch of absurdity. Both worked well for smell: olfaction is often considered an antiquated sense, one that is more important in “olden times” before the onset of modern technology; and the playful costuming overcame inhibitions about smelling things in public. Tour members were given blindfolds to help eliminate visual distractions, along with a plastic funnel to enhance the gathering of scents into the nostrils. Contrary to the cynicism and blasé attitude of metropolitan inhabitants, Berrigan and McBean recaptured the affect of urban adventure and curiosity. The tour legitimated inhaling heartily to find, identify, and then verbalize the ethereal presences of scent. Since much of contemporary life is mediated and screen-based, works that prioritize physical behavior redefine urban knowledge and cognitive mapping as multisensory experiences. Pollution may be predominant in the downtown core, but the city smellscape is comprised of myriad manmade and natural odors – that is, engaging and meaningful smells coexist with negative and confusing ones.25 The Smelling Committee encouraged ordinary citizens to exercise the right to investigate, to trust the value of tangible experience, and to take collective action to understand a neighborhood’s air quality. The invisibility of some toxic pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, makes it difficult for residents to know the extent to which they are exposed. Even with visible irritants, such as the family of nitrogen oxides that contribute to smog, concentrations cannot be discerned without sophisticated sensors. Citizen-activists campaigning to remove contaminants from their environment are disadvantaged by the lack of hard facts justifying their concerns. Proboscis, a London-based research team led by Giles Lane and Alice Angus, brings together artists, designers, and scientists to boost the agency of individuals and communities. Their projects typically combine popular, fun activities with the hacking and scavenging of experimental technologies – generating new possibilities for information collecting and empowerment. Robot Feral Public Authoring (2005–2006) (see Figure 7.4 bottom), for instance, addressed pollution in a London neighborhood by reengineering toy cars and off-the-shelf components to serve as cheap, mobile sensors. The electronic noses were designed to detect airborne toxins and map gradients aligned with GPS coordinates, and then had their data uploaded to an online platform (Urban Tapestries) for archiving and visualization.26 As the artists noted, information is power: by compiling their own statistics, everyday people established concrete evidence to support investigative journalism, petitions to the government, changes to bylaws, involvement in policy debates, and the enforcement of regulations (Proboscis 2006). Proboscis terms this process “participatory sensing” and “guerrilla public authoring,” where the means for knowledge production is put into the hands of non-professionals who then tell their own stories and leverage the information for greater influence over decisions affecting their environment (Lane et al. 2006; Proboscis 2007). Proboscis is aware, however, that an overly technocratic focus on pollution might have adverse effects upon residents – for instance, by strengthening presumptions of the city as rife with manifold dangers and poisons. Instead of empowering citizens, fear and stigma become reinforced (Proboscis 2006, 4). To counteract such negativity, the group recognizes the importance of making the environmental monitoring process playful and aesthetically engaging. They propose integrating data gathering into a neighborhood’s preexisting holidays and rituals. Carnival is one popular art form that could be harnessed to activist ends, particularly since the event already possesses an anti-authority emphasis and participatory ethos. In Snout (2007) (see Figure 7.5

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Figure 7.5 Top: Proboscis, Snout (2007), Mr. Punch and the Plague Doctor, mock carnival in Shoreditch, London. Bottom: Amy Balkin, Public Smog (2004–ongoing), detail, digital image of clean air park over Los Angeles, June 2004, created by purchasing Coastal Reclaim Trading Credits, 24lb. NOX at $4.25/lb. Source: Top: Thierry Bal, courtesy of and © Proboscis and Iniva. Bottom: courtesy of the artist.

92  Jim Drobnick top), Proboscis demonstrated how clothing could be equipped with electronic noses. Costumes for the Plague Doctor and Mr. Punch (from Punch and Judy) incorporated a custom mobile computer, batteries, GPS locators, and sensors for noise, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and organic solvent vapors, all hidden within the ample folds and papier maché of the easy-to-assemble costumes, as well as featuring LED displays for each sensor to show live, embodied data.27 Amidst the colorful parades and clownish antics in the streets, these traditional figures could simultaneously entertain and gather valuable information about pollution. The energy and rebelliousness of the carnival suits an activist agenda seeking to challenge what artists and residents see as a “history of delayed regeneration and failure of public agencies to deliver statutory services” (Lane 2008). Addressing London’s air quality and the high levels of asthma may be the primary goal of the feral robots and the sensor-laden costumes, but the agency invoked by these projects intervenes more broadly into what Proboscis calls the “gap between formal democratic structures and… everyday experience” (Lane 2008). Empowering urban nostrils starts with the olfactory component to health and well-being, yet it also implicates and supports other causes – such as reducing carbon emissions, protecting habitats and green spaces, and alleviating additional forms of pollution (light and noise) – that affect citizens’ entire quality of life. Olfactory data gathering greatly supports campaigning against harmful toxins at the neighborhood level, where information tends to be sparse, but on national and global levels such data is readily available. More numbers would merely corroborate the scientifically proven dangers of airborne chemicals; what activism needs on the international scale are different types of numbers. Amy Balkin’s Public Smog (2004 and ongoing) (see Figure 7.5 bottom) builds upon well-documented knowledge about the menace of air pollution and greenhouse gases. Her multipronged conceptual project seeks to create a “clean air park” in the atmosphere by strategically appropriating economic and legal systems already in place to manage threats against human health and the environment. The first system was financial, and the numbers integral to this aspect related to the costs of emissions allowances and trading on the carbon exchange. Infiltrating the markets formed in the wake of the Kyoto Protocol to regulate compliance by pollution-discharging manufacturers and corporations, Balkin purchased the rights to emit 24 lbs of nitrogen oxides (contributors to smog and acid rain) and 51 tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas). The intention, though, was to neutralize the system by “retiring” the offsets, denying their use to other polluters, and thereby “buy[ing] back the sky” for the common good (Balkin 2006a, 2006b). Given the volume of trading, the artist’s transactions were small and temporary, meaning that Public Smog’s clean air park amounted to a fraction of the sky and lasted for two weeks in the space over southern California, and five months over the European Union. 28 As much as Balkin’s aspirational gesture revived the original goal of the exchanges – reducing pollution to generate fresh, breathable air – it also demonstrated how that goal had been hijacked by free-market profiteering. 29 If building the clean air park by purchasing pounds and cubic meters of gases turned out to be unaffordable, the second strategy employed in Public Smog pivoted on an audacious plan: save the entirety of the earth’s atmosphere all at once. Here the system to be harnessed involved UNESCO’s legal process of establishing World Heritage sites. The layer of air enveloping countries across the globe easily qualified under the United Nations’ (2020) criteria for preservation as a “superlative natural phenomen[on],” but, as Balkin (2007) discovered, only state agents, not individuals,

Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond  93 could submit a nomination. Undeterred, the artist initiated lobbying efforts to persuade several governments to take action. Over 90,000 signed postcards, for instance, were gathered during just a few months of DOCUMENTA (13) (2012) and sent to Germany’s Minister of the Environment, who agreed with the principles of the project but declined the request to facilitate an application.30 The impressive number of citizens willing to add their name and signature to Public Smog’s mission hinted at a groundswell of popular support for respecting the integrity of the atmosphere, yet the will of so many remained blocked by neoliberal government policies and bureaucratic enablers that make it easier to pollute than to conserve. Through Public Smog’s limited success, the project highlighted the difficulties of attaining atmospheric justice through the social systems currently available.31 However, a clean air park is not out of the realm of possibility; while it exists currently as what the artist calls a “speculative counter-space” (Donovan 2011), the ability to make the park a reality only entails an incremental shift in legal, moral, and political attitudes. All of the strategies in this section demonstrate how olfactory activism can empower citizens through the strength of numbers: scientific data produces indisputable evidence of toxins; economic figures calculate the cost of decontamination; signatures confirm the popularity of conserving the atmospheric ecosystem. Numbers, though, are insufficient on their own. They set the preconditions for action, while much negotiation remains to disentangle the air from entrenched interests that exploit or deny the impending crisis. Empowerment demands both imagining alternatives and taking concrete steps. By hacking into consumer electronics, cap-and-trade markets, or international law, olfactory activists subvert and repurpose available materials and structures to reveal the potential for agency and viable actions. *** The scents of pine, lavender, and sage. Brand-name and custom-made perfumes. Pheromones. Neighborhood odors and lingering pollution. Fresh air. The smells of olfactivism span the spectrum of fragrant to noxious aromas, natural to synthetic scents, ambient to bottled odors, locally sensed to globally circulating airs, making it seem that just about any olfactory sensation can be commandeered into performing a critique. The versatility of scent is also striking. While most of the projects discussed above could be placed within the sensibility of eco-art, they adopt a compelling range of strategies employed by activist artists more generally: guerrilla-style and imperceptible tactics that reconfigure the everyday (Sierra, Hopkins); the occupation of public spaces to interrupt habitual complacency (Bramwell, Severns and Voulgarelis Illgen); dramatic spectacles and publicity-like promotions that attract media attention (Ant Farm, Tolaas); relational projects that organize neighborhoods and communities (Proboscis, Smelling Committee); hacking and the co-opting of existing products and social systems (Proboscis, Balkin); and the creation and distribution of information and counter-discourse (Oleson, Smelling Committee, Balkin). While these artists do not attempt to supersede other forms of activism (protests, boycotts, etc.), their emphasis on the olfactory broadens out the sensory toolkit for activists and underscores the environmental risk inherent to every breath. Despite their differences, the olfactivist strategies of abjection, remediation, and empowerment all start with a bracing whiff of the city’s smells, what sensory geographer Douglas Porteous (2006) calls “nosewitnessing.” Each project then prompts the

94  Jim Drobnick taking of some kind of action through a different olfactory affect. For the olfactivist strategy of abjection, the dominant affect comprises a blend of fear and disgust. The shock of a discomforting smell strikes up an ethical challenge: is one satisfied with the abject status quo, or should something be done about it? Olfactivist remediation diffuses a more aspirational set of affects: hopefulness, caring, cultivation. Health and well-being are the ambitions, and this method supports the feeling that the world could be improved and made more redolent with possibility. The third olfactivist strategy, empowerment, corrals its audience into an affective state of community and purposiveness. Olfactory data can be gathered, functional goals can be set and worked toward, groups of individuals can be united as a powerful force, all of which engender a sense of agency. Which olfactivist method is the most useful in compelling government action and influencing public opinion? The contextual nature of activism makes it difficult to decide definitively between the options: olfactivist projects address specific conditions with particular audiences. As much as artists may aim for a concrete outcome or a defined “success” in resolving a political or environmental issue, all of these works manifest aesthetic and cultural worth even if they ostensibly “fail.” The tactics used by artists dealing with climate change vary in effectiveness, according to psychologists Laura Sommer and Christian Klöckner (2021). Their interviews with spectators identified artworks proposing an “awesome solution” to be the most emotionally and cognitively activating.32 “Awesome” may have been the dominant affect at the time the interviews occurred (reflecting initial reactions, rather than long-term impact), yet the study’s conclusion problematically centers on what could be called a “quick fix.” Olfactivist artists, on the other hand, emphasize the complexity and interrelatedness of issues impacting urban atmospheres. While the aspiration seems simple – clean streets, fresh air, livable environments – before the issues of pollution and climate change are resolved one cannot know in advance which artistic strategy will turn out to be the most beneficial. Until that time, olfactivist interventions combining various types of affect, smell, and agency are necessary. Despite their diversity, olfactivist works demonstrate something distinctive: they employ a self-reflexive approach. A congruence exists between the use of smell as both a topic and a medium. Olfaction simultaneously signals the problem to be addressed and offers the platform in which to stage analysis and critique. First, smell constitutes the sign of trouble: scent is the surefire warning of rotting, toxicity, or neglect. Second, smells indicate when a predicament has been fixed. A fresh fragrance signifies dignified living conditions, a revitalized neighborhood, a revivified atmosphere, an engaged citizenry. The crisis and the healthy resolution, it could be said, lie right in front of people’s noses. Olfactivist works are reflexive in another way: they implicate audiences through ordinary acts of respiration. Unlike vision, in which one can feign to occupy a transcendent position, breathing forces an acknowledgment of being embodied. The inevitable need to breathe grounds olfactivism in the direct experience of people’s lives, comfort, safety, and survival. That so many of olfactivist projects involve performance is not coincidental but integral to smell. Whether artists seek to install odors, remove them, cover them up, simulate them, talk about them, analyze them, or campaign about them, scents remain uncontainable and a bit unruly. Managing them requires constant attention to the ethical conflicts suffusing society. Just as smells extend beyond physical experience to encompass psychological, symbolic, and political dimensions,

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so too do they represent a microcosm of how humans treat each other and care for the environment. Olfactivism thus occupies a profound ethico-aesthetic domain: affecting persons intimately, but bearing global ramifications. Olfactivist works tend to begin with a local focus and site-specificity, but their implications are environmentally vast. Neglected infrastructure, toxic neighborhoods, and adverse living conditions may serve as immediate motivations, but the enormity of the atmosphere inherently leads to the greatest collective challenge facing cities and humanity today – climate change. The major significance of olfactivism is the recognition of smell as the twenty-first century’s bellwether phenomenon: fix the root causes of noxious smells, and numerous other problems, social and environmental, will also be resolved.

Notes 1 This chapter correlates to publications on the politics of air where I discuss the inverse of olfactivism – odoterrorism – in which artists utilize antagonistic smells (Drobnick 2003, 2018). 2 While the “ism” in olfactivism may imply an art movement, I do not consider the artists in this chapter to form a cohesive group. Rather, my intention is to show how disparate artists share strategies and interests. Olfactivism draws from Sissel Tolaas’s description of herself as an “olfactivist,” i.e., an activist for olfaction and scent art. My use of olfactivism differs in that I apply it broadly to artists who may not solely focus on scent and who address a diverse range of issues. 3 This chapter draws from material first presented at the symposium Olfaction and the City, Vienna (2009). 4 The postcard book also features pleasant scents such as pretzels, flowers, and a Christmas tree. 5 Met Office (n.d.). Since then, the lethality of air pollution and fine particulate matter has increased to the point that they are estimated to cause 1 in 9 deaths worldwide (Mingle 2019). 6 Many of Ant Farm’s events display a spirited humor. The absurdity of Air Emergency’s solution, a temporary bubble, mimicked the futility of technocratic solutions that merely adapt to rising levels of pollution. For Ant Farm, a better strategy would be to stop polluting altogether. 7 The work comes with a warning that cockroaches and their feces can carry bacteria, viruses, fungi, and pathogens leading to diseases such as leprosy, bubonic plague, dysentery, typhoid, asthma, and gastroenteritis (Sierra 2007). 8 Cisneros (2008). Interestingly, the cities in which 300 Sheets was initially shown, Munich and London, dwell within countries with far-right nationalist groups stoking fears about foreigners. Immigrant populations are often subjected to racist taunts because of fabrications about their “smell” (Smith 2006). Another work by Sierra, Door Plate (2006), critiques the ways in which prejudice may be articulated; the list begins with “untidy and smelly others.” 9 Headspace analysis is a nondestructive process by which scents are collected and subjected to gas chromatography and/or mass spectrometry to discern the individual components. 10 The installation also diffused Dirty No. 1 into the air. 11 Another of the artist’s goals is to defuse sensory prejudices and encourage the appreciation of a broad range of smells, even abject ones. By recasting stench as a compelling perfume, visitors had the opportunity to retrain their noses and destigmatize odors they normally avoided. 12 Hopkins, emails to the author, April 22 and May 1, 2009. Since the 1980s, the artist has created paintings and installations on the topic of “social fluids,” of which perfume is a major theme. 13 Hopkins was discovered once while replenishing the scent at the shelter intervention. The building’s manager wanted the artist arrested, but admitted that he and the residents had liked the scent (Hopkins, email to the author, May 1, 2009).

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14 Consider the contrast between Hopkins’ interventions and official public art. At the Fountain of Perfumed Water in Grasse, France, the fountain’s pleasant fragrance is undermined by an ominous caution about the water’s toxicity: “Do not drink” (Henshaw 2014, 196). 15 At one location, crack dealers ran Bramwell out of the building but made sure the superintendent cleaned regularly. The artist moved to another neglected tenement (Hamilton 1995). 16 The healing aspect of Bramwell’s project becomes more evident when he ventured internationally to clean other traumatized spaces: Tokyo’s subway (sarin attack), a Senegalese port (slave trade), and Auschwitz (Holocaust) (Maintenance Required 2013, 67). 17 The duo also cleaned public spaces in other US and European cities. 18 Severns and Voulgarelis Illgen (2008a). The artists were cognizant of scent sensitivities. Before cleaning a subway train, they advised those who might be concerned to ride in an adjoining car. 19 Severns and Voulgarelis Illgen (2008b). The artists’ daily blog on the project reveals a rollercoaster of emotions. 20 This paragraph and series of “transformations” draws from Severns and Voulgarelis Illgen’s “Mission Statement” (2013). 21 Oleson (2012, 19, 25–26). I can attest to the contamination. When living near Newtown Creek in the 1980s, the tap water smelled oily and I avoided drinking it. Long-term residents failed to notice anything wrong, however, thus proving their habituation to the pollution and the success of its cover-up. 22 On odorphobia, see Drobnick (2006). 23 Other tours featured an online map, where anyone could add odoriferous reflections to enhance the project’s research. 24 Caitlin Berrigan, email to the author, June 14, 2020. 25 When the origins of urban smells are unknown, suspicion arises. Consider the maple syrup aroma scares perplexing New Yorkers from 2005 to 2009 (Chung 2019). 26 The electronics and software were developed by Dima Diall and Dimitrios Airantzis of Birkbeck, University of London. Robot Feral Public Authoring built upon Proboscis’s 2001 “Private Reveries, Public Spaces” project that commissioned new media specialist Natalie Jeremijenko to reengineer robot dogs into pollution sensors. Jeremijenko conducted further experiments with robot sniffer dogs in New York City (Lane 2020). 27 The costumes and sensors were developed in collaboration with inIVA and Birkbeck’s School of Computer Science and Information Systems. 28 For transaction details, see Balkin (2006b) on “Lower Park” (California) and “Upper Park” (Europe). 29 The pollution markets follow a pattern similar to what political analyst Naomi Klein (2007) has described as “disaster capitalism,” where crises (natural or manufactured) are exploited by corporate profiteering. 30 Balkin (n.d.). Other countries, such as Switzerland and Australia, declined or never responded. An exception was Tonga, an island nation witnessing the devastating effects of global warming. 31 Public Smog continues through publications, billboards, gallery installations, and a comprehensive website outlining the obstacles the artist encountered along with information about pollution and climate change (Balkin 2006b). 32 The activist approaches identified as less effective were “comforting utopia,” “challenging dystopia,” and “mediocre mythology.”

References Aldred, Lisa. 2000. “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances.” The American Indian Quarterly, 24: 3, 329–352. Arnold, Carrie. n.d. “Sensory Overload? Air Pollution and Impaired Olfaction.” https://ehp. niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP3621. Balkin, Amy. n.d. Public Smog. http://tomorrowmorning.net/publicsmog. Balkin, Amy. 2006a. “Economics.” Public Smog, www.publicsmog.org/?page_id=5.

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Balkin, Amy. 2006b. Public Smog. www.publicsmog.org. Balkin, Amy. 2007. Public Smog. San Francisco: Collective Foundation POD Press. Berrigan, Caitlin and Michael McBean. 2008. “The Smelling Committee.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 16: 2–3. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2012. “Occupational Realism.” TDR, 56: 4, 32–48. Chung, Jen. 2019. “Happy 10-Year Anniversary of NYC Finding the Alleged Source of the Mysterious Maple Syrup Smell.” Gothamist. February 5. https://gothamist.com/news/ happy-10-year-anniversary-of-nyc-finding-the-alleged-source-of-the-mysterious-maplesyrup-smell. Cisneros, David. 2008. “Contaminated Communities.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 11: 4, 569–601. Donovan, Thom. 2011. “5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Amy Balkin.” Art21 Magazine. February 17. http://magazine.art21.org/2011/02/17/5-questions-for-contemporarypractice-with-amy-balkin/#.XoXuHq2ZOHo. Drobnick, Jim. 2003. “Trafficking in Air.” Performance Research, 8: 3, 29–43. Drobnick, Jim, ed. 2006. The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Drobnick, Jim. 2018. “Smell, Terrorism and Performance.” Performance Research, 23: 4, 350–356. Gayle, Damien. 2019. “Extinction Rebellion Protesters Stop Traffic in London.” The Guardian, June 14. www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/14/extinction-rebellionprotesters-stop-rush-hour-traffic-london-lewisham. Hamilton, Andrea. 1995. “Artist Turns Art into Life with a Broom.” September 12. https:// apnews.com/410e4ee8cc6b261dd45be9632a5e0227. Henshaw, Victoria. 2014. Urban Smellscapes. New York and London: Routledge. Hogenboom, Melissa. 2019. “How Pollution Is Doing More than Just Killing Us.” BBC Future, April 19. www.bbc.com/future/article/20190415-how-air-pollution-is-doing-morethan-killing-us. Hurley, Andrew. 1994. “Creating Ecological Wastelands.” Journal of Urban History, 20: 3, 340–364. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine. New York: Metropolitan Books. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lane, Giles. 2008. Social Tapestries. London: Proboscis and Diffusion ebooks. Lane, Giles. 2020. E-mail to the author, July 13. Lane, Giles, Camilla Brueton, George Roussos, Natalie Jeremijenko, George Papamarkos, Dima Diall, Dimitris Airantzis and Karen Martin. 2006. “Public Authoring & Feral Robotics.” Cultural Snapshot 11, http://proboscis.org.uk/publications/SNAPSHOTS_ feralrobots.pdf. Maintenance Required. 2013. New York: Whitney Museum. McKeldin, Caroline. 1995. New York Smells. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Met Office. n.d. “Great Smog of 1952.” www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/ case-studies/great-smog. Mingle, Jonathan. 2019. “Lethal Air.” New York Review of Books, September 26, 64–68. Oleson, Jeanine. 2008. “About.” www.nycsmudge.com/. Oleson, Jeanine. 2012. The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse. New York: Circle & Square. Oleson, Jeanine. 2020a. E-mail to the author, August 11. Oleson, Jeanine. 2020b. E-mail to the author, September 1. Porteous, Douglas. 2006. “Smellscape.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, 89–106. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Proboscis. 2006. “Robotic Feral Public Authoring.” http://socialtapestries.net/feralrobots/ index.html. Proboscis. 2007. Snout. http://socialtapestries.net/snout/snout_documentation.pdf.

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Rinck, Fanny, Moustafa Bensafi and Catherine Rouby. 2011. “Olfactory Nuisance and Its Impact on Quality of Life.” In Senses and the City, edited by Madalina Diaconu, Eva Heuberger, Ruth Mateus-Berr and Lukas Marcel Vosicky, 155–164. Vienna and Berlin: Lit Verlag. Robbins, Bruce. 2007. “The Smell of Infrastructure.” boundary 2, Spring, 25–33. Rogers, Victoria. 2013. “Maintaining Development.” In Maintenance Required, 8–21. New York: Whitney Museum. Scott, Felicity. 2007. Ant Farm. Barcelona and New York: Actar. Severns, Hayley and Angela Rose Voulgarelis Illgen. 2008a. “E train WTC comments…” April 18. http://meaningcleaning.blogspot.com/2008/04/. Severns, Hayley and Angela Rose Voulgarelis Illgen. 2008b. “Overheard Today Along 14th Street.” October 4. https://meaningcleaning.blogspot.com/2008/10/overheard-today-along14th-street.html. Severns, Hayley and Angela Rose Voulgarelis Illgen. 2013. “Mission Statement.” March 7. http://meaningcleaning.blogspot.com. Sierra, Santiago. n.d. www.santiago-sierra.com. Sierra, Santiago. 2007. “300 Sheets and Wall Impregnated with Blattodea Pheromone.” www. santiago-sierra.com/200710_1024.php. Smith, Mark. 2006. How Race Is Made. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Neil. 1990. Uneven Development. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Solomon, Deborah. 2001. “The Downtowning of Uptown.” New York Times Magazine, August 19, p. 44. Sommer, Laura and Christian Klöckner. 2021. “Does Activist Art Have the Capacity to Raise Awareness in Audiences?” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, 15: 1, 60–75. Tolaas, Sissel. 2000. “DIRTY No. 1, London 2000,” unpublished text. UNESCO. 2020. “The Criteria for Selection,” http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/. Warren, Samantha and Kathleen Riach. 2018. “Olfactory Control, Aroma Power and Organizational Smellscapes.” In Designing with Smell, edited by Victoria Henshaw, Kate McLean, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins and Gary Warnaby, 145–155. New York and London: Routledge.

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Is There Empathy through Breathing? Dorothée King

Can We Breathe? Breathing is a constant process of filling and emptying the lungs. The internalization and letting-go of air stands for exchange and border-crossing between an organism and its environment. Just as breathing can connect the inside and the outside in a positive sense, the inability to breathe or inhaling something unpleasant may lead to exclusion, a feeling of non-connectedness, or in the worst case to death. As I am writing these lines, the death of George Perry Floyd is present in many people’s minds. Demonstrations in opposition to police violence against Black people are spreading all over the planet. While I prepare myself to write about smell, breath, and the arts, the slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement, “I can’t breathe,” keeps resonating in my mind. “I can’t breathe” were the last words of both Eric Garner and George Floyd, two Black men who choked to death during their arrests in 2014 and 2020 as a result of excessive force by police officers. Unfortunately, this phrase, named most memorable quote of 2014, was revived in 2020 (Izade 2014, 1). Breathing is essential to being alive. The demonstrations against police violence additionally imply that being able to breathe stands for feeling well and being understood. “I can breathe” means living a life without constant fear. Breathing is living a life on equal terms. Racism is one of the most entrenched toxins in our society to this day, and in its interwoven injustice it remains incomparable to other toxic forms. The two olfactory artworks I intend to discuss here do not address racism directly. Racism and how it is made visible these days are more institutionalized than the social injustice addressed in Vaporización, 2002, by Teresa Margolles and Pollution Pods, 2017, by Michael Pinsky. Still, I hope these olfactory artworks initiate empathy for others in the way they center the activity of breathing together. Could breathing in art, and perceiving art via smell, create more empathy for other human beings when visual impact is simply not enough? Social injustice becomes visible in criminality and air pollution due to economic injustice: For Vaporización (2002), Teresa Margolles fills the gallery with a foggy mist created from the disinfected water used to wash corpses of drug cartel murder victims in the Mexico City morgue. Through breathing in the artwork, one participates in the fate of the socially disadvantaged inhabitants of Mexico City. The architecture Pollution Pods (2017) by Michael Pinsky is a series of interconnected domes, each simulating a different pollution cocktail from cities around the world, showing that distinctive local smells are often based on developments of globalization or climate change. In the following, I intend to show the distinct cultural and physical mechanisms of respiratory perception. In a second step, the analysis of the artworks will open up possibilities to develop empathy for others. They set the impulse to become aware of one’s own breath and its conditions.

100  Dorothée King

Why Breathe to Change the World? Breathing has seldom been seen as a way to perceive or change the world. Since antiquity, in culturally dominant Western, white traditions, the sense of smell through breathing has been one of the so-called lower senses. The sense of smell had the reputation of being poorly developed. Aristotle thought that smells are “less easy to determine” than other sensory perceptions (Aristoteles 1999, 421a). Cognitive perception and knowledge acquisition were attributed primarily to seeing and hearing (Aristoteles 2001, 440b). Later, Kant condemned the lower senses—smelling, tasting, and touching—as unfit for cognitive perception (Eisler 1964, 492). Hegel recognizes only the “theoretical” senses—seeing and hearing—as suitable for perceiving and understanding art (Hegel 1988, 622). Freud argues from a psychoanalytical perspective that adults who still rely heavily on their olfactory sense have not grown up and are delayed in their mental development (Freud 1961, 46). Even the perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim states that although one could immerse oneself in smells and tastes, one could scarcely think in them (Arnheim 1969, 18). Only a few scholars speak highly about the olfactory sense. In 1754, Condillac states in the Traité des Sensations that olfactory and other nonvisual sensory perception is essential for our thinking (Condillac 1947, 136). And Friedrich Nietzsche announced that “all my genius is in my nostrils,” condemning philosophy for failing to give enough attention to the nose (Nietzsche 1988, 366). But these smell-driven thinkers are an exception. So far, insights and events in history and the arts have been documented and archived via text, images, sound, and film—not necessarily through odors.1 Olfactory perception through breathing is rarely consulted as a reliable source for cognition by these thinkers. The Western historical, cultural, and philosophical assumptions about smell also underline the potential disqualification of breath or smell as media for cultural change. Yet despite the bad reputation that is built around breath as a way to acquire perceptual information, some studies show the importance of breathing in smells to structure human social behavior. In the 1980s, cultural theorist Alain Corbin laid the foundation for exploring the interplay between cultural affiliation and breathable perception with his book The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination. Corbin sets out how strongly odor affiliation (who can afford to wear fragrant clothing?) and appropriation of space (who can afford certain standards of hygiene?, who has to live where smell is unreasonable?) has shaped our society. As an example, one might cite the British children’s song “Ring a ring o’ roses / A pocket full of posies / a-tishoo, a-tishoo / We all fall down.” The song probably refers to the times of the plague, when people tried to escape the dangerous smells of diseases with aromatized cloths. Today we wear face masks, use hand sanitizer, and go into quarantine to face the COVID-19 pandemic. More recent cultural studies on breath and smell build on Corbin’s historical research. The perception of olfactory sensations changes over time. “Smell can bother us, but it does not scare us anymore,” states the historian Annick Le Guérer, to imply that the times are over when epidemics could still be smelled and stinking actually meant danger to one’s life (Le Guérer 1992, 256). Looking at the reality of visible economic differences during the Covid-19 pandemic, one could question that statement. I am sure one smells better and breathes easier in a fancy Swiss hospital as compared to an overfilled refugee camp without resources to maintain hygiene standards. However, the rejection of breathing in so-called bad smells has remained. Cultural theorist Mădălina Diaconu describes, in citing Corbin, smell as a culturally significant medium for the structuring of society and sexuality. She believes that breathing in pleasant

Is There Empathy through Breathing?  101 smells might convey a sense of familiarity and belonging to communities or places (Diaconu 2005, 228). And as historian Jonathan Reinartz argues, people use scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the “good” smells pleasant and the “bad” smells reek. These differences may be morally constructed or caused through differences in economies and environments (Reinartz 2013, 85). Cultural critic Walter Benjamin suggested that we look dialectically at the history of the senses and examine the relationship between historical variables and biological constants (Benjamin 1977, 161). In order to understand the cultural handling of inhaling odor better, it is helpful to revisit the physical aspects that breathing and smelling play in our perception. Looking at the unique features of the physiological breathing process makes smell for art making and aesthetic experiences a bit clearer: Olfactory sensations are sent through the olfactory cranial nerve, which enters the skull through the cribriform plate of the ethmoid bone. The olfactory impulses are then directed to various brain regions for interpretation. The main target of the olfactory tract is the primary olfactory cortex in the medial temporal lobe. However, the sense of smell is heavily interconnected with all the brain structures, referred to as parts of the limbic system. One of these structures is the amygdala, an old region of the brain considered to be one of the regions for emotional response, whether positive or negative. Another one is the entorhinal cortex, which projects to the amygdala and is also involved in emotional and autonomic responses to odor. The entorhinal cortex also projects to the hippocampus, which is involved in motivation and emotional memory (Lewis 2015). Collectively we may think of the brain structures connected to smell as a source for emotional responsiveness and motivation. Based on this research, the psychologist Richard Stevenson states that olfactory perception is more likely to trigger emotional responses such as disgust, joy, nausea, or fear, than other modes of sense perception (Stevenson 2014, 157). When we breathe, air and its scents enter our bodies in an unmediated act. Looking at the unique features of the physiological olfactory process in stirring up emotions of empathy or love on the one hand, and fear and disgust on the other, makes the qualities of smell for political art projects a bit clearer. When we can’t breathe, we can’t feel those emotions. In the case studies I discuss here, Vaporización (2002) and Pollution Pods (2017), the suggested mode of perception is inhalation. Smell as artistic material may not only challenge our familiar mode of art perception but also test our perception of the world. The strategies of Teresa Margolles and Michael Pinsky are informed by a biological and cultural framework for respiration. The artists specifically comment on injustice via the act of breathing.

Teresa Margolles: Vaporización (2002) Teresa Margolles is an artist, yet her work is influenced by her studies in forensic medicine and communication sciences. Her art projects often deal with social injustice in her home country, Mexico (Jauregui 2004, 135). In her work, she investigates the social causes and consequences of death. One particular material interest of hers is human bodies and bodily fluids. As the curator Letizia Ragaglia puts it, The work of Teresa Margolles has always taken the human body and its liquid components as protagonists; they serve as vehicles for a relentless indictment of

102  Dorothée King the growing violence in the world at large and in her own native country in particular, namely Mexico. (Reins and Ragaglia 2010, 112) As an example of an olfactory artwork by Margolles, I will focus on Vaporización, as shown in her solo exhibition Ya Basta Hijos de Puta at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan, Italy, in 2018. The audience enters a large exhibition space. The walls are bare. The only object in the space is a humidifier. Every ten minutes the humidifier turns itself on. Again and again the machine emits fumes into the exhibition space, until the whole space fills with a thick fog. After five minutes, the humidifier stops and the air slowly clears again. The material of Vaporización is air, a misty fog. The way to perceive this artwork is through inhalation. The work penetrates the recipient physically. It is impossible to not inhale it until one leaves the room. The attributes ascribed to the smell of the fumes are of course very subjective. I perceived the smell of Vaporizatión as rather neutral, maybe a bit sweet or rotten. Yet knowing about Margolles’s preferences for social causes in her artwork, inhaling the mist made me feel uncomfortable. The olfactory aesthetic experience of the artwork probably changes for everybody after learning about the origins of the smell. Reading the label and the brochure accompanying the exhibition reveals the sources of the liquids that are vaporized into the exhibition space. For Vaporización Margolles fills the gallery with a foggy mist created from the disinfected water used to wash corpses in the Mexico City morgue. In this public morgue, countless unidentifiable corpses from Mexico City are stored. The deceased, tens of thousands every year, are often people nobody wants to connect to: victims of drug wars, victims of missing alternative social structures, victims of social injustice. Margolles literally rubs the violent reality and social injustice of Mexico City into the noses of the people who experience the work. She makes her artsy and probably privileged Milan audience aware of the fate of “the others,” the socially disadvantaged inhabitants of her hometown, through olfactory sensations in this exhibition context. Milan is the center of northern Italy’s economy, yet it is also the city of Chinese immigrants, who have to live and work in slum-like settings. Class differences are visible at every other corner, yet they are not necessarily life-threatening for the probably well-off museum goers. My point of interest is Margolles’s choice of material. For Vaporización she chose the ephemeral material air. Why was the artist not showing photos? There is no lack of moving imagery of the circumstances in Mexico. As seen in the news in recent years, morgues in Mexico run out of capacity, corpses left in parking lots (Tyler 2012). Yet Margolles chose to communicate her message via smell, in an exhibition far from the violence of the Mexican drug cartels. Smell brings with it an immediate experience in the space of the exhibition. I want to investigate the efficacy of the medium of air as a preeminent transmitter for creating awareness for social injustice. A revisit of the cultural categorization of our olfactory sense and its physiological characteristics might be helpful to understand the special role of smell in the context of Margolles’s political art. Vaporización triggers emotions. Emotions of disgust, but also emotions of belonging. Disgust could trigger feelings of indignation about the living conditions in Mexico City. Feelings of belonging could possibly lead the recipients into a deep, mentally and physically felt, empathy with the deceased and their destinies (Jauregui 2004, 135).

Is There Empathy through Breathing?  103 In both cases of empathy, the message of social injustice stays the same. Margolles deliberately uses an olfactory sensation to support this emotional, empathic relationship. Through breathing in her artwork, one empathetically participates in the fate of the deceased of Mexico City, even in a city as far from Mexico as Milan. As Jim Drobnick put it 20 years ago, “Breathing in and smelling a fragrance collapses rigid dichotomies of viewer and object, self and other, even inside and outside.” (Drobnick 1998, 10) With Vaporización olfactory aesthetic reception makes the audience aware of the inequality of life circumstances, comparing Milan to Mexico City, and at the same time, sets the stage for an unexpected physical and empathetic intimacy.

Michael Pinsky: Pollution Pod (2017) “Pollution affects my family and me every day in London. And unlike many cities in the world, London’s pollution is entirely avoidable,” the architect and smell artist Michael Pinsky told the design magazine Dezeen (Ravenscroft 2018). In 2018, Pinsky installed Pollution Pods in London at Somerset House to highlight the levels of air pollution experienced daily by city inhabitants. This smell installation was first installed in Trondheim, Norway, in 2017. In both settings the air that is considered “normal” completely varies. The artist chose to link different pollution settings to make the audience aware of different levels of air contamination. One might think that the air you are inhaling is the same everywhere, until you experience the drastic difference of air quality within minutes of breathing in the air of Pollution Pods (Figure 8.1). The installation comprised five interconnected geodesic domes that contain carefully mixed recipes emulating the relative presence of ozone, particulate matter,

Figure 8.1 Michael Pinsky, Pollution Pods, Trondheim, 2017. Source: photo credit by Thor Nielsen / NTNU, copyright Michael Pinsky.

104  Dorothée King nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide that pollute five diverse cities. Starting from a coastal location in Norway, the visitor passes through increasingly polluted cells, from dry and cold locations to hot and humid ones. The visitors circulate through the installation to experience what the air is like in London, Beijing, São Paulo, and New Delhi. The different degrees of pollution in the cities chosen by Michael Pinsky represent various stages of healthy or unhealthy living that comes with breathing in more or less contaminated air. Pollution might be difficult to understand through images. Yet the visitors experienced physically different possibilities to breathe—often linked to the average wealth of the respective inhabitants. Walking through the pods, and smelling different degrees of air pollution, makes the audience aware of this diversity. Going from one smelly pod to the next demonstrates that these cities are actually interconnected and interdependent. The air in Norway can only be so clean because the production of the goods consumed in the world is happening in other places. Through the architectural design of the space, by interconnecting different smellscapes so close to each other, the installation opens up quick connections to different olfactory habitats. One wanders from dome to dome experiencing the change of air much faster and more directly than would be possible in real life. Revisiting the biological relationship between smell and the emotional parts of our brain, we may appreciate Pinsky’s attempt to create an empathetic artwork-audience relationship. As the artist states in an interview, “I want people to engage with the issue of pollution viscerally, to challenge the notion that we always need to travel in our private bubble whilst consuming cheap goods from the east” (Ravenscroft 2018). By connecting different “private” bubbles with each other, the artist intends to deprivatize the different air qualities and raise awareness for the different, and often unjust, modes of living and breathing on this planet. With Pollution Pods and Vaporización the artists deliberately center inhalation as the mode of perception. Both artists choose visceral physical and emotional engagement with their artwork via inhalation. When one compares living in Oslo to living in Beijing and São Paulo, one might link different levels of pollution to unjust economic distribution—and at the same time draw on one’s own emotions. One might be angry about the pollution on this planet, yet one might also feel more empathy toward the people who have to live in less clean places.

Possibilities of Empathy Learning more about the relationship between inhalation and the emotional parts of our brain supports the worry that smell might not be the best source for cognitive processing of information. Yet it also supports my main contention here: that with Vaporización and Pollution Pods the artists intend to set up not a rational but an empathetic artwork-audience relationship. In both cases the participation in the fate of others does not take place based on reflection but based on emotions. Teresa Margolles builds a physical and emotional relationship between the unidentified corpses in Mexico City and the audience in Milan—based on inhalation. Michael Pinsky connects air-filled rooms and invites his audience physically to feel the disparity of the air quality breathed by people whose fates brought them to live in those places. Pinsky’s audience inhales air laden with various levels of toxicity. We are used to looking at pictures and video footage of smog-filled cities, yet we are so used to our own surroundings that we might think our own level of smog, be it the crystal-clear

Is There Empathy through Breathing?  105 air of Norway or the dense, hard-to-breathe air in New Delhi, is the only way to live. Pollution Pods might evoke feelings of injustice. In art historical terms, all feelings that position the recipient in relation to the work of art are summarized under the term empathy. In contrast to psychological definitions, in art-related research it is irrelevant whether empathy is a compassionate or a negative emotion (Fontius 2001, 123). Included in the definitions of empathy—and this is interesting for the analysis of inhalable art—is that sensory perception is part of the aesthetic experience. The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms defines empathy as “the emotional bond formed by the spectator with the work of art” (Lucie-Smith 1984, 74). The Metzler Lexicon of Aesthetics states, “In installation art, the sensual-aesthetic experience becomes in an empathic way constitutive for the functioning of the artistic process” (Lehmann 2006, 354). The functioning of the artistic process, as described here, therefore “depends on the active participation and emotional involvement of the recipient” (Hamker 2003, 180). So physiologically and artistically, olfactory perception via breathing and emotions are inseparably linked. Philosopher John Dewey took a closer look at the emotions that can make up the empathic bond between recipient and work of art. In Art as Experience he lists feelings that can be set in motion by an aesthetic experience: “joy, sorrow, hope, fear, anger, curiosity” (Dewey 2005, 43). Dewey’s list also applies to odor-based works, as a glance at the examples confirms. Sorrow for the people of Mexico City could arise from the informed smelling of the Vaporización installation. Anger could also capture exhibition visitors at the reception of Vaporización. 2 Pollution Pods might evoke feelings of hope—there are still places on this planet with fresh air; or maybe we feel fear that the air might be unbreathable soon everywhere. Yet maybe the most important feeling is empathy as a way to show compassion, for the murdered, for people breathing nearly unbreathable air. This term, unlike sorrow, captures even more precisely the emotional bond that is mediated by the work, intimately connecting far-flung groups of people. Compassion involves not only caring for someone but also empathizing with the feelings of others, in this case the grief or anger of those left behind, those suffering the effects of violence or air pollution. For a definition of empathy and the emotions included in it, art dictionaries can be consulted, but they do not go far enough in the case of the reception of odor-based art. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer defines empathy as a means of “transferring a context of meaning from another ‘world’ into one’s own.” (Gadamer 1974, 1061) An art scholarly concept of empathy extended by this definition gives rise to an idea of empathy, according to which one’s own situation is experienced anew through the empathetic experience and learning about foreign contexts.

Conclusion Vaporización and Pollution Pods show that in spite of all the theoretical and historical objections, inhalation can be a legitimate, information-bearing source of perception. Margolles and Pinsky use biologically unique scents to involve their audience emotionally. Their audiences are engaged by the intimate physical interaction with the artwork. Here, the aesthetic experience of the art objects is only partly determined by their materiality; it is also determined by the perception of the perceiving subject in relation to the object (Gadamer 1990, 48).

106 Dorothée King Smell in this art transmits multifaceted messages. Not only do we smell these projects in exhibition spaces, where we are used to looking around, we also experience how they defy our sense of belonging and identity. Breathing in the art challenges the audiences’ set modes of perception, questions the representations of the status quo, and triggers art smellers to face their presumptions about what is familiar and what is foreign. Yet, is the aesthetic principle involved in the reception of these smells really as simple as “Familiar smells are good, and unknown smells irritate?” The different perspectives on the deployment of inhalation and breath in Vaporización and Pollution Pods address the audience’s political and social attitudes toward the known and the unknown, “the self” and “the other,” the just and the unjust, uncovering diverse respiratory preferences and prejudices. Teresa Margolles makes her audience aware of the fate of socially disadvantaged inhabitants of her hometown through breathable sensations in this exhibition context. Michael Pinsky makes his audience aware of growing inequality in a globalized culture marked by socioeconomic differences and climate change. In both cases, the artists give people the opportunity to experience feelings triggered by smell. The visitors have the chance to develop empathy by inhaling the artwork. By transferring contexts of meanings from another world into one’s own, to follow Gadamer, one might be able to understand how difficult it could be to breathe for others, or not being able to breathe at all.

Notes 1 Apart from a few minor exceptions, like the Osmothèque Conservatoire International des Parfums á Versaille, no larger smell archive has been established. 2 As unpleasant as the smell or the hint of the smell of decay may be for our noses, it is not dangerous, because a cadaveric poison does not exist.

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Is There Empathy through Breathing? 107 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1974. “Hermeneutik.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Band 3, edited by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel/Stuttgart: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 539–541. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Wahrheit und Methode, Grundzüge einer Philosophischen Hermeneutik. 1. Tübingen: Mohr. Hamker, Anne. 2003. Emotion und ästhetische Erfahrung. Zur Rezeptionsästhetik der Video- Installationen Buried Secrets von Bill Viola. Münster/New York: Waxmann. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. 1988. Æsthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Izade, Elah. 2014. “‘I Can’t Breathe.’ Eric Garner’s Last Words Are 2014’s Most Notable Quote, according to a Yale Librarian.” Washington Post, December 9. Jauregui, Gabriela. 2004. “Nekropolis: Die Exhumierung der Arbeiten von Teresa Margolles.” In Teresa Margolles, Muerte sin fin, edited by Udo Kittelmann and Klaus Görner, 130–155. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje-Cantz. Le Guérer, Annick. 1992. Die Macht der Gerüche. Eine Philosophie der Nase. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Lehmann, Annette Jael. 2006. “Sinne. Sinnlichkeit.” In Lexikon Ästhetik, edited by Achim Trebess, 352–354. Stuttgart/Weimar: J.B. Metzler. Lewis, Jordan Gaines. 2015. “Smells Ring Bells: How Smell Triggers Memories and Emotions.” Psychology Today. January 12. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-babble/201501/ smells-ring-bells-how-smell-triggers-memories-and-emotions. Lucie-Smith, Edward, ed. 1984. The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms. London: Thames and Hudson. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988. Ecce Homo, Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Ravenscroft, Tom. 2018. “Pollution-Filled Domes Installed at London’s Somerset Houses.” Dezeen, April 25, www.dezeen.com/2018/04/25/pollution-filled-domes-installed-atlondons-somerset-house/. Reinartz, Jonathan. 2013. Historical Perspectives on Smell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Stevenson, Richard. 2014. “The Forgotten Sense. Using Olfaction in a Museum Context: A Neuroscience Perspective.” In The Multisensory Museum. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, edited by Nina Levent and Alvaro PascualLeone, 151–166. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Tyler, Alan. 2012. “Mexico’s Drug War. 50,000 Dead in Six Years.” The Atlantic, May 17, www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/05/mexicos-drug-war-50000-dead-in-6-years/100299/. Wolfs, Rein and Letizia Ragaglia. 2010. Frontera: Teresa Margolles. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

9

Olfaction as Radical Collaboration Lindsey French

It is late summer as I climb the hill toward a swimming hole in Western Pennsylvania. The promise of waterfalls has drawn me and my hiking partner out of Pittsburgh into a hilly landscape not far from the city, thick with hemlock, white pine, and oak. The air is warm and heavy with terpenoids, the chemicals responsible for that delicious pine smell of late summer. As we crest a hill, I recognize a familiar pungent smell—a cabbage-y scent wafting in the air alongside the warm piney notes. To our left on the path stands a piece of infrastructure made of pipes and knobs, marking the origin of the smell. It is the scent of mercaptan, a gas odorant used to mark natural gas, the otherwise odorless, colorless material trapped in the shale rock below for approximately 390 million years until today. Pittsburgh is located in a geological region known as the Marcellus Shale. Here shale formed, trapping natural gas in its pores in the Devonian Age approximately 290 million years ago. Only recently has it been targeted for its natural gas potential. Until 2005, the region was considered unsuitable for gas extraction, but beginning in 2008, the area became the focus of natural gas extraction in the United States, making Pennsylvania one of the largest gas producers in the US in 2018, second only to Texas, according to the US Energy Information Administration (2019). The air here is humid, carrying not only the green smells from the abundant plant life that sprouts lushly throughout the city’s hills and neighborhoods but also the olfactory clouds of gaseous waste from industry that built this area economically. In 2019, the city’s air quality was rated the seventh worst in the nation for year-round particle pollution, and tenth worst in the nation for short-term particle pollution by the American Lung Association. In 2016, air quality conditions prompted the creation of “Smell PGH,” a smartphone app that enables citizens to record observations of airborne pollutants, which are directly submitted as odor complaints to the Allegheny County Health Department. App users can also view an interactive map that visualizes this data, including location, intensity, and description of smells (CMU CREATE Lab). On another hike south of the city, I again smelled the familiar scent of mercaptan odorants. This time, a yellow post marking a gas line sat alongside a popular hiking path in Frick Park, nestled in among late summer Elecampane, or Inula helenium, its tall yellow flowers surrounded by pollinating insects. Stopping to look at a bee, I noticed a transparent snail on the leaf’s underside, persistently chewing the leafy flesh, and probably precipitating another airborne event alongside the natural gas. In a history parallel to this boom of natural gas extraction of the region, the past decades have brought an increase in scientific research in plant communication. These

Olfaction as Radical Collaboration  109 studies reveal how molecular communications among plants trigger an incredible complexity of interspecies interactions. Known channels of plant communication include electrical signaling, sound, exchanges via mycorrhizal networks, and communication via volatile airborne chemicals (also known as VOCs: airborne chemicals released by many plants and received by other plants, insects, and other animals). As a defense strategy, some plants emit chemicals repulsive to predators, or attractive to insects that prey on their predators. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on airborne communication as a form of interspecies communication in order to understand the implications and potentials of olfaction as a site for radical collaboration and exchange. When I say collaboration, I am influenced most directly by three thinkers, who contextualize collaborative dynamics as forms of political engagement, particularly the dynamics that arise in multispecies collaborations. Donna Haraway’s work considers humans as hybrid forms, within and among multispecies arrangements in negotiations of power. Haraway introduces her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by proposing that the political task at hand is to “make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (1). Haraway’s arguments are also entangled with eugenicist and anti-populationist arguments. Her hopeful vision of the future relies on dramatic decreases in human populations, and the vagueness of her proposal does not adequately address the racial violence inherent to these projects historically (Lewis 2020, 159). I disavow Haraway’s reliance on these harmful legacies, and I include her for her insistence on including both human and nonhuman constituents among the configurations where power is negotiated in the shared project of survival, and with an acknowledgment of both her influence and of the work that needs to be done in reckoning with the violence embedded in popular ecological thought. Ongoing anti-colonial indigenous work about kinship relationships and climate justice is critical to multispecies configurations, and I turn to the work of Indigenous philosopher and climate scholar, Kyle Powys Whyte. Whyte articulates the qualities of kinship relationships that might allow us to address climate justice—consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity— and reminds readers that these are exactly the qualities that take time and generations to establish. His proposition that “the very fabric of the complex phenomena of climate change has to do with kin relationships or their violation” (Whyte 2020, 4) is a powerful framework for the political implications of multispecies relationship. The co-constitutive nature of survival is also at the heart of the idea of “contamination as collaboration,” introduced by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing argues not only that we are all contaminated but that contamination is at its heart change brought about by encounter. As we encounter others, we change—and these changes and exchanges are where the political is negotiated (Tsing 2015, 27– 28). Tsing’s framing of contamination is not a way to glorify toxicity; it is a way to consider contaminative encounters as a site for radical change. Emanating from current understandings of plant defense strategies, and with this spirit of collaboration in mind, I will trace projects that position olfaction, respiration, and ingestion as sites for the formation of coalition and radical change.

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Olfaction as Communication In 1983, Rhoades et al. published a study marking the beginning of scientific research into volatile-mediated communication between plants (Rhoades 1983, 55–68). The study evidenced that willow trees in the airspace of herbivore-infested willow trees became more resistant to herbivores. Suggesting a form of information sharing through the atmosphere between these plants, this paper arguably initiated scientific study of plant communication via volatile chemicals (Guerrieri 2016, 126). Airborne communication by plants is broadly organized into categories of plantplant communication and plant-insect communication. Plant-plant communication also includes interspecies and intraspecies communication. Plant-insect communication includes Herbivore Induced Volatile Communication (HIVC) and Green Leaf Volatiles (GLVs). Green Leaf Volatiles (GLVs) are a series of compounds released by plants across the plant kingdom, in varying blends. Once released, these compounds can precipitate a number of interesting responses, including attracting or repelling herbivores and their predators, initiating a plant’s defenses, priming them for defense against herbivores and pathogens, or directly producing toxic effects on bacteria and fungi. GLVs are usually released in response to stress—including direct damage to plants, or damage from herbivores or fungal or bacterial infections. These chemicals can be triggered by environmental stresses of drought or heat, high levels of light, or the presence of heavy metals (Ameye et al. 2018, 669). GLVs are commonly described in popular science as warning signals plants send either to neighboring plants or to beneficial insects. The amounts of GLVs released vary depending on the type of encounter. Oral secretions of insects can cause the release of GLVs, and herbivores can suppress the release of these chemicals. Both plants and insects can “fine tune” the GLV composition. Some studies suggest that fungi have a large role to play in the regulation of GLVs (Ameye et al. 2018, 674), leading to interesting questions of agency and encounter. Which organism is precipitating these changes? Is it possible to identify the source of “warning signals” in a single organism, or are there complex interspecies negotiations at play in this chemical release? While these questions surround the sending of the signal, more questions remain about the plant’s mechanism of reception. According to a meta-analysis of GLV production by plants, as of 2017 only one volatile receptor in plants had been identified for ethylene (Ameye et al., 674). The plant’s “nose” is still not known. Though humans don’t play a direct role in these plant-to-plant or plant-to-insect communication networks, these smells are nonetheless perceptible to us, most readily as the smell of freshly cut grass. The human nose is peripheral to these encounters. A  smell traverses the body at a scale too small to be noticed materially, but these chemicals are real objects that enter and penetrate a body. But what happens when we try to “learn the language” of another species? In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer notes a general reluctance among Americans in the United States to learn other languages, including the languages of other species. “But imagine the possibilities,” she writes, Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out

Olfaction as Radical Collaboration  111 everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be. (58) Working with multiple systems of knowledge in both her writing and scientific work, Kimmerer draws from the Potawatomi knowledge system to contextualize and inform her work in plant ecology and botany. From Kimmerer’s proposal of learning the language of another species, I want to consider Italian artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s One Tree ID – How to Become a Tree for Another Tree, which frames olfaction as a method of biochemical communication between human visitors and an individual tree. Brandis describes the piece as a “biopoetic and biochemical odor communication installation and experiment.” Like much of Brandis’s work, the piece uses advanced technological data collection and analysis in service of a poetic gesture. In collaboration with scientists at the Institute for Biosciences, University of Rostock, Brandis recorded the VOC profile of an individual Himalayan cedar. They created airtight chambers to isolate airborne molecules surrounding different areas of the tree, then used a process called gas chromatography to analyze the compounds that make up these areas (or “clouds”) around the tree’s roots, stem, and crown. Noting the inability to fully capture 100% of the VOCs released by the plant, Brandis also brought in a perfumer, Marc vom Ende, to provide “nose data” to supplement the machine data. The collected machine and nose data of the three “clouds” were used to create three separate perfumes. In the installation, a Himalayan cedar grows next to vials of these perfumes. Human visitors can don the biochemical identity of another tree to poetically wear the tree’s identity, potentially conversing in the medium of the biochemical (Brandis 2019). Brandis borrows techniques and technologies from both VOC analysis in plant communication experiments and professional perfuming to situate the resulting substance as both perfume and biochemical communication. But the poetic gesture speaks to the ability to reposition oneself in relation to the tree—arguably, to “learn the language” of the tree. To momentarily alter the atmospheric emissions of one’s body is to be perceived differently by an individual from another species, and thus to take a new form in the relational assemblage of the installation. Brandis’s piece speaks of the poetic (or, the “biopoetic,”), as an active embodiment or performance of that which exists not only outside of human language but also outside of our best systems of measurement (in this case, scent perception and machine analysis). The poetic gesture is exactly in this excess, that which points beyond the limits of what we know as possible. In Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Franco “Bifo” Berardi discusses poetical acts as excess, or, the ability to break established conventions of communication to open up new horizons of meaning. Berardi writes, “The poetical act is a semiotic excess hinting beyond the limit of conventional meaning, and simultaneously it is the revelation of a possible sphere of experience not yet experienced (that is to say, the experienceable).” He says, “Let’s try to think outside the sphere of measurability and of measure […] Let’s go out of this century of measure, let’s go out to breathe together” (Berardi 2019, 21–22). By involving such precise systems of measurement while highlighting the inadequacy of these systems alone, Brandis leverages systems of measure(ment) precisely to bring us outside of them. One Tree ID establishes a phenomenological system of exchange that suggests the possible (a conversation with an individual tree in the tree’s own language?) while acknowledging the limitations of human sensorial systems.

112  Lindsey French The piece engenders an experience in excess of what is measurable or representable. If the political is an investigation into how to be together, then a poetic gesture connecting human and botanical subjects requires that we refigure the primacy of human communication systems. To understand our current (literal) atmosphere as a political sphere and a physical reality, we may understand the relations among human and nonhuman subjects as a collectivity that not only exceeds the bounds of the measurable but, in doing so, creates new possibilities for structures of affiliation.

Olfaction as Exchange The cloud as a physical and political object has been taken up by designer and historian David Gissen, who insists on the importance of perceiving gas and smoke as architectural forms. Rather than imagining the atmosphere as a neutral space, he politicizes and historicizes it. Gissen introduces gas and smoke as forms of “subnature,” which he defines as “those forms of nature deemed primitive (mud and darkness), filthy (smoke, dust, and exhaust), fearsome (gas or debris), or uncontrollable (weeds, insects, and pigeons).” (Gissen, Subnature, 22). Despite, or perhaps, because of the designation of these forms as inferior and even threatening to architecture, Gissen takes them up as essential to the investigation of contemporary and historic conditions. His conceptual historical reconstruction project, Reconstruction – Smoke, brings attention to the smoky atmosphere of historical Pittsburgh as both political and physical material. Gissen presents his proposed reconstruction as a digital image that depicts a cubelike cloud, visualized as a swirling gray form suspended above the city (see Figure 9.1). Its sharply geometric edges

Figure 9.1 Reconstruction – Smoke (Pittsburgh), David Gissen, 2006. Source: Copyright David Gissen.

Olfaction as Radical Collaboration  113 establish an impossibly clear distinction between the air of the contemporary photograph and the suggestive plumes from the early twentieth century, when rich deposits of coal were extracted and run through the machines of industry enveloping the city in dense, smoky air. Just 30 miles south of Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River is a small town, Donora. The town’s historical society too understands smog as an historical feature, dubbing itself “The Smog Museum.” Donora was home to US Steel’s Donora Zinc Works and its American Steel and Wire Plant, which frequently emitted the harmful airborne chemicals of hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide. In 1948, a temperature inversion trapped these gases in Donora, causing dangerous smog levels that resulted in deaths and illnesses (Donora Historical Society n.d.). The museum contains typical small-town historical material, but the significance of the smog event (and the role of the steel mill) is inescapable in its collection. Sitting on a museum shelf is an event book from a women’s society related to the mill, whose cover is a hand-painted image of the steel mill with colorful particulates blooming from its chimneys (see Figure 9.2). While this visualization of an historic atmosphere of the region is visually quite different from a conceptual gesture of conserving the atmosphere, the amateur painting of smoke rising from the chimneys seems akin to Gissen’s rigid cube above nearby Pittsburgh. The smoke and the air engulf and entangle the inhabitants of this region into a complex and intimate relation with the steel industry. The social dynamics of this area were shaped by this amorphous and sublime smoke and its origins in industry, and to consider this region without this actor is to misunderstand it entirely.

Figure 9.2 Donora Women’s Club Social Activities Scrapbook, 1948. Source: Copyright Donora Historical Society and Smog Museum.

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Figure 9.3 Hays Woods / Oxygen Bar, Laurie Palmer, 2005. Source: Copyright Laurie Palmer.

Here, the smog itself becomes an actor, a collaborator, or even a provocateur, in a human history expanded here to include particulates as an agential force or condition. In the same region devastated by the steel industry, Laurie Palmer’s 2005 artwork O2 Bar (or, Oxygen Bar) works with the atmosphere as a site of human interaction and multispecies collaboration. Palmer’s piece focuses on a large parcel of land in Pittsburgh known as Hays Woods, which at the time of her piece, was in early stages of discussion for redevelopment. O2 Bar is a mobile oxygen bar that Palmer brought to several public spaces around the city of Pittsburgh. Rather than sourcing her oxygen from canisters, Palmer created a “mini-version of Hays Woods” using Panicum virgatum, a common grass known for its ability to efficiently sequester carbon. Participants were invited to use gas masks to breathe the air generated by these plants, an offering of inhaling and enjoying the benefits of cleaner air produced by the plants of Hays Woods (Palmer 2005). Importantly, Palmer’s piece does not rely on a perspective that prioritizes the health of nonhuman species of a landscape over the health of that landscape’s human

Olfaction as Radical Collaboration  115 residents. O2 Bar instead serves as “an excuse to engage in conversations,” situating her to “learn more about how a range of people from different economic and racial backgrounds think about land use, collective ownership, and related issues of environmental justice” (Palmer 2019). O2 Bar is playful in its encounter, and complicated in its attempt to consider the ecological and the social as inextricable from one another. Reflecting after the piece was completed, Palmer describes how her resistance to hauling the bulky sculptures into public spaces was replaced by the end of the day by joyful and ecstatic feelings from the eagerness of strangers to connect—once it was clear she was not selling something—and the sense of trust that was cumulatively created. She also describes how her assumptions about the constituents of local environmental groups were challenged. Groups such as Pittsburgh’s Environmental Justice Institute, which emerged from Pittsburgh Transportation Equity Project, consisted predominantly of people of color doing the work of environmental justice. And many of the people involved in environmental work once worked for local industry, or came from families employed by the same industries responsible for the city’s pollution. O2 Bar engages plants both symbolically and actually. While the gesture of sniffing a breath of fresh air from plants is not significantly different from any other breath, it calls attention to that which we already inhale, which we may or may not consent to. Palmer does not visualize the air, but instead offers a respiratory experience of breath that turns our attention to the inhalation of the atmosphere surrounding us, and in conversation with those who live and breathe here (see Figure 9.3).

Olfaction as a Contamination The stakes of ingestion, a close cousin of inhalation, are raised for Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent?, a piece presented in 2014 at Frieze London by brothers Ei and Tomoo Arakawa (known collectively as United Brothers). In the piece, they offer a radish soup (made by their mother) to art fair visitors. The radishes are sourced from Fukushima prefecture, where three years prior an earthquake prompted a nuclear disaster that released radiation into the surroundings. The Japanese Farmers’ Association (JFA) certified that all materials were safe (Neuendorf 2014), but the provocation remained—would a London visitor take this potentially contaminated offer of hospitality, and ingest the potentially toxic vegetables which the artists’ mother eats regularly? Rather than attempting to sterilize and purify an environment (in this case, an impossibility), the artists invite their audience momentarily into a contaminative experience. By ingesting a single vegetable, you remove a possibility of purity. As anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests, “Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option” (27). In the invitation to consent to ingesting potentially toxic materials, the artists invite you into the reality of a contaminated present, and also offer in this gesture an opportunity for solidarity. You are not alone. And anyway, to reiterate Tsing, “purity is not an option.” Importantly, this gesture relies on the actuality of physical change. Eating the vegetables offers the real possibility of ingesting radioactive materials into your body (even if at levels deemed safe by the JFA). While this gesture is not a gesture of olfactory art, it does operate in many of the same modes—while we must breathe, we also must eat. The vegetables suggest a daily necessity—in this case, the necessity of eating, akin

116  Lindsey French to the necessity of breathing. What is at stake when the basic molecules of life are potentially contaminated? And what possibilities for comradery and companionship exist once we accept this reality? When speaking with journalist Rachel Corbett, who wrote about the piece in Food & Wine magazine in 2016, Ei Arakawa said, “We eat the soup,” a simple statement but complex in its proposition of who belongs in the “we.” Here, Arakawa means himself, his brother, and family—or perhaps we, as in, those of us from Fukushima. But in this statement, he also invites you into this we. The gesture of ingesting the soup is symbolic but also actual; a visitor accepts hospitality and becomes entangled—with the artists, with their mother, but extrapolating further, perhaps with the residents of Fukushima, perhaps with its landscape, perhaps even with the microorganisms that make up our gut bacteria, perhaps even with the idea, and actual presence, of radioactive materials. Because, after all, what is a safe level? If we return to plant communication, this offer of radish soup is not the same gesture as signaling to neighboring plants so they can increase their defenses. Rather, this kind of gesture could be read as a bio-communicative or biochemical invitation to work together. Ingesting the radioactive material, a visitor becomes implicated in the idea of a contaminated world, and perhaps builds a form of social solidarity. Doing so and surviving might soften the strong boundaries we erect as talismans of protection. Instead, it turns the terrifying reality of contamination into a possible source of pleasure. I have not tasted the soup, but I can imagine that it tastes pretty good. I can also imagine that the conversation surrounding it might open me up to a new sociality—with those around me, with the artists, with their mother. And, maybe even a sociality involving my gut bacteria, undoubtedly modified (if slightly) by the soup and its effect on my microbiome. I want to think with Haraway here to consider that United Brothers may be proposing a way of forming what Haraway would call “oddkin,” in establishing relationships of responsibility. “Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become—with each other or not at all” (Haraway 2016, 4). Offering participants soup from the location of a radioactive disaster, the United Brothers are inviting a relationship of shared responsibility, and an opportunity to “stay with the trouble” of nuclear disaster and entanglement in energy systems. They are not offering a solution to toxicity, nor are they creating a system of blame or shame for entanglement in global energy production. Rather, they offer a seat at the table, an invitation to share responsibility. Contemporary artist Anicka Yi’s work with multispecies participants also brings attention to the collaborative forces that make up the human microbiome and highlights the fearful attitudes that guide us to neutralize, sterilize, and contain forces that are hidden, enduring, and possibly dangerous. Embracing the ability of odor to spread, Yi works with scent to establish nonvisual modes of experience. In her 2015 exhibition You Can Call Me F, Yi darkened the exhibition space of The Kitchen to cue the visitor to the content of the exhibition through the nonvisual experiences of smell. Upon entering the gallery, a glowing petri dish at the back of the room signals the presence of objects. Though visible, the main phenomenological experience is that of the sharp and sour smell, familiar yet mostly unidentifiable, that wafts through the gallery space. Its origins, it turns out, are from saliva and vaginal bacterial samples

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gathered from one hundred women. These bacterial specimens are not only on display but invisibly fill the airspace in the darkened exhibition and enter the air passageways of any visitor who enters and inhales. The other scent in the room is the sterile scent of the atmosphere of the Gagosian Gallery, analyzed and recreated as a bright contrast to the sour smell of the bacterial cultures. In Yi’s exhibition, the sterilized air of patriarchal art institutions is contaminated by something more insidious and disturbing (Guerber 2016). In an interview with art critic Karen Rosenberg, Yi frames scent as a kind of cannibalism: “you are able to ingest somebody when you smell them.” If we follow this logic, then simply by entering the gallery space, the visitor ingests something of the potent network of the women from whom Yi gathered bacterial samples. These female networks infect us and threaten what we understand as our boundaries. Yi’s installation positions feminine networks as a viral and dangerous force that threatens the edges of established boundaries, and implicates the visitor merely through their presence. Yi’s work is leaky and atmospheric, challenging the easy edges of singular bodies. The quarantine environment of the exhibition suggests the powerful danger of these particles, and that life itself is at stake if the insidious illness of female power is not neutralized or contained.

Speculation In early fall, I am with a friend visiting the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant an hour outside the city. We stand at the edge of a road in a church’s public cemetery, near enough to provide a close view of the plant’s infrastructure. The road’s edge hosts a thick swath of plants that thrive at disturbed edges. Warmed by the sun, the goldenrod and pokeweed waft fragrant chemicals into the air—floral notes among the more pungent smells of sulfur dioxide, alongside the present but odorless nitrous oxide and fly ash. A video on the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant’s website lists these airborne byproducts, after clarifying that the visible vapor that “billows out of the cooling tower [is] simple water vapor, just like a cloud” (FirstEnergy). We learn that the coal plant is scheduled to close in another month, a year and a half ahead of plan, due to financial concerns stemming from the low cost of natural gas (Frazier 2019, 1). We speculate on this industrial landscape’s undecided future. Who will be its recipients? What kinds of collaborations will form in the shared work of survival here? What has already occurred in this landscape with its complex and layered past and present of colonial violence, extraction, and energy production? I return to the olfactory composition of Solidago sempivirens, Phytolacca decandra, and sulfur dioxide, and the imperceptible nitrous oxide, wondering too, what negotiations are already occurring.

Bibliography Ameye, M. et al. 2018. “Green Leaf Volatile Production by Plants: A Meta-Analysis.” New Phytologist, 220, no. 3 (November): 666–683. Berardi, Franco. 2019. Breathing: Chaos and Poetry. Los Angeles: Semiotext€. Brandis, Agnes Meyer. 2019. “One Tree Id – How to Become a Tree for Another Tree.” Uploaded April 7, 2019. Video, 5:00. www.blubblubb.net/OneTreeID/index.html.

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Brown, Mark. 2014. “Fukushima Vegetable Soup on Menu at Frieze London Art Fair.” The Guardian, September 25, 2014. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/25/ fukushima-vegetable-soup-frieze-london-art-fair. CMU CREATE Lab. “Smell Pittsburgh.” Accessed October 10, 2019. https://smellpgh.org/. Corbett, Rachel. 2016. “Does This Soup Taste Radioactive?” Food & Wine, February 1, 2016. www.foodandwine.com/blogs/does-soup-taste-radioactive. Donora Historical Society and Smog Museum. 2019. “About Us.” Accessed October 11, 2019. www.sites.google.com/site/donorahistoricalsociety/about-us. FirstEnergy. “Tour of Bruce Mansfield Plant,” June 21, 2013. Uploaded June 21, 2013. Video, 11:16. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbI5AoWP3fk. Frazier, Reid. 2019. “Bruce Mansfield Power Plant to Shutter Early.” The Allegheny Front, August 13, 2019. www.alleghenyfront.org/bruce-mansfield-power-plant-to-shutter-early/. Gissen, David. 2008. “Reconstruction – Smoke, 2006.” HTC Experiments, September 26, 2008. https://htcexperiments.org/2008/09/17/project-06-reconstruction-smoke-2006/. Gissen, David. 2009. Subnature: Architect’re's Other Environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Guerber, Megan. 2016. “Anicka Yi: You Can Call Me F.” Art and Translation, February 15, 2016. www.artandtranslation.com/anicka-yi-you-can-call-me-f/. Guerrieri, Emilio. 2016. “Who’s Listening to Talking Plants?” In Signaling and Communication in Plants, edited by Robert Glinwood and James D Blande, 117–136. Springer Nature. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. Lewis, Sophie. 2020. “Cthulu Plays No Role for Me.” In Hope against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis, edited by Out of the Woods Collective, 159–175. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions. Neuendorf, Henri. 2014. “Artists to Serve Radioactive Soup at Frieze London.” artnet news, September 26, 2014. https://news.artnet.com/market/artists-to-serve-radioactivesoup-at-frieze-london-114962. Palmer, Laurie. 2005. “Hays Woods / Oxygen Bar – Laurie Palmer.” In Ground Works: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art, edited by Jack Auses, Grant Kester, and Jenny Strayer, 148–153. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University. Palmer, Laurie. 2019. “Oxygen Bar / 40 Acres.” Unpublished reflections sent to author via email. Rhoades, David F. 1983. “Responses of Alder and Willow to Attack by Tent Caterpillars and Webworms: Evidence for Pheromonal Sensitivity of Willows.” In Plant Resistance to Insects, edited by Paul A. Hedin, 55–68. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society. Rosenberg, Karen. 2015. “Scent of 100 Women: Artist Anicka Yi on Her New Viral Feminism Campaign at the Kitchen.” Artspace, March 12, 2015. www.artspace.com/magazine/ interviews_features/meet_the_artist/scent-of-100-women-anicka-yis-viral-feminism-52678. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). 2019. “Pennsylvania - State Profile and Energy Estimates.” U.S. Energy Information Administration. Last modified August 15, 2019. www. eia.gov/state/?sid=PA. Whyte, Kyle. 2020. “Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice: Ecological and Relational Tipping Points.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 11, no. 1 (January/February): p.n/a.

10 Chrysanthemum Powder and Other Interspecies Scent Rituals D Rosen

Introduction Throughout this chapter, I explore scent as a tool for interspecies care. My primary ethical concern is to prioritize interspecies care within fraught conditions of domestication that uphold capitalist systems of extraction. Rejecting binary distinctions between species is vital to establishing frameworks of care in contexts where beings are treated as property for extractive ends. Scent-based interactions can serve as a means of establishing trust or repulsion between beings, across species. Ultimately, my hope is that expanded frameworks for kinship might allow beings to build less violent, more caring worlds that center diverse sensoria. In The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten explore ways of thinking with and reading with (Harney and Moten 2013, 10–11). They use a deeply collaborative model to highlight the inevitability of entanglement. Scent is one form of thinking with beings. Plants, non-human animals, bacteria, and many organisms physically participate in the making of scents. Non-humans also transmit and receive scents as communicative signals to other members of their1 species. Anna Tsing talks about smell as a form of entanglement in Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing explains that smell is elusive and that describing smell is “almost as difficult as describing air.” Yet smell is distinct from air, according to Tsing, because it signals an encounter with another. Tsing asks: “might smell in its confusing mix of elusiveness and certainty be a useful guide to the indeterminacy of encounter?” (Tsing 2017, 45–46). To elaborate on how smell sets the stage for the indeterminacy of encounter, I will spend some time exploring how animals are mutually entangled in the production and reception of scents. In the first half of this chapter, I deploy a queer methodology to explore how scent permeates the lives of animals, both human and non-human. Jack Halberstam explains that “a queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior” (Halberstam 1998, 13). Queer or scavenger methodologies highlight the inevitability of entanglement, or reading with. In addition, non-human scavengers such as Rats, Pigeons, Coyotes, Feral Cats, and Mice2 have been some of my best teachers. Scavengers are resourceful and have learned to flourish in a country working to exterminate, displace, starve, or harass them. In the second half of the chapter, I describe gestures of mutual care between animals that form the foundation of my artistic practice. Using care as a framework for

120  D Rosen both thought and ethical motivation, I provide examples of how scent can be a tool for working with non-human animals across various contexts shaped by the carceral structures of domestication and capitalist extraction. My experiences on urban and rural working farms, artist residences, and farm sanctuaries over three years have informed this work. Using encounters with non-human animals as a guide, I explore how scent can be used in rituals of interspecies care and as a tool to celebrate diverse sensoria.

Animality When thinking about scent as a form of interspecies entanglement, it is important to discuss materials that have been extracted from the bodies of non-human animals and used throughout history as fixatives for perfumes. Richard Stamelman describes the sites of extraction for these scents in “The Eros—and Thanatos—of Scents.” Stamelman explains that many of the scents originating in the bodies of non-human animals were extracted from glands or sacs near the animals’ sexual organs … civet comes from the Ethiopian Cat, musk from the Tibetan Deer, castoreum from the abdomen of the Beaver, and ambergris, with no anatomical sexual connection … from the intestinal lining of the Sperm Whale. (Drobnick 2012, 270) Human-animals have used the sexual excretions of non-human animals to fix our animal pleasures. Why do human-animals feel compelled to extract scent from the glands or pheromones of other species to perfume our bodies? It might be easy to assume that the fecal or musky odors extracted from the sexual organs of non-human animals are used as mating signals. However, the research regarding the role that scent plays within human-animal desire is largely unresolved. As biologist D. Michael Stoddart explains, Research into whether human body odors play any part in human sexual behavior has been largely inconclusive. [Yet] the role of odors in the sexual physiology of non-human primates and other mammals is sufficiently clear for there to be a very strong possibility that they do indeed play some role in our own species. (Drobnick 2012, 263) However mysterious our human-animal olfactory desires might be, it is clear that scent plays a role in our lives and within the lives of non-human animals. Like scent, queer animals do not often settle within fixed categories or corporeal expressions of desire. In “Queer Smells,” Mark Graham describes the queer performativity of scent. Graham writes, “Desires that are olfactory but also aural and tactile, may be less easy to compartmentalize and less amendable to a rigid heteronormative and homonormative categorization of gender and sexuality than a distant disembodied participation through the visual” (Drobnick 2012, 318). If more attention were paid to scent, Graham argues, the “ubiquity of queer desires” may emerge.

Interspecies Scent Rituals  121 The queerness of scent is not limited to the domain of human-animal desires. Fruit Flies use scent to scramble categories of gender and sex. In Evolution’s Rainbow, Joan Roughgarden explains, Some insect species have females that synthesize male perfumes. … During mating a male Fruit Fly transfers an ‘antiaphrodisiac’ to the female. Although most evaporates four to six hours after the first mating, females later synthesize this compound themselves during courtships, making them less attractive to males. Butterflies also use ‘antiaphrodisiacs’…The most extensive studies of masculine females come from insects. (Roughgarden 2013, 115) Female masculinity is contextualized by Jack Halberstam as one form of gender deviance that opens up space to “think in fractal terms about gender geometries” (Halberstam 1998, 21). Imagine the kaleidoscopic identifications and exchanges that may arise from a queer refashioning of scent. The playful fashioning of a unique scent profile is one way of defining corporeal beauty for oneself, beyond the binaries of gender or species.

Territory Scent can expand the sensory territory of non-human animals living in conditions of confinement and sensory repression. In Animal Madness, Laurel Braitman describes how perfume has been used in zoo enrichment programs. Enrichment programs were developed because non-human animals subject to the carceral conditions within zoos often become depressed. Self-harming behaviors along with disordered eating and other unhealthy patterns of behavior become coping mechanisms for confined non-human animals. As part of the enrichment program at the Bronx Zoo, “Cheetahs spend more time exploring their enclosure when sprayed with Calvin Klein’s Obsession Cologne for Men” (Braitman 2014, 237). Scent is used to engage non-human animals whose territory and lives have been truncated for the purposes of humananimal entertainment. As Ellen Byron elaborates in the Wall Street Journal, Zoos have long spritzed perfumes and colognes on rocks, trees and toys in an effort to keep confined animals curious. Ann Gottlieb, the ‘nose’ who helped create Obsession for Men, [describes the appeal]: ‘It’s a combination of this lickable vanilla heart married to this fresh green top note—it creates tension,’ she says. The cologne also has synthetic ‘animal’ notes like civet, a musky substance secreted by the Cat of the same name, giving it particular sex appeal, she adds. ‘It sparks curiosity with humans and, apparently, [non-human] animals.’ (Byron 2010) Creating a richly scented enclosure opens up space for non-human animals; scent expands the artificially narrowed limits of their sensory territory. Although it may seem indulgent to buy designer cologne for Cheetahs, it is really the least we can do for the beings that we’ve permanently imprisoned. I agree wholeheartedly with Che Gossett’s argument for widespread abolition. On Verso, Gossett writes,

122  D Rosen abolition is the unfinished project of ending anti-Black racism, racial capitalism, anti-Trans, anti-Queer, patriarchal policing, colonialism, Animal killing and caging. Animal liberationists must confront the devaluation of Black life and racialization as animalization and the prison industrial complex as part of a movement for abolition. (Gossett 2015) Rather than enriching cages with scent, we should abolish carceral systems that suppress the sensory capacities and life force of both human and non-human animals living in confinement. In less systemic contexts, scent is a tool used between animals to mark territory and signal presence. As Jakob von Uexküll explains in A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, scent plays a role in social and environmental relations between non-human animals. The biologist very clearly details how Dogs use scent to mark their territory. Dogs mark over one another’s scent and their markings are visible to the human eye. However, in some cases, as Uexküll describes, “a timid dog would go bashfully past the odor marks of a strange dog in that dog’s territory and through no odor sign betray their own presence” (Uexküll 2010, 106). Scent allows animals to make our presence known (or not) even after we have left the physical site of encounter. While working on an Icelandic Sheep farm in Vermont, I experimented with scent as a tool to mark human-animal territory in order to repel a Bear. Within one week after my arrival on the farm, the Bear had killed Blossom, a retired milking Sheep who was blind, along with a Lamb Ram. After the Bear killed Blossom and the Lamb Ram, the farmer hired local hunters to shoot the Bear. Independently, out of empathy for the Bear who was being hunted and in search of nonviolent solutions to conflict, I began to explore scent-based tools to repel predators. Human urine and hair are often used by gardeners to keep non-human animals such as Deer and Rabbits from eating their vegetables. However, the National Park Service advises against that method because the smell of human bodily waste may attract large predators such as Bears. Pine oil, bleach, and ammonia are among the few smells that could be used to deter Bears (JG 2014). There was also the possibility of using scents such as blackberry bait oils and other sweet syrupy odors to lure the Bear into a live trap. Once the Bear was caught, they would have to be released over 20 miles away from the farm, outside of their range of smell, to prevent another attack. Bears possess a sense of smell that is one hundred times stronger than human-animals. It became clear through research that scent was more often a scrumptious invitation than a warning or repugnant barrier (Figure 10.1). Using scent as a lure and repellent was also a factor in a recent exhibition where I collaborated with Mice living in the porous building of the Chicago gallery, Julius Caesar. For the exhibition, The Intuitive Language of an Extended Hand, I built a plinth out of flock blocks. The piece was titled Nourishment is a Plinth in Repose. The flock blocks used to construct the work are typically designed for laying Hens. Most laying Hens have been bred to overproduce, which leaves their bodies calcium deficient and causes them to cannibalize their eggs. Flock blocks contain sunflower seeds, corn, molasses, and oyster shells, along with minerals. The oyster shells supplement the diets of Hens, aid in digestion, and deter Hens from eating their eggs. These blocks have a salty, earthy, and tangy bouquet. The blocks lured a Mouse friend,

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Figure 10.1 Nourishment Is a Plinth in Repose, 2019 Plinth of Flock Blocks* Carved by Mice (Seed et al.) 96 × 48 × 8 in. *Donated to the Chicago Chicken Rescue at the end of the exhibition. Source: Roland Miller for Julius Caesar, Chicago.

whom I named Seed, and later an entire crew of Mice into the space. Over the course of the exhibition, the Mice gnawed through the center of the sculpture, tunneling cavities through the blocks. At the end of the exhibition, the seed blocks were donated to the Chicago Chicken Rescue as planned. Of course, the Mice were still looking to the site as an abundant food source and began to wreak ravenous havoc in the gallery. To usher my Mice collaborators out of the space, I laced the perimeter of the gallery with peppermint oil as a repellent. Dual aspects of scent were used in this collaborative process both to feed new friends and to signal that the feast was over. Scent can serve as both a lure and repellant to signal territorial boundaries, mark presence, and affect social interactions between species.

Extraction Much like the process of working with scent, in all of its ephemeral romance, working with non-human animals reveals the union of love and death. Working with, caring with, and grieving with non-human animals across contexts means frequently confronting the death of one’s non-human friends through rapid cycles of slaughter, predation, genetics, and illness. The interrelationship of love, death, and scent is put into words by Stamelman, who writes, “[scent] gives voice to the … evanescent spaces into which words cannot venture. One such space of inexpressibility is love and death” (Drobnick 2012, 275). Unlike love, death smells.

124  D Rosen Political scientist Timothy Pachirat experienced the many smells of death while working in an industrial slaughterhouse in Omaha, Nebraska. In his book, Every Twelve Seconds, Pachirat explains that within industrial slaughterhouses, mechanisms of distance are created to reinforce “racial, gender, citizenship, and education hierarchies that coerce others into performing dangerous, demeaning, and violent tasks from which [consumers] directly benefit” (Pachirat 2014, 9). It is important when talking about the ethics of treating non-human animals as commodities to illustrate clearly how the violence directed at non-human animals also negatively affects the lives of humans. Throughout the United States, the unsavory effects of slaughterhouses disproportionately affect People of Color, especially undocumented People of Color who are underpaid to perform violent and dangerous work. Industrial waste leaks into the ground and has been sprayed on the houses of Black communities in North Carolina (Guardian 2017). Those who live near slaughterhouses often endure the long-term physical and emotional impacts of environmental racism. In addition to clearly outlining the inherent racism within the division of physical labor and the panoptic working conditions of the slaughterhouse, Pachirat also describes the way that smell pervades the bodies of workers. The smells of death clearly mark those who work on the “clean side” and those who work on the “dirty side” of the slaughterhouse. Those who are assigned some of the most taxing and dirty labor of fabrication work in the paunch-opening room. When the Cows’ stomachs are cut open, “a thick odor escapes … a combination of the acrid smell of vomit and the sulfuric stench of rotting eggs.” The humid air mixes with the scent of human sweat, which adds to the “heady olfactory mix.” Those who work in the paunch-opening room carry the smells of their labor on their bodies into the locker room, where those who work in other sections of the slaughterhouse hold their breath (Pachirat 2014, 75). By performing the labor of extraction, slaughterhouse workers are perfumed with the smells of death. The smell of their work affects their social relations, even within the slaughterhouse itself. The bodies of humans and non-human animals are impacted by extractive processes. In her book, Cow with Ear Tag #1389, Kathryn Gillespie cites A. Breeze Harper’s important work titled Sistah Vegan. Both authors examine the correlations between systematic racism and speciesism. The violence that is enacted through capitalistic extraction devalues life and foregrounds property or the ownership of living beings. Gillespie asks human-animals to critically examine how “forms of injustice mutually reinforce each other” and through reflection, how we may develop “less violent and oppressive way[s] of living and being in relation with others” (Gillespie 2018, 214). Christopher Sebastian also writes cogently about the necessity of examining systemic violence when he states, “This is not a comparison of human animals to nonhuman animals. This is a comparison of like systems of oppression” (Sebastian 2018). Ending domestication and enslavement begins with a philosophical reexamination of all carceral systems that historically have confined both humans and non-human animals. It means examining how our pleasures are produced, who is impacted in the process, and how our deathly procedures of extraction are deodorized—physically and conceptually—for our sterilized consumption.

Care Care is not often seen as a value within capitalist economies that treat beings as property. Scent, at its best, can disrupt patterns of violence and interrupt processes of

Interspecies Scent Rituals  125 extraction by centering care. While performing scent-based rituals with non-human animals, I acknowledge the violence of domestication. I work to insert care where and when I can, even if all I am able to offer is a temporary respite. This is perhaps why I look to scavengers as robust models for survival: scavengers do their best with what is available. When working with non-human animals, my goals are not extractive but collaborative. In this way, I see rituals of care within farming contexts as a form of harm reduction. While at an art residency in Maine, I worked with a group of eight Holstein Cows over eight weeks. The Cows were rented by the organization to serve as grazing pastoral decorations. Initially the farmer told me that to prevent Flies, they used a rope saturated in diesel fuel that was long enough to trail the backs of the Cows passing through the barn. With permission of the farmer, I slowly befriended the Cows by bringing them molasses grain every day. After a week, they came to me without being called and would follow me around the pasture. At that point, I was able to touch the Cows and began spraying a natural bug spray on their bodies while brushing the encrusted feces off their backs. Every day, we took in calming notes of lemongrass, tea tree, eucalyptus, and rosemary oils with apple cider vinegar and castille soap. Every day we engaged in a group ritual of feeding and grooming. From my perspective, there was no real distinction between caregiver and receiver during our time together. Our daily rituals of mutual care were an act of solidarity between myself and the Holstein Cows that I grew to love. These rituals were a way of stating that you and I are much more than either an ornament or a worker, that we are not only for breeding or milking. We are together not to herd or to lead but just to walk. To have company. To understand the profound importance of committing daily to brushing the shit off the bodies of those you love and applying homemade remedies to soften the weight of being treated as property. We did not own each other. While working on an urban Goat farm in Chicago, I also observed and engaged in various scented rituals of care. Within that context I had much less autonomy and was required to follow the lead of the farmer. The Goats were primarily for milking; however it is important to be clear that the slaughter of kids or calves, biological males, and older mothers is a part of any milk production cycle. Mastitis is a common infection on dairy farms. An infection of the udders, it can be caused by many factors, including contact with environmental contaminants like the milking machine or passed through familial exchanges between Goats. This is a common problem that dairy farmers have to contend with because it lowers production and profits. Feeding raw garlic to the Goats, as well as cleaning and massaging their udders with a minty balm, is a common preventative practice. Another scent-based ritual of care included powdering the knees of each Goat on the milking station with chrysanthemum powder. Chrysanthemum powder dried their knees, which were often wet with urine from sitting in their pen. The floral powder kept the flies away. Powdering the knees of each Goat with ground flowers felt like a baroque application of makeup. Barn cleaning is a common scent-based practice of care. Methods vary based on the scale of each farm but in this case, barn cleaning involved removing urine-soaked cardboard with the strong smell of ammonia. After the pens were clean, I would lay down fresh pine shavings. Deodorizing spaces through cleaning is a common gesture of care for non-human animals who do not have a choice where they rest, sleep, defecate, or spend their days. Outside of farming contexts, I also integrate scent while providing care for companion species in client’s homes. Recently, I had the privilege of working with

126  D Rosen a Dog named Lady. They were abused for the first year of their life before being adopted by a kind family. The early trauma Lady endured means that they have many triggers. They are terrified of most human-animals, especially maleidentifying people, in addition to sticks, loud noises, and abrupt movements. To get to know Lady and earn their trust, I paired calming scents along with heart chakra mediations. My goals were to establish a calm space for our time together and to learn more about Lady’s preferences. When Lady is excited, they make a low grunting noise so I used that as an indicator of their individual preferences. Lemongrass and neroli are two of Lady’s favorite scents. Other scents that are calming for domesticated companions include valerian root, chamomile, clary sage, and lavender. When I go to Lady’s home, I wear lemongrass as a scented signal to cultivate familiarity and calm. Working as a caregiver for non-human animals also requires that I manage my own emotional energy. If I am not calm, it negatively affects the beings that I care for. The necessity of caring for myself in order to show up for non-human animals is something that took a long time to learn. Unlearning negative training techniques has also been an important part of my ongoing reeducation as an animal socialized by human-animals. We live in a culture where trainers use toxic behaviors such as dominance or advocate for the use of prong collars in their methods. It is my goal to integrate rituals of care that are about reciprocity and relationship building between animals. Based on my experiences working with non-human animals, I strongly believe that positive reinforcement is the most effective tool for working with animals, both human and non-human. Using positive reinforcement, we focus on what we would like to see manifest; with positive reinforcement we teach others how to treat us. And scent can be its own positive reward for Dogs like Lady or human-animals like myself, who love to smell. Rituals of scent with non-human animals often coincide with rituals of touch. Introducing a calming scent is a transition that can lead to touch. For example, if a Dog is uncomfortable with strangers but I need to put on their harness, the scent of a treat can aid that process safely for both of us. My favorite training tool for anxious, hyper, or reactive Dogs is touch. Using the Dog’s favorite treat to scent your hand, you ask them to touch your palm with their nose and then give them a treat when they do. Touch can be an important recentering tool for distracted Dogs. In more abstract terms, beings are always touching when they are taking the scents of the room into their bodies, together. Touch and scent allow for the possibility of interspecies communication without a shared verbal or textual language. As Constance Classen writes in The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, “a lack of words … does not mean a lack of feelings or social significance” (Classen 2012, xvi). Like scent, many feelings are ineffable or at least very difficult to translate into the languages of human-animals. Classen states that engaging with scent “sensitizes us to the multiple ways in which [animals] communicate and express themselves through nonlinguistic modalities” (Classen 2012, xvi). While I was doing scent research to repel the Bear on the farm in Vermont, I also engaged in daily grooming rituals with the three Sheep—Luna, Aurora, and Juniper—to remove burrs that accumulated in their wool. While I applied bug spray to the Cows in Maine, they crowded around a salt lick, carving the object with their tongues; this inspired further interspecies collaborations. Scent and touch often coincide, signaling an encounter with another animal (Figure 10.2).

Interspecies Scent Rituals  127

Figure 10.2 I DOLATRY II, 2018 Cast Bronze. Grooming ritual with three Icelandic Sheep over two weeks. (Original Objects: Burrs, Hay, Wax, Wool) 4 × 4 × 4 in. *This work is also pictured on the plinth of flock blocks in Figure 10.1. Source: Jordan K. Fuller.

Care should be specific to the sensory, physical, and social needs of each individual being that we encounter. In this discussion of care, it is crucial to be honest about the ways that I’m both critical and complicit in fraught systems of pleasure. My truly voracious enjoyment of scent may cause a space to become inaccessible to those with chemical sensitivities or other scent sensitivities. Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha’s vital text, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, has been an instructive tool to think about care and accessibility. They write, Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. Why am I fighting so hard for a fragrance free-space or a ramp, if it’s not something I personally need? When disabled people get free, everyone gets free … when you work to make spaces accessible … you can come from a deep profound place of love. (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018, 78) Making space accessible while engaging in scent work is still something that I am learning to navigate as an artist who strives but often fails to be respectful of everyone’s needs. Claudette, an Icelandic Chicken living on a farm in Vermont, also caused me to consider questions of ableism and care more deeply. Claudette broke their leg at the joint after flying into the chicken wire fencing around their coop. Now Claudette uses

128  D Rosen

Figure 10.3 IDOLATRY III, 2019. Salt Lick from Farm Sanctuary carved by Goats, Unsealed Cast Bronze Salt Lick touched by Human-Animal Hands, Rituals of Nourishment. 18 × 15 × 4 in. *This work is also pictured on the plinth of flock blocks in Figure 10.1. Source: Meg T. Noe.

their wings to balance as they hop, curiously exploring the local environment. On this small farm, Claudette has a special space and is able to move freely. Every day they are taken out of the coop and placed in a protected outdoor area, with ample space and feed away from the roosters. At night, Claudette is carried into the coop and put to bed with the rest of the Chickens and Ducks. On an industrial farm or under the care of a less compassionate small farmer, Claudette would have been slaughtered after their leg was injured. Claudette is a living being full of vitality, not a unit of weight and measure. It is essential to carve out accessible spaces for beings like Claudette, not to “fix” them but to meet their needs as kin, to understand the important ways that beings of all abilities are innovative, thriving, and simply living their lives. Making space accessible means respecting the unique sensory needs of each being that we are sharing space with. Johanna Hedva talks about the politics of care when they write, “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself” (Hedva 2015). A politics of care means honoring the needs of oneself and of every human in the room including People of Color, Crip people, and Queer people. Disrupting long cycles of abuse means including non-human animals within

Interspecies Scent Rituals  129 frameworks of care and kinship. Decentering the desires of the most privileged members of society means that our society would not only look but smell and feel entirely different. We could make more room for a range of senses. I think it would be beautiful (Figure 10.3). If we believe, as Elaine Scarry explains in On Beauty and Being Just, that beauty leads to justice because it reproduces itself, then perhaps we can explore the polyvalence of beauty (Scarry 2001). I imagine that my version of beauty smells somewhat different than yours. And that your version of beauty smells different than Claudette’s or Lady’s or Seed’s version of beauty. How we each receive and respond to beauty as unique animals might produce a kaleidoscopic effect of beautiful sensory experiences that can be received in many ways by many species. Some gestures of beauty are certainly imperceptible to humans such as the scent-based gender bending of the Fruit Flies discussed earlier (p. 4). Scent explorations are opportunities to get to know the sensorium, or as Uexküll put it, the equally perfect yet distinct perceptual spheres, of each being with whom we come into intentional contact (Uexküll 2010). Scent-based practices of care are political gestures because they celebrate a diverse and entangled array of animal sensoriums.

Notes 1 The pronouns they, them, and theirs are used throughout so as not to make assumptions about the gender identifications of humans or nonhuman animals, unless in the case of humans, a preference is clearly stated. Whether or not nonhuman animals identify with bioessentalist classifications of gender assigned at birth is another topic entirely that I look forward to exploring in the future. 2 The name of each species listed throughout the chapter are capitalized. This is to indicate that nonhuman animals are living beings with personal agency, even when they are not distinguished by individual names.

Bibliography Aftel, Mandy. 2008. Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith. Benjamin, Walter, and Howard Eiland. 2003. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Braitman, Laurel. 2014. Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and ­Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves. New York: Simon & Schuster. Byron, Ellen. 2010. “Big Cats Obsess over Calvin Klein’s ‘Obsession for Men.’” The Wall Street Journal, New York. www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487045131045752564 52390636786. Classen, Constance. 2012. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Drobnick, Jim ed. 2012. The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Gillespie, Kathryn. 2018. The Cow with Ear Tag #1389. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gossett, Che. 2015. “Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign.” Verso Books, Brooklyn, NY. www.versobooks.com/blogs/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign. Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions. Harper, A. Breeze. 2010. Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society. Brooklyn: Lantern Publishing & Media.

130 D Rosen Hedva, Johanna. 2015. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine, Brooklyn, NY. www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory. Hellerstein, Erica, and Ken Fine. 2017. “A Million Tons of Feces and an Unbearable Stench: Life near Industrial Pig Farms.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, New York. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/20/north-carolina-hog-industry-pig-farms. JG. 2014. “Bear Series, Part One: A Bear’s Sense of Smell.” National Parks Service, Yosemite, CA. www.nps.gov/yose/blogs/bear-series-part-one-a-bears-sense-of-smell.htm. Pachirat, Timothy. 2014. Every Twelve Seconds Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Roughgarden, Joan. 2013. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scarry, Elaine. 2001. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sebastian, Christopher. 2018. “Slavery. It’s Still a Thing.” Vegan Publishers, Boston, MA. veganpublishers.com/slavery-its-still-a-thing-christopher-sebastian-mcjetters/. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2017. Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Uexküll, Jakob von. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

11 Eat Your Makeup Perfume, Drag, and the Transgressions of Queer Subjects under Capitalism1 Matt Morris

Queer Revenge, Categorical Experiments In the 1865 classic The Book of Perfume, Eugène Rimmel—perfumer, scholar, and interestingly the inventor of the first non-toxic mascara—tells of a governor in ancient Babylon named Nanarus. Nanarus is described as “very effeminate”—shaving his body, and wearing cosmetics and perfumes intended for use among women. A rival Parsondes sought to seize Nanarus’s political office, saying, “I thought myself more worthy of the honour, for I am more manly … than you.” The code-switching gender challenger Nanarus swore revenge on Parsondes, had his would-be usurper captured, and subjected him to the daily punishment of being shaved, exfoliated, bathed, anointed with perfumes, and put into makeup and a woman’s hairstyle popular at the time. This treatment rendered Parsondes more effeminate than his rival, so much so he was perceived as a woman when presented to King Artæs’s ambassador (Rimmel 2005, 69–70). I take Nanarus’s creative form of retaliation as a productive early precedent with which to contextualize a line of questioning that first arose in my 2013 essay “a set of hips set in clouds,” in which I ask, “What kind of knowing is possible when the infrastructure exudes a faggy, floral fragrance that tells you it is coming and where it has been?” (Morris 2013, 94) Attempts to describe that possible knowledge reveal language in broad terms as an inextricable dimension of how scent, but most especially perfume, is situated within its culture. Further, an approach to this question of knowledge within the frame of capitalism is one addressed to conditions of value: the commodity fetish is the answer to that question, first of all. With an eye toward the material conditions of production within a consumer society, this question of knowledge, annotated as fetishistic, directs my research toward several fantastical capacities for relating. Following upon this epistemological inquiry, it’s my pleasure to explore the ways that drag can and has been used as a mode of contestation and resistance to gender normativities as well as the conditions of commodification, exchange, and circulation under capitalism by which conventions around gender—and more, subjecthood per se—are developed within culture. As will be developed in this study, we find that drag is not inherent to, say, a kind of body or a type of garment; rather, it is a disorientation of mores to which bodies, their dress, and their further expressions are typically bound that drag incites. Drag is not simply an antiquated notion of “cross-dressing”; it also extends into a subversive, performative art by which the assumptions that give form to a socialized individual are undermined, confused, fragmented, and contested.

132  Matt Morris Historically, though, drag is largely practiced and theorized through those visible traits a body is made to possess: not only attire, makeup, and hairstyle, but also the possible legibility of the comportments, mannerisms, and stylings of an embodied position. Scent too has always been a latent signifier in the performance of drag—one that is non-visual, suggestive, and elusive. The cultural space for perfume is one that became increasingly more rigidly gendered over time, and the transgression among drag queens to select a “women’s” perfume that is associated with their performance persona can be a critical dimension of the transformations that are realized. This is noted on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 3—one of several spin-off television series based on the life and career of drag performer RuPaul, explored below—when perennial drag celebrity Shangela Laquifa Wadley advises her cohort of competitors, “Ladies, you’re not a real woman if you don’t have perfume on!” (RuPaul’s Drag Race 2018). Drag is never solely concerned with what recommended uses and popularized definitions pertain to objects and their subjects. Drag is a kind of mis/use value that is enacted through a panoply of strategies, and my research here considers the ways perfume can become drag through the ways in which it is positioned and deployed. While the visual spectacle of drag operates assertively in relation to the dominant traits and even tacit oddities of how gender is practiced, one’s scent can be a destabilizing indicator that traces out an oblique space for recognition and knowledge—encroaching and withdrawing, never seen, but often penetrating in the depth of its capacity to set the tone for constructing a “self”: for oneself or in speculation of an other. The interstices of desire and power are rendered sensible in these emergent capacities in which drag and perfume have conspired in striking ways across the past century (and further across history)—with the objective not simply of entirely collapsing a capitalist framework but rather of transgressing within these spaces of control. Rarely will any of these figures or art projects provide a stable set of moves for ongoing resistance; by design, they don’t hold together in such reliable forms. Indeed, we can repeatedly track how early liberation mindsets in these projects become subsumed by a change in faith that the market will provide for greater numbers of differences, even supplying commodified forms of being flexible and fluid in how one is made to construct one’s own identity. Instead, I track the ways that withdrawal, refusal, disorientation, contradiction, and potentially critical mimesis at close range might prove disruptive when perfume is used as part of a project of drag—what is revealed through smelling that may not be evident in what can be seen, when seeing anything is even made available. Notions of self and commodity are always already entangled. What is required is an analysis of the interrelatedness of the functional fiction of individual, agential consciousness, and the extent to which identity is compulsory not simply in identifying target demographics for selling goods but in annotating the ways the old idea of “subjecthood” and its fashionable packaging “identity” are themselves commodities that are compulsory in their acquisition and use. As with all material realities, these commodities are fetishized through the ways desire confers the capacity for value—a nexus of sensuality and superstition by which something or someone is made to matter, that is, bestowed significance and eventually a rate of exchange. Emerging uneasily among these structural relationships between a self and its social surroundings, identity as it is understood today becomes sensible as an effect of capital. We buy ourselves. And it would follow that as civilization disintegrates—as it has

Perfume, Drag, and Queer Subjects  133 done, and will return to do again—its discontents, who have been constructed in relation to the aesthetics-ethics that they now observe shattered in deadly repose before them, feel the inevitability of their own utter dispersal. (Morris 2017, 1) I am curious to investigate the ways that performative identities which start to approach a working definition of drag might be useful tools for perceiving where and how transgression is possible under such anticipatory burgeoning markets. Likewise, I am less curious about the body that precedes an added perfumed scent (if such a thing could be proven to exist), and more compelled by the enigma that is produced of a body recognized through smell. This writing is perfume. I make it behave in the ways I find perfume to behave, especially when used by drag queens. Its top notes are raspberry, iris, cinnamon, and clove. Its heart notes are queer vengeance—outrage at the unsustainability of neoliberal capitalist pursuits that wreak havoc on the environment and fail to provide basic needs for those living things within these failing systems. The base notes of this writing are nude-colored lipstick, room air freshener, incense, socialism, and the nostalgic smell of vintage plastic and rubber dolls. This writing is in drag—several sorts in fact—with acknowledgment to the academy, and other illusory layers that will dance and shimmer within the text. Writing is, for my purposes, always perfume, always a body, always a body in drag, and if we begin at these claims, stoked by Nanarus and his capacity for revenge, a series of transgressive moves under capitalism may be traced. These subversions are not only enacted by but also embodied in the LGBTQIA+.2 And here I promiscuously flutter between “queer,” “faggy,” “camp,” and “drag,” and other pluralisms in order to be a body that does not submit to binary logics. In the millennia that perfume has been used in successive civilizations, only gradually did particular fragrances come to be associated with specific historical figures of significance. Perhaps the earliest concepts of a “signature fragrance” are those distinct materials that came to be associated with one or another deity in burned fragrant sacrifices. The Egyptian god Nefertum, for example, was associated with the smell of the blue lotus flower (Hart 2005, 99). Across history, public figures such as Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte came to be associated with particular perfumes. In the former’s case, the Queen of France commissioned a succession of bespoke perfumes from her court apothecary Jean-Louis Fargeon, and as her whims shifted from roses to jonquils to lilacs, violets, or lilies, so too would her imitators throughout the upper classes (De Feydeau 2007, 42). During Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial expansion across Europe, his obsession with Eau de Cologne—a citrus, herbaceous blend said to originate in Germany in the earliest years of the eighteenth century—spread with his political influence (The Perfume Society n.d.). It is from here that a “signature fragrance” served as a signal for the commodification of identity itself. By the start of the twentieth century, the confluence of slavery’s abolition in the United States, the escalation of industrialization and with it rising markets and an explosion of manufactured goods, and the advent of war at a global scale precipitated an approach to art making that was more inquisitive and necessarily subversive than, say, earlier eras in which the artist capitulated to (if not also in the direct employ of) the dominant power structures of the age—the church,

134  Matt Morris the government, and the aristocracy, in broad strokes. At the turn of the century, the purpose of painting was questioned vis-à-vis the advent of the wider use of photography, and the function of art per se was similarly scrutinized by artists within a broader cultural climate that was contending with advertising, propaganda, and the deeper implications of mechanical reproduction. Likewise, the proliferation of cheaper synthetic perfumery ingredients marked a relative accessibility to a fragrance market that had previously been highly exclusionary. The society that Guy Debord would call spectacular, with its twin impulses toward mass media and commodity fetishism, was stirred into being by the throes of the early 1900s. Experimentation with form, presentation, and constitutive mediums flourished toward the end of the nineteenth century in art, theatre, dance, literature, and even architecture as creatives attempted to reorient to the world’s emergent structure. Ambivalent resistors operated as illusory courtesans with ulterior motives whose agency under capitalism is complicated by shifting, contradictory identifications conveyed through fragrance (or the linguistic proposition of such a sensory capacity).

The Most Ugly Name for My Personal Taste3 Marcel Duchamp had arrived in New York in 1915, following the start of World War I. Here he had met and become close collaborators with Man Ray, with whom he developed a female alter ego under whose name he would produce and sign artworks and pieces of writing: Rrose Sélavy was introduced to the world in 1921 by the advertisement of her signature perfume, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette. Sélavy (see Figure  11.1) first of all represented a plaintive critique of notions around authorship and coherent, monolithic identities—in these ways, she could be read as at least protean in her anti-capitalist and queer political leanings. But beyond those wry operations of her as a sign of dissent from identity, in her fleeting immateriality—a signature, a few photographic traces, a fragrance—she is characterized by an elusive femininity, one that barely appears, and when she does, it is to trick the eye, complicating straightforward legibility. The photographic portraits Man Ray took of Sélavy—eventually collaged as a label onto a Readymade bottle of Un Air embaumé, Eau de violette by Rigaud brand perfume—trace out a partial construction of a gendered imaginary who disappears into Duchamp’s developing field of sophisticated and playful language operations. The announcement of Rrose Sélavy is in itself the start of her disappearance, that is, the disappearance of an aspect of Duchamp and the attendant artworks assigned to Sélavy into a mostly unarticulated, taboo femininity. It’s unclear whether Duchamp, fleeing from the material horrors and disturbing implications of World War I, was aware that his arrival in New York City was under the command of a law in New York dating from 1845 which forbade cross-dressing on penalty of arrest or greater charges. The so-called Masquerade Laws were, technically, developed to prevent disguises for the sake of tax evasion, but by the twentieth century, enforcing gender appropriateness became their more common use. So Rrose Sélavy’s rare photographic appearances were made in counter-position to social stigmas around perceptions of gender and sexuality, but also in spite of laws governing her very fabrication during this period. The injustices for which such Masquerade

Perfume, Drag, and Queer Subjects  135

Figure 11.1 Man Ray. Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (Beautiful Breath, Veil Water), 1921. Gelatin silver print, 4 1/2 × 3 1/2 inches. © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund and with funds contributed by Alice Saligman, Ann and Donald W. McPhail, and the ARCO Foundation upon the occasion of the 100th birthday of Marcel Duchamp, 1987, 1987-36-2, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

136  Matt Morris Laws were responsible have been thought of as a contribution to the breaking point expressed in the riots at Stonewall in 1969 (Eskridge, Jr., 1999, 27). Rrose Sélavy performs as an irreverent interloper within early twentieth-century conditions that are more often than not violently misogynistic around the representations and material realities of women. She is not experienced in live performance; she is only photo-documented having been performed. She is an anachronism by definition, only ever presented as historical evidence of her own existence, and yet she acts progressively—authorial, popular, encoded into a proposed commodity and its branding. Her smell is more the rumor of a smell, words substituted for embodiment, uneasily wondering whether there is a bodily experience apart from one described by language. Her modified perfume bottle layers ironic treatments of imitation, contradiction, and paradox onto an established social process of purchasing a (mass or industrially produced) sign with which to signify one’s self: here that self is a drag character, destabilizing through impersonating femininity, authorship, and even identity, categorically. While her character is named Rrose, her scent smells of violets. Façade, artifice, and the constructedness of identificatory categories such as gender and orientation are emphasized. Most of all, the artwork presages the coming century in which celebrity-endorsed and branded perfumes spread into ubiquity.

Her Hysterical Nose Duchamp’s use of drag as a play of signifiers without any adherence to an especially orderly representation of gender may be traced across several artists and periods in which drag is a tool for resistance, read all the more complexly for the ways that its operators divest from the visual, favoring instead the rhetoric of smell and language to disrupt the stability of the transactions of identity practices under capitalism. The ways that drag is deployed transgressively in the films of John Waters could hardly be enumerated. And from the beginning, even his earliest, short experimental works centered on character actor Harris Glenn Milstead’s transformation into the larger-than-life starlet Divine—a social deviant who performed alterity with rancor and relish. Particularly in John Waters’s early, unreleased short film Eat Your Makeup, 1968, and the feature film Polyester, 1981, it is the ways that Divine’s drag is made to collide with cosmetics and scent that subversions like those conjured by the legend of Nanarus and the conceptual art objects of Rrose Sélavy are activated in the magic of motion pictures. Waters’s Eat Your Makeup stages a frenzied femme revolt through which disjointed narrative sequences jump around actor Maelcum Soul’s turn as a disturbed governess who kidnaps young fashion models and tortures them by forcing them to eat their makeup and model themselves to death (see Figure 11.2). Meanwhile, Divine’s character drifts into a fantasy of herself4 as Jackie Kennedy on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 (see Figure 11.3). Eat Your Makeup doesn’t offer a very clear narrative for analysis, but the proximity of Divine’s traumatized First Lady to shots of doomed models ingesting cosmetics functionally paraphrases some of the brushes between power, authority, gender, and beauty that I am tracking at the interstices of drag and perfume. Adjacently, eaten makeup queers things nicely: the visual subsumed by oral fixation; the president’s wife is a man in disguise; the rhetoric of the beauty industry of the 1960s perverted into a death wish in the proportions of Bataille or Sade. Eating one’s makeup is détournement—that is, hijacking cultural

Perfume, Drag, and Queer Subjects  137 artifacts from their expressly intended uses in order to reveal the weary conditions of the power structures by which such uses are designed. This deviance, while perhaps not solidly anti-capitalist (What do L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, or Coty care what you do with your makeup once you’ve bought it? Or even stole it?), proposes a disordering of desire as its been organized through marketing, preferring instead a fetishization that is more akin to abjection. What’s more, as with the elusiveness of Rrose Sélavy, Waters’s Eat Your Makeup has almost no public life; without theatrical release nor distribution for home video, it’s only been screened a handful of times since it was filmed. Like Sélavy, it recedes from being seen. Like perfume, it seems to dissipate into rumor and hearsay rather than stabilize into anything solidly knowable. If Eat Your Makeup behaves like an ethereal perfume, it is in Waters’s first motion picture released by a major distributor, Polyester, that scent pervades the narrative and the drag that Divine performs as beleaguered housewife Francine Fishpaw. This 1981 feature-length film, that David Chute called “an R-rated weepie burlesque,” recounts the precipitous undoing of a woman replete with rote suburban housewife normativities (Chute 2011, 94). All of the repression and inferences in the picaresque films of Douglas Sirk are set loose in Polyester so that in lieu of a quietly put-upon heroine, Divine delivers a wild hysteric who is overwrought with suspicion and anxiety, and who is openly demeaned by nearly all who encounter her (even her first visit to Alcoholics Anonymous erupts into a rally of taunts and yelling). I don’t describe Divine’s Francine role as a hysteric without knowingly attaching her to the full weight of the oppressive, sexist, medico-juridical history of hysteria as a tool of violence against women over centuries. Francine is a figure of refusal who risks madness rather than succumbing to the gaslighting of her husband and community. Polyester is an epistemology that proposes the protagonist drag queen’s nose as the primary tool of exegesis. Throughout the film, it is Francine’s keen sense of smell that both overwhelms her and also guides her toward apprehending a series of realities about her network of relationships. Scent is the contested space between Francine and a very threatening environment, and during the film, we see her navigate that territory with senses of denial, self-preservation, desire, and the will to know. Notably, Divine’s portrayal of super smeller Francine did not solely reside in the narrative of the film. Polyester had a tie-in gimmick in its theatrical release where audiences were provided with scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” cards. Roses are the first scent audiences were made to smell, but from there flatulence, glue, gasoline, skunk, and dirty shoes were among the other more unsettling smells that populated the theater. Here again, we observe desire’s disappearance into the invisible but potently sensual capacity to smell. A certain continuity between Divine’s drag persona smelling her way toward knowledge and the attraction/repulsion dynamic of Waters’s “Odorama” is produced. A historical figure situated at the intersection between the treatment of hysteria and women’s noses is echoed in Divine’s Francine. Emma Eckstein was a patient of Sigmund Freud’s in the 1890s, during a time that Freud was deeply associated with a surgeon in Berlin named Wilhelm Fliess. In 1892, Fliess developed a medical theory of “nasal reflex neurosis” that closely paralleled theories Freud was developing about women’s hysteria, except that Fliess drew a connection between women’s genitals and their noses. In 1895, upon Freud’s recommendation, Eckstein submitted to a surgical operation in which Fliess removed a small internal bone from her nasal passage. The

138  Matt Morris

Figure 11.2 Top: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968. Film. Berenika Cipkus. Bottom: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968. Film. Mona Montgomery, Mary Vivian Pearce, Marina Melin. Source: Captured Film Stills for both © Dreamland Productions.

Perfume, Drag, and Queer Subjects  139

Figure 11.3 Top: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968. Film. Maelcum Soul. Bottom: John Waters, Eat Your Makeup, 1968. Film. Divine and David Lochary. Source: Captured Film Stills for both © Dreamland Productions.

140  Matt Morris operation had disastrous effects, as it would not stop hemorrhaging for weeks, and even after a follow-up operation, Eckstein was permanently disfigured with the left side of her face caved in.5 Eckstein herself went on to practice as a psychoanalyst two years after this operation (Bronfen 2016, 243). In opposition to the misguided patriarchy of Dr. Fliess’s theory of a woman’s nose as the embodied source of her malcontent, Francine’s nose serves to liberate her from an entanglement of deceptions and manipulations. In the concluding shot of Polyester, a veritable happy ending unmatched in Waters’s oeuvre up to this point, Francine is reunited with reformed versions of her two children and her closest friend (her former housekeeper, portrayed by the inimitable Edith Massey). As they hug, Divine produces an aerosol can of air freshener that she sprays continuously around them, exclaiming, “Everything smells so much better now!” (Waters 1981). The “everything” connoted is a storyline that weaves through themes of foot fetishism, abortion, and campy lovemaking scenes between Divine and a still-closeted Tab Hunter. These touchstones of social disruption orbit around the most subversive device in Polyester: Francine’s sense of smell. The cloud of fragrance in which Francine and her family are ensconced is a form of signature scent that divines—as etymologically, perfume from Latin “through smoke” refers in ancient religious practice—and also seals in a value system that has been established among the characters across the course of the film.

Disruptive Performativity and Free Market Entanglements Although particular fragrances have been associated with figures of historical significance since ancient times, it is not until the 1990s that celebrity-endorsed perfumes skyrocketed in popularity. Perfume served as an affordable means to associate with a movie star or pop musician’s personal brand. An enduring early example of this phenomenon is White Diamonds, an Elizabeth Taylor perfume produced in 1991 by the brand Elizabeth Arden (who would go on, a decade later, to also partner with Britney Spears in one of the best-selling celebrity portfolios of fragrance in history). For the next 20 years, White Diamonds topped the market for celebrity perfumes, as reported by research companies such as Euromonitor (Independent 2010). It’s into this climate that RuPaul—arguably the most famous and successful drag performer in history—contributes her own proposition for the ways that scent and drag intersect at the site where identity is commodified. RuPaul came to prominence with the success of her hit single and music video for “Supermodel” in 1993, and in 1995, she modeled for a series of advertisements for MAC Cosmetics. Amidst this same period RuPaul shot multiple spoof commercials for a signature fragrance of her own called Whore … For She Who Is. Each iteration is a form of conceptual art, advertising for a nonexistent fragrance. Says the drag artist, “It never was actually a fragrance, it was more of an art project, you know?” (Myers 2015). While the 1993 commercial for Whore that appeared during RuPaul’s Christmas Ball TV special has markedly higher production values (made all the more satisfying in its parody when it was interspersed with “real” commercials for Liz Taylor’s White Diamonds during the televised event), the earlier, undated commercial is notably more irreverent. The satire exaggerates the promises of allure and attraction that other perfume advertisements regularly deal in, culminating in the guarantee, “Wear it. … and be willing to make some cash” (Charles ca. 1990s). In this earlier version,

Perfume, Drag, and Queer Subjects  141 the commercial begins with text recommending the scent to Black hookers, and in less than a minute, RuPaul’s wit strikes at a society that had normalized rampant prejudices toward gay men, people of color, people in poverty, and sex workers—a deft proposition for the ways that a faggy politics of smell might engage with cultures of fear and paranoia which AIDS-oriented queer activism of that era resisted. In the 1993 version, there is an arrest scene in which a white police officer handcuffs RuPaul against a wall—an image that treads even more uneasily near the realities of violence against sex workers, especially those of color, at the hands of law enforcement. The joke comes in the next shot as Ru is freed and walks away from the scene, tucking her Whore perfume into her brassiere. Up to this point, my objects of study have mobilized a drag that has been fairly synonymous with the agitation of gender, without perhaps seizing upon the more probing potential of an intersectional critique of identity. The contexts in which Duchamp or Divine circulated appear to have been largely homogenized. The pervasive whiteness of the New York avant-garde in the early twentieth century merits further analysis than has yet been produced in scholarship. While themes of racial inequity pervade Waters’s 1988 Hairspray and arise obliquely elsewhere in his oeuvre, the recurrent cast member in his productions Jean E. Hill (1946–2013) often appears as the only Black woman within what is otherwise a continuous state of whiteness. RuPaul’s confrontational, satirical treatment of race may be attributable as much to the shifting broader social discourses around race in the United States as to the artist’s roots in punk provocations through performance. As context, recall among other touchstones that Anita Hill testified to her experiences of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas in 1991, and in 1992, protests followed the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers tried for police brutality against Rodney King. RuPaul’s drag in these commercials for Whore not only transgresses tidy differentiations around gender but also enacts a racialized critique through parody of the sexualization, objectification, and commodification of Black women’s bodies that run continuously from times of chattel slavery into fraught stereotypical depictions within popular culture. The scene of arrest in the 1993 commercial not only signals to a history of brutality toward queer populations in the United States but also is a close-range reference to the abuses of power by law enforcement toward King just months earlier. In the context of these political conditions, drag’s potential for transgression is characterized by the uncertainty produced in the place of a steady, compliant reproduction of the as-of-yet compulsory features of identities marked by gender, race, sexuality, and class. While the entirety of RuPaul’s creative project antagonizes the demarcations and assumptions hegemonically assigned to differences in gender, her various Whore commercials casually strike at latently racist anxieties around the smells of nonwhite bodies.6 The politics of how matter—inclusive of bodies that matter— comes to be apprehended through description is criticized by the interplay between linguistic and sensorial capacities in Whore … For She Who Is, as with Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette before it. The conceptual operations of these perfumes excite a field of doubt: For She Who Is never was to begin with. In the place of having existed, a nebulous discrepancy around being/non-being is installed beyond the specters of transaction that haunt the Whore commercials: prostitution and product marketing serve as a premise to cast aspersion onto the means of determination and particular criteria by which “she” is “she,” understood as racialized, is attributed a smell. What, indeed, would be revealed amid an audience’s projections and imaginaries of what

142  Matt Morris Whore smells like, and how is it made to correspond to the coding of race, gender, and class to which RuPaul’s commercials allude? How might the rhetorical devices imitative of advertising in these projects come to be mapped when they, at least indirectly, sell nothing? These and related lines of question demonstrate the ways drag produces a complicated unknowing. What proceeds from this period of playful non-marketing within the sphere of queer culture is a range of gradual attempts to annex into a commodity marketplace the nonnormative positions to which RuPaul and these earlier performers have alluded. Convulsions between the subcultures within which she began working and flashes of global exposure directed RuPaul into a swiftly changing consumer landscape into which she and her queer fanbases were tagged as emerging potential markets—one that would gradually accept a queer, Black celebrity endorsement in a fashion similar to those by Taylor or Spears. Twenty years after the release of her televised perfume commercial spoof, after RuPaul’s show business empire had been built from several interrelated TV shows, regular releases of dance albums, and all sorts of tie-in products, the Supermodel of the World released an actual perfume called Glamazon, produced by Colorevolution in 2013. The notes of juniper, cedar, clean roses, and amber base are not really what one would expect from the hot fuchsia-and-marmaladecolored packaging. That it’s a fairly wearable unisex scent that uses some tried and true structures from modern so-called masculine perfumes is, perhaps, RuPaul’s ultimate punch line: the perfume itself is in a kind of drag, so that the packaging signals in the key and chroma of contemporary fragrances targeting youthful, female-identified consumers, but the contents remix staid conventions in masculinity. What does it mean for RuPaul to follow upon her satirical commercials for a nonexistent perfume with the release of a fully synergized niche fragrance that is tied into the marketing of a line of RuPaul cosmetics, a RuPaul peanut butter and chocolate candy bar, a scented candle, her second book deal, and an entire episode of her reality television competition RuPaul’s Drag Race in which the drag queen contestants must design and market their own fragrance (“Scent of a Drag Queen,” aired Monday, March 18, 2013)? To say that the art was assigned value and subsumed by capital seems an understatement. Following RuPaul’s example, several Drag Race alums have released their own perfumes in collaboration with the Los Angeles–based perfumery Xyrena. Trixie Mattel’s Plastic, 2017, for instance, is a punchy blast of Barbie doll plastic, screechy lavender, and big juicy fruit notes. And in 2018, Aquaria—one of the recent contestants on RuPaul’s reality show—appeared as a spokesperson for Maison Margiela’s perfume Mutiny. Given the embeddedness with which we encounter drag in today’s marketplace, is there anything left in these moves to still track as transgressive within the conditions of capitalism? Perhaps the establishment of spaces for shared queer desire supported by expanded margins of profit that glorify femininity as a fugitive, free-floating signifier and redistribute resources to a segment of the population that are historically disenfranchised could be argued to advance a progressive, more experimental relationship to gender than consumers would have found available previously. It’s not anticapitalist in a total sense—in fact, this is really but one more additional face painted over the argument of free market capitalism as a progressive moral structure—but even so, it’s worth noting that there are more material resources available to projects that continue to signal subversively in the face of patriarchy and heterosexism.

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Angry Olfactory Imaginaries A perfume used as drag in the ways I’ve described serves to show that the use of perfume is always an element in producing a layered expression of performed identity, whether self-determined or compulsory. This rationale extends beyond perfume. Drag and camp make all tools for world-building suspect and duplicitous: authorities come under question, with their own shifting illusions made visible, even as a queer body elects to exit by virtue of being nothing but perfumed mist. Perfume always withdraws; more precisely, its molecules are drawn into your body, so that both wearer and smeller have been put into an invisible drag, one that may (and often does) directly contradict the authority of visual form and presumptions of its legibility. I’m heartened by the times when these projects reject value and circulation through a marketplace: Rrose Sélavy’s Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921, was a disfigured, store-bought bottle of scent—more a delightfully enigmatic conceptual question than a product—until it was sold and sold again and again until 2009, when it realized $11.5 million at Christie’s Auction.7 Eat Your Makeup is drag withdrawn almost fully, with only rumors remaining of cosmetics being tossed about and ingested and the drag queen bloodied in her reenactment of Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s assassination. RuPaul’s Whore, and even the differences between the earlier and later versions of its commercial, is an uncertainty, a proposition that shifts advertising into its own role of commodity, just as the illusion of a woman and a perfume that was never produced disappear, getting out of costume, never smelling to begin with, strategically failing to deliver what’s expected. Polyester, Glamazon, and the resulting market for TV content and merchandise that has expanded from RuPaul’s career are harder to quantify. The central question is what, if any, critique may be carried into a mimesis at such close range. Between the historic periods marked by these projects, the tendencies of late capitalism are seen, as social anthropologist Mark Graham notes, “to dissolve distinctions, to fragment subjectivity, to encourage and even require flux and change” (Graham 2006, 306). Graham critiques modes of queer theories emergent at the end of the twentieth century with complicity and even shared strategies with those of capitalism, saying, “Flexible gender codes, fluid sexualities and sexual identities … are compatible with the mobility and adaptability required of service workers, and the new fluid forms of the commodity” (Graham 2006, 314). The perfume industry’s evolution toward more unisex fragrances shows even perfume as commodity involved in flexibility redefined not as a tool of subversion toward a fixity in identity but as a premise for an economy in which code switching is an asset in a workforce tasked with multiple competing roles and jobs. And yet, these examples of queerness performed through scent demonstrate capacities for irony and parody, for tensions to be rendered legible between the voluntarism of individuality supposed possible in our present cultural era and potential ways that hegemonic power may be made sensible through strategic forms of participation and critique. Graham writes of “an alternative olfactory imaginary that is at least suggestive of other gender and sexual possibilities … and [that] scramble the categories that sustain them.” In the withdrawal from being partially or totally apprehended through looking, and the contradictions between what is smelled and believed to be known, these strategies could compel positions of power to reveal themselves. They could compel

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recognition of the fragile edges of a façade, a tiny gap through which a perfumed vapor might pass. Here we have witnessed the dis/orientations that follow on the episteme of Divine’s nose as Francine Fishpaw; these projects restore and work from precisely the emotional capacity that Wilhelm Fliess attempted to withdraw from Emma Eckstein’s nose. While moving skeptically through the new marketplaces of queer dollars and drag queen commodities, polymorphous perversities are offered space and reality where previously they were not. A whore smells like nothing: take a moment to absorb this proposition that is anti-racist, oriented toward class struggle, and resistant to the regulative forces of law and morality. How scent marks sex and commerce is uncertain and unstable, always. Lest the space of this investigation appear frivolous and superficial in its talk of the sale of perfumes and the fame of reality TV drag queens, recall the outrage of Nanarus and carry it forward across these inquiries. As humorous and playful and irreverent as these touchstones might appear, there is also an outraged collapse poised as a possibility at any point in these projects. This writing is perfume. This perfume smells angry.

Notes 1 This chapter is an abridged version of a longer text. I want to express my great appreciation to our book’s editors as well as Michael J. Morris, Eric Ruschman, and John Waters for support in production of this version. 2 Per OutRight Action International: Adding a ‘+’ to the acronym is an acknowledgement that there are non-cisgender and non-straight identities which are not included in the acronym. This is a shorthand or umbrella term for all people who have non-normative gender identity or sexual orientation. https://outrightinternational.org/content/acronyms-explained. Accessed 20 August 2020 3 Duchamp describes the production of his performed fugitive identity category thus: “Rose Sélavy, born in NY. Jewish name. Change of sex—Rose being the most ugly name for my personal taste and Sélavy the easy play on the words: that’s life.” Quoted in Marcel Duchamp, Notes. Trans. Paul Matisse. 1983. Boston: G. K. Hall. Note 286. 4 Here and throughout this chapter, I refer to drag queens with female pronouns. This does not assume the gender identity of the performers but rather situates this writing closely to the fantasies that are produced in the performance of drag. There is an important distinction to be made between the art of drag and gender identities; likewise, holding space for the ways that transgender identity and drag intersect is crucial. For my purposes, I write about gender here in relation to the personae effected by the performers. 5 A fuller account of Freud and Fliess’ association as well as the effects of the surgery on Eckstein can be found in J.M. Masson’s (Ed.). 1985. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 6 For a deeper analysis of this history, I recommend Jonathan Reinarz. 2014. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 7 Sale price listed in official auction results here: www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/marcelduchamp-1887-1968-belle-haleine-5157362-details.aspx.

Bibliography Bronfen, Elizabeth. 2016. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Print. Charles, RuPaul. ca. 1990s. “Whore! Perfume Commercial.” Accessed 6 January 2018. https:// youtu.be/DZBMBXoHyms Chute, David. 2011. “Still Waters.” In John Waters: Interviews. Edited by James Egan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Print, 93–104.

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De Feydeau, Elizabeth. 2007. A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinette’s Perfumer. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Print. Eskridge, Jr., William N. 1999. “Masquerade and the Law.” Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Print. Graham, Mark. 2006. “Queer Smells: Fragrances of Late Capitalism or Scents of Subversion?” In The Smell Culture Reader. Edited by Jim Drobnick. New York: Berg. Print, 305–319. Hart, George. 2005. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. London: Routledge. Independent. January 5, 2010. “Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘White Diamonds’ Tops Global Celebrity Scent List.” Accessed 18 July 2019. www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/ elizabeth-taylors-white-diamonds-tops-global-celebrity-scent-list-1858430.html Morris, Matt. 2013. “a set of hips set in clouds.” In Clownflâneur. Edited by Steve Reinke. Evanston: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. Print, 86–107. Morris, Matt. 2017. Destroy, She Said (1) She Would Buy the Flowers Herself (2) (1) Duras (2) Woolf. Chicago: Field & Florist. Print. Myers, Owen. June 1, 2015. “The Subversive Genius of RuPaul.” DAZED. Accessed 1 November 2019. www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/24914/1/the-subversivegenius-of-rupaul The Perfume Society. n.d. “Napoleon, Josephine and a Giant Bill for Cologne…” Accessed 12 October 2019. https://perfumesociety.org/history/napoleon-josephine-anda-giant-bill-for-cologne/ Rimmel, Eugène. 2005. Originally published 1865. The Book of Perfume. London: Elibron Classics. Print. RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 3. February 2, 2018. “Pop Art Ball.” World of Wonder, LogoTV. Waters, John. 1981. Polyester. New Line Cinema.

12 Scented Bodies Perfuming as Resistance and a Subversive Identity Statement Viveka Kjellmer

Prologue: Violet Leaves and Smoky Leather on Skin I open the gray glass bottle and spray perfume on my wrist. The sweet smell of patchouli fills the air, and a whiff of dry leather smacks me on the head. I am embraced by a powdery cuddling of green violet leaves. This is a fragrance with many faces, one that refuses to be subordinated to rigid marketing categories such as masculine/ feminine. On my skin, Dirty Violet smells like a warm cloud of powder, laced with smoky leather. It is cozy and intimidating at the same time, a shapeshifter that keeps me interested for hours. On the front page of the leaflet that accompanies the perfume bottle is a blackand-white photograph of a person dressed in gloves, corset, and stockings. She wears perfect makeup. A pierced nipple and multiple tattoos on her arms stand in contrast to the white skin of her face and neck. The photographer has caught a moment when she focuses on buttoning her gloves. I see a star, just before the show begins. This portrait gives us a glimpse of two worlds: the performer in costume and the person behind the stage persona. I am comparing my impressions of these two portraits of drag queen and performance artist Violet Chachki, artistic creations inspired by the same person—in two different materialities (see Figure 12.1). The perfume Dirty Violet (by Douglas Little 2019) plays with different ingredients to create a gender-fluid and unexpected result. Many of the same traits can be seen in the photographic portrait of Chachki (by Ruven Afanador 2019), where contrasts and refusal to submit to fixed identity categories are distinct qualities of her persona. This comparison reveals that identity can be expressed in many ways, and that perfume is one of them. I argue that, as an identity statement, fragrance can be far more than decorative; it has the potential to be provocative, subversive, and also political.

Following the Nose: An Introduction As shown by Karen Cerulo (2018), olfactory meaning-making has an impact on social interaction. In this chapter, I examine fragrance as sensory communication, bringing together a theoretical framework based on olfactory art (Drobnick 2014), scented scenography (Banes 2007), and critical costume theory (Monks 2010; Barbieri 2017) with recent views on the sociology of smell (Cerulo 2018). I propose that scents can be worn as acts of non-verbal resistance and that scented bodies become noticeable, and potentially threatening.

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Figure 12.1 Unboxing Dirty Violet, 2020.

Using examples from the art world and the fragrance industry, I discuss how the subversive qualities of scent can be used to transgress the normativity of age, beauty, and gender ideals and claim alternative identities. I show how scent can be political when used as non-verbal communication to challenge the norms and rules of everyday social interaction.

Scented Presence: Theoretical Framework In my case studies, I use Drobnick’s (2014) challenges, interpreted as possibilities, and Banes’s (2007) representational functions as critical tools to analyze both the olfactory aspects of the scented artworks and the use of fragrance as a personal identity statement. Together with Cerulo’s (2018) views on scented meaning-making, and recent costume theory (Monks 2010; Barbieri 2017), these possibilities and representational functions help us to understand what scents can do and how they actively contribute to olfactory agency in bodily communication and social interaction. Curator and art scholar Jim Drobnick (2014) highlights the institutional, critical, receptive, curatorial, and sensorial challenges faced by olfactory art in museums. As my focus is the agency of scented bodies, I invert these challenges and view them as possibilities when it comes to the subversive use of fragrance. A challenge in a museum setting might translate into a possibility when considering perfume as a normbreaking tool outside the museum building. The institutional challenge is about scent fitting poorly into a museum tradition predominantly constructed for visual art. The critical challenge centers on the lack of a precise language for olfactory description. It is easier to focus on the visual aspects of art, for which we do have words. The receptive challenge concerns variations in individual smelling ability and taste. The curatorial challenge concerns the practicalities of exhibiting and archiving invisible and volatile scented artworks. The public might need signs to locate the artworks, or to be made aware that they are works of art at all. The sensorial challenge addresses sensory awareness and societal normativity regarding scents (Drobnick 2014, 183–195). The latent possibility in these challenges

148  Viveka Kjellmer lies in our being generally unaccustomed to scents in a visually oriented society. This means that olfactory communication might affect us without our noticing it. Wearing substances that cannot be seen, affecting the space around us, has obvious potential if the goal is olfactory communication, subversive or not. Since ideas about socially acceptable, and gendered, scents—albeit subject to change over time—are culturally established in society, they also prove to be productive areas of provocation. Theater historian Sally Banes has developed a taxonomy of aroma design based on the effect or representational function of odors in order to understand scented communication. Her use of a semiotics-inspired method to understand scented scenography points to the agency of scent. Banes primarily identifies six categories of aroma design and emphasizes that an odor might be active in several categories at the same time. Her categories include aromas that (1) serve to illustrate characters or places, (2) evoke moods/ambiences, (3) complement or contrast with aural or visual signs, (4) evoke memories, (5) frame the performance as ritual, and (6) serve as distancing devices (2007, 30–31). These categories explain how olfactory cues can emphasize or question what is seen or heard, to help create an immersive and multisensory experience. Banes’s taxonomy is also applicable outside the theater when examining scented events or encounters. Sociologist Karen Cerulo (2018) examines the links between olfaction and social interaction. Her research demonstrates that olfactory meaning-making is a complex process and highlights the understanding of scents as dependent on both intuitive and formal social understanding. Having conducted blind-tests of commercially marketed and top-selling fragrances, she shows that even without the marketing, packaging, and brand information, most participants were able to identify the general cultural meaning of the scents—what she calls the perfumes’ “public codes.” She notes that her test groups “correctly decoded the manufacturers’ intended message, target users, and sites of use” (Cerulo 2018, 363). She further shows that even if most users understood the intended meanings, on a personal level their meaning-making could vary according to social position and personal experience. Her results indicate that the cultural meanings of perfumes on a general level, their public codes, are well known in society, and that most people are able to identify them even if they do not share these views. This means that scented communication, both in accordance with and against these public codes, will constitute effective messages. Put differently, wellknown social codes can be used in order to signal that we adapt to, question, or—as an act of social disobedience—oppose them and the normative view they represent. Wearing perfume can be a political act. Using fragrance as a personal identity statement means that we can “dress” in scent, in much the same way as we can choose to dress according to the visual impression we want to make. When discussing the concept of scent as costume, I am inspired by theoretical perspectives on costume agency from theater and performance scholars Aoife Monks (2010) and Donatella Barbieri (2017), who both show that costume is more than clothing—that it interacts with the body wearing it and plays significant parts in performance. Costuming is not just dressing up a body; it encompasses, as Monks puts it, “the complex work that costume does in producing the body of the actor” (2010, 9). The same, I argue, applies to what I call perfuming. Actively and consciously wearing perfume far exceeds smelling nice; rather, it is about creating bodily presence and designing an olfactory identity that interacts with the wearer and the surrounding space.

Scented Bodies  149 Olfactory art challenges the detached and deodorized visual paradigm of modernism (Classen et al. 1994; Drobnick 2014; Shiner 2020) by shifting the emphasis toward the corporeal and the immersive, and forcing us to inhale the artwork itself into our bodies in order to perceive it. Hsu (2016, 2) notes that olfactory art activates the air itself as an aesthetic medium. The sense of smell is direct and hard to resist; there is an element of intimacy in sharing scents with other visitors and breathing in a work of art together. This has obvious political implications if we consider, as Cerulo proposes, that the sense of smell is an often unnoticed but powerful communication tool affecting social interaction on both conscious and unconscious levels. Interpretations of smell as embodied experience, as an interpersonal olfactory message, and as pollution of shared space all point to the communicative capacities of olfactory art. Using this theoretical framework, I discuss perfuming as the act of wearing scent as costume, and olfactory meaning-making as embodied, non-verbal communication that affects us on cultural, social, and personal levels, regardless of whether we encounter fragrance as olfactory art or as an act of individual perfuming. Bringing these perspectives together helps unpack the agency of the scented body.

Scented Communication In the following section, I examine scent as a personal and potentially political tool for communication, and discuss how smell can affect social relations. Smell can be political on many levels, creating or maintaining social hierarchies. Classen et al. (1994) describe how the idea of “smelling bad” has been used throughout history to socially dismiss the other, be it the lower classes, foreign ethnic groups, or the opposite sex. They write, Often, however, the odor of the other is not so much a real scent as a feeling of dislike transposed into the olfactory domain. In either case, smell provides a potent symbolic means for creating and enforcing class and ethnic boundaries. (Classen et al. 1994, 169) The idea of smelling bad is still regarded as shameful and socially unacceptable. As pointed out by Cerulo, smell is also gendered; we have ideas about how certain persons, situations, and objects should smell, and we react to disturbing odors that do not fit these ideas. I propose that even a seemingly personal choice such as wearing the “wrong” perfume can be viewed as a deliberate provocation, a political act of defiance and social disobedience. Sissel Tolaas and Georg Hornemann, (n)visible (2018) To better understand perfuming as an act of social disobedience, I will focus on smell as a tool for creating bodily presence and claiming space. Smell researcher Sissel Tolaas has explored the unpleasant and mundane qualities of smells, for example by exhibiting the smell of fear as artwork, or making olfactory portraits of cities. She has also created a repellent smell to wear when she wants to be left alone (Museum Tinguely 2015; Tolaas 2020). This smell is meant to be slightly off-putting and to project a feeling of unease, thus discouraging other people from approaching. According to Banes’s taxonomy, it is a smell that creates an unpleasant mood. It also builds

150  Viveka Kjellmer on the idea of olfactory dispersion—smell as invisible pollution of shared space. The smell makes use of Drobnick’s curatorial and sensorial challenges to intervene in the social space by creating around the wearer an invisible olfactory cloud meant to deter rather than attract, and eliciting the social stigma of smelling bad. Tolaas takes this idea a step further in a recent collaboration with German jeweler Georg Hornemann. In their project (n)visible, they designed a ring with scented capsules that can release an unpleasant smell, “Distraction,” if the wearer wants to keep others at a distance. The ring also comes with a smell designed for focus, “Attention,” for when the wearer wants to concentrate, and an appealing smell, “Attraction,” to invite people to come closer (georghornemann.com). Tolaas wanted to create a functional piece of jewelry with olfactory properties. She explains that her work is really about communication. Smell molecules can transmit meaning and smell can thus be functional. This is a different way to communicate, she points out, one that is more playful and subconscious, using the entire body in a multisensory way (Tolaas 2020). Her collaboration with Hornemann brings attention to functional smell in the guise of a ring, jewelry that is more than ornamental. It combines jewelry history, giving a playful nod to poison rings and amulets with hidden compartments, and contemporary design with state-of-the-art research on the communicative capacities of smell. When I asked Sissel Tolaas about the effects of the ring, she spoke at length about the experiments she has been carrying out in her lab, and how she has been testing individual molecules’ capacities in terms of defense, awareness, consciousness, memory, attraction, distraction, and so on, on different people and in different settings to ensure that they really work. And they do, she emphasizes. These smell molecules have a noticeable impact on behavior (Tolaas 2020). She further explains that the smell can be quite subtle, hardly detectable, yet still work. As she puts it, smell is a playful and non-aggressive way to communicate. Instead of openly offending someone by telling them off verbally, the smell suggests in a subtle and subconscious way that they keep their distance. I initially proposed that we can “dress” in smell, wearing it like a non-visual costume. Tolaas’s work with functional smells and smell-based communication touches on similar ideas. She compares changing smells to changing dresses and explains how different smells will make completely different impressions. Not only will the smell change how others see us, but it will also alter the way we feel about ourselves. She says, “What is interesting here, is that not only your surroundings are aware that something is going on, but that you program yourself in a different way” (Tolaas 2020). Just like theatrical costumes have agency and produce the stage persona together with the actor’s body, as found by Monks (2010) and Barbieri (2017), I conclude that smell can be understood as costume. Thinking about smell as costume means to acknowledge the embodied and communicative capacities of smell. Bodies that smell claim space, even if the olfactory communication is very subtle and partly subconscious. Choosing to communicate with smell on our own bodies—dressing in scent—amounts to designing an olfactory identity that will affect the surrounding space, the people who enter this space, and not least ourselves. Perfume, Visual Presentation, and Gendered Communication Fragrance as a means to evoke desire is historically well established in most societies (Classen et al. 1994; Largey & Watson 2006; Shiner 2020). This belief has long been of interest to the fragrance industry, which markets fragrance as bottled attraction.

Scented Bodies  151 Scent is not only culturally linked to attraction, at least in the minds of marketing executives, but it is also gendered, something that is visible when entering the perfume section of any shop; scents for women and men are segregated on different shelves, in different types of packaging. The standard approach for marketing mainstream perfumes has long been based on gender segmentation and ideas of attraction, a strategy that is communicated visually in the marketing and package design, and olfactorily in the actual scents. These stereotyped gender positions do not necessarily appeal to everyone, and the marketing strategies for mainstream perfumes are slowly adapting as well. Petersson McIntyre (2019) investigates perfume and perfume packaging in relation to gender and cultural sense-making. Today many mainstream brands hint at gender fluidity in marketing and packaging to offer the luxury of self-indulgent choices even when it comes to gender identity. She notes that this adaptation is not about changed perceptions of gender in the industry but about changed consumer perceptions of luxury as freedom of choice (2019, 402). She further argues that gender is still a powerful mechanism in the perfume industry and concludes that “the marketing representations employed in the perfume industry express a commodification of gender fluidity rather than the dissolution of gender categories” (2019, 389). Her conclusions indicate that, instead of being a sign of actual change, the seemingly generous offer of gender fluidity could be understood as a commercially driven marketing adaptation of the mainstream perfume market. It tickles the imagination of the customer but does not change the view of perfume as a gendered product. There are exceptions. Unisex scents are standard in the niche fragrance business; “niche” here being understood as smaller, experimental fragrance houses with limited circulation and meager marketing budgets. These brands have their connoisseur followers, but in small numbers—the idea of perfume as unisex has yet to gain acceptance among the general public. Deliberately questioning these established gender positions, wearing the “wrong” fragrance can be an act of social disobedience. As I argue above, wearing a fragrance can be a political statement. This is scented self-invention, or perfuming as the active wearing of scent that opposes the norm in order to problematize cultural ideas about, for instance, age, beauty, or gender, as a way to create an alternative olfactory identity.

Smelling the Perfume: Scented Case Studies In this section, I smell and analyze—in terms of identity, art, and provocation—three perfumes in which the concept of perfuming is operative. Antoine Lie & Antoine Maisondieu, Eau de Protection (2007) Perfumer Antoine Lie plays with normativity in fragrance by expanding fine perfumery to include the smells of bodily fluids. Eau de Protection, created together with Antoine Maisondieu, is a rose fragrance that uses the smell of blood as a warning (etatlibredorange.com). The idea was to make a “protective” rose fragrance focusing on the dual aspects of the flower: beautiful from afar but defensive with prickly thorns up close. On my skin, Eau de Protection initially presents itself with a blast of metallic sharpness paired with spicy notes of carnation, red wine, and dark red roses (see Figure 12.2). After a while, the fragrance warms up and becomes less aggressive, albeit still protective, rich, and spicy.

152  Viveka Kjellmer

Figure 12.2 Spraying Eau de Protection, 2020.

The perfumers use a metallic odor reminiscent of blood to create a sense of danger. In terms of Banes’s taxonomy, it is an illustration of blood among the roses, but also an aroma that evokes a mood of danger and protection. Eau de Protection is meant to empower and protect the wearer—a seemingly pretty fragrance with great integrity. It is a rose perfume but a non-typical one—problematizing traditional gender and beauty ideals and signaling stay-away rather than come-hither. Lie and Maisondieu work with Drobnick’s challenges and the possibilities they afford, combining them to create an effect that builds on sensory unawareness and the non-verbal and often unnoticed character of olfactory communication. It evokes a vague feeling, affecting us, though not necessarily on a conscious level. The smell of blood is not what we usually expect to find in perfume, and it resists the normative dichotomies of beauty and gender. Blood could mean violence, danger, and threat. It could also represent menstrual blood and feminine intimacy. Both interpretations signify identity but in different ways, and can be understood as threatening, disgusting, or empowering depending on the social and cultural position of the person smelling it. This perfume is about bodily presence and fragrance as costume; wearing Eau de Protection is wearing the scent of blood as armor for protection and as a thinly veiled threat. The provocation lies in the subtly altered olfactory message; the beauty and the alluring perfumed skin are there, but so are the claws. The warning embedded in the olfactory message, as Tolaas puts it, is a playful and less aggressive way to claim personal space, engaging in subconscious and embodied communication. The olfactory message, however, also has political implications as non-verbal resistance against what Cerulo calls the public codes of perfume, the normative opinions about how a man or a woman should smell. When the pretty rose fragrance bares its claws, it causes ambiguity and disruption of the expected. This is perfuming at play. Clara Ursitti, Poison Ladies (2013) Olfactory artist Clara Ursitti has explored notions of scented presence in her artwork Poison Ladies, a fragrant intervention at an art gallery. Twenty-five women, mostly over 60 and all wearing the perfume Dior Poison, walked into an art gallery at the

Scented Bodies  153 same time. The idea was to let a socially often-invisible group suddenly take over a room by the use of fragrance (claraursitti.com). This artwork problematizes the social invisibility of women after a certain age, and points to our obsession with youth and beauty. It is also an example of how smell has agency and the ability to claim space. Dior Poison (1985) is a perfume revolving around the floral scent of tuberose, a white flower with a heavy, sweet character. The smell of tuberose has been described as rich and beautiful, but also as overwhelming and headache-inducing. It is a complex floral scent that also has subtle undertones of decay and rotting flesh. This is due to the presence of indoles, a class of molecules that can be found in small amounts in many white flowers, contributing to their multifaceted olfactory character. I spray the fragrance on a paper strip (see Figure 12.3). My first impression is a sharp, salty note, mixed with a velvety floral blast. Green and fleshy notes of leaves mingle with hints of fruit. A couple of minutes later, the full floral character of the scent unfolds, a giant bouquet of white tuberose and lilies. On my skin, the perfume is drier. The fruit is less detectable and the floral aspects appear cleaner. If on paper the perfume was a bouquet of white flowers, on my wrist it is an expensive soap. To my nose, the smell is beautiful but also slightly nauseating, clinging to my skin for hours and hours. Created by perfumer Edouard Fléchier, Dior Poison was one of the “power scents” of the 1980s. Today, we favor lighter scents and are less used to this kind of overwhelming perfume. In Banes’s terminology, this aroma is meant to contrast with what is seen; in Ursitti’s artwork, the visible impact of a group of older women is far less threatening than their collective olfactory impact. In Poison Ladies, Ursitti utilizes several of Drobnick’s challenges as possibilities to claim territory in the art gallery and render the group of women visible: the invisibility of scent, which matches the social invisibility of older women, the social taboo of smelling too much of anything. A tuberose-centered perfume smelling of bygone beauty and decaying flesh could be interpreted as a political comment on our society’s fear of aging. Here, the act of perfuming functions as the olfactory equivalent of physically claiming space with aggressive body language. The scented bodies have social and

Figure 12.3  Smelling Poison, 2020.

154  Viveka Kjellmer political agency. In high doses, scent itself gets physical and invades not only our personal space but also our lungs and bodies, to the point where we might fear suffocation. The possibility of perfume causing health issues is another aspect of smell as potentially political. Today, research about the impact of smell is considered when discussing healthy environments at work, in schools, and in public spaces (Steinemann 2019). Arguments for fragrance-free workplaces and perfume-free public zones have been voiced for many years. So has the debate about the ethics of olfactory persuasion in public space and whether ambient scenting is pleasant/ harmless or manipulative/unethical (Shiner 2020, 286–295). Scent-free policies— or the lack thereof—might be a touchy subject, whether viewed primarily as a health issue, a matter of social interaction, or a question of the freedom to express one’s personal identity. The debate continues, and a quick search in any database will produce articles arguing for both sides, an indication that it is a politically weighty issue. Douglas Little, Dirty Violet (2019) Dirty Violet, the olfactory portrait of Violet Chachki, introduced my research questions in this chapter. This fragrance is a limited edition, very much in the spirit of the work of perfumer Douglas Little. Little has been exploring unconventional sides of fragrance under the brand name Heretic Parfum since 2015, and subsequently has been breaking the rules of established perfumery with his Dirty series, where the perfume’s main note is “dirtied” with something unexpected to make it more interesting, maybe even subversive (www.hereticparfum.com). Why is a “dirty” perfume controversial? Mary Douglas’s seminal discussion in Purity and Danger (2002) can shed light on the understanding of dirt and its implications for social interaction. Douglas explains the symbolic meaning of dirt as disorder and as potentially capable of causing social disruption. Eliminating dirt is another way of creating order, of conforming to social and societal rules and standards. The more rigidly we follow the norms, the more offensive we find ambiguous objects, ideas, or individuals that fall between categories and refuse to be easily labeled. Douglas concludes, “Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise” (Douglas 2002, 200). Applied to Dirty Violet, the dirt is the unexpected, the harsh leathery notes that soil the purity of the violet and transform the floral perfume into something ambiguous that defies clear-cut categorization. I described Dirty Violet as a shapeshifter, a perfume with multiple characteristics that make it hard to define according to the usual categories of commercial perfumery. This fits well with Drobnick’s receptive and sensorial challenges and creates possibilities to present alternative categories or identities. Using Banes’s terminology, this is an aroma that complements the visual image of Chachki’s stage persona, a strong character who disobeys the normative rules of gender and beauty. It is also an aroma that contrasts with the commercial fragrance market. Its political implications could be summed up precisely in how it challenges normative views of beauty and gender and plays with ambiguity as resistance.

Scented Bodies 155

Ambiguity, Identity, and Resistance: Conclusion As a medium, smell transforms us into participants rather than spectators from afar. Fragrance takes this into the routines of our everyday life where we are regularly exposed to the fragrant impact of bodies around us. Breathing in the smell of someone else is very intimate; whether we like it or not, smelling someone admits them into our personal space. This could be an act of shared intimacy but also an act of unwelcome olfactory intrusion. Given this participatory aspect of smell, I argue that perfume can be both subversive and political. The concept of perfuming, understood as the deliberate use of fragrance as resistance and the creation of an alternative olfactory identity, suggests that scented bodies have the potential to claim space—socially, physically, and emotionally. The growing niche fragrance industry that insists on producing non-gendered perfumes not only threatens the traditional display order in the perfume departments but also questions core beliefs about what a man or a woman should smell like. On a personal level, it is about likes and dislikes, whether we prefer the expected perfumes or want to challenge our surroundings with a norm-breaking olfactory identity. This sensory challenge, which Mary Douglas calls “the cognitive discomfort caused by ambiguity” (2002, xi), is more than just a personal statement. On a larger scale, the questioning of norms and beliefs becomes political. Fragrance is a multisensory communication tool with agency. As an act of civil and social disobedience, the wearing of scents can make powerful statements about identity and bodily presence. Perfuming is a way to utilize the immersive and communicative powers of perfume as resistance.

References Banes, Sally. 2007. “Olfactory Performances.” In The Senses in Performance, edited by Sally Banes & André Lepecki, 29–37. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Barbieri, Donatella. 2017. Costume in Performance. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Cerulo, Karen. 2018. “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-making, and Meaning Attribution.” American Sociological Review, 83(2): 361–389. Classen, Constance, Howes, David & Synnott, Anthony, eds. 1994. Aroma, the Cultural History of Smell. London & New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. [1966] 2002. Purity and Danger, An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Re-printed edition with new preface, London and New York: Routledge. Drobnick, Jim. 2014. “The Museum as Smellscape.” In The Multisensory Museum. CrossDisciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory and Space, edited by Nina Levent & Alvaro Pascal-Leone, 177–238. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Etat Libre d’Orange. n.d. Homepage. Accessed October 12, 2019. www.etatlibredorange.com Georg Hornemann. n.d. Homepage. Accessed August 3, 2018. www.georghornemann.com/ en/collaborations/sissel-tolaas.html Heretic Parfums. n.d. Homepage. Accessed November 20, 2019. www.hereticparfum.com Hsu, Hsuan L. 2016. “Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality and the Museum Environment.” Resilience, 4(1): 1–24.

156 Viveka Kjellmer Largey, Gale & Watson, Rod. 2006. “The Sociology of Odors.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, 29–40. Oxford & New York: Berg. Monks, Aoife. 2010. The Actor in Costume. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Museum Tinguely. 2015. Belle Haleine. The Scent of Art. Interdisciplinary Symposium. Basel: Museum Tinguely. Petersson McIntyre, Magdalena. 2019. “Gender Fluidity as Luxury in Perfume Packaging.” Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 5(3): 389–405. Shiner, Larry. 2020. Art Scents. Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steinemann, Anne. 2019. “Ten Questions Concerning Fragrance-Free Policies and Indoor Environments.” Building and Environment, 159(15 July): 1–8. Tolaas, Sissel. 2020. Interview by Viveka Kjellmer, May 4, 2020, audio recording, 51.41 min. Ursitti, Clara. n.d. Homepage. Accessed July 12, 2018. www.claraursitti.com

13 Women’s Smell Towards a New Representation of the Body1 Sandra Barré

Smell at the Service of Bodily Representation In the West, the “female” body has long been shaped by the way it has been viewed. These distant glances divide the sexes in terms of thought, morality, religion, politics, and science. They seek to characterize two entities as drastically different: the masculine and the feminine. Antinomic, these two entities have relegated to art a possible separation first established by vision and offering to the sense of smell an imaginary link to what the eye created. The smell of the “feminine body,” as we will see, is greatly linked in its artistic use, to the history of representations. According to Thomas Laqueur —historian of medicine, sexuality, and gender— the representation of the “feminine body” saw a turning point in the Age of Enlightenment. Until that point, two body systems had been posited, one considering the masculine and the feminine as being modeled around a single sex, differentiated by a scale of values (the masculine dominating the feminine), and the second judging the two versions of the body to be quite different. In the eighteenth century, preference was given to the latter system. According to the Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s reading of the history of sexualities and gender, the regime in which the king protected those considered weaker—“sovereign masculinity”—gave way to a new era: feminism. This era is characterized by a consideration of a body, which was later claimed by some feminists as a body designated by its capacity to give birth and distinguished by attributes visible to the human eye. A woman is one who does not have a penis but a vulva hidden by an abundant fleece; round and generous breasts; ample hips; long hair; and a modesty—even candor—observable in her gestures. In a colonial and Western world where the Judeo-Christian religion is predominant, women were also associated with purity and whiteness. This norm of the “feminine” is still anchored in the common imagination. These marks of gender organized into what we could call visual semiotics of gender and are visible in works that constitute the canon of art history. They have contributed to establishing the presence of women in art: they serve as models for the male gaze (Mulvey 1975). They will be as desirable, beautiful, soft, sensual, calm, and helpful as possible —an objectifying construct that artists have been fighting against since the feminist revolution of the 1960s. Walking in tandem with the theorists, artists have worked to enhance the value of the body implied by binarism, that which Simone de Beauvoir and many of her peers call “the Other.” Feminist art then became the obvious place for re-appropriation and joined the political struggles that

158  Sandra Barré challenged the role of the feminine, primarily aimed at pleasing men and taking care of the domestic interior. Feminist artists chose to use the image of this observed and defined body as material to, on the one hand, re-appropriate what they had been stripped of—the possibility of defining themselves—and, on the other hand, to create new representational perspectives. To do so, they re-appropriated the visual language that was imposed on women’s bodies, claiming it or diverting it in order to bring those who were denigrated to the same rank as those who denigrated them. In feminism, they sought to assert the specificity of their bodies in order to become equal to men and, as Virginia Woolf puts it, they strove to “change the current scale of values” (Woolf 1963, 87). Precisely to get out of this representational hierarchy where the masculine prevails, some artists decided to explore other forms. Olfaction is one of these new proposals. Its use appears judicious, in that it opposes the hegemonic senses that dictate gender, especially the sovereignty of sight and hearing. As Constance Classen writes, Women have traditionally been associated with the senses in Western culture, and in particular, with the ‘lower’ senses. Women are the forbidden taste, the mysterious smell, the dangerous touch. Men, by contrast, have been associated with reason, as opposed to the senses, or else with sight and hearing as the most ‘rational’ of the senses. (Classen 1998, 1) From the 1960s, during the second wave of feminism, the question of scent associated with the feminine became political. Female artists, who were mostly in the struggle for a revaluation of their bodies, split into what can be identified as two trends of an olfactory feminism. The first takes a critical look at the dogmas historically imposed on women’s bodies regarding their appearances and what these dogmas have said about female temperament. We could call this movement “olfactory appearance” and associate it with what Joan Riviere explains in her concept of masquerade, a psychoanalytical concept that leaves women the only possibility of existing by taking over the straitjacket imposed on them (Riviere 1929). The second trend proposes a new definition of the body and thus a new possibility of a feminine claimed as independent and free; this definition is based on the animalistic qualities of the body’s odor. In this twofold olfactory possibility, a form of smell empowerment is observed. Just as with the revival of certain visual codes, some of the artists using smell to designate their bodies make use of injunctions to which they have been subjected. By making these smells the object of their work, artists transform them into a gendered weapon that is still widely regarded as part of the binary division of the sexes. Here, in these two olfactory expressions, one referring to appearance and the other designating a more ontological aspect, a reflection on the status of the feminine is envisaged in what it specifically brandishes. Aware of a culture of smell that is still largely ignored, these two olfactory possibilities develop what could be called “the smell of the feminine.” However, to these two potentialities of the feminine is added a third, structuring a path that, although linked to feminist struggles, deviates from them. This third way, designated by Paul B. Preciado as belonging to the reign of “pharmacopornography,”2 is taking shape in a world where bodies no longer oscillate between a gender characterized either by a force that can cause death (masculine) or by a force that can give birth (feminine) but by a multiple definitional possibility, as he states. Since the new subjectivities of gender were brought to light some 50 years ago, particularly through

Women’s Smell  159 the visibility of intersexual and transsexual people, gender has been reconsidered. Through queer theories, a veil is being lifted: what is gender and who decides it (West and Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990)? It would seem that the answer is multi-faceted and that some artists are trying to formulate it through formal means that are not yet mired in systems of representation enslaved by an academic history of art. Smell is one of the possibilities. So, “‘female’ no longer appears to be a stable notion” (Butler 2007, xxxi). The development of these ideas demonstrates how scent, in its polymorphic and artistic form, allows us to explore three visions of the feminine. Even today, these visions overlap and coexist.

The Smell of the Woman Olfactory Appearance The idea of olfactory appearance takes its source in Joan Riviere’s concept of masquerade. An early twentieth-century British psychoanalyst, she observes in her essay “Womanliness as Masquerade” (Riviere 1929) that her female patients knowingly assume the mask of what Simone de Beauvoir would call “the Eternal Feminine,” an idealized image of a loving, gentle woman, who works to be pleasant to ensure love and recognition. The most obvious of these—what psychoanalysis calls “disguises”—is that of coquetry, which is used to maintain a disposition generally associated with the “gentler sex,” that of physical seduction. Even if, today, it is debatable to consider the use of make-up and perfumes as being a process of feminine conquest, cosmetics remain largely gendered. The culture still clings to this image of a pleasant feminine in which the good smell of skin, hair, and breath is essential. The writing of the French poet Charles Baudelaire3 underscores this line of thought just as much as the paintings of women bathing. With their long history, cosmetics can be considered as a second skin, and with them, the scent they release totally participates in this beauty ritual. More than that, it determines them. This association of smell with coquetry guides and determines olfactory interpretations, and when the smell of cosmetics, artistically worked, is taken out of its context, it carries with it the whole history of beauty affiliated to the female gender. So, the smell of cosmetics is linked to good looks, to appearance, to the mask, as Joan Riviere describes it, that one puts on one’s skin to correspond to the canons of beauty. Thus, lipstick can be the visual signifier of a feminine eroticism that many women claim and that continues to arouse certain carnal emotions. When it is used as the material of a work of art, these characteristics are not only made visible but also implicitly tied to an olfactory experience of the material. This affiliation of lipstick to gender can be found, for example, in the sculpture Un mètre cube de beauté [A cubic meter of beauty] presented by Fabrice Hyber at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2012. For the Matières Premières [Raw Materials] exhibition, he proposed a cubic work whose base material is Yves Saint Laurent lipstick. In the special edition of Beaux-Arts Magazine dedicated to the event, a spectator says that smelling the big vermillion cube is like “snorting femininity” (Hyber 2012, 16), comparing the odor to the effects of absorbing a drug substance. Here, it is not the experience of breathing in hard drugs that is referenced but the effect of inhaling the lipstick—the satisfying, even erotic, smell of cosmetics takes its full effect. Not only does it determine the work, the material

160  Sandra Barré is recognized by smelling it, —but it also offers a first interpretative proposal. If the smell is that of lipstick, then the feminine is evoked. The specific fragrance establishes itself as a marker of gender and confirms a history of gender representation. The spectator’s impulsive exclamation says a lot about the association of the smell of cosmetics with femininity. In this work, lipstick represents the ideal artifact of coquetry, the mask that calls for a kiss and promises unspeakable pleasures. The femme fatale appears with red lips and smells good. Aligning with some of Riviere’s patients’ masquerades, certain artists use this culture of the archetypal feminine to express a form of ownership. For example, the American artist Rachel Lachowicz, an outspoken feminist, takes iconic works from art history (all created by men) and re-molds them using lipstick. She transforms Carl Andre’s 144 Lead Square, Marcel Duchamp’s Fontaine, and Joseph Beuys’ Felt Suit into vermeil monochromes that bloom with greasy wax pastels and recall the “lipstick” blend, a scent mix of iris, violet, rose, frequently revisited in perfumery. Here, it is the very characteristic smell that gives strength to the work. Through the floral accord, this work refers to centuries of coquetry during which the manufacturers of lipstick use the same scent compositions as those found in perfume formulas. A common history links cosmetics with anointings and perfumes. By manipulating this olfactive material, Rachel Lachowicz brings the viewer back to the phallocratic monopoly that has long phagocytized the history of art; the smell of lipstick, engraved in the memory of those who have experienced it, recalls specific gender representations such as the working girl, the movie star, or even the mother. This gap between the well-known work made by Carl Andre and the lipstick scent of Lachowicz’s remake rekindles the question asked by Linda Nochlin in her essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Nochlin 1971). Lachowicz characterizes her work by arguing that these materials are not essentially feminine, but we experience them through a culture that desires bodies to be gendered and sexualized. Although these bodies are absent in much of my work, their sexualized presence is referenced through the cosmetic I employ. (Lachowicz 2013) It is neither the color red nor the visual materiality of the wax that gives the work its meaning, but rather its fragrances, which bring with them a history of gender. Here, the smell of lipstick as the prerogative of the feminine illustrates the idea of the olfactory appearance. Resulting from a custom attributed historically to the feminine, the use of lipstick in this replica of Andre’s work reveals an inequality: the (still) effective sexism in art. This red is not the color of blood, it is not the color of passion in love; rather it refers to the coloring of the lips of women who are still minor figures in the construction of the history of art, and its scent allows its identification. The material used can be recognized by the scent it exudes. Without this olfactory experience, it is impossible to understand the strength of this red. It is the scent that allows visitors to understand the work, situating it in cultural history and allowing it to be associated with the female gender. Scent presents the autonomy of the work, thus removing any other indication necessary for its understanding that we might find in the museum label, for example. This fragrant make-up, here referred to as a feminist weapon, is the code of a type of appearance that psychoanalysis has studied extensively. For Riviere, when a woman uses the mask of coquetry, she responds to the fear of seeing these desires for

Women’s Smell  161 fairness sanctioned. In the works of Rachel Lachowicz, the use of lipstick highlights the struggle for the revaluation of the feminine, and its smell symbolizes this struggle. In addition to the artist’s ingenuity in using gendered codes that are still clearly active, such use raises questions. Is it not absurd that “women” or the feminine can be summed up by the smell of a cosmetic? Is it not absurd that a gender could be characterized by a material with a pleasant scent and whose primary function is beautification? These questions, often discussed from various perspectives, harken back to the essence of the analysis presented here. Should we respond to the oppression of women through the codes defining the “feminine” by adopting and claiming this masquerade of appearances, by making it a source of strength? Or should we deny it altogether and side with radical feminist theorists who, like the American Sheila Jeffreys, see make-up as chaining those who use it to a form of submission to certain canons of beauty, even operating as an expression of masochism? (Jeffreys 2005). The “Olfactory Neo-Feminine” In response to this obligation to smell good that history has placed on the female body, but which finds itself removed from all natural faculties, some artists claim a new olfactory possibility. It contradicts a human quest that has been going on since European antiquity: that of extricating oneself from a disowned and denigrated animal condition; the sense of smell is very clearly affiliated with the animal by the instincts to which it is assimilated. While most of the canonical representations of women in the history of Western art have designated the image of woman as pure, pleasant, and delicate, another artistic fringe based on strong scientific beliefs has linked her body to low animal impulses. Thus, from the Greek myths of the mermaid and the gorgonian to the Symbolists’ depiction, not to mention the rereading of fables such as Leda or Lady Godiva, the feminine is aligned with animality, often expressed in the flesh. Many feminists have claimed this animality as an integral part of their constitution, revaluing a body that they once had to silence or scrub clean and coat with sweet-smelling cosmetics. Some immediately associated animality with the relationship between women and smell. Writers such as Germaine Greer assert that “the efforts made to eradicate all smell from the female body are part of the same suppression of fancied animality” (Greer 1970, 38); artists have shaped it and ensured women’s membership in the bestial order through the scents exuded by the works they created. These smells, bridges between the two familiar yet disavowed systems of human and beast, seem to be an eloquent link, and the women, by claiming their reproached natural exhalations, disclose a truth. The artworks that will be considered in the following pages fully assume their effusions and participate in a first reflection on their negation. For although smells in art have long been repressed, the social question of a feminine smelly body is far from being settled. Exposing this body as it is turns out to be a political act in itself. By making olfactory references to meat, blood, sweat, tears, and all the fluids that can exude from the body, these artists propose a feminist discourse that goes beyond the imposed ideas governing how female bodies must smell. This “olfactory empowerment” goes beyond the socially accepted olfactory structures, and although it is focused on the female body, it could well plead for a carnal freedom beyond gender. The Italian performance artist Paola Daniele (see Figure 13.1) uses her own menstrual blood in her actions by affirming, through its scent, the materiality of her

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Figure 13.1 Paola Daniele, Still life with human bodies and menstrual blood, performance Paola Daniele, 2015. Source: Claire Chaulet.

Women’s Smell  163 body, which has become a paragon of all female flesh. For her performances, she freezes her own menstrual blood collected in vaginal cups, which she then stages in different ways. For In desire, still life with human bodies and menstrual blood (2015), she fills a chalice at a banquet, and associates her own blood with the blood of Christ. Through this sanctification, she points to the dichotomy between two categories of blood: the pure blood of the man—in this case Christ’s—and the blood of the woman, considered vile and defiled. By this gesture, by this inversion of worship, the artist examines the absurdity of this division. How can blood be seen in such a paradoxical way according to whom it belongs? How can this rite that is the Eucharist, lasting for centuries, glorify and sanctify a certain blood, when the one promising life remains repressed and despised? These questions could be read in Tears (2016) on the sheets of paper where the artist uses her menstrual blood like the ink of a typewriter. With the blood, she writes lightly scented letters delivering a message, that of her freedom. In I capelli della strega [The Witch’s Hair] (2016), the artist melts her previously frozen menstrual blood, likening it to a volcanic eruption. By associating it with a natural scream, she draws attention to its strength—also natural—and reminds us that long ago, before the monotheistic religions established the male figure as master, many cults, including that of the Great Goddess, honored life and the one who gives it. In many of her performances, the smell of blood is part of the process. As in Rachel Lachowicz’s lipstick works, the smell is intrinsically linked to its source and this smell is the vehicle of the artist’s discourse. Here, in Daniele’s works, the blood, revealed by its ferrous and organic notes, reclaims the esteem due to it, and through it, the status of the feminine hopes to be improved. Among the other possibilities of reclaiming the feminine body, the odors of vaginal and salivary mucous membranes stand out and can also be used to reclaim the place of the female body. This is what Korean-American artist Anicka Yi did for her exhibition event You Can Call Me F at the Kitchen Gallery in 2015, which placed smells of the female body at the center of her work. In Grabbing at Newer Vegetables (2015), one of the installations in this exhibition, she collects oral and vaginal samples from 100 women to form a “collective of bacteria.” In a long glass vitrine, a sort of vivarium of human germs, these samples are placed in agar. The culture of bacteria evolves, lives, and nibbles on the viscous substance that reveals the title of the exhibition, made up of red capital letters: You can call me F. The red evokes menstruation and the F—the first letter of feminism, of female, of feminine—establishes itself as a cry of revolt. Taboo, shunned by all and still considered ignoble, feminine secretions not only imply the act of creation, since they form the letters, but also participate in a demonization. Naming and acceptance. Added to the sight of this autonomous life is the diffusion of the smell of these intimate secretions, periodically projected into the exhibition space. The diffusion of this feminine smell alternates with another odor that the artist considers masculine. The latter, made from olfactory samples taken from the air of the Gagosian Gallery, symbolizes for the artist the masculine domination still effective in contemporary art. Like a mirror of Rachel Lachowicz’s work, Grabbing at Newer Vegetables uses body odor to highlight the gender disparities in the art world. As the smell spreads, the invisible taboos of a veiled animality slowly begin to dissolve. The emanations, imposed as a characteristic of the living, are transformed, here too, into a political armament. This weapon, despite feeding these fascinating works and others that I cannot deal with here, such as those of Claudia Vogel, Clara Ursitti, or Carolee Schneemann

164  Sandra Barré (to mention but a few), can nevertheless be contested. To claim the smell of the feminine in order to invent a new representation of it presupposes continuing to evolve in a world of binary opposition. Now, queer theories are no longer fighting to abolish the oppression of the feminine by the masculine, instead, they are fighting to question this gender division altogether in order to abolish it and to think of new political possibilities where equity would be the basis of any society.

The Gender of Smell Just as in feminist theories, since they are linked to them, appearance is omnipresent in questions of gender: performativity as theorized by Judith Butler or possession and appearance by Jacques Lacan. While one cannot reduce gender to what is seen, it is nevertheless determined by what the eye perceives, as art history testifies. To consider smell in this context is already a revolution in itself, as outlined above. If the attributes and symbols observed in plastic creations can point to the gender of the beings represented, it is because they emerge from a long history of representations of sexuality. However, what is felt remains mostly preserved. Here, a paradox needs to be clarified. If smell can envisage a cultural history of its appreciation—we have just seen it with that of lipstick or blood, for example—its activation is only possible in a certain context and through the association of other senses that allow a re- contextualization. The smell of lipstick is recognizable from the moment the red color and the texture of the work are perceived. If the smell of lipstick were isolated and displaced in a neutral context, there is a good chance that the association would be difficult. At least, it would take much longer to recognize. Perceiving a smell alone, devoid of all indications, and apprehending it in this way does not imply the same analogies as does perceiving a form that, because of the long history of art of which it is part, is more recognizable. While it is impossible to explain the causes of this difference here, as the subject would demand a book on its own, it must be borne in mind that this freedom of olfactory interpretation is primordial in the possibilities of the representation of an ungendered body, as it offers almost total freedom of expression. This freedom is proclaimed by the Italian-Swiss photographer Roberto Greco who, in 2017, signed his Oeillères series (see Figures 13.2 and Figure 13.3) of 31 photographs where flowers and human beings meet in the same dispositions. In each photograph, he places a single “figure,” flower, or human, at the center of the image, all presented in the same way. The humans, genderless, have their faces hidden and the light that illuminates them distorts their attributes. The flowers, for their part, raise their faded petals in a surprising dynamism. Defining is difficult, gender is troubled, and death seems like life. To this series of photographs, in collaboration with the perfumer Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, the artist adds what he calls “a perfuming object,” a scent that can take many forms, such as that of an hourglass or a perfume bottle, and whose accords reveal the idea of an “anti-flower” with “half-green and half-animalic” fragrances as well as that of a warm-honeyed body. This scent, which the artist hopes will aid in the interpretation of the photographs, abolishes typical gendered characterizations. The photographer asked the perfumer composing the scents to break away from any form of binarity, the first being that of gender. The perfume had to be neither feminine nor masculine, neither retro nor modern, but all simultaneously. This refusal of gender assignment is evident when the fragrance is worn by visitors who peruse the photographs, all wearing the same odor. All of them,

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Figure 13.2 Roberto Greco, Œillères, fig. XV, 60 × 75 cm, 2017.

in the plurality of their identity, become bearers of what the artist, with his singular aesthetic, has decided to freeze: decline and the multiple possibilities of human condition. Here, gender is abolished, and the absurdity of the divisions that perfumery employs through marketing is revealed. This representation, which allows for a consideration that goes beyond gender, is also used by the Swiss-Canadian artist Christelle Boulé; in her works, we can see a reconsideration of the codes of imagery used in the communication campaigns of perfume brands. These campaigns, based not on the perfume itself but on target customers, assert what each gender ought to smell like. Boulé has worked to reveal the true image of fragrance. For her “Drops” series, she pours three drops of perfume on argentic paper to extract a portrait that emanates a fragrance that stays on the paper for a while. Abstract forms, speckled spots, and arabesque waves of scent are then completely freed from a genderization of the scent. Terre by Hermès is not masculine with its presentation of an artist’s laboratory where she develops her argentic, any more than Amarige by Givenchy or Candy by Prada are visually perceived as feminine. The colorful aspects that emerge are “other,” impossible to categorize. Could the future of art history lie here, in this visual non-affiliation and in this opening to the representational possibilities offered by the senses? This is perhaps the strength of the presence of exhalations in a reflection on representations. If they draw with them a heavy range of signs and symbolic connotations,

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Figure 13.3 Roberto Greco, Œillères, fig. XIX, 20 × 25 cm, 2017.

which time has constructed, they can also be a way of affixing to a subject—here that of the image of women—another definition, an open possibility of being otherwise. A definition that art historian Griselda Pollock, like many thinkers, envisages: Analyzing the place of women in culture and its narratives requires a radical deconstruction of the discourse of ‘art history’. It also requires the production of a new discourse that goes beyond this sexism without replacing it with its simple opposite. By no longer viewing sexual difference as a mere binary opposition, it

Women’s Smell 167 is possible to analyze the relationships of sexuality, subjectivity and power, and how they condition cultural production and consumption. (Pollock 1994, 63) Is there really a reason for the difference between the sexes? The question can be asked about the current writing of the history of art that we are building. Is it better to continue to nourish this binarity by revaluing the female sex represented by formerly strict norms, or should we eradicate all distinction and favor the total abolition of gender? Whatever the answer, which remains personal and political, olfactory works direct us to a primary necessity that unites all beings on earth: breathing. Experiencing an olfactory work refers to the simple fact of inhaling and exhaling, the foundation of the most immediate life. Experiencing it also reminds us, in a more physiological way, that we are all penetrated by the fragrances we breathe in and penetrating the environment around us when we release this inspired air. Perhaps there is in these considerations and in the use of scents by contemporary artists, the possibility of considering, as Paul B Preciado proposes, those who make and those who live this art as no longer belonging to the masculine and feminine gender but belonging to the more harmonious, and perhaps more humble, gender of living beings.

Notes 1 The works of Roberto Greco and Christelle Boulé were smelled. 2 For Paul B. Preciado, this third political regime is directed by the relationship of individuals to the hormonal molecules they ingest such as Viagra, the pill, and all the healing molecules (“pharmaco”) and their effort to be able to correspond to the norms established by the universe of pornography. 3 See on this subject “Hymne à la beauté,” “Parfum exotique,” “La Chevelure” (Baudelaire 2005).

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. 2005 [1857]. Les Fleurs du Mal. Paris: Gallimard. Beauvoir, Simone De. 1970. The Second Sex. Translated by Howard Madison Parshley. New York: Bantam Book. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York & London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of “Sex”. London: Routledge. Classen, Constance. 1998. The Color of Angels : Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination. London: Routledge. Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch. London: Paladin. Hyber, Fabrice. 2012. Matières premières, au Palais de Tokyo. Issy-les-Moulineaux: Beaux-Art. Jeffreys, Sheila. 2005. Beauty and Misogyny. New York: Routledge. Lachowicz, Rachel. 2013. “Portfolio: Material Specificity and the Index of the Feminine.” Art Journal, Vol. 72, no. 4: 30–33. Accessed June 22, 2018. www.jstor.org/stable/43188631. Laqueur, Thomas. 1987. The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. London: University of California Press. Mulvey Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen. Vol. 16: 6–18. Nochlin, Linda. 1971. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”. Artnews, Vol 69, no. 9 (January): 22–39 and 67–71.

168 Sandra Barré Pollock, Griselda. 1994. “Histoire et politique: l’histoire de l’art peut-elle survivre au féminisme ?”. In Féminisme, art et histoire de l’art, edited by Michaud Yves. Paris: Ensba, 63–90. Preciado, Paul B. 2008. Testo junkie: sexe, drogue et biopolitique. Paris: Grasset. Preciado, Paul B. 2019. Un appartement sur Uranus: chroniques de la traversée. Paris: Grasset. Riviere, Joan. 1929. “Womanliness as Masquerade”. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 10: 303–313. Woolf, Virginia. 1963. L’Art du Roman. Translated by Rose Celli. Paris: Seuil. West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don H. 1987. “Doing Gender”. Gender and Society, Vol. 1, no. 2: 125–151.

14 Scent and Seduction The Power of Smell in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield Dorothy Abram

Introduction It seems an audacious remark to put in writing, but Virginia Woolf did just that when she took offense at writer Katherine Mansfield’s smell at their first meeting. Woolf wrote in her diary on October 10, 1917, The dinner last night went off: the delicate things were discussed. We could both wish that ones [sic] first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight, lines so hard & cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays the friendship. (Alpers 1980, 254; Bell 1980: VWD 1:58, 2:226; Maxwell 2018, 283) Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, extended the olfactory criticism of Mansfield’s person to her writing; Mansfield was “cheap scent and cheap sentimentality” (Ibid.). Writing about an impending visit to the Woolfs’ home that Katherine’s husband Murray was about to take, Mansfield said, “I’m sorry you have to go to them. I don’t like them either. They are smelly” (O’Sullivan and Scott 1987: CLKM 2:77). Critics since then have dismissed Woolf’s comment as an example of “catty” and competitive behavior between women (Bernikow 1980; Moran 1996). Beyond the apparent sexism in this characterization of Mansfield and Woolf, the Mansfield/Woolf dinner episode is significant for this study of smell in Mansfield’s writing: it demonstrates Mansfield’s love of scent. It may make us wonder, then, if Mansfield’s love of perfumes, scents, and smells also would be reflected in her writing and what meaning scent would carry in her stories. “Colors … scents … flowers … and fauna” filled her ecstatic letters to her friends, wrote her biographer Antony Alpers (1980, 319). Does scent also become an important source of symbolic meaning in her stories? How would the social norms and institutions of early twentieth-century England shape that meaning? Specifically, how do gender politics and class status limit or inspire Mansfield’s expression? These issues, I argue, are the role and function of scents in Mansfield’s short stories: to reveal the social and sexual meanings of the scenes in which she placed them. Significantly, Mansfield played a pivotal role imbuing the new literary aesthetics of modernism with this political voice.

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The Sociology of Scent Woolf’s criticism of Mansfield’s smell reflected Woolf’s own prejudices that she projected onto Mansfield. In the very charge of smelling like a civet cat—which provides the anal excretions that are used in traditional formulations of perfumes—Woolf displayed an ignorance of Mansfield’s preferred fragrance. Mansfield’s customary perfume—Genêt Fleuri, a fragrant and expensive blend—may not have presented the heavy animalic base notes of which Woolf accuses Mansfield (Maxwell 2018, 283). However, we need not discuss the actuality of scent in Mansfield’s life here but, rather, the prejudice concerning class status that Mansfield’s fragrance brought out in the Woolfs. It is quite common for personal and political meanings to interfere with and define the sensation of smelling. As Ines Valle Moran (2016) explained, olfactory sensation is not fixed and objective. It is experienced through the nose, mind, and social status of the perceiver. For the Woolfs, these interpretive screens were loaded with class bias; that is, from the Woolfs’ perspective, Mansfield was a lower-class exile from New Zealand—“a little colonial” (Ailwood 2005; Kascakova and Kimber 2015). These prejudices were experienced and expressed in the Woolfs’ characterization of Mansfield’s smell that evening within the context of their gender and social statuses. Even though Mansfield came from upper-class New Zealand society, her position as a colonial writer condemned her in British society to an inferior rank. Their differing relationship with scent and perfumes measures the political and social distance between Woolf and Mansfield. To Virginia that evening, Katherine stank … Perhaps that really turns upon a deeper difference between the two women, a larger issue altogether. Katherine … did go in for the life of the senses, and Virginia shied away from it, which is why she had such curiosity in this regard. Katherine did love food and scents and color and music … And Virginia … at the same time found it somehow vulgar … and this very distaste is a defect in her writing. (Alpers 1980, 254) Whereas Woolf rejected perfumes as cheap and trashy, Mansfield was part of a group called olfactifs; that is, artists committed to the sensory world of smell as providing unique entry into larger unseen realities (Maxwell 2018, 8). Mansfield’s sensuality and sexuality made Woolf uncomfortable, while, at the same time, Woolf also envied the insight, creativity, and sensitivity they offered her rival writer. For example, Woolf’s comment (“She’s done for!”) about Mansfield’s short story Bliss “reveal her anxious suspicion of a confident, expressive, and sensuous female sexuality” (Maxwell 2018, 283). Woolf wrote, “I threw down Bliss with the exclamation, ‘She’s done for!’ Indeed I don’t see how much faith in her as a woman or writer can survive this sort of story” (Bell 1980: DVW 1.179). Scent provided seduction into that transgressive world. In this way, scent and smell are useful tools to understand society and social structure and women’s place within them.

Scent and Story Scent was more for Mansfield than a simple perfume choice. Though various smells, scents, and flowers appear throughout Mansfield’s short stories, scholars typically

Scent and Seduction  171 have neglected to examine how they serve the themes or characters of the stories and oftentimes fail to analyze their symbolic contributions. That scents are mostly a detail in her stories does not necessarily make smells unimportant to the stories’ larger significance; in fact, they are what Roland Barthes called a punctum, an image that pierces through the main theme to reveal a repressed or neglected truth or reality (Barthes 1980). Though Barthes used this term for visual experience, feminist psychologists, similarly, recognize the role of women’s writing to reveal the unconscious and hidden realities of life. “I am there where it/id/the female consciousness speaks,” explained French psychoanalytic theorist Hélène Cixous (Jones 1981). As with Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, women’s writing of the id challenges the social order. “A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive … she blazes her trail in the symbolic…,” wrote Cixous of the imperative for women to write for this purpose and outcome (italics by Cixous 1976, 888). Scents and smells perform the role of revealing repressed and symbolic content in Mansfield’s stories. Specifically, Mansfield’s writing offers us a precise understanding of the interaction of colonial, class, and gender dynamics in the modernist aesthetic. We may witness the activity of the punctum in Mansfield’s desire “to intensify the so-called small things … so that truly everything is significant” (Alpers 1980, 81). Flowers and scents hold a special place; they are spaces of altered consciousness. “Flowers … as a bright dazzle, an exquisite haunting scent, a shape so formal and fine, so much a ‘flower of the mind’,” wrote Mansfield (Alpers 1980, 250). Thus, we must consider the effect of scent and smell descriptions in her short stories as examples of Barthes’ punctum for the meaning they contribute to the whole. Mansfield was not a traditional writer. In 1934, T.S. Eliot cited Mansfield’s short story Bliss as “an illustration of the dominant experimental tendency of modern fiction” (Kaplan 1991, 1–2) of the modernist movement that started in response to World War I (WWI). For Mansfield and other modernist artists, the war fundamentally changed human experience and artistic expression. I fear in the profoundest sense that nothing can ever be the same—that as artists, we are traitors if we feel otherwise: we have to take it into account and find new expressions; new moulds for our thoughts and feelings. Mansfield wrote to her husband Murray (November 16, 1919). Traditional storytelling, with its emphasis on plot, realism, and resolutions, no longer could represent a reality that had been shattered by the horrors of the war, including, for Mansfield, the devastating death of her beloved younger brother Leslie in 1915 (Kimber, Martin, and da Sousa Correa, 2014). Authors had to find another way to tell a story. Modernist narratives, in contrast to prewar writing, are broken and dreamlike; the inner worlds of characters are sites of exploration; and the stories’ endings are uncertain and ambiguous. The sensory experiences of the war, such as the smells of rotting corpses in the trenches and poisonous gases (de Cupere 2015), also were carried into modernist literature. In particular, the body and the sense of smell become potent signifiers of the modernist aesthetic and represent a new focus in the arts. Even so, contemporary scholars typically locate this “olfactory turn” as a postmodern development resulting from the publication of Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume while neglecting aesthetic evidence from the Great War (Ahern 2016, 16; Fjellestad 2001).

172  Dorothy Abram Modernist literary aesthetics used olfactory representations to speak to an embodied experience that pushed beyond the dualistic representations of prewar literature of the sort that Virginia Woolf, for example, described in her short story Flush: There are no more than two words and one-half for what we smell. The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses in the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. (Ahern 2016, 66–67) For Mansfield, those “infinite gradations” of smell conveyed states of altered consciousness that is characteristic of her modernist writings. In my analyses of her stories that follow, her use of scent expresses the psychological and political breakthroughs (and breakdowns) of her characters. She was a leader of this new style of writing through her innovations in the short story. Mansfield’s early death speaks to the enormity of her contribution to the development of modernist aesthetics in literature in such a short life span. Prelude & The Doll’s House Mansfield used smell to convey the emotional content of a scene to illuminate the underlying social class and the practices performed in that world. In her short story Prelude, in reference to the kindly lower-class worker who delivers the young sisters to their new home after their mother has left them behind, the first impression of this man is one of olfactory delight: he “smelled of nuts and new wooden boxes.” In Carnation, smell is identity. Down below, she knew, there was a cobbled courtyard with stable buildings wound it. That was why the French room always smelled faintly of ammonia. It wasn’t unpleasant; it was even part of the French language for Katie—something sharp and vivid and—and—biting! Clearly, for Mansfield, scent heralds a deeper desire to know another and break through class distinctions. In The Doll’s House, the scent of the newly varnished toy is repugnant to the socially prominent aunt: When dear old Mrs. Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells she sent the children a doll’s house. It was so big that the carter and Pat carried it into the courtyard, and there it stayed, propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room door. No harm could come of it; it was summer. And perhaps the smell of paint would have gone off by the time it had to be taken in. For really, the smell of paint coming from that doll’s house … But the smell of paint was quite enough to make anyone seriously ill, in Aunt Beryl’s opinion. Even before the sacking was taken off. And when it was… The joy of the toy’s acquisition transforms the smell into one of ecstatic delight for the children.

Scent and Seduction  173 There stood the doll’s house…. But perfect, perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell? It was part of the joy, part of the newness. “Open it quickly, someone!” Scent, then, may be said to be Mansfield’s underlying means to describe her characters’ true desire. “It was part of the joy,” she explains, transgressing sensory, social, and gendered boundaries. Here Mansfield anticipated Cixous’ notion of joy (jouissance) as the integrating force of female identity (Cixous 1976; Cixous and Clément 1986; Gilbert 1986). The Garden Party Evidence of Mansfield’s love of scents and their literary meaning is replete in her short stories where scent holds a special capacity to reveal the inner worlds of her characters in the social contexts in which they lived. For example, in The Garden Party, the narrator is a wealthy, upper-class daughter who offers to help the workers prepare for her family’s garden party. There she observes a workman plucking a sprig of lavender. Already the men [carters] had shouldered their staves and were making for the place. Only the tall fellow was left. He bent down, pinched a sprig of lavender, put his thumb and forefinger to his nose and snuffed up the smell. When Laura saw that gesture, she forgot all about the karakas in her wonder at him caring for things like that—caring for the smell of lavender? How many men that she knew would have done such a thing? Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought. Why couldn’t she have workmen for her friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper? She would get on much better with men like these. The gesture of caring for and responding to the smell of lavender is presented here as an extraordinary act that serves to upend class distinctions. It enables Laura, the upper-class protagonist, to judge the workingman as her equal and desired friend. She mocks class distinctions and, in the youthful emergent awareness of this difference, she rails against “the absurd class distinctions. Well, she didn’t feel them. Not a bit. Not an atom…” The scene may have reflected Mansfield’s own precarious class status in London as a colonial woman writer. “A New Zealand colonial from an upwardly mobile bourgeois background … she was always on the margins of established English intellectual life… she remained always an outsider…,” wrote Patricia Moran (1996, 13). Moreover, “promiscuity and sexual experimentation,” often the theme of her stories as well as her life, meant that she also was in the margins of her literary and social circles (Nicholson 1976: LVW 2:59). That marginal placement offered her a unique perspective on the class and gender distinctions of the times and the sociology of scent. “They taught me: The lower class smells,” wrote George Orwell about the sort of prejudice expressed through smell that was dominant in the ideology of the times (Abram 2017; Babilon 2017; Classen 1994; Corbin 1988). It was the “stink” of poverty that set the classes apart. Accordingly, Woolf judged Mansfield’s stories by Mansfield’s personal smell: the stories “permeate

174  Dorothy Abram one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in one’s nostrils,” Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West (Nicholson 1976: VWL 4.374; Smith 1999, 36). In The Garden Party, Laura subsequently resists taking in that environment to avoid the realization of mortality she is about to confront. She evades this awareness by clinging in her imagination to the smell and sensory impressions of the wealthy party that she had just left: Here she was going down the hill to somewhere where a man lay dead, and she couldn’t realize it. Why couldn’t she? She stopped a minute. And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, and the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her. She had no room for anything else… Wearing her extravagant party hat that is decorated with artificial gold daisies, Laura travels through the impoverished part of the neighborhood to deliver leftover pastries to the poor family of a recently deceased carter. Laura describes the neighborhood as “disgusting and sordid.” Shall we wonder about Laura’s recently achieved enlightenment about class relations? What happened to the solidarity Laura felt through her observation of the carter and the smell of lavender? Mansfield leads the reader to question Laura’s previous epiphany. Laura continues to travel to the wake of the deceased carter, wearing her mother’s flamboyant flower-decorated hat for which she apologizes profusely to the wife of the deceased when she arrives at their house. In this scene, Laura appears to be trapped by her wealthy upbringing that the scent of lavender had helped her realize. By this time in the story, the smell of lavender has faded, the canna lilies at the party are described without scent, and Laura wears artificial golden daisies on her head. In her final words to her brother, she asks: “Isn’t life…” not finishing her question. Mansfield leaves her readers to wonder about the possibilities of meaning inherent in Laura’s unfinished query. Has Laura learned from her experience with the lavender-loving carter? Or, has she regressed to that formerly privileged class status that she tried to flee—as represented in the hat that she continues to wear into the poor neighborhood and the luxurious artificiality of its flowers? This story of scent and privilege cuts us off from the comfort of a conciliatory conclusion and leaves the reader only with ongoing questions about class and consciousness. Mansfield’s modernist storytelling inspires “new expressions” out of the relics of tradition. Bliss For Mansfield, smell creates and intensifies symbolic meaning around the class and gender politics of her day. Consider, for example, the scent of the jonquils in Mansfield’s short story Bliss. Like the flowers in her other short stories, Summer Idylle and Carnation, the stories share similar narrative elements: both suffused with homoerotic intensity and an overpoweringly sensual atmosphere attributed to the perfume of flowers (manuka flowers and carnations) … acts as a sexual temptation, a tantalizing promise of satisfaction for transgressive appetites,

Scent and Seduction  175 wrote Kathryn Simpson (2015, 190). In Bliss it is the smell of jonquils that creates that same erotically transgressive atmosphere. How strong the jonquils smelled in the warm room. Too strong? Oh, no. And yet, as though overcome, she flung down on a couch and pressed her hands to her eyes. ‘I’m too happy—too happy!’ she murmured. As the protagonist Bertha presses her hands to her eyes and breathes in the overwhelming scent of the jonquil flowers, she sees on her eyelids “the symbol of her life” in the “wide open blossoms” of the pear tree in her garden. Bertha—for this moment at least—lives in a world of scent and seduction. Similar to this appearance of the pear tree in Bliss for Bertha, scent proves overwhelming while the visual rescues Katie, the protagonist, from its intensity in Mansfield’s short story Carnation: She made a warm, white cup of her fingers—the carnation inside. Oh, the scent! It floated across to Katie. It was too much. Katie turned away to the dazzling light outside the window. Whereas the tree was the visual symbol of Bertha’s sexuality with its “wide open blossoms,” the scent of the jonquils creates the experience of totality—the bliss—and the mystical moment of union that she desires. Uniting visual and olfactory perceptions into a single experience, Bertha demonstrates her anticipated bliss in the expected arrival of her dinner guest Pearl Fulton. In The Garden Party, the reader is told about vases of flowers (the canna lilies) that have no scent description attached to them. They are the party flowers of this wealthy event, not symbols of personal erotic arousal that the jonquils represent in Bliss. The canna lilies have color, but no scent described. Mansfield was intentional in her employment of scent as a literary device through its presence and, in addition, with its obvious absence in her stories. Scent is contextualized in her stories in transgressive and provocative situations to gain its significance as the carrier of sexual and social meaning and modernist innovation. In Bliss, that transgressive desire is that Bertha loves women: […] a “find” of Bertha’s called Pearl Fulton. What Miss Fulton did, Bertha did not know. They had met at the club and Bertha had fallen in love with her. As she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had something strange about them. When Pearl arrives, “Bertha smiled with that little air of proprietorship that she always assumed while her women finds were new and mysterious…” Yet Bertha cannot admit her desire, living, as she does, in a conventional and comfortable heterosexual marriage. Feeling, but not able to admit, her conflict, Bertha attempts to rationalize and dismiss her excitement. “I have everything…” Bertha explains. But something still is missing. Her desire for women cannot be admitted; it remains a “strange” feeling, unarticulated and unable to be articulated. Bliss tells the story of this repressed desire and

176  Dorothy Abram its inability to be satisfied within the constraints of twentieth-century marriage, its social norms, and gender politics. Repressed desire is what Mansfield had intended to reform in that “new mould for thoughts and feelings” in post–WWI modernist aesthetics. The setting of Bliss is a dinner party and the guests portrayed are conventional artists who display the deadening superficiality of social status in upper-class England—except, that is, for Bertha and Pearl Fulton, who are described with the sensory details and delights of light, color, scent, and symbol. Bertha believes that Pearl is sending her unspoken sexual messages and intimate innuendos throughout the evening. What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could fan—fan—start blazing— blazing—the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do with? […] But Bertha knew, suddenly, as if the longest, most intimate look had passed between them—as if they has said to each other: “You too?” that Pearl Fulton … was feeling just what she was feeling… Bertha feels “all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms” as she stands next to Pearl by the pear tree. Bertha is in ecstasy over this imagined rapprochement. Until … until her desire is quashed by her inadvertent discovery that Pearl is actually having an affair with her husband; it was only her repressed desire and active imagination that gave meaning to Bertha of Pearl’s casual glances and gestures. This short story is one of Mansfield’s most powerful criticisms of restrictive gender and sexual norms and their frustrations within society. Yet Mansfield is not contained by this silencing force [of social taboo] … The point is to indicate the psychological confusion caused by the ideology of heterosexual conformity, an ideology which prevents Bertha from understanding and expressing her own bisexuality. The ambiguity of Mansfield’s method skillfully replicates the uncertainty of the experience. (Head 2009, 30) By “replicating the uncertainty of the experience,” Mansfield has made her reader feel the oppressiveness of Bertha’s repressed sexuality within a twentieth-century heterosexual society. As with the story of Laura in The Garden Party, Mansfield leaves the reader wondering, through an ending that is left unexplained, about reality at the story’s conclusion. For Bertha, scent was seduction into an unexpressed and hidden meaning of repressed desire. Scent was disruptive, invading the protagonist’s heterosexual marriage with homosexual desire. The enigmatic title of this short story—Bliss—may refer to the expression “Ignorance is bliss …” (Moran 1996, 41) and to the experience of Bertha at the start of the story. At the end of the tale, however, when Bertha discovers that her imagined lesbian lover is actually having an affair with her husband, she, in her disappointment, lives out the ending to the aphorism: “[…] ’tis folly to be wise.” Bertha discovered the truth that ended her blissful state. Yet, the disillusionment of Bertha’s state of bliss exceeds simple sexual frustration. The shattering of the “fusion of the erotic, mystical, and political” is the outcome of sexual oppression (Gilbert 1986). The final line of the story displays the stillness

Scent and Seduction  177 that now replaces the previous “hysteria,” “drunkenness,” and incessant motion of Bertha’s unfulfilled bliss: “Oh what is going to happen now?” she cried. But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still. Mansfield’s endings are as enigmatic as ever, and they continue to inspire the reader to question the gendered politics of women’s place within a male-dominated and sexually repressive society.

Stench and Status As others in her time, Mansfield also used unpleasant olfactory cues to signify lower class status, but with a different purpose. Mansfield used smell to indicate social vulnerability, particularly concerning the status of women as they suffer in patriarchal British society. In her short story, Pictures, about a female musician who cannot find work because of her weight, looks, and gender, this female protagonist, Ada Moss, resorts to prostitution to be able to afford food and to pay her rent. Her debased social status is conveyed through the stale smells that pervade her rented room: Eight o’clock in the morning. Miss Ada Moss lay in a black iron bedstead, staring up at the ceiling. Her room, a Bloomsbury top floor back, smelled of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before. In The Swing of the Pendulum, the threat of the landlady to evict the narrator Viola from her room for not paying the rent is met with a piercing sense of the old woman’s smell: “Filthy old beast! Ugh! And the smell of her—like stale cheese and damp washing.” The reader follows Viola’s emotional transformation through her differing olfactory responses to the vase of flowers in her room that we witness shortly will be revealed to act as a punctum in this story. The only thing of life in the room was a jar of hyacinths given to her by the landlady’s daughter: it stood on the table exuding a sickly perfume from its plump petals; there were even rich buds unfolding, and the leaves shone like oil. Following this “sickly perfume” smell, Viola is lured from her room as “a faint scent of delicious cigarette smoke penetrated her room. She sniffed at it. Smiling again.” With the thoughts of the financial possibilities and promises that this unknown man who was smoking in the hallway might give her, she fantasizes about becoming “a great courtesan.” Viola dreams of “perfumes” and becomes “drugged with happiness.” As “that sweet scent of cigarette smoke floated into her dreams,” Viola decides to pursue this man who might offer her the luxuries of her scented fantasies. The strange man has been waiting for her in the hallway and, as she breathes in “the fresh, strong smell of his healthy body,” Viola meets him there. In the excitement of inviting him into her room, Viola’s mood is transformed, as witnessed here through her altered perception of scent (the punctum). Unlike the previous description of the “sickly perfume” that the hyacinths emitted, now those same flowers smell differently:

178  Dorothy Abram In that moment together in the passage a miracle happened. Her room was quite changed –it was full of sweet light and the scent of hyacinth flowers … Viola ran over to the table and put her arms around the jar of hyacinth flowers. “Beautiful! Beautiful!” she cried—burying her head in the flowers—and sniffing greedily at the scent. Over the leaves she looked at the man and laughed. As this stranger attempts to rape her, Viola fights him off, biting through the leather of his glove to injure him. She escapes from his hold and then orders him to leave. Her mood shifts to elation over her triumph: “A sensation of glorious, intoxicating happiness flooded Viola… That was her first fight, and she’d won—she’d conquered the beast –all by herself….” The swing of the pendulum, the title of this short story, moves the protagonist from a fantasy of being the well-kept possession of men to realizing her own strength in resisting and fighting against them. The story ends with her return to her impoverished boyfriend, as she is now drained of the “rage and disgust” she had felt for him in the beginning of the tale. Through the theme of scent and seduction, Mansfield critiqued the gender politics of female submission and its potential means of personal agency. Je ne parle pas français Mansfield’s story Je ne parle pas français used smell for her own personal sense of vindication against a previous lover, writer Francis Carco. The narrator of this story, Raoul Duquette, is a loathsome character repeatedly described as a “fox terrier,” the dogs typically used in foxhunts because of their superior sense of smell. In this story, scent is not a beneficent pathway to desire and knowledge but literary revenge on an unhappy affair that Mansfield had with Carco. Mansfield’s repeated renderings of him (Carco is the character Duquette) as a little fox terrier communicates her mocking displeasure with him. And then I [Duquette] stood on the shore alone, more like a little fox-terrier than ever […] curiosity couldn’t have kept my fox-terrier nose away…. Instead of being the masculine hunting dog, Mansfield describes Duquette as being perfumed and effeminate, establishing the themes of sexual ambiguity and victimization that fill the tale. Out of my sight, you little perfumed fox-terrier of a Frenchman,” said she [a woman named Mouse who is one of his victims]. Mansfield portrayed Duquette as an abusive and narcissistic man who uses women for his own benefit and whims. His despicable character as a pimp is represented by metaphorically naming him as a little dog that is perfumed. By posing this olfactory opposition (as both an active dog that smells out the prey in the hunt and, at the same time, as the dog that is the passive object of perfuming), Mansfield communicated her disdain for the protagonist’s gender politics and social manipulation. Maud Ellman explained, “Duquette unsettles gender categories, as well as those of sexual orientation. Both gay and straight, he … doubles as a pimp, procuring phony virgins for elderly old men” (2018, 21).

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Conclusion Mansfield used scent and smell in her stories in subtle but powerful political critiques. Flowers, floral scents, and other smells repeatedly signaled repressed erotic desire and social subjugation. That desire went beyond the physical to reveal, resist, and critique specific social norms—class status and gender politics—in which these erotic scents were transgressively experienced. The reader confronts Mansfield’s unwillingness to provide a transparent answer to the dilemmas she constructed in her stories. Such a cognitive confusion is the power and gift of her modernist writing. It enables the reader to question the social institutions and colonizing structures that continue to proscribe contemporary freedoms more than a century later. As she grew to become an artistic innovator with a strong literary reputation, Mansfield contracted tuberculosis and died in 1923 at the age of 34. Throughout their lives, Mansfield and Woolf remained literary rivals and “jealous friends” (Midarikawa and Sweeney 2017), though they never overcame the sensory, social, and sexual divide that defined their different literary, personal, and social aesthetics. Apart from their dissenting evaluations of scent and their personal rivalries, Woolf and Mansfield also had great respect for each other as writers. Indeed, Woolf was famous for admitting her complicated feelings for Mansfield: “I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of” (Nicholson 1976, DVW 1980, 2:227). Though their writings read so similarly that literary scholar Bernikow claimed an “affinity of consciousness” between them (Bernikow 1980, 127; Moran 1996, 8), that affinity never extended to scent in Woolf’s personal tastes or writing (Alpers 1980, 254). Certainly, this avoidance was a limitation that Woolf acknowledged. Woolf mourned Mansfield’s untimely death: gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont [sic] read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer. More generously I felt, But [sic] though I can do this better then she could, where is she, who could do what I can’t! (Smith 1999, 40) Scent was one of the many things that Katherine Mansfield did so well in her contribution to the modernist aesthetic that revolutionized the literature and consciousness of her times.

Bibliography Abram, Dorothy. 2017. Seven Scents: Healing and the Aromatic Imagination. Philadelphia and London: Singing Dragon Press. Ahern, Eleanor Christine. 2016. The Olfactory Shift in Literature of the First World War: The Reawakening of Smell. PhD diss., University of Adelaide, Australia. Ailwood, Sarah. 2005. “Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Tensions of Empire during the Modernist Period.” Kunapipi 27:2, 255–267. Alpers, Antony. 1980. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. New York: Viking Press. Babilon, Daniela. 2017. The Power of Smell in American Literature. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Barthes, Roland. 1980. Camera Lucida. London: Hill and Wang.

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Bell, Anne Olivier. 1980. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace. [cited in text as DVW] Bernikow, Louise. 1980. Among Women. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs, 1:4 (summer), 875–893. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betty Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma the Cultural History of Smell. New York: Routledge. Corbin, Alain. 1988. The Foul and the Fragrant Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Cupere, Peter. 2015. Curator, “The Smell of War.” https://scentculture.institute/ the-smell-of-war-the-exhibition-the-smell-of-war Ellman, Maud. 2018. “Powers of Disgust: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.” In Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, edited by Christine Froula, Gerri Kimber, and Todd Martin, 11–28. Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Fjellestad, Danuta. 2001. “Toward an Aesthetic of Smell, or, the Foul and the Fragrant in Contemporary Literature.” Cauce: Revista de filologia y su didactica 24, 637–652. Gilbert, Sandra. 1986. Introduction. In The Newly Born Woman, edited by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. Translated by Betty Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Head, Dominic. 2009. The Modernist Short Story A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Ann Rosalind. 1981. “Writing the Body toward an Understanding of L’Écriture Féminine,” Feminist Studies 7:2 (Winter), 247–263. Kaplan, Sydney Jane. 1991. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kascakova, Janka and Gerri Kimber. 2015. Katherine Mansfield & Continental Europe Connections and Influences. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kimber, Gerri. 2014. Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story. New York: Palgrave Pivot. Kimber, Gerri, Todd Martin, and Delia da Sousa Correa. 2014. Katherine Mansfield and World War One. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mansfield, Katherine Short stories on-line at www.KatherineMansfieldSociety.org Bliss (1918) Carnation (1918) Je ne parle pas français (1918) The Doll’s House (1921) The Garden Party (1921) Prelude (1917) Summer Idylle (1906) The Swing of the Pendulum (1911) Maxwell, Catherine. 2018. Scents and Sensibilities Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Midorikawa, Emily and Emma Claire Sweeney. 2017. A Secret Sisterhood the Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Moran, Ines Valle. 2016. “Une Histoire des odeurs: The Olfactory Model World in Primo Levi’s Narratives.” In Interpreting Primo Levi Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Arthur Chapman and Minna Vuohelainen, 115–127. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

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Moran, Patricia. 1996. Word of Mouth Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Nalbantian, Suzanne. 2002. Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholson, Nigel. 1976. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2 New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [cited in text as LVM] O’Sullivan, Vincent and Margaret Scott. 1987. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [cited in text as CLKM] Rosenthal, Caroline and Dirk Vanderbeke. 2015. Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Simpson, Kathryn. 2015. “‘Strange Flower, Half Opened’: Katherine Mansfield and the Flowering of ‘the Self’.” In Katherine Mansfield & Continental Europe Connections and Influences, edited by Janka Kascakova and Gerri Kimber, 185–201. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Angela. 1999. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

15 The Olfactory Counter-monument Active Smelling and the Politics of Wonder in the Contemporary Museum Brian Goeltzenleuchter Introduction I have come to believe that the practice of art making can make claims about the nature of knowledge and the means by which we understand the world. My practice is unconventional insofar as it privileges the event of experiencing art over the aura surrounding the object that is experienced. I orchestrate events designed to destabilize, or to function outside of the socially prescribed, bourgeois behavior of an artwork. I attempt to test propositions without coercing preordained outcomes. One proposition that recurs often in my work concerns the social use-value of the art museum. This chapter reflects on an ongoing project that uses scent as the focal point for an aesthetic event designed to survey and activate an art museum’s potential to facilitate civic dialog.

Sillage How would your understanding of your city differ if you let your nose, rather than your eyes, lead the way? So begins Sillage, an olfactory artwork I designed in 2011 and have since launched at three urban art museums.1 Every incarnation of Sillage centers on a collection of artist-made scents that represent the major regions of the city in which the partnering museum is based. Each region is comprised of several neighborhoods. The regions are preexisting and are chosen based on their being widely recognized by locals. For example, when Sillage was based in Baltimore, I selected the regions based on preexisting police precinct divisions. For the Los Angeles incarnation of the project, I selected regions based on an interactive map produced by the L.A. Times. In each case, my intent was to use names that locals recognize as specific areas of the city—names that call to mind specific scent memories and associations. I design each collection of scents based on a survey that the museum launches which asks the residents of that city to describe the smells they associate with familiar regions. The museums launch the survey as much as a year in advance of the project. This allows for several hundred residents to take the survey, and gives me time to digest the data and compose scents informed by survey responses. The responses, while occasionally tactless, bear surprising consensus about the regional smells of a city. 2 Once I have a clear idea about what residents think their city smells like, I embark on scent-walks, slowly notating my own perception of neighborhood smells. Each scent that I design can be thought of as a scent-scape: a fragrance in which a distinctive background smell describing the sky and ground creates a foundation, on

The Olfactory Counter-monument  183 top of which episodic smells reveal themselves over time (Porteous 2006, 91). Using perfume-grade materials allows me to craft a scent as a perfumer would, which is to say by creating olfactory accords that allow certain notes to reveal themselves over time. While most perfume caters to middle-class aesthetic conventions, the scents I create, to paraphrase essayist Megan Daum, peddle olfactory stereotypes (Daum 2014). For example, the scent of West Los Angeles—home to Beverly Hills, 90210, among other elite zip codes—is described as “wet lawn gives way to dry air which gives way to the clean sweat of a trophy wife” (Goeltzenleuchter 2014). Whereas, the scent of South Los Angeles is described as “metallic heat and hydraulic fluid pulse over old asphalt” (2014). The reason for these olfactory stereotypes, as Daum (2014) made clear in a 2014 L.A. Times op-ed about Sillage: Los Angeles, is that “Part of the perverse beauty of Los Angeles is that we manage to uphold so many clichés even as we knock them down” (2014). She conceded, not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city’s dominant chord. Not everyone in Hollywood emanates the scent of its ZIP Codes as interpreted by Goeltzenleuchter, which is to say ‘an old lady wearing cheap perfume, a kid sticky with cotton candy and a hipster redolent of sweet tobacco,’ but one whiff of that combination and suddenly it’s unmistakable. (2014) The peddling of olfactory stereotypes is just a foil to spur people to action, a ruse to get people talking. The unselfconscious contempt with which people verbally describe the smell of “the other” points to a kind of intolerance that I suspect would be curtailed—or at least euphemized for the sake of decorum—if they were describing any other sensory phenomena. In addition to eliciting a subjective, visceral reaction, smell originates in a part of the brain resistant to language. As such, most people find it difficult to verbally describe smells. At least that is what I am banking on when, in the weeks leading up to a Sillage event, media begins to promote the project by provocatively describing the smells that will be unveiled. Sillage culminates in a one-day event in which patrons, upon entering the museum, identify the region in which they live to the museum’s staff, who then log the data and spray a corresponding scent on the patron’s wrist.3 The only rule I give museum staff assisting with the project is that if patrons want to smell a neighborhood other than their own, they must approach other patrons and ask to smell them. The word “sillage” is taken from the French word for “wake,” as in the fleeting mark left in the water by a passing ship. This metaphor is commonly used in the perfume world to describe the fragrant trail that is left after the scented body has crossed one’s path. In spite of Sillage taking place within the context of the museum—an institution with no shortage of social mores—there is surprisingly little reticence among patrons about approaching a stranger and asking for a sniff. In fact, the sensory wonder of consuming olfactory art and the intimate thrill of transgressing social and institutional norms seem to motivate even the least impetuous of patrons to participate. And all of this against the backdrop of the museum, in which, as hundreds of documentary photos from Sillage projects will attest, the painting, sculpture, and other cultural objects on exhibit function essentially as décor (see Figure 15.1). At least for a few, short

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Figure 15.1 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters Museum of Art, 2016.

hours, Sillage activates the museum’s site as a platform for participation in public life by using neighborhood smells to initiate informal conversations with visitors around the topic of urbanism. Hannah Arendt might refer to this effect as the vita activa (Arendt 1958, 12). Unlike many philosophers who would prefer the head (or at least the mind) be permanently detached from the body, Arendt championed a philosophy of public activity—being present speaking and listening, which is to say remembering.4 Her metaphor of the polis was built on material culture, which extended even into the natural environment.5 In The Human Condition, Arendt structures the text around the ascending hierarchy of labor, work, and action—which she considers to be the three fundamental human activities. At the bottom of her hierarchy, labor is that which allows biological life to exist; those things humans share with other animals, which is why she likens labor to slavery, as our very existence depends on it.6 Work is designated by those artificial constructions that are grafted onto the natural; these are often the mundane things, such as cars, buildings, and roads, that are made by humans and designed to outlive their makers. It is around these constructions that culture, the world and its associated worldviews, are structured. While labor is based on the individual and is therefore inherently private, work—both its material and metaphorical instantiations—is cultural and inherently public. For Arendt, to be active in the

The Olfactory Counter-monument  185 world, one must be in public—that literal and figurative sphere not created by god or nature, but created by the work of men.

The Olfactory Counter-monument I’ve always thought of Sillage as an olfactory public artwork—or, to put it less succinctly but more precisely, an olfactory artwork made for Arendt’s conception of a public. Accompanying every incarnation of Sillage is a brief statement that attempts to situate the project within the context of new genre public art7: In public art, the idea of collective memory is often considered when designing monuments and memorials. Throughout the world, the built environment is full of objects that claim to embody a specific public’s memory. However, as opposed to embodying collective memory, many such objects have been criticized for displacing it. Through their permanent materials, masculine nature, and rigid meaning, conventional monuments have been challenged for being impotent, symbolic markers unable to adapt to a public that is constantly in flux. With the olfactory public artwork, this is inverted. ‘Counter-monuments’ like Sillage are highly ephemeral, physically unimposing, and capable of generating discourse chiefly because they provoke memory. (Goeltzenleuchter 2014) I borrow the term “counter-monument” from James E. Young, whose writing about 1980s German public art has deeply informed my approach to working with ephemeral materials and thinking about the shelf life of an idea: In dissipating itself over time, the counter-monument would mimic time’s own dispersion, become more like time than like memory. It would remind us that the very notion of linear time assumes a memory of a past moment: time as the perpetually measured distance between this moment and the next, between this instant and a past remembered. In this sense, the counter-monument asks us to recognize that time and memory are interdependent, in dialectical flux. (Young 1992, 76) Olfactory space is fundamentally temporal. We smell because scent molecules, known as odorants, evaporate in the air, which gives the impression of an odor when inhaled. Not coincidentally, many of these odorants happen to be the olfactory by-products of the very material culture—the cars, buildings, and roads—that, for Arendt, constituted the world of humans (see Figure 15.2). Most odors are made up of dozens of different-sized scent molecules. Depending on the size of the molecule, evaporation takes place quickly or slowly, which is to say the intensity of some odors diminish within seconds or minutes, while others last hours, even days. It’s also why some dimensions of an odor are more or less pronounced at different phases of its evaporation. Composing odors for an art experience is therefore a temporal and spatial proposition. Left to their own devices, odors do not respect boundaries, which makes them spatially hostile. Yet due to their invisibility, they can have arresting perceptual effects that, in my opinion, compare in visceral terms to experiencing the physical and material qualities of sculpture. However, as opposed to a conventional

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Figure 15.2 Documentation of building demolition in Baltimore, 2016.

sculpture or monument that taunts time with its seemingly permanent materials only to sooner or later succumb to it, the ephemeral nature of the olfactory countermonument mediates the experience of time by continually reminding participants that smell will soon be, at best, a memory.

The Dialogical Paradox If temporality is at the core of the olfactory counter-monument, then there is an implied dialectical responsibility on the part of participants to resist forgetting. But forgetting what? What they smelled? Not entirely. In the case of Sillage, the “what” is related to the idea that the smells of the city were disembodied from the urban and suburban worlds that produced them and relocated to the museum, a site normally distinguished by its antiseptic attitude toward odors (Goeltzenleuchter 2018, 248). The olfactory by-products of tourism, industry, transportation, gentrification, and a host of other factors arrested patrons at every turn, offering idealized, if incomplete, experiences that needed to be talked into completeness. In his unique contribution to the phenomenology of olfactory environments, Magic, Perfume, Dream …, Alfred Gell (2006) argues that smell is an ideal that “hovers on the edge of actualization” (404) in a way that is completed by the experience of the smell in the context that created it. In Sillage, the city smells were divorced from their origins. However, the

The Olfactory Counter-monument  187 scents I designed for each incarnation of Sillage were completely crowd-sourced by residents of the city, which suggests that participants would have experienced most of the smells in the context that created them. So part of the challenge for patrons in solving the phenomenological puzzle had to do with talking about where they were (memory) and how they felt (emotion) when they experienced those scents. Here is where we arrive at what I call the “dialogical paradox” of the olfactory counter-monument. As previously mentioned, not only are most people unable to identify common smells by name, they also have a difficult time describing what they smell. To be fair, most languages have very few, if any, words that are used to specifically describe smell.8 The reason for this, scholars speculate, is that smell is not processed linguistically; smell bypasses the thalamus and goes straight to the limbic system where it is processed by the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb is directly connected to the hippocampus and amygdala, two areas of the brain responsible for memory and emotion, respectively. This neural processing route distinguishes smell from taste, touch, sight, and sound. It also suggests why smell may elicit deeper memories and stronger emotions than the other senses.9 So, whereas smell poses a challenge to linguistic sense-making, it also stimulates a type of collective wonder that leads to active dialog. Hence the dialogical paradox. But the direction a dialog takes can be highly unpredictable. One reason is that people experience smells subjectively. For example, the Sillage scent of West Baltimore—a dusty, musty, watery smell (see Figure 15.2)—is described as “decaying air of demolished building washes down sidewalk” (Goeltzenleuchter 2016). The involuntary reaction to that scent might elicit hope in some residents who relate it to urban renewal, while it might evoke rage in others who equate it with the gentrification of low-income neighborhoods. In yet others it may trigger the nostalgia of a first kiss in a ghetto alleyway. While for others, still, it may simply be an inconvenient stench that penetrated the air-conditioning of their luxury automobile as it glided through the very same ghetto. The wide divergence of reactions to smell astonishes most participants, who, in the safe confines of the art museum, can reflect upon and discuss these olfactory triggers. One upshot of their astonishment is to carry on sustained conversation with others in a way that does not prioritize or invalidate the subjective experience. Rather, it is through the plurality of narratives that the spatial and temporal experiences brought about through dialog actualize these scents. Ultimately, it is the memory of these dialogs that should be preserved. Engaging in the dialogical paradox activates an art audience and changes its role from spectator to participant (see Figure 15.3). In The Human Condition, Arendt noted that to be political, to exist in a polis, required speech—rhetoric—rather than force or violence. A champion of plurality, she theorized a public domain that was built on the “simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives” (Arendt 1958, 57). This domain, or “space of appearance,” was intended to endure by being enacted and reenacted by subsequent generations. For Arendt, actions cannot take place in isolation. Public acts depended on the plurality of perspectives and identities of the citizenry, each containing the a priori potential to invoke novel and unexpected contributions; by being witnessed in public, one’s contribution could be evaluated and remembered. Arendt’s metaphor of the polis was based on the ancient Greeks, who had a very exclusive understanding of what it meant to be a free man.10 I don’t fault her for using this metaphor, particularly since she was reaching back to the ancients for an antidote

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Figure 15.3 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters Museum of Art, 2016.

to the “loss of the world” (Arendt 1958, 52) that she viewed as a by-product of modernity. But not all features of that metaphor translate when scaled to accommodate the multicultural plurality of the global present. Accelerated globalization has interconnected once disparate cultures, creating constellations of temporalities and modes of experiencing time. This makes for a fundamentally more ruptured public domain than could be conjured by her phrase, the “simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives” (Arendt 1958, 57).

Chasms in Olfactory Time In their book, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art, Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund persuasively argue that our present is characterized by a “multitude of different temporalities on different scales,” which run parallel but often interconnect (Cox and Lund 2016, 9). They distinguish a colloquial definition of the contemporary (i.e. “the now”) from a critical definition of the contemporary. While the former category periodizes the present era, the latter exemplifies an experiential way of registering coexisting temporalities, however unevenly distributed and subjectively experienced they might be.11 Cox and Lund noted, “Put simply, our relation to time is constituted or ‘mediated’ by the technical means through which it is apprehended” (Cox and Lund, 27). No doubt, in this era of the global present, particularly in cities throughout the world, we apprehend time differently. And yet, most of us overlook the potential of smell

The Olfactory Counter-monument  189 to apprehend the present. Smells spatialize and temporalize our environments. With every breath, we are offered updated olfactory data. It may be a phenomenological truism to state that the senses mediate our perception of the world, but it’s worth pointing out that smell could be the least mediated sense, insofar as by ingesting air molecules we are directly interfacing with the environment. This feature of smell can shake us awake to the real-time differences—the chasms in olfactory time—in which others experience the present. The attempt to make connections between chasms in olfactory time is an oftenoverlooked aspect of Sillage, which as a dialogical art form, prompts public conversation but does not provide stable footing as to where one should begin talking. Topically, conversations often oscillate between personal, cultural, political, economic, and technological registers. These topics begin and end, transform and overlap in no set order. Conversations tend to be experiential rather than technical or theoretical; they tend to be story-based, putting the narrator at the dynamic position of the experiencing subject. As rhetorical connections are developed, interconnections are made between chasms in olfactory time. It all begins with a slowing down and, hopefully, a synching of time. A pause to consider what is it exactly that I (and you) smell? (See Figure 15.4).

Figure 15.4 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters Museum of Art, 2016.

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The Contemporary Museum By proposing a relational aesthetics situated around active smelling, talking, and listening, Sillage doesn’t so much resist Immanuel Kant’s formalist aesthetics as it sidesteps them. Kant’s assertion that scent is not a vehicle for serious art holds little interest for me; there is already more than enough compelling evidence exposing his bias against smell, which when coupled with the current commercial, academic, and technological interest in olfaction makes for a persuasive case that the sense of smell is alive and well (Kant 2007, 158). However, the lingering hierarchy of the senses is a rather benign reminder of an Enlightenment hubris that has institutionalized racism and promoted cultural superiority.12 For that reason I am profoundly interested in the impact Kant’s ideas have had on the shaping of museum culture, and have devoted my practice to proposing alternatives that resist its hegemony. Kant’s presence has long eclipsed the domain of aesthetics, penetrating the literal and figurative structure of the institutions that facilitate, contextualize, and disseminate art. The fact that it’s only marginally more difficult to imagine a world before art museums than it is to imagine a world before art suggests how deeply pervasive Enlightenment thinking is to our own worldview. In order to arrive at a definition of a “contemporary museum” that I argue resists the hegemonic legacies that have existed since the time of Kant, it is necessary to briefly trace the trajectory of the art museum, from the Enlightenment through the postwar, modern era into our current era characterized by neoliberal agendas. The Kantian ideal arose at roughly the same time as the formation of art museums as we know them today. It helped shape the nineteenth-century museum as an aristocratic space for nation-states to educate and inspire its citizens. Those museums were often housed in neoclassical buildings designed to exemplify the kind of high seriousness that inspired self-abdication for the glory and superiority of the nation-state. Exhibitions featured treasured artwork culled from encyclopedic collections and systematically arranged to evoke narratives of national superiority. However, the brutality of the Second World War laid to rest any optimism that a peaceful society of nations could coexist. Moving forward into the Cold War era, capitalist liberal democracy and socialism became competing claims that attempted to protect global human values. As director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. offered a new cultural perspective beyond nationalism. He linked social realism with totalitarianism and championed a bohemian avant-garde producing modern (i.e. “abstract”) art (Barr 1952). Modern art soon became international in scope and was used as an ideological weapon of freedom against socialism (Cockcroft 1974, 39–41). By co-opting a version of Kantian aesthetics for modernist theory, critics such as Clement Greenberg championed a model of modern art that offered an autonomous, seemingly depoliticized viewing experience. The white-cube model of modern art spread throughout the Western world; audiences could go to their regional museum and experience the linear progression of Western art history as naturally as they could walk from one gallery to the next. The late 1980s brought the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it the narrative that communism, too, had fallen. The effect this had on museum culture was multitiered. Free-market values seeped into museum administration at a time when culture wars and austerity measures threatened the status quo. Privatization, or the transferring of public funding for the arts to private sources, forced the museum to revise its mission from being collection-driven to being audiencedriven; marketing and demographics encouraged blockbuster exhibitions, which

The Olfactory Counter-monument  191 mixed spectacle with infotainment to draw crowds and revenue for museums, which were now expected to compete with cinema and concerts for the entertainment dollar. Museums became brands, commissioning blue-chip architects to design flagship campuses; the most elite even franchised their brand around the globe. Yet at auction, many museums found themselves competing with members of their own boards of trustees—often unsuccessfully—for the so-called “best” work on the market. Some of those same trustees have begun opening their own private museums, perversely receiving tax breaks from the United States federal government for doing so. Culturally speaking, we are far from the Enlightenment quest for inquiry. Yet, as museums populate the globe, they bring with them vestiges of the Kantian paradigm: auratic objects, usually static and visual, exist for our consideration in buildings that produce architecturally determined behaviors that, at best, limit what art is capable of doing. Working against the pervasiveness of this hegemony should be a chief concern of the contemporary museum. By “contemporary museum” I don’t mean museums of contemporary art. I mean museums, which, regardless of the holdings in their collection, aspire to deal with a critical contemporaneity through their mission and programming. One among many reference points for this topic is Claire Bishop’s (2013) book-length essay, Radical Museology or What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art. Therein she asks, “Can a museum be anti-hegemonic?” (56). She answers in the affirmative, introducing her concept of “dialectical contemporaneity” (23) as exemplified through the practice of three museums.13 She argues that these museums define themselves against neoliberal interests that have “creatively and intellectually crippled” many of today’s museums, which use blockbuster exhibitions to pander to mass audiences, corporate investors, and influential donors: These museums create multi-temporal remapping of history and artistic production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks, rather than opting for a global inclusivity that pulls everything into the same narrative. An apt term to describe the result of these activities is the constellation, a word used by Walter Benjamin to describe a Marxist project of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and properties… [R] ather than thinking of the museum as a storehouse of treasures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons. (56) When I conceived of Sillage, I imagined the museum playing the role of Arendt’s metaphorical polis, a space of appearance, where people come together to form communities of memory, to make their appearance explicit (see Figure 15.5). I knew that the museum’s change in role would not come with a change in costume—that its core values, as exemplified by everything from its policies, to its architecture, to its personnel would remain the same. But I welcomed that. The figure/ground relationship that distinguished what the museum temporarily became from what it previously had been—and no doubt would resume being after Sillage concluded—challenged both patrons and museum staff to expand their imaginations by taking in the relevant cues, reflecting on them, and wondering about how this museum experience differed from previous ones. In so doing, the project resisted the forces of hegemony by using, of all things, air.

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Figure 15.5 Sillage: Baltimore, olfactory public artwork launched at The Walters Museum of Art, 2016.

Notes 1 Sillage premiered in 2011 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, in 2014 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), and in 2016 at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 2 By “tactless” I mean that when respondents are unable to verbally articulate specific smell phenomena, they tend to rely on pejorative metaphors or insensitive descriptions. 3 For non-residents I design a smell called “other,” which usually evokes hotel soap or suntan lotion. 4 Arendt focused on activity (praxis) and speech (lexis), apparently presuming listening was a by-product of being an audience to speech. But in our age of partisan hackery, it’s worth enunciating what was likely self-evident to Arendt—that there is no speaking without listening. 5 Arendt’s concept of the polis was clearly metaphorical: The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. Thus the famous motto: ‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis’ (1958, 198) 6 It may be necessary to elaborate on Arendt’s concept of “labor,” because likening it to slavery may sound offensive to modern readers. Drawing on the worldview of the ancients, Arendt distinguished the private, domestic domain from the public, political domain. She

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likened the domestic world to slavery because, in order for the species to survive, humans have no choice but to eat and procreate, which consequently involves a kind of compulsory service. The circular nature of this experience—eat, digest, find more food, and repeat—is no different from any other biological entity, which is why it occupies the lowest category of her hierarchy of what it means to be human (1958, 83). I am perfectly cheerful about the many neologisms that have arisen over the past 20 years to describe art forms that derive meaning from intersubjective encounters. But I go back to Suzanne Lacy’s (1996, 19) term, “new genre public art,” not only because it preceded most of the current practices but because by having “public art” in its name, it implicates the genre of public art, which, at least in the United States has been a colossal failure. For a popular science explanation of the phenomenon, see: www.wired.com/2014/11/ whats-up-with-that-smells-language/. But as Larry Shiner and Yulia Kriskovets (2007) keenly pointed out, although smell originates in the limbic system, it still winds up in the cortex, which is why it leaves us with more than simply “a sensuous buzz and altered mood” (276). It excluded women, slaves, and non-land-owning Greek men. I encounter this all the time when encountering so-called contemporary artists. One might refer to his practice as “contemporary” solely because he is alive now. While another might refer to his practice as “contemporary” because of the ways in which his work intersects with or somehow addresses the complexities of the global present. “Enlightenment philosophy was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular European perceptions of the human race. The numerous writings on race by Hume, Kant and Hegel played a strong role in articulating Europe's sense not only of its cultural but also racial superiority” (Eze, 1997, p. 5). Bishop’s (2013) concept of “dialectical contemporaneity” is not altogether different from that proposed by Cox and Lund (2016). Not only does it resist presentist ideologies of demography and market research, but it also organizes itself around the focal points, temporality and value.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Barr, Alfred H. 1952. “Is Modern Art Communistic?” The New York Times Magazine, December 14, 1952. Bishop, Claire. 2013. Radical Museology or, What's 'Contemporary' in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig. Cockcroft, Eva. 1974. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War.” Artforum 12, no. 10 (June): 39–41. Cox, Geoff, and Jacob Lund. 2016. The Contemporary Condition. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Daum, Meghan. 2014. “Op-Ed: Smells like… a Westsider: All Wet Lawn and the Sweat of a Trophy Wife.” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2014. Eze, E. Chukwudi. 1997. Race and Enlightenment. Cambridge: Blackwell. Gell, Alfred. 2006. “Magic, Perfume, Dream ….” In Jim Drobnick (ed.), The Smell Culture Reader (pp. 400–410). Oxford: Berg. Goeltzenleuchter, Brian. 2018. “Scenting the Antiseptic Institution.” In Victoria Henshaw (ed.), Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques and Challenges (pp. 248–258). New York: Routledge. Goeltzenleuchter, Brian. 2016. “Sillage: Baltimore.” www.bgprojects.com/home/2017/9/4/ sillage-baltimore. Accessed December 4, 2019. Goeltzenleuchter, Brian. 2014. “Sillage: Los Angeles.” www.bgprojects.com/home/2017/9/5/ sillage-los-angeles. Accessed December 4, 2019. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Meredith. New York: Oxford. Lacy, Suzanne. 1996. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press.

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Porteous, J Douglas. 2006. “Smellscape.” In Jim Drobnick (ed.), The Smell Culture Reader (pp. 89–106). Oxford: Berg. Shiner, Larry, and Yulia Kriskovets. 2007. “The Aesthetics of Smelly Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 3: 273–286. Young, James Edward. 1992. “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” In W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Art and the Public Sphere (pp. 49–78). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

16 Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation Toward a New Aesthetics of Smell Lauryn Mannigel

Introduction This chapter presents a critical exploration of my art piece Love Sweat Love, a performative olfactory dating experiment which reveals the perceptual experiences and judgments made about people’s smells. Conceptually, Love Sweat Love challenges smell’s historically pejorative relationship to animalism and sexuality. These ideologies fueled the neglect and moral repression of the sense of smell in aesthetics and modern psychoanalysis. In practice, Love Sweat Love spurs participants to experience other people's smell and to reflect on their feelings about them. The work is part of a series entitled The Aesthetic and Political Potential of Body Scents, which seeks to resist the philosophical repression of the sense of smell and the marginalization of people based on the way they smell in contemporary Western culture by critically dismantling both. The theoretical goal of my argument is to form a new aesthetic approach to smell in order to contribute to restoring its importance in aesthetics. By challenging Immanuel Kant’s influential aesthetic theory of disinterested contemplation of objects which claims universal legitimacy of aesthetic appreciation and judgement (Sibley et al. 2001, 239–242), my approach deliberately draws upon embodied cognition and the role of value attribution to experiences of other people's smell. Kant did not include either smell or taste in his highly influential theory of aesthetics; this reinforced the Cartesian sensory hierarchy prioritizing sight and sound over other perceptual modes. According to him, smell and taste encouraged subjective sensuous experience that failed to foster the cognitive faculty to reach a universal understanding of objects. That is to say, Kant understood smell as lacking in objectivity. Overall, Kant’s ideas have been crucial to the development of a basic comprehension of aesthetics, which is generally still considered relevant today. This requires a “critical and reflective attitude” toward one’s experience which can be obtained through practices of contemplation and distancing (Diaconu 2006, 2). In line with the design concept for Love Sweat Love, which resembles the set up and protocol of a scientific laboratory experiment, this chapter uses the basic structure of a science article. The first section, “Introduction,” exposes the concepts behind Love Sweat Love. The next section, “What Was the Performative Olfactory Dating Experiment Love Sweat Love?” presents the intentions and goals of the performative olfactory dating experiment, as well as provides a detailed description of the experiment's aesthetic design. The third section, “Analysis: What Were Participants’ Felt Experiences?” depicts an evaluation of participants’ felt experiences. The final

196  Lauryn Mannigel section, “Conclusion: How Does Love Sweat Love Highlight the Sense of Smell in Aesthetics?” synthesizes my conclusions about an aesthetic approach toward smell generated by this experiment. The Concept of Body Scents In English, the phrase “body odor” elicits a variety of negative reactions. For instance, Medical News Today, which publishes media related to medical research in the USA, defines body odor as follows: “When a body gives off a scent others may find unpleasant, it is known as body odor” (Felman 2017). Outside of the context of sexual attraction, body odors are generally perceived as “socially discreditable odors,” and people emitting them can be morally stigmatized (Largey and Watson 1972, 1027). To better discuss the way people smell, I use the more body-positive phrase “body scents” to refer to the interplay of various smells that constitute a person’s olfactory identity. I understand the concept of body scents as shaped by a three-dimensional approach pertaining to cultural practices, biology, and atmosphere. Regarding cultural practices, I refer to the social interactions between humans, which include leisure and work activities we engage in, the food we eat, the fragrant products we apply or come in contact with, as well as the built environment and landscape that we inhabit. The biological aspects of body scents encompass genetics, the microbiome, as well as the condition of our health. Finally, when referring to atmosphere, I mean weather-­ related conditions. My concept of body scents draws from the fields of neuroscience and social psychology. Most importantly, my concept has been influenced by Jessica M. Gaby and Vivian Zayas’s research in the field of social psychology. Contrary to most research on body odor, they explore the social perception of people’s scents in a quasi-real-life context. Gaby and Zayas use the term “diplomatic odor” to describe a person’s body odor that is “modified by fragranced products, dietary choices, and personal habits” (2017, 406). As a more neutral and inclusive term to refer to a person’s smell than pure body odor, my concept of body scents aims to contribute to the undoing of the social stigmatization about the perception of people’s smells. The Political Potential of Body Scents Smells impact social life because we affect each other both unconsciously and consciously with our body scents.1 Everyone who does not have a limited sense of smell or is not anosmic can pick up on others’ body scents in physically shared social situations, whether they are aware of it or not. Smells are powerful; they play a fundamental role in shaping our feelings and making us aware of our unfiltered and uncensored self. We cannot avoid being intimately touched by smells, as they need to permeate our bodies in order for us to perceive them. Through my artistic research, I have observed that the perception of body scents is political because it shapes and is shaped by our social and cultural environment. As a social phenomenon, scents play a crucial role in determining social belonging “by engaging one’s senses in visceral processes of acceptance and rejection” (Spackman 2019, 3). On the one hand, scents have a long-reaching history of nurturing feelings of

Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation  197 togetherness and belonging, for instance through religious rituals. On the other hand, scents are also the reason why people disunite and why certain groups are marginalized (Reinarz 2014, 85). For instance, the demolition in 2015 of Sorgenfrilägret—a small shantytown in Malmö Sweden—shows the power of culturally motivated moral judgement and repression of smells associated with ethnic minorities (Gerber 2019). Olfactory experiences are not commonly perceived by everyone in the same way, but they align with certain meanings and values depending on the cultural body that experiences them (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 3). Cultural historian Clare Brant writes that “[the] deodorization [of public space in the Western world in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries] appears to be in conflict between fragrance-free and compulsory olfaction” (Brant 2008, 544). The divide between these dichotomous branches of olfactory thought gave way to the current socially accepted norms of human body scent. In this regard, we are limited to either not emanating any scent at all or emitting one that is fragrant. There is an instilled belief that fragrant products allow social acceptance (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 186). According to sociologist of the senses Anthony Synnott, people who diverge from the social olfactory code are perceived as if “something [was] wrong with [their] physical, emotional or mental health” (Synnott 1993, 190). In other words, the perception of body scents can become a tool for practices of othering—a form of social exclusion that is based on the premise of a person or group being perceived as different. The process of marginalizing people based on their body scents walks alongside with notions of class, ethnicity, gender, moral, and racial difference. Here, I highlight a few examples: In early psychoanalysis, keen olfactory sensitivity was perceived as a primitive characteristic exposing a preoccupation with anal sexuality, which was morally judged as an animalistic trait (Le Guérer 2002, 9). Moreover, sexual relations, which generate particular body scents, have historically been repressed within the Christian tradition (Reinarz 2014, 47–48). During the 1960s, in the United States, the scientist Andrew Dravnieks used food smells that lingered on bodies to categorize people based on their ethnic backgrounds (Spackman 2019, 6–7), while stereotypes of the smelly immigrant in contemporary New York City demonstrate that Asian Americans have suffered discrimination because of the ethnic food smells they carried (Manalansan 2006).

What Was the Performative Olfactory Dating Experiment Love Sweat Love? What Were the Intentions and Goals? Love Sweat Love is intended as an act of resistance. It seeks to question dominant Western values that prioritize “objective” knowledge and the culturally constructed sensory hierarchy that has led to a history of neglect toward the sense of smell. It aims to re-evaluate the aesthetic potential of the sense of smell by contributing to a new aesthetic approach to smell. This work resists “the abstract and impersonal regime of modernity by virtue of its radical interiority, its boundary-transgressing propensities and its emotional potency” (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 5). It does so by confronting (1) the historically constructed moral repression of the sense of smell in Western aesthetics through negative associations with animalism and sexuality and (2) the marginalization of people based on their smell in contemporary Western

198  Lauryn Mannigel culture. Love Sweat Love uses body scents as a way to question these culturally constructed judgments by investigating the possibilities for positive body scent experiences through the framework of a performative olfactory dating experiment. By creating a reflective experience of one’s feelings and assumptions in regard to others’ body scents, the work intends to foster awareness about the diversity of body scents and perceptual agency over olfactory judgments. Love Sweat Love investigates (1) how to encourage participants to explore their feelings and potential judgments about others’ body scents in the face of socially and culturally generated prejudice toward body scents; (2) how participants feel about other’s body scents; and (3) how insights into participants’ felt experience prompt a new aesthetic approach to smell. What Was the Experiment’s Design? The Dutch foundation Mediamatic2 commissioned Love Sweat Love for Museumnacht, the Long Night of Museums, held in Amsterdam on November 5, 2016. The crucial element for the spatial design of the performative experiment was to explore how participants could be inspired to examine their feelings and potential judgments toward others’ body scents. Love Sweat Love offered two conceptual interventions: (1) tackling the continuing stigma around people’s smells, and (2) emphasizing the social and cultural dependency of everyday body scents. Regarding the first concept, I assumed that exploring others’ body scents could provoke an emotionally overwhelming experience related to potentially difficult past life events (e.g. painful breakups, psychological or physical violence, etc.). In an attempt to dampen intense visceral experiences, I sought to create a space that would generate an artificial distance for the participants from these feelings. Since medical clinics and scientific laboratories are, for better or for worse, commonly associated with objectivity, neutrality, and cleanliness, these spaces can prompt a constructive distance from potentially overwhelming emotional experiences. Drawing on these insights, I created an environment that resembled a scientific laboratory, which I anticipated would not only help participants deal with possibly alarming emotions, but also foster curiosity for exploring body scents. The spatial design of the experiment consisted of one black curtain, one white standing table, four sterile looking metal tables, and white lab coats for the “scientists” (performers). I also equipped the facilities with white cotton pads and uniform glass jars for the collection of body scents. The black curtain ran parallel to the wall of the exhibition space where the entrance was located. The white standing table was positioned at the entrance of the exhibition space to welcome participants. It was followed by a linear arrangement of four sterile metal tables, which displayed the collected body scent samples. Past this collection, and on the opposite side of the entrance, sat the “scientists” desk. The second design concept promoted critical engagement with the primary focus on “pure” body odor in traditional scientific laboratory studies of human olfactory perception. For these olfactory studies, participants are commonly asked to regulate their body scents, which may include avoiding alcohol, not smoking, and not eating strong-smelling foods (Sorokowska, Sorokowski, and Szmajke 2012). Although olfactory perception is inherently unique to each person, a range of scenarios representing this diversity has not yet been explored in scientific laboratory experiments. Up until now, the case study entitled “Smelling is Telling: Human Olfactory Cues Influence

Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation  199 Social Judgments in Semi-Realistic Interactions” has been the only one that investigates people’s feelings toward others’ body scents in a quasi-real-life context (Gaby and Zayas 2017).3 In Love Sweat Love, I have set out to challenge the lack of diversity in traditional scientific laboratory studies by proposing participation to everyone who was willing to smell others and collect their own underarm body scents. In comparison to a real-life encounter, the artificial situation of smelling people’s underarms acts to create a certain sense of absurdity, yet not necessarily in an olfactory dating context. I designed this olfactory dating experiment to prompt people to willingly explore others’ body scents. I envisioned that people’s anticipation toward potentially dating someone would pique their curiosity to smell others and could create a positive body scent experience. If so, the experiment could contribute to breaking down the marginalization of people based on their body scents because: (1) according to the principle of neuroplasticity (Barwich 2020), a positive body scent experience can induce the brain to surmount negative memories of prior experiences, and (2) the emotional expression of disgust is not innate but a learned cognitive phenomenon, which can be overcome (Herz 2012, 6–7). This experiment exhibits what an embodied aesthetics of smell is by prompting people to smell others’ body scents and reflect upon their experiences. Since I consider any sensory experience to be aesthetic, the nose also generates aesthetic knowledge, which in the case of Love Sweat Love, guides participants to seek out potential dating partner(s) based solely on smell. My approach toward an embodied aesthetics of smell is based on the concepts of “embodied reflection,” and “aesthetic perception.” Varela, Thompson, and Rosch contend that “embodied reflection” is a reflection in which body and mind have been brought together. What this formulation intends to convey is that reflection is not just on experience, but reflection is a form of experience itself—and that reflective form of experience can be performed with mindfulness/awareness. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1993, 27) I fostered this kind of reflective experience in Love Sweat Love by integrating a questionnaire that encouraged participants to evaluate their experience qualitatively. Sharman Russell argues that “aesthetic perception” is a socially constructed cognitive process of assessing an experience, which entails the personal associations that are attributed to any sensory experience and how we re-enact the latter (1997). Her concept demonstrates the importance of people’s individual backgrounds and values because they fundamentally shape aesthetic experiences. Since sensory experiences are as diverse as people, I attempted to design an experiment that would express this by not restricting participation on grounds of personal choices over olfactory and gustatory intakes as well as social and cultural practices. How Did the Experiment Work? Between 7:30 p.m. and midnight on Saturday evening, November 5, 2016, performers appearing as “scientists” in traditional white lab coats invited the public to participate in an olfactory dating experiment. They instructed interested participants to (1) collect their underarm body scent with the help of white cotton pads, (2) smell through

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Figure 16.1 Love Sweat Love, Mediamatic, 2016. Source: photo: Anisa Xhomaqi and Mediamatic.

the collection of body scent samples to identify up to three samples that they feel the most attracted to, and (3) fill out a short paper questionnaire to reflect on their associations, feelings, and odor descriptions of their favorite samples (Figure 16.1). While sampling their own scents, participants were smelling their way through the body scent samples of previous participants. All samples were anonymous and solely identifiable by a number, in order to not reveal any details about gender or gender preferences. Participants were thus choosing potential dating partners exclusively on the basis of liking their underarm body scents. After selecting their favorite samples, participants dropped off their questionnaire at the “scientists” desk along with their own scent sample. At the drop-off point, they were asked to put their infused cotton pads into a glass jar, which was subsequently identified with the number that had been assigned to their questionnaire. The “scientists” informed participants via text message or email when someone liked their scent. The message would read: “Number 63 likes your scent.” With this information at hand, participants were able to seek out the body scent samples of the number(s) that liked them. When two participants both fancied each other’s smell, the “scientists” offered to connect the pair and provide them with a free drink at Mediamatic’s bar. To facilitate the matching, each participant was given a pin with the number of their submitted sample. While technical issues prevented data collation on the number of matches, this did not take away from the most powerful and hopefully transformative element of the experiment—the experience of smelling others.

Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation  201 Each newly donated body scent sample was randomly added to one of the metal tables that displayed the collected samples. In addition, each participant’s completed questionnaire section relating to their smelling experience was displayed on the large black curtain located at the entrance of the exhibition space. Both collections grew over the course of the evening. Overall, approximately four hundred people participated in Love Sweat Love.

Analysis: What Were Participants’ Felt Experiences? Within the scope of my research, I define a “feeling” to be an embodied reflection of emotional events, which implies the evaluation of one’s own experience. Additionally, feelings are influenced by the social and cultural realms we partake in. Through the questionnaire, participants in the experiment responded to the crucial question of how they felt about the body scent samples that they had experienced as attractive. As a starting point for evaluating participants’ feeling statements, in 2017, I assigned them using the Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (GEOS) (Chrea et al. 2009, 56). Developed by neuroscientists, the GEOS is used to investigate the meaning of individual feeling responses toward a diverse range of odors (Figure 16.2). Three hundred and fourteen participants responded to the Love Sweat Love questionnaire. I considered only two hundred and twenty-nine recorded responses for this evaluation, omitting participants who did not complete one -third or more of the questionnaire. Participants were asked to indicate their biological sex,4 their use or nonuse of fragrance, and the meaningfulness of scent in a relationship for them on a scale from zero to five. I initially sought to make all of these aspects key elements in the evaluation of people’s feeling responses. I thought that including biological sex as an analytical criterion could spark conversations with researchers in laboratory studies on human chemical communication, as it seems to be a factor of crucial importance to them. However, since this would create a conceptual tension with the anonymity of the body scent samples in the experiment, I dropped attributing participants’ feeling statements to different groups based on their biological sex, as post-event analysis indicated it went against the idea of exploring body scent samples in an anonymous fashion. Finally, I assigned the feeling responses of participants who had indicated a four or five concerning their meaningfulness of scent in a relationship to two different groups depending on their use or nonuse of fragrance. Table 16.1 shows these participants’ feeling responses. Due to the restricted print size of this book format, I have omitted the feeling terms that make up each feeling dimension. Overall, Love Sweat Love, counted one hundred and sixty-eight participants who used fragrant products and sixty-one who did not. Attributing participants’ feelings to the GEOS highlighted the model’s limitations, since a number of participants’ responses did not neatly fit into one of the six feeling dimensions the model depends on. Thus, I expanded the six GEOS dimensions—“pleasant feeling,” “unpleasant feeling,” “sensuality,” “relaxation,” “refreshment,” and “sensory pleasure”—with two new dimensions—“neither pleasant nor unpleasant,” and “pleasant and unpleasant.” Additionally, I added the feeling terms “relieved” and “liberated” under the feeling- dimension of “refreshment.” For instance, the feeling response “okay” required its own dimension “pleasant and unpleasant,” as it can mean both. It was challenging and at times it seemed impossible to ascribe certain feeling expressions to any feeling dimension.

202  Lauryn Mannigel

Figure 16.2 Lauryn Mannigel’s design of the GEOS. Source: Chrea et al. (2009).

Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation  203 Table 16.1  Feeling responses by participants of Love Sweat Love (2016) toward others’ body scents.

Pleasant feeling

Participants who used fragrant products

Participants who didn’t use fragrant products

10 × happy :)

8 × happy

5 × good

5 × comfortable

4 × comfortable

3 × neutral

1 × fairly mellow

2 × naturally positive

1 × gives me a homely feeling

2 × nice

1 × happy to smell something good

1 × eh it's okay

1 × I like ;)

1 × good

1 × nice to smell

1 × natural

1 × OK :)

1 × ok

1 × smells good 1 × understanding 1 × vanillary 1 × vertrouwd (transl. familiar) Sensuality

5 × romantic

1 × adventurous

3 × Sexy

1 × attracted

2 × horny

1 × desire

2 × interested

1 × heavenly

2 × warm

4 × relaxed

1 × adventurous

2 × sexy

1 × amazing

2 × warm

1 × enthusiastic 1 × excited 1 × feeling like spring is coming 1 × girly 1 × harsh 1 × hungry 1 × lief (transl. sweet) 1 × loved 1 × manly 1 × makes me feel like i want to cum 1 × More of that smell 1 × mysterious 1 × Shy!! Excited! 1 × soft, creamy (Continued)

204  Lauryn Mannigel Participants who used fragrant products Sensory pleasure

Participants who didn’t use fragrant products

1 × holiday 1 × party, fun

Refreshment

4 × fresh!

1 × clean

3 × energetic

1 × curious

2 × free

1 × fresh

1 × clean

1 × inspired

1 × dit was het enigste dat elke vieze zweetlucht liet verdwijnen --> reddingsmiddel (transl. this was the only thing that made any dirty sweat smell disappear --> life-saving)

1 × like wearing something freshly washed

1 × eindelijk een beetje oke lucht (transl. finally a little bit of okay air)

1 × refreshing

1 × NEUTRAL, BUT AT LEAST SMELLS HUMAN 1 × pine trees 1 × relieved

1 × feel free as a bird! 1 × fresh like a morning after a shower 1 × like a nice forest walk 1 × morning feel Relaxation

4 × relaxed

3 × calm

2 × calm

2 × safe

1 × chill

1 × COMFORTING

1 × comforted

1 × connected to the earth

1 × natural

1 × familiar

1 × quiet

1 × secure/safe

1 × trust Neither Pleasant Nor Unpleasant

1 × neutral, not excited neither disgust

1 × ALL RIGHT

1 × okay Pleasant & Unpleasant

1 × back in school 1 × CAN'T SAY, I'M MARRIED 1 × hangovery 1 × made me think of an ex-lover! 1 × oh this smells like my exboyfriend :) / :( 1 × prikkelig (transl. prickly)

Unpleasant

1 × not interested

1 × like in a perfume shop 1 × Nauseous

fresh outdoors

6

7

female specimen

SOFT

5

9

vinegar

4

SMELLS SWEATY

jumm

3

8

perfume but nice

2

Participants who didn’t use fragrant products

soft men

1

Participants who used fragrant products

Association

#

Group

like in a perfume shop

NEUTRAL, BUT AT LEAST SMELLS HUMAN

connected to the earth

like wearing something freshly washed

CAN’T SAY, I AM MARRIED

harsh

hungry

made me think of my ex-lover

dit was het enigste dat elke vieze zweetlucht liet verdwijnen --> reddingsmiddel (transl. this was the only thing that made any dirty sweat smell disappear --> life -saving

Feeling

fragrant

earthy, musky, woody

earthy, mossy, woody

soothing

bitter

spicy, sweet

woody, sweet

musky, spicy

Description

Table 16.2  Feeling responses by participants of Love Sweat Love (2016) toward others’ body scents that were difficult to place.

Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation  205

206  Lauryn Mannigel Table 16.2 demonstrates a selection of these cases. In order to better contextualize people’s reported feelings in Table 16.2, I included their associations with the body scent samples they found attractive, as well as the descriptive terms they had selected. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Demonstrates a description of a relieved feeling, as it dramatically shows the person’s discomfort or potential disgust of the smell of somebody else’s perspiration. Shows a description of the participant’s olfactory memory of their ex-lover. What might feeling “hungry” mean in an olfactory dating context? Is this participant expressing their sexual desire, their desire for cannibalism, or literally their feeling of being hungry? Reads as a portrayal of the olfactory quality of “vinegar,” which the participant mentions to be their association with the body scent sample. Is a case where a participant indicated a feeling of uncertainty/un-comfortability. Is a description of what the body scent sample feels like to this participant without mentioning their actual feeling about it. Is a depiction of a feeling that relates to feeling grounded. Is a description which comes across as if the participant is relieved to smell a body scent sample that does not smell of fragrant products. Is an explanation of the feeling expression of an olfactory source (place) that reminds the person of the smell they observe. They seem to express a disliking toward fragrant products.

I argue that using my expanded GEOS model in order to make sense of participants’ feeling expressions shows two things. First, participants had a different understanding of what a feeling is than what this model encompasses. For this experiment, I purposefully did not provide a clear definition of what I meant by feeling because I was curious to discover peoples’ own understanding of the term. Second, participants may have been challenged to reply to the rather unusual question asking them to state how they feel about a stranger's body scent. From an artistic perspective, the feeling dimension model that I used proved helpful in examining feeling expressions toward others’ body scents of a large number of people. I concluded that any experiment aiming to examine people’s felt experience about others’ body scents requires a customdesigned, context-specific model. Overall, Love Sweat Love is about challenging the foundational values of the philosophy of aesthetics—“[…] distance, detachment and disembodiment […]”—by offering to explore feelings and potential judgments in intimate encounters with stranger’s body scents (Drobnick 1998, 10).

Conclusion: How Does Love Sweat Love Highlight the Sense of Smell in Aesthetics? While working as a performer at the “scientists” desk during the experiment, I observed the diverse ways in which participants removed their infused cotton pads from their armpits and put them in a glass jar. Two prevalent patterns emerged. Some participants smelled their own body scent samples before dropping them in the jar. Others rapidly removed their cotton pads while holding them on two fingertips as far away from their noses’ and bodies’ as possible, followed by an apparent sigh of relief. While walking around the exhibition space and watching participants at different

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performative stations, I noticed that the majority were highly engaged in smelling many body scent samples. Participants took their time to explore samples from different tables. Throughout the experiment’s duration, small groups of participants frequently formed and changed compositions. Within these groups, participants exchanged their olfactory impressions. First and foremost, the engagement that arose during the experiment is more significant than the olfactory dating because (1) it showed people’s curiosity toward others’ body scents, which normally is socially repressed, and (2) it demonstrated the potential of olfactory experiences to foster group discussion by encouraging participants to reflect on their experiences. Since participants both reflected upon their perception of others’ body scents and often discussed their felt experience among each other, Love Sweat Love fostered participants’ agency by inviting them to actively perceive rather than being passive recipients of olfactory information. The question that remains: can agency about one’s perceptual judgment and social bias of other’s body scents contribute to the undoing of the marginalization toward the way people smell? The groundwork for overcoming the Western sensory hierarchy was laid out by designing a dating experiment, which (1) invited participants to be led by their noses, (2) instigated the perceptual agency to actively experience and reflect upon others’ underarm scents, and (3) formed the basis for an embodied aesthetics of smell. The data collected in the experiment revealed that people’s feeling expressions toward others’ body scents were mainly positive. In my view, this is the result of both people’s willingness to actively participate and the fact that encounters with others’ intimate smell are powerful for their unexpected attraction, which in turn can foster positive scent-related experiences. Given that having positive body scent experiences can rewire our brains, it seems possible that this experiment might play some role in challenging the stigma around the perception of body scents. Furthermore, according to Barwich’s research at the interface of cognitive science and philosophy, “[…] Training your nose’s performance (just like other cognitive capacities) fundamentally shapes what you perceive by rewiring the system” (Barwich 2020). This idea suggests that experience shapes our perception, and more importantly, that we have agency over our perception of the world. Love Sweat Love demonstrates that odor can be a powerful locus for resisting the dominant values of “objective” and reductionist knowledge production, a move that enacts a politics from below. In particular, it challenges the limitations that are practiced in traditional laboratory studies on human olfactory perception by highlighting the importance of social context and diversity in the perception of people’s real-life body scents. By playing with the laboratory as a performative site for social experimentation, Love Sweat Love demonstrates how olfactory experiences create knowledge of the world around us. Overall, I hope that my critical analysis of Love Sweat Love will attract a wider engagement with the powerful political potential of body scents.

Notes 1 Despite the physical matter of body scents being rendered smellable thanks to bacteria (nonhuman), exploring the olfactory communication between human and nonhumans goes beyond the scope of this chapter.

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2 Mediamatic demonstrates a crucial interest in art science and particularly in smell. For instance, since 2015 it continues to produces the olfactory art, research, and design series— Odorama—curated by olfactory art historian Caro Verbeek. 3 This case study “developed a novel paradigm to provide an initial empirical assessment of social judgments based on olfactory cues conveyed by the whole body in live interaction. Blindfolded […] heterosexual female participants […] made social judgments about the body odor of an unknown donor, seated beside them for 1 min” (2) 4 With biological sex, I refer to a person’s genitals and hormonal constitution but not gender identification.

Bibliography Barwich, Ann-Sophie. 2020. “Mind your Nose.” Neo.Life, August 26, 2020. https://neo. life/2020/08/mind-your-nose/. Brant, Clare. 2008. “Scenting a Subject: Odour Poetics and the Politics of Space.” Ethnos Journal of Anthropology 73, no. 4 (December): 544–563. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00141840802563964. Chrea, Christelle, Didier, Grandjean, Sylvain, Delplanque, Isabelle, Cayeux, Bénédicte, Le Calvé, Laurence, Aymard, Maria Inés, Velazco, David Sander, and Klaus R. Scherer. 2009. “Mapping the Semantic Space for the Subjective Experience of Emotional Responses to Odors,” Chemical Senses 34, no. 1 (January): 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/ bjn052. Classen, Constance, David, Howes, and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London and New York: Routledge. Curran, Allison M., Carlos F., Ramirez, Adee A., Schoon, and Kenneth G. Furton, 2007. “The Frequency of Occurrence and Discriminatory Power of Compounds Found in Human Scent across a Population Determined by SPME-GC/MS.” Journal of Chromatography B 846, no. 1–2 (March): 86–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jchromb.2006.08.039. Diaconu, Madalina. 2006. “Reflections on an Aesthetics of Touch, Smell and Taste.” Contemporary Aesthetics, August 6, 2006 www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=385. Drobnick, Jim. 1998. “Reveries, Assaults and Evaporating Presences: Olfactory Dimensions in Contemporary Art.” PARACHUTE 89 (Winter): 10–19. www.david-howes.com/senses/ Drobnick.htm. Ekman, Paul. 1984. “Expression and the Nature of Emotion.” In Approaches to Emotion, edited by Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman, 319–344. Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates. Felman, Adam. 2017. “What’s to Know about Body Odor?” Medical News Today, November 29, 2017. www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/173478#what-is-body-odor. Gaby, Jessica M., and Vivian Zayas. 2017. “Smelling Is Telling: Human Olfactory Cues Influence Social Judgments in Semi-Realistic Interactions.” Chemical Senses 42, no. 5 (June): 405–418. https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjx012. Gerber, Alison. 2019. “The Smell of Others: Olfactory Claims and the Public Sphere.” SocArXiv, August 9. doi:10.31235/osf.io/9vqzp. Herz, Rachel. 2012. That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Largey, Gale Peter, and David Rodney Watson. 1972. “The Sociology of Odors.” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 6 (May): 1021–1034. https://doi.org/10.1086/225257. Le Guérer, Annick. 2002. “Olfaction and Cognition: A Philosophical and Psychoanalytic View.” In Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, edited by Catherine Rouby, Benoist Schaal, Danièle Dubois, Rémi Gervais and A. Holley, 3–15. Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Manalansan IV, Martin F. 2006. “Immigrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, 41–52. Oxford and New York: Berg. Reinarz, Jonathan. 2014. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Russell, Sharman. 1997. “The Anthropology of Aesthetics: A Cross-Cultural Approach,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 28, no. 2: 177–92192. www.anthro. ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/anthro/documents/media/jaso28_2_1997_177_192.pdf. Sibley, Frank, John Benson, Betty, Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox. 2001. Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sorokowska, Agnieszka, Piotr, Sorokowski, and Andrzej Szmajke. 2012. “Does Personality Smell? Accuracy of Personality Assessments Based on Body Odour.” European Journal of Personality 26, no. 5 (September): 496–503. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.848. Spackman, Christy. 2019. “Ordering Volatile Openings: Instrumentation and the Rationalization of Bodily Odors.” Food, Culture & Society 22, no. 5 (July): 674–691. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/15528014.2019.1638135. Synnott. Anthony. 1993. The Body Social – Symbolism, Self and Society. London and New York: Routledge. Varela, Francisco J., Evan, Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1993. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

17 Malodors and Miasmas The Political Potential of Working with Smell Alanna Lynch

Introduction Subjectivity of Smell The sense of smell is subjective. We each perceive odors differently due to our individual experience (learned associations) as well as genetic variations in the functioning of odor receptors. Our sense of smell is also shaped by other factors such as context (Dalton, Claeson, and Horenziak 2020). This subjectivity is one of the reasons why I am so interested in working with smell. Odors provide both an effective and affective means to approach issues of identity and power. My research is embodied in my own subjective body. Therefore, before discussing the politics of smell, it is important to first situate myself. Situating Myself My artistic practice is research-led, transdisciplinary, and material-based. I explore the politics of affect, recognizing the interdependence of our collective bodies, minds, and emotions within systems of power. A focus in my work is on the fear of contagion and threat felt within the body, rupturing the idea that the body is self-contained. Difference, disgust, care, and visceral, vulnerable bodies are important themes. My research falls within a queer, feminist, and decolonial framework and is influenced by affect studies, “new” materialisms, biopolitics, and community activism. I draw from many fields but the starting point of my research comes from my own affective experience. I use an auto-ethnographic method of embodied research. My experience as a (cis) woman of color, more specifically a second-generation settler Canadian of mixed European and Afro-Caribbean descent, strongly influences my perspective which is complicated by multiple intersecting (and fluctuating) identities, each carrying various privileges. Materials from the Body and Early Experiences with Smell My interest in smell comes from a powerful experience I had with my own urine. As an artist, I work with materials from my own body, including hair, urine, and even my microbiome. I have been working with my own hair for many years. The qualities that make my natural kinky hair unruly and coarse facilitate the manipulation of it as material. I work with these qualities and the affective state of my hair: the way it can

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Figure 17.1 C oncealed and Contained, since 2009. Performance in 2016 at Tempting Failure Biennial of International Performance Art and Noise, London, UK. Source: Photo: Julia Bauer, supported by Tempting Failure CIC and Arts Council England.

be perceived as beastly, as something not human. In the live performance Concealed and Contained (since 2009) (see Figure 17.1), I crochet a yarn made from my hair onto my body. Currently, this “mask” covers my entire head and chest, continuing further downward as the work progresses over the years. This work is intended to be experienced live and up close. The hair carries an odor, something that can be experienced only in close proximity as I wear it on my body in performance. It reflects not so much the fragrance of products (I don’t use any) but a bodily smell from the oils I produce (more on body odor later). Up close it is also possible to experience the thickness of the hair and see the sweat that rolls down my body underneath. I first worked with urine in the process of felting my hair. Urine has been traditionally used to facilitate processes of felting, dyeing, and stain removal. Collecting my own urine in large amounts at first did not have much of a smell. But over time it became very strong and unpleasant due to bacteria that proliferate. I experienced this smell as very intense, visceral, and unpleasant. It haunted me; I carried the memory of this terrible smell in my nose even in its absence. Fermented urine is penetrating; the intensity of that smell stays with you. At the time I assumed that my revulsion indicated the presence of some biological indicator evolved to warn the body against contact and possible infection, such as explained by the theory of the behavioral immune system (Schaller 2011). While this may play some role, I now know that smells are learned through association and are therefore

212  Alanna Lynch strongly subjective. Odor perception happens on two levels. In the case of urine, the smell of the bacteria is detected by odor receptors in the nose, triggering a learned association response, while ammonia stimulates the trigeminal nerve within the nose and causes physical irritation and a repelling response, experienced as pungency. From this experience, I began to research and explore smells and the potential of working with them in art. Volatile Effluvia I work with smells because they are powerful. They refuse to be contained. They are not neutral. Although frequently undervalued, smells provide valuable information. I have been particularly fascinated with so-called bad smells: organic smells related to the body and which provoke negative reactions. Throughout this process of working with smell I have come to question how and why we classify smells into binary categories of good and bad and to recognize the subjectivity of this process. This fundamental subjectivity of smell calls into question concepts of objectivity or neutrality in favor of a multiplicity of experience. This in itself is political. Recognizing the subjectivity inherent in hegemony and questioning the categories and hierarchies that structure society are further explicitly political. The tendency in Western epistemology to classify and simplify things into binaries serves to uphold systems of power. Some examples include ontological dualism, hierarchies in the classification of life, and social constructions of race and gender. Working with the subjective experience of smell and by questioning perceptions and judgments embedded in structural processes, it may be possible to destabilize these categories and normativity more generally.

Spilling Liquids Starting from my early artistic experiences with urine, I have often since worked with smelly, bodily liquids. I’m interested in the ability that both liquids and smells have to resist containment and cross boundaries. They have the ability to take up space. Influence of Smell Even at a low concentration, urine smells strong. It is usually perceived as unpleasant, and it can generate a heightened response. Using my own urine in performance, I witnessed the intense, emotional reaction people can have toward it. However, we need not be aware of smells for them to affect us. Even when they are not consciously perceived, smells can influence moods, thoughts, and behaviors (Herz 2002; HavilandJones, Wilson, and Freyberg 2016). The “mere suggestion” of an odor can produce changes in mood (Herz 2002, 163). I am interested in this suggestibility of smell. Working with urine, I aim to achieve a smell at the threshold where it is detected by the nose but not consciously perceived. I believe that by working subtly and using something offensive in a covert manner, there is more potential in the ability to influence and to disrupt. Perhaps subtle, gentle action can have a bigger impact than a more direct confrontation. In the installation Show of Strength / The Lively Vessel and the Contaminated State (2015/2018) (see Figure 17.2), a large glass vessel with a small hole at the top

Malodors and Miasmas  213

Figure 17.2 Show of Strength / The Lively Vessel and the Contaminated State, 2015/2018. Installation, Berlin Art Prize Exhibition, Berlin, Germany. Source: Florian Denzin.

214  Alanna Lynch (a demijohn used for fermenting wine) is filled with my urine and suspended from the ceiling by a rope of hair. Throughout the duration of the exhibition of this work, I monitor and maintain the urine, regularly replacing it, with the intention that the level of smell stays below what is consciously perceived (while acknowledging that this is highly variable among people). This large, fragile vessel is suspended from the ceiling by a rope made of blond hair. I collected this hair from the garbage of hair salons and it still carries a faint smell of shampoo. I separated the hair into categorizations of color. Collecting the hair I deemed “blond,” I spun it into what became very fragile yarns, due to both the texture of the hair (straight and smooth, in contrast with my own textured, kinky hair) and its relatively short length. However, once the individual yarns are twisted together in one direction and then another in the pattern of the rope, the hair becomes very strong. While I know that the rope is very strong—I tested it against my own body weight—in this form there is still a fear that the glass will crash to the ground spilling the urine everywhere. Spilling as Resistance This threat of spilling is the potential for action. If the rope were to break, the glass vessel would come crashing to the ground. First the liquid would spill and then the smell would spread, occupying not only the two-dimensional space of the floor but the three dimensions of the air all around it. Spilling exceeds the borders, resists containment, takes up space, and causes disruption. As feminist philosopher and theorist Elizabeth Grosz (1993) states, body fluids in particular demonstrate the permeability of the body and threaten the subject’s autonomy and identity. Unstable in form, body fluids “are engulfing, difficult to be rid of; any separation from them is not a matter of certainty … [they] flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed” (193–194). The stench of my fermented urine has an insisting presence. It has power. It is significant that this disruption comes from the body and specifically my own body. My material body resists control and order; it does not stay in its place; it is excessive. In taking up space in this way, I follow artist and scholar Luiza Prado de O. Martins’s (2018) call to “revel in our excesses,” noting the racialized and gendered otherness of the colonized body characterized as excessive. Another smelly liquid with which I have worked is kombucha. This fermented drink is produced by microorganisms in a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeasts (SCOBY) and has a strong vinegar smell that is reminiscent of the human body. In Gut Feelings (since 2016), I have been working with the materiality of the SCOBY (its sliminess and skin-like appearance), its strong smell, and the various microorganisms that come to coexist within through contamination, presenting my research through performance and experimental formats.1 I have often presented the following performance. A large glass container filled to the brim with 18L of overly fermented kombucha tea stands on a table. I plunge my arm into it and the liquid overflows, spilling all over the table and on to the floor (see Figure 17.3). As this happens, molecules are stirred up into the air and dispersed toward the audience. These molecules enter into their bodies. This action, and the wave of smell that results, breaks the expectation of an olfactorily “neutral,” deodorized space. The excess of sensory stimulation creates a disruption. Once again this spilling of liquid fills the ground while the smell takes up space in the air.

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Figure 17.3 Gut Feelings, 2016. Performance as part of the exhibition Fraud, Fake and Fame – Goldrausch 2016, St. Johannes-Evangelist, Berlin, Germany. Source: Matthias Reichelt.

216  Alanna Lynch Immersion and Implication Our bodies are permeable and vulnerable: we can be affected. We are not autonomous but interdependent. Molecules of matter enter the body and make contact with smell receptors that then send a message to the brain. In this area where emotion and memory are processed, the smell is perceived and interpreted. Unlike all of the other senses, smell is unmediated; information goes directly to the central nervous system, a process that is non-conscious (Haviland-Jones et al. 2016). The involuntary experience of a smell is a shared physical experience for those present; as cultural historian Constance Classen (1992) states, “a shared smell can give the partakers a strong ‘we’ feeling” (160). Through its immersion, the body becomes implicated in its physical presence. As critic and curator Jim Drobnick (2000) says, smells “present powerful, emotionally resonant experiences. Invoking the sense of smell also directly implicates the body, especially the viewer’s intimate, corporeal state of being” (38). Further, the encounter with smell works to situate the body, both in location spatially and within a specific, subjective body. I feel such powerful visceral experiences can help to facilitate embodied knowledge, which is always situated knowledge. Given the subject of power, it is important to experience this implication, to position yourself as a starting point for action. This particular kombucha tea used in the performance has been fermented for many months, and so the smell is very acidic. It also smells sweet from the sugar and there is another smell, slightly unpleasant, like stinky feet. These are body-like smells, from microorganisms related to those residing in the body. These smells hang in the air; the molecules don’t dissipate easily over time. This strong smell also sticks to the skin when you touch it and can’t be easily washed away. Body Smells and Communication We communicate with our body odor, which is produced by bacteria on the skin that feed on waste products, such as sweat. Specifically, we communicate social information that is usually not perceived consciously (Haviland-Jones et al. 2016). Studies have found that mood can be communicated through body odor and can even reproduce the same mood in the perceiver (Haviland-Jones et al. 2016). Body odor can communicate information related to identity, age, gender, health, emotions (de Groot et al. 2018), and personality (Haviland-Jones et al. 2016). The shared smells of kombucha liquid and the human body indicate the presence of similar bacteria both on the skin and in the gut. Body odor extends what we think of as the limits of the body. As French historian of smell Alain Corbin (1986) states so poetically, “[a]ll the vapors and emanations expelled by the excretory ducts [make] up the atmosphere of the individual” (37–38). Our bodily scents expand the territory of the body, bringing identity and subjectivity beyond the private and into public space. This public space is not neutral but is affected by those in and around it. There is great potential in smells to function as a mode of communication, if we are attuned to them. Smell of the Other Due to the physiology of the nose, it detects difference. We become habituated to our environment and no longer perceive constant stimuli. What we perceive are changes to it. We don’t smell ourselves, we smell “the other.” In this sense, smell maintains

Malodors and Miasmas  217 boundaries despite the other ways in which it breaks them down. Familiar odors lose specific associations through repeated exposure and tend to evoke pleasant responses (Herz 2002), while unknown odors may be met with suspicion and negative perceptions. There is an association between strong odor and power: groups seen to threaten the stability of the dominant culture are frequently characterized as strong-smelling (Classen 1992, 141). Throughout history, olfactory stereotypes have been used to justify the degradation and othering of various groups (Smith 2012). Yet as Classen elaborates the stench ascribed to the other is far less a response to an actual perception of the odor of other than a potent metaphor for the social decay it is feared the other, often simply by virtue of being ‘other,’ will cause in the established order. (135) Smells are invisible but have the ability to take over space as they expand and disperse. Causing a big stink can be a strategy of reclaiming space and asserting power.

Stink Bombs and Malodor Continuing my investigation of “bad” smells, I have been creating stink bombs. As the name implies, these smells were created for disruption and resistance. Emotional Labour (2018) (see Figure 17.4) consists of small glass bottles perched on a glass shelf. These are do-it-yourself stink bombs made from household materials: vegetables and hair that release sulfur as they decompose. In the installation they are odorless,

Figure 17.4 Emotional Labour, 2018. Installation, La Central Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal, Canada. Source: Paul Litherland.

218  Alanna Lynch contained within small delicate glass bottles, but once set on fire by the sun they foster the process of decomposition to build up an intense stench. These stink bombs are adapted from a recipe found on the website wikiHow (wikihow.com 2020). They are crowd-sourced instructions produced by many anonymous contributors and with no clear origin. The stink is created by the power of the sun, which is concentrated through a magnifying glass, aimed inside the glass jar at a match head, which builds up in temperature over time until it ignites a flame. Depending on conditions, it could take up to nine hours to start a fire. This process of setting fire takes persistence and time. It is a subtle, gentle action that produces transformation. This is a similar process to a lot of political organizing work that goes on in many communities, something that I have been involved with in the past. Invisible and/or undervalued care work (often the work of women of color) persists and is cumulative in its impact. Malodors Malodors are smells that are perceived as unpleasant or offensive (Dalton et al. 2020). Research has found that exposure to unpleasant odors results in negative effects on mood, avoidance behavior, physical changes in the body, changes in pain perception (Haviland-Jones et al. 2016), negative effects on cognition (Dalton et al. 2020), and can impact our judgments (Herz 2002). Herz argues that much of the action of these bad smells is due to subjective beliefs about odors. In fact, just the suggestion of an odor can cause physical distress. In addition, many malodors are also strong stimulants of the trigeminal nerve and can be irritating, even painful, and this aspect can make a smell immediately repelling (Herz 2006). Given our discomfort and aversion to bad smells, they have been used as weapons, non-lethal modes of controlling crowds. Developing the ultimate malodorant (smellbased non-lethal weapon) is an area of military research. Skunk, developed by the Israeli Defense Forces for crowd control, is exported around the world to military and police. It has been described as such: Imagine the worst, most foul thing you have ever smelled. An overpowering mix of rotting meat, old socks that haven’t been washed for weeks—topped off with the pungent waft of an open sewer … imagine not being able to get rid of the stench for at least three days, no matter how often you try to scrub yourself clean. (Davies 2008, para. 2) While what constitutes a bad smell may seem obvious within a shared cultural context (e.g., rotting meat, an open sewer), there is no universal bad smell. During the process of developing their own stink bomb, the US Army was not able to find a universal bad smell across cultures (Dilks et al. 1999, in Herz 2004). Likewise, the intense power of Skunk was ineffective in controlling crowds when used in India (Ahuja 2017). This is because our reactions to and perceptions of smells are learned responses, and perceptions and preferences vary particularly between different cultures. Good or Bad Smells Whether an odor is considered pleasant or unpleasant (good or bad) is its hedonic quality. As I have already noted, odor perceptions are learned and cultural. The main

Malodors and Miasmas  219 factors determining whether we perceive smells as pleasant or unpleasant are our expectations, past experience, and the context of the smell (Dalton et al. 2020). In Odor and Power in the Americas: Olfactory Consciousness from Columbus to Emancipation, Andrew Kettler (2017) describes how enslaved people of the transatlantic trade made use of smell as a mode of resistance. He looks at how odors were used by enslaved people to convey information amongst themselves, information that was unperceived by the slaveholders. He argues that enslaved people were able to use smells in these ways because they conceptualized smells beyond the European discourse that devalued them and produced a dichotomy of good and bad smells. As Kettler states, “[t]he transgressive nature of smell comes from its subjectivity” (287–288). This illuminates the great potential there is in unlearning the Western tendency to classify smells as good or bad and to consider odors outside of these judgments. Thinking outside a binary opens the possibility to attend to the information that smells carry. This research also suggests possibilities for how smells can be used as resistance today, for example in my own work. Smells from Below In the hierarchy of senses, smell has been seen as a “lower” sense and has been debased through its association with animals and the body (Drobnick 2002). With this in mind, taking up space by using smell can be seen as a strategy from below. This threat from “below” can refer to the devalued part of many classifications: the body of mind/body duality, smell within the hierarchy of senses, and the “other” or subaltern positions (for example, women and non-binary people, racialized peoples, people from the global south). In the case of my stink bombs, a powerful impact is created through the use of readily available domestic ingredients, discarded materials (bottles), and even the use of bacteria in fermentation. Using bacteria to create smells, whether from the body or via fermentation, introduces another category of the devalued: the nonhuman (see Figure 17.5). Those from below in fact have great power. William Miller in The Anatomy of Disgust (1997) speaks of those above in “superior” positions being vulnerable to the “defiling powers of the low” (9). As Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) further elaborates, the position of being “above” “is maintained only at the cost of a certain vulnerability … as an openness to being affected by those who are felt to be below” (89). As both Miller and Ahmed imply, something that disgusts us has the ability to contaminate and affect us through its proximity. The emotion of disgust is visceral, deeply rooted in the body. It triggers a response of withdrawal, a desire to put distance between oneself and the thing that disgusts. However, it is not automatic like a reflex but is a learned response (Herz 2006). Through their low status alone, smells are considered disgusting. “In the Western tradition smell ends up associated with the dark, the dank, the primitive and bestial, with blind and subterranean bestiality that moves in ooze” (Miller 1997, 75). Disgust maintains boundaries, between self and other, between inside and outside, between groups, and therefore as Miller argues, disgust is intensely political; it works to maintain hierarchies. Sensitivity to disgust, and thus vulnerability to smells, is highly variable among people. Research shows that those with a higher sensitivity to disgust tend to have more conservative political attitudes (Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom 2009). Knowledge of

220  Alanna Lynch

Figure 17.5 Gut Feelings, 2017. Performance at Art Laboratory Berlin as part of the Nonhuman Agents Series, Berlin, Germany. Source: Photo: Tim Deussen, www.tim-deussen.de.

this vulnerability reveals the power and potential impact of resistance-based smells. There is great subversive potential to working with smell. As Jim Drobnick (2002) says, smells “are threatening because they easily subvert the regulation of emotions and behavior supposedly necessary to societal organization” (Drobnick 2002, 35). Bringing together these less-than, devalued entitles to act in solidarity and resistance through smell, for example via a stink bomb attack, is to use the very classifications imposed by the hegemony of the dominant groups against them. These struggles are interconnected; it is the same systems of power that oppress. Making Powerful Smells Our perception of and reaction to a smell, in other words its power, comes not only from the quality of the odor (its origin or the identity of the smell molecules) but its intensity, duration, and volatility, how it can stick and penetrate, as well as its ability to stimulate the trigeminal nerve. I feel that a much stronger, more offensive smell is possible than what I have created with my stink bombs. Over the past two years, I have been experimenting with fermenting and distilling various materials to create what to me smells “bad,” that which leaves a negative lasting impression. I have also experimented with culturing bacteria from my gut, isolating various strains that can be identified by various properties, including their different smells. 2 I was surprised to find that aside from the foul fecal smells of E. coli,

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the bacteria I cultured from my gut were sweet and pleasant. Normally hidden away in the body, we can look to these smells for the other types of information that they can provide. Accessing knowledge through the body via sensory experience allows us to expand understanding “beyond a conscious knowing” (Lara et al. 2017, 39). Smells have the power to generate emotions. I’m interested in using intense, provocative smells but at a very low concentration, one that mirrors the subtle course of everyday resistance: not readily perceivable but just below the surface. Resistance is productive for scholar Mona Lilja (2017). Writing on emotions in demonstrating assemblies, she speculates on the role emotions play in generating political subjectivities. To go one step further, I wonder, what subjectivities smells can generate. Smell is subjective but can it generate subjectivities?

Conclusion The political potential of smell lies in its propensity for resistance, communication, knowledge, and space production, and in the ability it has to break down binaries and stimulate questions. A fascinating aspect of smell is its subjectivity and its embodied presence. Due to these qualities, there is a great potential in how smell can be used to explore issues of power. With my work I aim to create intense, affecting smells. I seek to create smells “from below.” Beyond provocation and the claiming of space, I look to smells in their ability to communicate information and generate situated knowledge. Looking toward the future, I continue to investigate malodors through the transformation of materials, using waste materials, matter at various points in the cycle of life and death, looking to anaerobic processes and the sulfur they produce. I plan to work closely with Kettler’s research looking at how odor has been used as resistance by enslaved people and the subaltern historically as I continue to develop intriguing odors.

Notes 1 This ongoing research-based project is informed by rapidly developing research on the microbiome. Only relatively recently it has been discovered that more than half of the cells in the human body are in fact bacterial cells and that the brain and gut (along with the microorganisms living there) are linked in both directions, with each system directly influencing the other. This knowledge contributes to challenging ideas of the self-contained body and, with it, binary categories such as subject/object, human/nonhuman, and mind/body. 2 This work was undertaken at the biohacking space Hackuarium, in Écublens, Switzerland, in the spring of 2019. I was working with microbiologist Rachel Aronoff and designer Vanessa Lorenzo, as part of a residency at Utopiana in Geneva, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press. Ahuja, Rajesh. 2017. “Smelly Bomb Planned to Douse Protests Doesn’t Raise a Stink.” Hindustan Times, July 27, 2017. www.hindustantimes.com. Classen, Constance. 1992. “The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories.” Ethos 20 (2) (June): 133–166. https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1992.20.2.02a00010 Corbin, Alain. 1986. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Hamburg: Berg.

222 Alanna Lynch Dalton, Pamela, Anna-Sara Claeson, and Steve Horenziak. 2020. “The Impact of Indoor Malodor: Historical Perspective, Modern Challenges, Negative Effects, and Approaches for Mitigation.” Atmosphere 11 (2): 126. https://doi:10.3390/atmos11020126 Davies, Wyre. 2008. “New Israeli Weapon Kicks Up Stink.” BBC News, October 2, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk. de Groot, Japser H., Liseanne van Houtum, Ilse Gortemaker, Yuting Ye, Wei Chen, Wen Zhou, and Monique Smeets. 2018. “Beyond the West: Chemosignaling of Emotions Transcends Ethno-Cultural Boundaries.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 98: 177–185. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.08.005 Drobnick, Jim. 2002. “Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spatiality.” Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7 (1): 31–47. https://doi:10.1080/09697250220142047. Drobnick, Jim. 2000. “Inhaling Passions: Art, Sex and Scent.” Sexuality and Culture 4 (3): 37–56. https://doi:10.1007/s12119-000-1020-x. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1993. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haviland-Jones, Jeannette M., Patricia Wilson, and Robin Freyberg. 2016. “Olfaction: Explicit and Implicit Emotional Processing.” In Handbook of Emotions, Fourth Edition, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Lewis, and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, 199–214. London: Guilford Press. Herz, Rachel. 2006. “I Know What I Like: Understanding Odor Preferences.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, 190–203. Oxford: Berg. Herz, Rachel. 2004. “I Know What I Like: Understanding Odor Preferences.” Sense of Smell Institute the Research & Education Division of the Fragrance Foundation. www. senseofsmell.org/ Herz, Rachel. 2002. “Influences of Odors on Mood and Affective Cognition.” In Olfaction, Taste and Cognition, edited by Catherine Rouby, Benoist Schaal and A. Holley, 160–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inbar, Yoel, David A. Pizarro, and Paul Bloom. 2009. “Conservatives Are More Easily Disgusted Than Liberals.” Cognition and Emotion 23 (4): 714–725. https://doi: 10.1080/02699930802110007 Kettler, Andrew. 2017. “Odor and Power in the Americas: Olfactory Consciousness from Columbus to Emancipation.” PhD diss., University of South Carolina. https://scholarcommons. sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5152&context=etd Lara, Ali, Wen Liu, Colin Patrick Ashley, Akemi Nishida, Rachel Jane Liebert, and Michelle Billies. 2017. “Affect and Subjectivity.” Subjectivity 10 (1): 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41286-016-0020-8 Lilja, Mona. 2017. “Dangerous Bodies, Matter and Emotions: Public Assemblies and Embodied Resistance.” Journal of Political Power 10 (3): 342–352 https://doi.org/10.1080/ 2158379X.2017.1382176 Miller, William. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. London: Harvard University Press. Prado de O. Martins, Luiza. 2018. “A Topography of Excesses: Bodies, Spaces, and CounterCurses.” www.luiza-prado.com/a-topography-of-excesses Smith, Mark M. 2012. “Transcending, Othering, Detecting: Smell, Premodernity, Modernity.” Postmedieval 3: 380–390. https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.35 Schaller, Mark. 2011. “The Behavioural Immune System and the Psychology of Human Sociality.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366: 3418–3426. wikihow. 2020. “How to Make a Stink Bomb.” Last modified June 22, 2020. www.wikihow. com/Make-a-Stink-Bomb.

18 Enteric Aesthetics Arnaud Gerspacher

A myth persists that Vincent van Gogh fed on yellow tubes of paint in order to alter his mood. However unlikely these stories may be, there is little question that the painter suffered from serious digestive ailments. This being the case, in light of current knowledge of the gut-brain axis and its role in modulating our cognitive and emotional lives, how might art historians undertake a sort of psychointestinalysis of his work? While it would be difficult to take these microbiotic depths into interpretive account (how would they even be coded?), his digestive ailments unavoidably informed his artistic mind to some degree. For a more recent example at the level of the audience reception, how might we interpret participatory installations involving foods and their affectivity on visitors’ gut microbiomes?1 Making these questions even more complicated is the fact the gut microbiome is increasingly situated in communion not only with the brain but also with the other microbiomes of the body—nasal, pulmonary, dermal. Hence what is at stake is the subject as holobiome (Bienenstock, Kunze, and Forsythe 2018). It is an ecological theory of our insides as always in negotiation with the ecological realities of our outsides. Any neuroarthistory, a method that tends to restrict its concerns to the visual brain and the cognitive, is incomplete without this wider affectional aggregate of digestive, endocrinological, and pneumatic being. 2 This is additionally a creaturely theory. It is ethological in the sense Deleuze and Guattari use the term in their Spinozian theory of becoming-animal—of knowing “what a body can do” (or cannot do) in its “individuated multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 254, 256). While our microbiomes allow us to live, breath, and consume, they also keep us grounded as interdependent and multispecies creatures. In our teaming reliance on all sorts of bacteria, fungi, and other microbiota—which alone qualify us as individuated multiplicities—we always run the risk of having this dependence instrumentalized in some way. In other words, using the anthropologist Heather Paxson’s coinage, we have always lived in a microbiopolitics (Paxson 2008). Like all other holobiomic creatures, we find ourselves caught between biopolitical control and our ability (or inability) to escape and live freely—or, at least, to live within pressures and constraints in a more or less comfortable way—and part of understanding subjectivity through our microbiomes is sniffing out how ideology can come in through the mouth and nose, implicating a multispecies set of tongues and nostrils. But maybe smelling, chewing, and digesting also offer forms of resistance and critique. “I smell a rat” or “going with your gut” are kynical forms of street-smart attunement that can see through academic, neoliberal, and humanist pretensions. I use the word “kynical” in Peter Sloterdijk’s sense, which performs critique through

224  Arnaud Gerspacher pantomime or by embracing the creaturely body as a way of thumbing one’s nose (Sloterdijk 1987). This was likely Nietzsche’s angle—a thinker who was no stranger to stomach problems—when he claimed his ideal reader should be able to ruminate like a cow (Nietzsche 2014, 215). More modestly, we may simply have not yet reached gut enlightenment. We might first need to attune ourselves to the ways our microbiomes influence our reason and emotions, as well as reveal their enmeshment in wider eco-political realities. I develop these lines of thought in the following, first by returning to the exhibition Les Immatériaux from 1985, which often implicated bodily processes in both its works on display and its visitors. This exhibition will then lead me back to Marcel Duchamp and the ways his work called upon the digestive processes of the enteric system and the olfactory, and then forward to some contemporary artists working on eco-political olfactory art and the microbiomic—namely, Mathias Kessler, Peter de Cupere, and Maja Smrekar.

Les Immatériaux First is Les Immatériaux, an expansive collaborative exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in 1985, curated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the design curator Thierry Chaput, which has gone down as the “postmodern exhibition” and is often seen as having augured a number of trends in contemporary art—notably the exhibition-as-artwork. It sought to demonstrate all the ways technoscientific advances have or will affect society, culture, and the human subject, often in disorienting and deleterious ways. Though only a fraction of the show’s heterogeneity, the display’s postmodern sensorium elicited affects coming in through the nose and mouth (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 203–205).3 There were two sites devoted to smell. One was called “painted smell,” and featured artworks presaging today’s more fully fledged olfactory art—including Marcel Duchamp’s Belle Haleine, Eau de voilette, 1921 and Jannis Kounellis’s Untitled, 1969 (ground coffee suspended on weighing scales). The other site was called “simulated smell,” and involved emissions of synthetic chemistry replicating various fruits that the visitor had to identify. As for the gustatory, there were three sites devoted to food. One was called “preparedcuisine—prepared-speaking,” which displayed space-age powdered or freeze-dried foods, and made the analogy between prepackaged meals and preprogrammed forms of speech. Another was “fast food,” which projected images of meals on four white plates, implying that the time-saving acceleration of eating practices is in inverse relation to the idea of food as culture. Lastly, there was “dietary intake,” featuring a microwave and an open refrigerator filled with macronutrient piles of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.4 A few things bind these sites of smell and taste together. First, they evince a general nostalgia for tradition in the age of simulacra. The olfactory and gustatory are deemed reducible to manipulable data inputs—a victual flat ontology controlled by the proper effusion of desired smells and the delivery of proper nutrients. In many ways, Lyotard augured today’s Silicon Valley bio-hacking projects that gear the practice of eating toward optimization and efficiency so as not to get in the way of productivity. These sites also suggest that simulacral smells and edibles make us susceptible to a world turned into a potentially mystifying taste and smellscape (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 197).5 From today’s vantage point, however, this fear of simulation is arguably an overreaction, despite the warranted anxieties about deep fakes and the

Enteric Aesthetics  225 like. After all, not all simulations are proving to be bad or alienating. In food politics, the recent rise of simulacral plant-based and lab-grown meat should be understood as part of climate solutions and food justice, however nutritionally imperfect and tied to the limitations of a competitive economy. In perfumery, the synthesizing of civet cat musk is an ethical improvement over the abused glands of the real animal. And in cinema, computer generated images (CGI) violence is always better than violence in real life (IRL). On the whole, Les Immatériaux emphasized what we would today call the transhumanist—i.e. techno-supplements that augment or alter human qualia— specifically in these sites of smell and taste, the becoming-cyborg of our foods, nostrils, and intestines. But what of the other side of the transhumanist coin—namely, the creaturely? Across the Atlantic in 1985, Donna Haraway was writing her now classic manifesto, which employed not only the figure of the cyborg as an ambivalent figure of resistance but also the nonhuman animal. Her subject is a fuzzy-bordered transcorporeal matrix of human-animal-machine (Haraway 2016). What if Lyotard and Chaput had also inserted creaturely thematics of resistance into Les Immatériaux? And relatedly, what would they have made of what we know today about the gut-brain axis, neurogastroenterology, and the microbiomes of the body? More than likely, this knowledge (which would only get off the ground a decade later) would have figured in the tacit affective subject of resistance that can be read as inhabiting Les Immatériaux’s techno-biopolitics of control. It seems Lyotard may even have envisioned an ultimately unrealized counter-exhibition that would have been called Résistances, which would have entailed a return to the body—specifically, the preand sub-linguistic affective body Lyotard often associated with the infans or infancy (Birnbaum and Wallenstein 2015). This interest in somatic resistance might very well have incorporated the microbial and the enteric. For while the nose can be easily deceived, the gut is less easily fooled: we either ingest matter with little to no nutritional value and feel the toll, or we incorporate beneficial matter with the hope of well-being—notably fibers and carbohydrates that facilitate circulation and produce short-chain fatty acids for good bacterial feedings.

Transcorporeal Duchamp One of my favorite, if pithy, definitions of the contemporary is Peter Sloterdijk’s, when he says to be “absolutely contemporary” is to “presuppose that there is hardly anything left to presuppose” (Sloterdijk 2016, 65). Built into this definition is not only exhaustion and a buffering against being taken in but also the ultimate vantage point on history and knowledge—an admittedly impossible or endlessly deferred vantage point of seeing all frames. For Sloterdijk, the angel of history always tends toward making things more and more explicit, for better and for worse. The twentieth century is decisive for Sloterdijk as manifesting three conjoined ideas coming out of the historical clearing—terror, design, and the environment. In his genealogy of atmo-terrorism, which he claims began in 1915 with the first instance of gas warfare in Ypres, France, what was once latent—i.e. the inhalation of air as necessity for living—became painfully obvious through its ambient weaponization. Using Sloterdijk’s term, it became “explicated” in asphyxiating attention. From this basically Heideggerian reading of the environment as increasingly visible in its brokenness ensues the pampering immunological history of air-conditioning, weather design, and modern

226  Arnaud Gerspacher forms of terrorism “whose decisive idea was no longer to aim at an enemy’s body, but rather his environment” (Sloterdijk 2016, 90). This turn from individuated address to a general atmospheric, ambient, and ecological front—wherein fast and slow state and corporate violence alike can seep, control, erode, demoralize, immiserate, and destroy—is suggestive. One can now kill through the nose and mouth from the greatest of distances and with even a modulation of release and legal responsibility; this includes the harmful consequences of the industrial agro-social hegemony of Western diets, which have been scaled to monstrous proportions and similarly degrade humans and nonhumans from a distance. It is therefore surprising that Sloterdijk uses Salvador Dali’s comical 1936 performance in London—a lecture given behind a deep-sea diving suit for the International Surrealist Exhibition—as his avant-garde correlate to his theory of atmospheric explication (Sloterdijk 2016, 144–179). A more suitable candidate would have been from two years later, namely, Duchamp’s 1,200 sacks of coal filled with newspapers hanging from the ceiling of a darkened space filled with coffee aromas at the 1938 Exhibition Internationale de Surréalisme. This display certainly explicated the atmospheric container of art and the gallery-goer as a pneumatically dependent entity. It is little surprise that Duchamp was a major influence on Lyotard’s curatorial concepts and there are a number of suggestive affinities between Les Immatériaux and the 1938 surrealist exhibition. Most notably, they both sought to discomfort the public—one through a performative acceleration of techno-scientific impositions, the other through what then must have been strikingly incongruous elements in a version of the surrealist marvelous that also played with malevolence, as the art historian T.J. Demos has suggested (Demos 2012, 129–188).6 Compatibly, Benjamin Buchloh has argued that Duchamp’s display was an acceleration of “self-immolating” commodity consumption as then a newly emergent form of public control (Buchloh 2014, 55). One of the reasons Duchamp’s display remains so compelling (from an admittedly retrospective standpoint) is that it implicates what we today would understand as four central autoimmune disorders of Western culture and industry: the falling dust of coal standing in for the fossil fuels propelling the industrial revolution and all its attendant growth, which has led to the anthropogenic self-immolation of global warming; the coffee smell standing in for histories of Western imperialism, colonialism, and its naturalized neocolonial presence as commodity staple; the newspapers used as stuffing standing in for democratic public media, which, when coerced or manipulated by state or corporate interests, can be a powerful tool of informational warfare (Buchloh 2014, 57); finally, the sacks themselves—sourced from the Paris slaughterhouses at La Villette that in 1938 were still in operation —standing in for modern animal agriculture and its harmful role in environment degradation and global warming, notably through methane. In each case, what was envisioned as making Western civilization stronger and indeed pampered—energy, distant “exotic” resources, democratization of information, and the scalability of animal products—has boomeranged and jeopardizes nearly everyone. Duchamp likely did not foresee these autoimmune disorders, yet he did have an idea of the instrumentalization of the environmental idea for nefarious ends.7 Take his note from his Green Box of 1935 in which he purports to “[e]stablish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes (air meters; imprisonment and rarefied air), in case of non-payment asphyxiation if necessary (cut off air)” (Duchamp 1975, 31). This overidentification of privatized air has been realized as street ads for a

Enteric Aesthetics  227 fictional product called “Eviair,” a satirical gasmask fitted with commodified air for individual consumption.8 This cheeky note from the Green Box is only one instance of Duchamp implicating breathing, smelling, and other transcorporeal emanations in his work.9 Along with the coffee smells and settling coal dust, which would have produced unforeseen affects and moods in the audience, we have the transformer, a hypothetical machine endowed with all our creaturely bodily functions and secretions, urinals implicating bowel functions, coffee grinders alluding to masturbation, references to sneezing, and so many other carnal allusions that make Duchamp a twentieth-century Diogenes. In its synesthesia that implicates far more than sight alone, Duchamp’s interest in enveloping atmospherics and bodily emanations aligns with his well-theorized antiretinal stance. As the copious Duchampian literature lays out, this anti-retinality is always at least double. For Rosalind Krauss, this means a Jekyll-and-Hyde split between Duchamp’s highbrow conceptualism and his ludic fascination with sex and all things desublimated (Krauss 1993, 95–146). For Thierry De Duve, this means Duchamp’s cerebral gray matter on the one hand and his mocking of painting as olfactory masturbation on the other (Duve 2006, 44). For David Joselit, the key Duchampian oscillation is between the “mensurable,” that which can be measured, and the “immensurable,” that which exceeds measurement (Joselit 2001, 9–70). Interestingly, this split between the controlled mind and uncontrollable body can be superimposed on the larger Western historical and intellectual split that Sloterdijk has analyzed between Enlightenment rationality and scientific seriousness on the one hand, and kynical uprisings and libidinal attachments on the other. These lead Sloterdijk down rather amusing philosophical corridors attending to all sorts of bodily functions normally kept out of serious play— from the uncontrollable semiotics of farting, to the ecological significance of refuse, to genitals and masturbation as cheeky self-reliance in a kynical anthropology that turns Freudian uprightness and handedness on its head.10 If the lofty and the base continually mingle in his work, then Duchamp has prefigured the fact that the cognitive is reliant on the internal functioning of the body as holobiome, especially the olfactory and the enteric. He points toward our contemporary knowledge that mindedness is contingent on bacteria, fungi, fiber, circulation, feces, and a likely “immensurable” matrix of affectivity between brain and viscera— in sum, the microbiome-gut-brain axis. By marrying Duchamp, Sloterdijk, and the microbiotic in such a way, I insist on two interrelated features: first, that the genteel and seriously minded are forced to find themselves in a state of dependency on an environment—be it with their microbiomes, the microcosm of the gallery, or the macrocosm of the planet—even if this dependency continues to be disavowed in modernist and humanist notions of autonomy; second, that this dependency explicates our creatureliness. Any artist or philosopher who ruminates on this evolutionary givenness of thinking, creativity, and so much else is offering a non-pejorative understanding of the creaturely—and, as such, is part of a kynical lineage attuned to the positive possibilities of animality, often in critical resistance to humanist and neoliberal overreach. When Duchamp claimed that “eroticism is an animal thing” (Duve 2006, 160), he had one foot in the older trope of animality reducible to feral drive, but also, through his transcorporeal aesthetics, one foot in a newer understanding of the creaturely as productively tied to the molecular body. The olfactory scholar Jim Drobnick even claims that Duchamp’s understanding of paint and perfume, which often overlap, “operate psychophysically, as both intoxicant and fuel,” which preceded the eventual

228  Arnaud Gerspacher discovery of animal pheromones (Drobnick 2013, 270). Yet it is not only pheromones. Duchamp prefigured all sorts of transcorporeal situations of affectivity, even if only intuitively or with retroactive interpretive help. Recall Krauss’s reading of Duchamp as influenced by “psychophysiological” research in his Large Glass, 1915–1923, his Rotoreliefs, 1935, and Étant donnés, 1946–1966. Following Lyotard, Krauss wants to disabuse “metaphysical” interpretations of Duchamp in opting for a “carnal” reading, keeping in mind that “Duchamp’s view of the gray matter—that part that exists beyond the retina—cannot be separated from the other kinds of organic activity within the physical body” (Krauss 1993, 125). This being the case, Duchamp’s oeuvre points toward a proto-neurogastroenterological aesthetics with all its allusions to endocrinological transcorporeal emanations, bodily functions, and the visceral.11 Most suggestive is Étant donnés: if the peephole turns the viewer into a Sartrean voyeur whose body is “thickened” by the gaze of others, then certain hormonal changes or affective disturbances likely accompany this embodied gaze and get released in the air. The museum guards at the Philadelphia Museum of Art may have become connoisseurs of human smell and the olfactory molecules of embarrassment, surprise, shame, or fear elicited by this most famous diorama. In humans, these molecular becomings remain at the level of an olfactory and enteric unconscious—and yet, reinforcing the creatureliness in all this, a therapy dog in the gallery would certainly be conscious of these emanations with their acute vomeronasal organs, pheromones inclusive (Horowitz 2019, 54–55). Once we introduce the porous plasticity of atmosphere, gut, and brain, works of art are potential sites for a psychointestinalysis that considers the microbiome-gut-brain axis, something Duchamp’s collapsing of the cognitive and the visceral seems to have done avant la lettre.

Contemporary Directions If many of the olfactory and enteric themes I have worked with remain latent in Duchamp’s work, many contemporary artists are more explicit in this regard. Consider the Austrian Mathias Kessler and his The Taste of Discovery, 2009. The artist went on an expedition in 2007 to document icebergs under floodlights off a boat near Ilulissat, Greenland, one of which appeared on video in The Taste of Discovery two years later at the Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria. The moving image of the iceberg on video was installed opposite a mirror that had been rigged to a compressor in another room, making its reflective surface periodically oscillate between freezing and melting (see Figure 18.1). This shift from cold to warm mimicked the experience of the expedition, as did the sounds of the compressor’s motor standing in for the boat engine (see Figure 18.2). Kessler also sought to invoke the smells of the expedition and collaborated with a French perfumer to create an unruly scent, one that upon contact with human skin (with its own microbiome) emits a noxious combination of human body odor and crude oil. The corporeal entanglement became unavoidable, as the scent was diffused in the exhibition space, editioned in vials, and inserted in well-known perfume ads. It not only cataloged the human phenomenality of such expeditions—expeditions that litter the histories of colonial and neocolonial trade— but it also made fossil fuels viscerally palpable for the viewer—by proxy CO2 , which unlike other animals, we humans cannot detect through smell. Its accelerated emission as a greenhouse gas continues to fuel global warming and the melting of the arctic, including this area of Greenland made visible by Kessler’s photographs.

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Figure 18.1 Mathias Kessler (b. 1968) The Taste of Discovery, 2009. Kunstraum Dornbirn, Installation view. Source: Photographer: Mathias Kessler.

Figure 18.2 Mathias Kessler (b. 1968) The Taste of Discovery, 2009. Kunstraum Dornbirn, Installation view. Source: Photographer: Mathias Kessler.

A more localized example demonstrating how ideology can come in through the mouth and nose is the Belgian artist Peter de Cupere’s (b. 1970) outdoor project for the 2015 Havana Biennial titled Smell of a Stranger. For this installation, the artist presented nine indigenous Cuban flowers and plants genetically modified to emit

230  Arnaud Gerspacher some decidedly non-floral smells—from blood, sperm, sweat, and vaginal scents to dead bodies, gun powder, air pollution, and US dollar bills.12 As the sensory studies scholar Hsuan Hsu notes, these incongruous smells were meant to disturb the viewer/smeller into affectively considering US eco-cultural impositions and neocolonial power. This includes economic and military impositions, seedy sex tourism, and the ecologically disastrous foisting of our current food policies and animal industries onto distant and not-so-distant geographies. One of the scents that de Cupere had to omit for “technical reasons” was of hamburgers and French fries. Should this meat-flower have been realized, nothing would have kept viewers/smellers from re-associating fast food with blood and death. Add to this mix air pollution and money and we have a fairly accurate miasmatic matrix of the ecological and nutritional violence imposed by modern Western diets, with their ludicrous amounts of meat and processed foods. These industries have outsourced their products to the rest of the world and literally cut into the macrobiotic “lungs” of our planet through deforestation, especially in the Amazonian biome. This has resulted in deleterious consequences for the collective human gut microbiome, which prefers the fibrous anti-inflammatory components of plants to the inflammatory markers of most animal products. And since the gut microbiome seems to mirror the nasal microbiome, de Cupere’s installation becomes even more suggestive.13 My final example comes from the Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar and her K9_ Topology: Ecce Canis from 2014, which works in a more obviously creaturely mode. Part of her larger K9_Topology project exploring the conjoined evolutionary history of humans and canines, this installation involved the artist and her dog inhabiting a pre-Neolithic “spherical cave” lined with wolf skins re-appropriated from used fur coats and, most crucially, an ambient olfactory component: working with a biochemical engineer, Smrekar isolated her serotonin and synthesized it with the isolated serotonin of her dog, which was then transformed into an odor that could be diffused in the installation (see Figure 18.3). The hormonal smell, which by the artist’s account approximated “bad breath,” encapsulated their relationship and their “common mind,” of which the public could enter into “phenomenological empathy” when experiencing the installation in entering into the cave on all fours in order to sniff the evaporation sensor.14 As Smrekar lays out in her research accompanying this project, one reason serotonin is so interesting in this history of domestication is that humans and dogs developed a mutual polymorphic genetic mutation—specifically, the gene that codes for serotonin transporter slc64A. This played a role in the evolutionary melding of human and canine minds and bodies, our reciprocal sociability, and our ability to empathize with each other via sympoietic limbic systems—which, not so incidentally, are anatomically proximate to our olfactory bulbs. Crucially, this relationship—which amounts to a mutual (if asymmetrical) taming and not the old humanist unilateral domination of the beasts—is as much digestive as it is cognitive. A multispecies psychointestinalysis even reveals key evolutionary dietary adaptations as domesticated dogs, unlike their wolf ancestors, show the gene for the enzyme amylase, which allows them to digest simple and complex carbohydrates alongside us. No wonder 90% to 95% of serotonin is produced in and distributed from the gut. The ancient cynic Diogenes, who favored dogs over humans and embraced all things creaturely, would have loved this work. The modern Kant, on the other hand, would have abhorred it. He would

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Figure 18.3 Maja Smrekar (b. 1978) K-9_topology: Ecce canis, 2014. Kapelica Gallery, Kersnikova Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Source: Co-produced with Bandits-Mages (Bourges, France) and supported by CNC - centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, France. Photographer: Miha Fras.

have seen it as both illiberal and indiscrete. His crucial retroactive mistake is not knowing that these creaturely contaminations are already inside and all around us. In her fascinating critical synthesis of neuroscience and philosophy, Catherine Malabou explores the notion of brain plasticity and argues that it is nothing less than a self-forming work—a sculpted encephalon shaped by neuronal feedback loops between synapses, experience, and culture. In short, brain plasticity is history (or at least a history). And yet, updating Marx’s definition of ideology, Malabou affirms that “Humans make their own brain, but they do not know it” (Malabou 2008, 1). The same could be said about the gut. What should we do with our microbiomes? is a question to be asked alongside Malabou’s titular What Should We Do with Our Brain? Answering these two questions in tandem might lead to an enteric and creaturely enlightenment, which, as I have begun to demonstrate above, is in communication not only with internal states of cognition but also with external ecological realities whose violence and degradation may well have their own feedback loops inside us—up and down a coagulated spine that stifles circulation along the gut-brain axis, or through analogous and homologous relationships connecting agro-business, ultra-processed foods and the animal industrial complex, deforestation, the leveling of species diversity, the erosion of intestinal linings, and the loss of bacterial diversity in gut flora. We may well need to turn our insides inside-out in order to trace the immeasurable yet mutual living topographies we share with the planet and all its creatures. If not, ideology resides in the pit of our stomachs and we do not know it.

232 Arnaud Gerspacher

Notes 1 For compelling recent work on the gut in relation to multispecies studies and the post humanities, see Jamie Lorimer, Heather Paxson, Elizabeth Wilson, and the virtual exhibition Gut Instinct: Art, Design, and the Microbiome curated by Charissa N. Terranova and David R. Wessner. 2 For an overview and history of neuroarthistory, see Onians (2017). 3 Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott nominated smell as the postmodern sense in their well-known cultural history of olfaction. 4 All of these details are from the “Inventaire” in Pompidou (1985). I have translated the French site titles. 5 Admittedly, the technology was not really new, as the first synthesized smells and flavors can be found in the nineteenth century. 6 Demos argues that Duchamp’s display both dominated the art objects and the public and undercut commodity desire through the oppressive procedure of serialization of the sacks on the ceiling. 7 Counter Sloterdijk, we might go further back to the great stinks of London and Paris for key moments in the explication of the environmental idea. In fact, Jim Drobnick has pointed out that Duchamp’s interest in all things breathy and smelly likely stems from his first nose experience of the great stink of Paris of 1911. Or, even further back, we might find the explication of air dependency in the creaturely proxies of asphyxiating animals in Boyle’s air pumps from the seventeenth century. For Duchamp and the 1911 great stink of Paris, see Drobnick (2013, 266). 8 The posters are by two activist artists known as Raemann. See www.instagram.com/ raemann1/ (accessed 4/6/2020). 9 The term “transcorporeal” was coined by the environmental humanities scholar Stacy Alaimo. 10 See especially chapter 6, “Concerning the Psychosomatics of the Zeitgeist,” and “Sexual Cynicism” in chapter 7, in Sloterdijk (1987, 139–154/250–266). 11 It is telling that “viscera” is a productive leitmotif in David Joselit’s reading of Duchamp’s readymades as having residual carnality. See especially chapter 1 in Joselit (2001). 12 For an excellent analysis of de Cupere’s work, see Hsu (2016). 13 For the nasal microbiome mirroring the gut, see Koskinen et al. (2018). 14 The insight that the hormonal air smells like “bad breath” comes from my interview with the artist, 1/11/2020. Otherwise, see Maja Smrekar’s “K-9_Typology: ECCE CANIS (2014)” at www.majasmrekar.org/ekce-canis (accessed 1/17/2020).

References Bienenstock, John, Wolfgang A. Kunze, and Paul Forsythe. 2018. “Disruptive Physiology: Olfaction and the Microbiome-Gut-Brain Axis.” Biological Reviews 93 (1): 390–403. Birnbaum, Daniel, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein. 2015. “From Immaterials to Resistance: The Other Side of Les Immatériaux” In 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science, and Theory, edited by Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann, 245–267. Leuphana University of Lüneburg: meson press, Hybrid Publishing Lab. Buchloh, Benjamin. 2014. “The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The Degenerate Art Exhibition (1937) and the Exhibition Internationale du Surréalisme (1938).” October 150: 49–62. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London; New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2007. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Demos, T. J. 2012. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Drobnick, Jim. 2013. “To ‘Feel Breathing’: Duchamp and the Immaterial Aesthetics of Scent.” In Aesthetics of Matter edited by Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru, Benedikt Hjartarson, 263–276. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.

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Duchamp, Marcel. 1975. The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: marchand du sel. London: Thames and Hudson. Duve, Thierry de. 2006. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Manifestly Haraway: The Cyborg Manifesto, The Companion Species Manifesto, Companions in Conversation (with Cary Wolfe). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Horowitz, Alexandra. 2019. Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell. New York: Scribner. Hsu, Hsuan L. 2016. “Olfactory Art, Transcorporeality, and the Museum Environment.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4 (1): 1–24. Joselit, David. 2001. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910–1941. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Koskinen, K., J. L. Reichert, S. Hoier, J. Schachenreiter, S. Duller, C. Moissl-Eichinger, and V. Schˆpf. 2018. “The Nasal Microbiome Mirrors and Potentially Shapes Olfactory Function.” Scientific Reports 8: 1–11. Krauss, Rosalind E. 1993. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Les Immatériaux. Album et Inventaire. Paris: Edition du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2014. Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Onians, John. 2017. Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki. New Haven: Yale University Press. Paxson, Heather. 2008. “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (1): 15–47. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2016. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban: Semiotext(e).

Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables and italic page numbers refer to figures. abjection 77, 78, 79–81, 94 ableism and care 127–128 Abram, Dorothy 169–181 abstract art 18, 190 accessible spaces 127–129 active smelling 61–62, 182–192 activism 46–47, 51, 53, 79, 82; data gathering for 90, 92, 94–95; see also resistance adverse smells see malodors aesthesis of air 67 The Aesthetic and Political Potential of Body Scents 195; see also Love Sweat Love aesthetics of smell: Black populations and 13–19, 25; enteric aesthetics 223–232 affective experience 18, 23, 210, 225, 228 Afrocentric signifiers 16–18, 25, 28; see also Black diaspora agency see empowerment Ahmed, Sara 36, 219 air 65, 67–68, 76, 149; privatized 226–227 Air Emergency (1970) 77, 78, 79 Air Polluter (2007) 72 air pollution 56, 65; eco-olfactory art 65–73; olfaction as radical collaboration 112–113, 112, 113; in public health 38; replicas of 67–68, 103–105, 103, 230; urban environments 76–77, 78, 79, 108, 112, 112; see also atmosphere; pollution airborne communication see plant communication airpocalypse 72 Alaimo, Stacy 69 allyship 51 Alpers, Antony 169–171 ambient scenting 59, 154 ambiguity 155 Anamnesis (Nkanga) 26 The Anatomy of Disgust (1997) 219 Anderson, Warwick 39–40 Andre, Carl 160 Angus, Alice 90 Animal Madness (Braitman) 121

animality 120–123, 219, 223, 227–228; aesthetics of smell 195, 197; feminine alignment with 161, 162, 163–164 animals 225; domestication of 120, 124, 125; non-human scavengers 119; olfactory surveillance 57–58, 61; as origin of fixtures for perfumes 120–121; scentbased rituals with 123–129; see also Dogs/ dogs; humans Ant Farm 77, 78, 79 Anthropocene/Capitalocene 68–70 Antibiotic (2011) 18 antiblackness 11, 18; see also race anti-environments 66–67 anti-retinality 227 Antoine’s Organ (Johnson) 27 Arakawa, Ei and Tomoo 115–116 Aranke, Sampada 28 Arendt, Hannah 184–185, 187–188, 191 Aristotle 100 Arnheim, Rudolf 100 aroma design taxonomy 148, 151–152, 154 Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Classen et al.) 2 art see olfactory art Art as Experience (Dewey) 105 art history, gender and 164–167 art industry, resistance in 6 art museums 182–194; challenges of olfactory art in 147–148; contemporary 190–192; social use-value 182; white-cube model 26, 68–69, 79–80, 190 Arte Povera 3 artifacts, visuality and 4 (art)work of living 40–41 atmosphere 11, 18–19, 24, 216, 225–226; proposed as a World Heritage site 92–93; racial 10–19; see also air pollution atmo-terrorism 225 attraction, scent and 150–151 auto-ethnographic methods 210 awareness 59–60

236 Index Baaz, Mikael 5–6 Babylon 131 bacteria 116–117, 163, 219; culturing from gut 220–221; see also kombucha Balkin, Amy 91, 92–93 Baltimore 186, 187, 188, 189, 192 Banes, Sally 147–148, 151–152, 154 Baraka, Amira 27 Barbieri, Donatella 148 Barr, Alfred H. Jr. 190–191 Barré, Sandra 157–168 Barthes, Roland 28–29, 171 Baudelaire, Charles 159 Bay of Smokes solo show 68 Bears, scent to repel or lure 122 beauty 29, 129, 159, 161; see also cosmetics de Beauvoir, Simone 157, 159 Beck, Ulrich 65, 68 behaviour 72–73, 150 Beijing, China 67–68 Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921) 3, 134, 135, 143 Benjamin, Walter 5, 25, 101 Bensafi, Moustafa 88 Berardi, Franco “Bifo” 65, 111 Berrigan, Caitlin 88, 89, 90 Beuys, Joseph 28 Biden, Joe 22, 29 Black bodies 22–23, 25; breathing 11–12; reevaluation by Black artists 29; see also People of Color; race Black diaspora 10–19, 23 Black Lives Matter movement 99 Black microclimates 12–13; olfactory aesthetics and 13–19 Black olfactory projects 16, 190; everyday practices 10, 13, 26–28 black soap 16, 18, 26–28 Black spaces 10–12 Bliss (Mansfield) 170–171, 174–177 blood 161, 162, 163; smell of in perfumes 152 bodies 37, 149–150; bathing rituals 27; feminine 157–161, 162, 163–164; materials from 210–212; permeability of 69–70, 214, 216; scented 146–156; smell and 29, 157–168; see also Black bodies bodily fluids 161, 214; smell of in perfumes 151–152; smells genetically engineered 230; see also blood; microbiomes; saliva samples; urine; vaginal samples bodily knowledge 34, 56–57 body odor/body scent 120, 149, 196; cleaning and 37; communication and 216; disease diagnosis and 63; Identification Based on Individual Scent (IBIS) project 58; intimacy from smell 155; perception and judgment

of 195, 198–199, 201, 202, 203–204, 205, 206–207; uniqueness 24–25; see also gender; identity; otherness; race; women’s smell Böhme, Gernot 69 The Book of Perfume (Rimmel) 131 Boulé, Christelle 165 Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer) 110–111 brain 187, 199, 231; emotional regions 71–72, 101 Braitman, Laurel 121 Bramwell, Michael 82, 84, 85 Brandis, Agnes Meyer 111 Brant, Clare 197 Brazil 49–50 breath odor, COVID-19 and 63 breathalyzer technology 58 breathing 65, 99, 101, 187; empathy through 99–109; olfactivist art and 94–95; racial atmospherics and 10–13; stories of the air we breathe 65–75; see also air pollution; inhalation Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (Beradi) 111 Brooklyn Smelling Committee (1891) 88, 89, 90 Bryan-Wilson, Julia 82 Buchloh, Benjamin 226 Bučinskaitė, Jogintė 47, 49, 52 Building Sweeps-Harlem (1995–1996) 82, 84, 85 Byron, Ellen 121 cannibalism, scent as 117 capitalism 46, 52, 140–143; air quality and 66–68; art museums and 190–191; transgressions of queer subjects under 131–145 Capitalocene/Anthropocene 68–70 capture of odors see headspace technology carbon trading 91, 92–93; see also climate change Carco, Francis 178 care see interspecies interactions Caribbean 50 Carnation 172, 174–175 Carved to Flow Foundation 26 case studies 151–154; Dirty Violet (2019) 154; Eau de Protection (2007) 151–152; Poison Ladies (2013) 152–154, 153 categorical experiments 131–134 celebrity culture 29, 140–141 Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Montreal 2 Cerulo, Karen 146–149, 152 Chachki, Violet 146, 154 Chaput, Thierry 224–225 chemical sensitivities 127

Index  237 Chickens 127–128 China 39 Ching, Madame see Stout, Renée chrysanthemum powder 124–129 Chung, Him 41 cigarette smoke 177 cities see urban environments Cixous, Hélène 171, 173 class 170, 172–174, 176–179 Classen, Constance 2–3, 35, 126, 158, 216–217 Claude (perfume project) 12 clean air parks 91, 92–93 cleaning 37; performances 82; see also deodorization Climart research project see Pollution Pods climate change 56, 66–68, 70–73, 109, 228; artistic strategies 91, 92–95; resistance 5; see also environmental issues cockroach pheromones 79–80 collaboration 108–118; see also interspecies interactions collective action 56 colonization: deodorizing and 39–40; indigeneity and 47, 49–52; smell and 22–23, 26; see also cultural appropriation commodification 46, 52, 132–134, 226 common sense/s 40–41 communication: art versus 6; body smells and 216; gendered communication 150–151, 157–158; olfaction as 59–61, 110–112, 148; scent as tool for 149–155; see also interspecies interactions; language; plant communication companion species, mutual care 125–126 compassion 105 Concealed and Contained (since 2009) 211, 211 Condillac (Traité des Sensations) 100 confinement 121–123 conjure products 13–15 conservative beliefs, disgust and 60, 219–220 contact improvisation 41 contamination 109, 115–117; see also deodorization contemplation, disinterested 195–209 The Contemporary Condition (Cox and Lund) 188 contemporary directions 225, 228–231; contemporary, definition 188–189; museums 190–191 conversation see language coquetry 159–160 Corbett, Rachel 115–116 Corbin, Alain 2, 37, 100, 216 Corticchiato, Marc-Antoine 164

cosmetics 159–161, 163–164; see also Eat Your Makeup (1968) Cosmic Slop (2008) 27 costume theory 146–148, 150 counter-monuments 185–188 COVID-19 pandemic 63, 100 Cow with Ear Tag #1389 124 Cows, mutual care 125 Cox, Geoff 188 Crain, Cæmeron 36 creaturely theory 223, 225, 227–228, 230–231 creolization 49–50 Crowford, Bethany 32–43 Crutzen, Paul Josef 70 cultural appropriation: sage smudging 46, 50–53, 87; shea butter 17–18 The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed) 219 culture: cleanliness and 40; disorders of 226; meanings of perfumes 28–29, 148, 152; smell situated within 35, 87, 100–101, 131, 197, 218 de Cupere, Peter: Air Polluter (2007) 72; Factory Tree (2015) 70; Smell of a Stranger (1970) 229–230; Smoke Cloud (2013) 69; Smoke Flowers (2017) 70 cyborg, as a figure of resistance 225 Dalí, Salvador 226 Daniele, Paola 161, 162, 163 data gathering 90, 92, 94–95, 111 dating experiment see Love Sweat Love Daum, Megan 183 death 11, 123–124 Debord, Guy 134 deep ecology 70–71 Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch 126 dehumanization 80 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 223 Demos, T.J. 226 deodorization 10, 12, 37–40, 76, 197; see also contamination; remediating smells Deodorizing China (Huang) 39 dependency 227 Deptford High Street, South London 80–81 desire, scent and 150–151 Dewey, John 105 Dewey, Myron 52 Diaconu, Mădălina 100 diasporic art see Black diaspora digestive ailments 223–224; see also gutbrain axis digital devices, dependence on 60–61 Diogenes 227, 230 Dior Poison (1985) 152–154, 153

238 Index “diplomatic odor” 196 dirt 38; see also contamination Dirty No. 1 (2000) 80 “dirty” perfumes 154 Dirty Violet (2019) 146, 147, 154 disgust 102–103, 199; conservative political attitudes 60, 219–220 disinfection see deodorization; hygiene disinterested contemplation, shaking off 195 disorientation 33–34 disruptive performativity 140–142 Divine (character) 136–137, 139, 140, 144 DOCUMENTA (13) (2012) 93 Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent? (2014) 115–116 Dogs/dogs 125–126, 178, 230–231, 231 The Doll’s House (Mansfield) 172–173 Donora, PA 113, 113 Douglas, Mary 154–155 drag, and the transgressions of queer subjects 131–145 Dravnieks, Andrew 197 “dress” in smell 150 Drobnick, Jim 76–98, 147, 150, 152–153, 216, 227–228; The Smell Culture Reader (2006) 1–2, 4; “Towards an Olfactory Art History” 2 “Drops” series 165 drug detection 58, 61 Duchamp, Marcel 225–228; 1938 Exhibition Internationale de Surréalisme 226; Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921) 3, 134, 135, 143, 224; Étant donnés, 1946–1966 228; Fontaine, in lipstick 160; Green Box (1935) 226–227 “Dutchman” (2013) 27 Duve, Thierry De 227 Eat Your Makeup (1968) 136–137, 138, 139, 143 Eau de Protection (2007) 151–152, 152 Eau Doom board game 62 Eckstein, Emma 137, 140, 144 ecological activists see activism economic injustice 99–100 eco-olfactory art 67–73, 93, 223–224; see also environmental issues Edreva, Eleonora 56–64 effeminacy 131 electronic noses/e-noses 57–58, 61, 90, 92 Ellena, Jean Claude 2 embodied experience 56–57, 69–70, 199, 216 Emotional Labour (2018) 217, 217 emotions 29, 71–72, 101, 187, 221; see also empathy

empathy 99–109; artwork-audience relationship 104–105; definition 105 empowerment 93, 158, 161; responsibility and 72–73, 116; urban environments 87–88, 89, 90, 91, 92–94 empuzzlement 81–82 end of the world, olfactory resistance at the 56–64 Enlightenment 57, 190–191, 227 enslaved people 10–13, 17; resistance 61, 219 entanglement 119–120, 140–142; see also interspecies interactions enteric aesthetics 223–232 environmental issues 56–57, 62, 66–70, 76, 115; atmo-terrorism 225–227; environmental monitoring 90, 92; see also activism; climate change; eco-olfactory art; pollution; survival Equiano, Olaudah 10–11 erasure of smell see deodorization “The Eros—and Thanatos—of Scents” 120 esthetics see aesthetics of smell estrangement 81–82 Every Twelve Seconds (Pachirat) 124 Evolution’s Rainbow (Roughgarden) 120 exchange, olfaction as 112–115, 112, 113, 114 Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution (Anderson) 39–40 exhibitions 3–4; exhibition-as-artwork 224 experiential art, soft power of 66–67 extractive processes 123–124 Factory Tree (2015) 70 familiarity 34 Fanon, Frantz 11 fascist nihilism 5 fecal smells of E. coli 220–221 feeling responses scale (GEOS) 201, 202, 206 female 25, 117, 121, 152–153, 171; see also gender; women’s smell feminine bodies 157–161, 162, 163–164 feminine secretions see blood; vaginal samples feminism 157–158 fermentation 211–212, 220–221; see also kombucha fiction, scent in see Mansfield, Katherine Fidelis, Gaudêncio 3–4 Filipino bodies 39 Fire Is Form 51, 53; campfire 45, 47, 49–50, 52; crow feather cleansing fan 47, 48; pine tree scent station 47, 48, 52 500 Cards with Blattodea Pheromone (2007) 78, 79–80 Fléchier, Edouard 153 Fliess, Wilhelm 137, 140, 144

Index 239 flowers 164, 229–230; chrysanthemum powder 124–129; in Mansfield’s stories 169–171, 174–175, 177–178; olfactory calendar of 60–61 Fluxus 3, 62 food 34–36, 224–225; modern Western diets 230; plant-based and lab-grown meat 225 A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans 122, 129 Foucault, Michel 41 The Foul and the Fragrant (Corbin) 37 foul smell see malodors fragrance-free workplaces 154 fragrances see perfumes/fragrances fragrant art works see olfactory art Fraud, Fake and Fame – Goldrausch 2016 exhibition see Gut Feelings (since 2016) free market entanglements 140–142, 190–191 freedom of olfactory interpretation 164 French, Lindsey 108–118 Freud, Sigmund 100, 137, 140 Friedman, Thomas 70 Fruit Flies 120, 129 Fukushima prefecture, radishes from 115–116 functional smells 149–150 fungi, in plant-insect communication 110 funk, philosophy of 12 Gaby, Jessica M 196 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 105–106 Gagosian Gallery 117, 163 “game thinking” 62 games 62 The Garden Party (Mansfield) 173–175 Gatne, Vinita 32–43 Gauguin, Paul 2 Gell, Alfred 186 gender: binary opposition questioned 164, 166–167; bodily representation and 157–159; drag, and conventions around 131–132, 134, 136, 141–142; gendered communication 150–151, 157–158; Mansfield on 176–178; masculine domination in art 157–158, 163, 185; non-gendered perfumes 134, 142–143, 146, 151, 152, 155; olfactory appearance 159–161; sexuality and 120–121, 134, 135, 136; of smell 22, 25, 149, 154, 158, 163–167, 165, 166; see also female; women’s smell Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (GEOS) 201, 202, 206 Gerspacher, Arnaud 223–233 Gillespie, Kathryn 124 Gissen, David 112, 112

Givaudan (company) 59 Glamazon perfume 142, 143 Glissant, Edouard 49–50 global interconnectedness 68 global warming see climate change “global weirding” and the sublime 70–71 Goats 125 Goeltzenleuchter, Brian 182–194, 184, 188, 189, 192 Goldman, Danielle 41 good smells 81–87, 218–219; see also odors/ scents; perfumes/fragrances Gossett, Che 121–122 Gottlieb, Ann 121 Grabbing at Newer Vegetables (2015) 163 Graham, Mark 120, 143 Gramsci, Antonio 40–41 The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse (2008) 86–87 Greco, Roberto 164, 165, 166 Green Leaf Volatiles (GLVs) 110 Greenland, icebergs in 228, 229 Greer, Germaine 161 Grosz, Elizabeth 214 group formation analysis 41 Guattari, Félix 223 Guilty Smells digital game 62 gut bacteria 116, 220–221 Gut Feelings (since 2016) 214, 215, 220 gut-brain axis 223, 225, 227–228, 231; see also enteric aesthetics; microbiomes habituation to odors 77 hair, working with 210–211, 213, 214 Hairspray 1988 141 Halberstam, Jack 22–23, 119, 121 Hall, Stuart 36 Haraway, Donna 109, 116, 225 Hardt, Michael 52 Harney, Stefano 119 Harper, A. Breeze 124 Hauser & Wirth 27 Havana Biennial 229–230 Hazzard-Donald, Katrina 14 headspace technology 24, 58–59, 72–73, 80–81 health 100; effects of perfumes 154; effects of pollution 38, 56–57, 65–66, 87–88, 92; nonhuman and human 114–115; olfactory disease detection 63; spirituality and 14, 18; see also deodorization; pollution hedonic quality 218–219 Hedva, Johanna 128–129 Hegel 1–2, 100 Heng, Geraldine 23 Herbivore Induced Volatile Communication (HIVC) 110

240 Index Heretic Parfum 154 hierarchy of senses see sensory hierarchy High John the Conqueror Root 13–14 Hill, Jean E. 141 historical reconstruction project 112–113, 112 Hogenboom, Melissa 88 holobiome 223, 227 homosexual desire 175–176 Hoodoo products 13–16, 15 Hopkins, Peter 81–82, 83 Horn, Eva 67 Hornemann, Georg 149–150 Horton-Stallings, LaMonda 12 houses 40–41 Hsu, Hsuan 10–21, 23, 67, 230 Huang, Xuelei 39 The Human Condition (Arendt) 184–185, 187–188 humans 62–63, 70; human-dog relationships 230–231, 231; as hybrid forms 109; see also interspecies interactions Hurston, Zora Neale 13–14 Hyber, Fabrice 159 hygiene 18, 35, 38, 39, 59–60; see also deodorization hysteria 137 I capelli della strega [The Witch’s Hair] (2016) 163 I Want to Be Ready (Goldman) 41 icebergs 228, 229 id, women’s writing of the 171 Identification Based on Individual Scent (IBIS) project 58 identity 49–50, 148; drag and 132–133, 141–142; olfactory portraits 24–25; smell and 28, 35, 155; subversive identity statements 151–155, 220; territory and 36–37; see also body odor/body scent ideology 231 IDOLATRY II, 2018 127 IDOLATRY III, 2019 128 illicit bodies and substances 57–58 immersion 216 In desire, still life with human bodies and menstrual blood (2015) 162, 163 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1972) 14 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) 32 incense 17–18, 62 Indigenous communities: activism by 44–47, 51–53; framing of indigeneity 47, 49–52; see also cultural appropriation; sage smudging

industrialisation 56, 113–115, 113, 114, 117, 226; see also perfume/fragrance industry ingestion 115–117 inhalation 69–70, 149, 167, 189; bacterial samples 116–117, 163; cosmetics 159–160; empathy and 101–106; plant-generated oxygen 114, 114; see also breathing insects 110; see also cockroach pheromones; Fruit Flies instinctive reactions 71 Interformat Symposium on Rites and Terrabytes 47, 53 intersexual people 159 interspecies interactions 100–112, 116–117; mutual care 119–120; scent rituals 124– 129; see also plant communication intimacy 149, 155 The Intuitive Language of an Extended Hand exhibition 122 Inuit culture 36–37 invisible risk 65–66 Islam, Tanwi Nandini, MALA podcast and perfume project 12 “Islands” (2014) 27 Japanese game 62 Jaquet, Chantal 2 Je ne parle pas français 178 Jeffreys, Sheila 161 jewelry with olfactory properties 150 Johnson, Rashid 16–17, 18, 26–27, 29 Joselit, David 227 justice 99–100, 102–106, 109 K9_ Topology: Ecce Canis (2014) 230–231, 231 Kant, Immanuel 1–2, 100, 190–191, 195, 231 Keller, Andreas 67 Kerléo, Jean 2 Kessler, Mathias 228, 229 Kettler, Andrew 13, 23, 219 Ki-Kongo lu-fuki (“bad body odor”) 12 Kimmerer, Robin Wall 110–111 Kinder (2016) 68–69, 71 King, Dorothée 99–107 kinship 109, 119 Kjellmer, Viveka 146–156 Klöckner, Christian A. 71–72, 94 Knebusch, Julien 66 knowledge 34, 56–57, 90, 131; data gathering 90, 92 kombucha, working with 214, 215, 216 Koolhaas, Rem 40 Kounellis, Jannis 224 Krauss, Rosalind 227–228 Kristeva, Julia 77 Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau 3

Index 241 Kwanzaa 28 kynicism 223–224, 227 Lachowicz, Rachel 160–161, 163 land 36–37 Lane, Giles 90 language: connection with smell 47, 49–50; olfactory description 61, 147–148, 183, 186–187; of other species 110–111 Laqueur, Thomas 157 Le Guérer, Annick 100 Lee Kuan Yew 40 Les Immatériaux (1985) 224–226 Leung, Kai-chi 41 Lewandowski, Simon 72 Lewis, Joe 28–29 LGBTQIA+ 133 Lie, Antoine 151–152 life, as an art object 41 Lilja, Mona 221 limbic system 101, 187 lines of history 32, 34, 36–37 linguistic sense-making see language lipstick 159–160, 163–164; see also Eat Your Makeup (1968) liquids, spilling 212–217, 213, 215 Lithuanian cooking 47, 49 Little, Douglas 146, 154 living, (art)work of 40–41 London (UK) 67–68 Long, Carolyn Morrow 13 Los Angeles Department of Transportation, fragrances at bus stops 23–24 Love Sweat Love (Mannigel) 195–207; participants’ felt experiences 201, 202, 203–204, 205, 206–207 Low Kee Hong 39 lower senses see sensory hierarchy Lund, Jacob 188 Lynch, Alanna 210–222; Concealed and Contained (since 2009) 211, 211; Emotional Labour, 2018 217, 217; Gut Feelings (since 2016) 214, 215, 220; Show of Strength / The Lively Vessel and the Contaminated State, 2015/2018 213; situating myself 210; spilling liquids 212–213 Lynn, Gwenn-Aël 44–55 Lyotard, Jean-François 2, 224–226 McBean, Michael 88, 89, 90 McLuhan, Marshall 65–67 Magic, Perfume, Dream …(Gell) 186 Magic Car (2000) 72 Magic Tree car air fresheners 72 Maisondieu, Antoine 151–152 “Make Nature Smell like Culture” 72

make-up see cosmetics; lipstick MALA podcast and perfume project 12 Malabou, Catherine 231 male see gender Malmö Sweden 197 malodors 164; artworks 70; Black bodies and 10–11; definition 218; negative effects of 218–219; political potential of 210–222; as protest tactic 60; psychological effects of 86–87; in public health 38–39; remediating the metropolis 81–87; slave ships 10–11; status and 177–179; stink bombs 217–218, 217; urban environments 24, 76, 77, 78, 79–81, 87–93; as weapons 57–58, 218, 225; see also body odor/body scent; odors/ scents; smell, sense of Mann, Bonnie 70–71 Mannigel, Lauryn 195–209 Mansfield, Katherine 169–181 marginalization 80, 197, 199 Margolles, Teresa 99, 101–103, 105–106 Martins, Luiza Prado de O. 214 masculine domination in art 157–158, 163, 185; see also gender masquerade 158, 159–161 Masquerade Laws 134, 136 materiality 1, 25, 28, 36, 37 Matières Premières [Raw Materials] exhibition 159 mating signals, scents as 120 Mattel, Trixie 142 Mawani, Renisa 11 Mayfield, Fatima see Stout, Renée Meaning Cleaning (2008) 82, 84, 85 meaning of scents 28–29, 148–149, 197, 201, 202 Mediamatic 198, 200 medical issues see health memories 23, 26, 29; in positioning oneself 33–34; in public artworks 185–188 men see gender menstrual blood see blood Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 69 Metcalfe, John 23 metropolis see urban environments Mexico City 72–73, 102–103, 105 Meyer-Brandis, Agnes 111 miasmas 11, 76, 80, 230; see also malodors Mice, as collaborators 122–123, 123 microbiomes 116, 210, 223–225, 230, 231; see also gut-brain axis microbiopolitics 223 microorganisms see bacteria; fungi The Migrant as a Nexus of Social Relation 41 migrants 37–38, 41, 197 Milan, Italy 102–103 military, smell technology 57–59, 218

242

Index

Miller, William 219 Milstead, Harris Glenn 136–137 modernist literary aesthetics 171–172, 179 modernity, erasure of smell and 10, 40 Monks, Aoife 148 Moran, Ines Valle 170 Morris, Matt 131–145 Morton, Tom 27 Moten, Fred 119 movement 41, 58 Muller, Clara 65–75 multispecies psychointestinalysis 230–231, 231 Museum of Modern Art 24 museums see art museums The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins 119 mutual care see interspecies interactions Næss, Arne 70 Nakagawa, Alan 23–24, 29 Nancy, Jean-Luc 4 nasal reflex neurosis 137, 140 nation states, indigeneity and 49 Native American ritual gestures see sage smudging natural gas 108 Nature/nature 69–72, 112; see also ecoolfactory art; environmental issues navigation through smell 32–34 negative odors see malodors Negri, Toni 52 neighborhood smells see urban environments neo-colonial behavior see colonization Netherlands, shared spaces in 40 Neto, Ernesto 6 neuroarthistory 223 neurogastroenterological aesthetics 228 neuroscience see brain New Delhi (India) 67–68 The New Escapist Promised Land Garden and Recreation Center (2008) 16–17 New York City 77, 81–82 Ngamcharoen, Pitchaya 32–43 Nida Art Colony 47, 50–51 Nietzsche, Friedrich 100, 224 Nigeria 26–28 nihilistic agendas 5 Nixon, Rob 68 Nkanga, Otobong 26, 29 Nochlin, Linda 160 non-gendered perfumes 134, 142–143, 146, 151–152, 155, 164–165 non-human animals see animals non-verbal resistance see resistance noodle soup shop, orientation and 32–34

Norway, Climart research project 67–68, 103–105, 103 nose surgery 137, 140 noses see smell, sense of nosewitnessing 93 Nourishment is a Plinth in Repose (Rosen) 122–123, 123 noxious aromas see malodors numbers, odor in 87–93, 89, 91; see also activism (n)visible (2018) 149–150 Nykolak, Jenevive 25 O2 Bar (or, Oxygen Bar) (2005) 114–115, 114 O8 Black Stone 26 Obama, Barack 22, 29 “occupational realism” 82 ocular hegemony of the artifact 4; see also sensory hierarchy “oddkin” 116 Odim, Cheryl Johnson 27 Odor and Power in the Americas (Kettler) 219 The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories (Classen) 35 odorants 185 odorphobia 88 odors/scents 127; artist-made scents 182; from below 219–220; in Black diasporic art 13–17; bodily presence and 36, 149–150; descriptions of 183; drag and 137, 140; as evidence of beings 28–29, 35, 37–38, 40–41; good smells 81–87, 218–219; making powerful smells 220–221; as a metaphor for pollution 67–68; odor affiliation 100; perception of 212; preservation of 59; in public health measures 35, 38; scented case studies 151–154, 153; situated within culture 131; strong responses to 67; subjective experience of 187; of war, in modernist narratives 171; women’s smell 152, 157– 168, 162; see also animality; bodily fluids; body odor/body scent; Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (GEOS); headspace technology; malodors; race; remediating smells; smell, sense of; smellscapes Odortec “skunk water” 58, 218 Oeillères series (2017) 164, 165, 166 offensive smells see malodors Oleson, Jeanine 86–87 olfactifs 170; see also activism olfactory aesthetics see aesthetics of smell olfactory appearance 158–161 olfactory art 146; active smelling 182–192; activism and 46–47, 51, 53; air and 65–75;

Index 243 behavioral changes 72–73; challenges of in museums 147–148; communication through 66–68, 149; context and 164; definition 1; enteric aesthetics 224–225; exhibitions 3–4; history 1–4; identity statements 147, 152–154; methodologies 6–8; odorous as well as visual 24–26, 29; political potential of 4–6, 10, 16; soft power of 66–67; see also eco-olfactory art olfactory board game 62 olfactory bulb 187 olfactory calendars 60 olfactory capitalism 59 olfactory communication see communication olfactory counter-monument 185–186 olfactory dating experiment see Love Sweat Love olfactory denigration see sensory hierarchy olfactory difference 22–23, 29, 35; see also gender; race olfactory disease detection 63 olfactory disgust see disgust olfactory education 61–62 olfactory games 62 olfactory identity see body odor/body scent; identity olfactory imaginaries 143–144 olfactory language see language olfactory manipulation 60–61 olfactory meaning-making 148–149, 152, 197; GEOS scale 201, 202 olfactory navigation 60–61 olfactory neo-feminine see women’s smell olfactory nuisances see malodors; pollution olfactory persuasion 154 olfactory portraits 24–25, 80–81 olfactory remediation see remediating smells olfactory resistance see resistance olfactory stereotypes 183 olfactory studies 6–7 olfactory surveillance 57–58, 61–62; “skunk water” 58, 218 olfactory technology see technology olfactory time, chasms in 186–189 On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry) 129 One Tree ID – How to Become a Tree for Another Tree (Meyer-Brandis) 111 “oneness” 35 oral samples 116–117, 163 orientation through smell 32–34 Orwell, George 173 Osman, Ashraf 3 Osmothèque perfume archive 2 otherness, smell of 22, 35, 38, 60, 81–82, 157, 183, 197, 214, 216–217 Otten, Liam 28

Paalen, Wolfgang 3 Pachirat, Timothy 124 Palmer, Laurie 114–115, 114 Parliament (funk music collective) 27 Parr, Debra 22–31, 58–59 participatory aspect of smell 90, 155 The Pathology of Excess (project) 28–29 Paxson, Heather 223 Pennsylvania 108 People of Color: environmental inequalities 68, 115, 124; odors attributed to 22; politics of care 128; see also Black bodies; race performative olfactory dating experiment 195–207 Perfume (1985) 171 Perfume Performance: Bridge Underpass (c.1987) 82, 83 Perfume Site: Trench #2 (c.1987) 82, 83 perfume/fragrance industry 29, 59, 151, 155, 165 perfume-free public zones 154 perfumes/fragrances: artist-made scents 182; Belle Haleine 3, 134, 135, 143; as bottled attraction 150–151; at bus stops 23–24; drag and 132, 140–144; fragrance blending 80–81; health and 38, 154; MALA podcast and perfume project 12; meanings of 28–29, 148, 152; non-gendered 134, 142–143, 146, 151–152, 155, 164–165; perfumed paintings 24–26; perfumers and perfumery 2–3; perfuming as resistance 22–31, 146–156; public figures associated with 133; queer performativity of scent 120–121; resistance and 23; signature fragrances 133–134, 140–142; as subversive identity statement 146–156; synthetic smells 225; an unruly scent 228; worn while working 16; see also gender permeability of bodies 69–70, 214, 216 persistence 218 personal space 152–155 pharmacopornography 158–159 pheromones 79–80, 228 Philosophie de l’Odorat (Jaquet) 2 philosophy of “funk” 12 physical seduction 159 physiological breathing process 101, 187 Pictures (Mansfield) 177 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi 127 Pindell, Howardena 24–26, 29 Pinsky, Michael 67–68, 99, 103–106, 103 Pittsburgh, PA 108, 112–115, 112 plant communication 100–112, 116; malodors 110–111; plant defense strategies 109, 116; plant-insect communication 110; scientific research in 108–109

244

Index

plants 114, 114; identification in board game 62; see also flowers Plastic, 2017 (Mattel) 142 Plato 4 Playing Dead (Wiebe) 36–37 poetic gestures 111–112 Poison (1985) 152–154, 153 Poison Ladies (2013) 152–154, 153 police 58, 218 the political, definition 4–5 politics 4, 24, 76; in Black diasporic art 10–19; potential of body scents 196–197; see also resistance Pollock, Griselda 166–167 Pollock, Jackson 28 pollution 86–88, 89, 90; artistic strategies 94–95; ingesting radishes from Fukushima 115–116; pollution art spectacle and performance 77, 78; smell tours and 88, 89, 90; see also air pollution Pollution Pods 67–72, 99, 103–106, 103 Polyester (1981) 136–137, 140, 143 position, smell and 33–35 “Post-Black” aesthetic 17 post-coloniality 49, 51; see also colonization postmodern developments 2, 70, 171; Les Immatériaux (1985) 224–225 poverty 79–80, 173–174 power 56–57, 59–60, 109; resistance and 6; smell and 28–29, 217; smell technology 57–59, 218; see also the political; resistance powerful smells, making of 220–221 Preciado, Paul B. 157–158, 167 predators 122 Prelude (Mansfield) 172–173 preservation of scents 59 prison, smell of 12 privatized air 226–227 privilege 28–29, 173–174; see also class Proboscis research team 89, 90, 91, 92 productivity 59 protection 59–60, 151–152 protest see resistance psychic dirt 86 psychoanalytic perspectives 100, 140, 158–160, 171, 195, 197 psychointestinalysis 223, 228, 230–231, 231 psychological effects of malodors 87–88 public activity, Arendt on 184–185, 187–188 public artwork 185–188 public health measures 35, 38; see also deodorization Public Smog (2004 and ongoing) 91, 92–93 public space cleaning see cleaning punctum 171, 177 purity 154; see also contamination Purity and Danger (2002) 154

queer animals 119, 120–121 Queer Phenomenology Orientation, Objects, Others (Ahmed) 36 queer revenge, categorical experiments 131–134 “Queer Smells” (Graham) 120 queer theories 5, 143–144, 159, 164; see also Eat Your Makeup (1968) Questions of Cultural Identity (Hall) 36 race 11; artistic treatment of 141–142; breathing and 99; environmental racism 69; smell and 10–14, 18–19, 22–23, 28–29, 35, 57–58; speciesism and 124; see also Afrocentric signifiers; Black microclimates; Indigenous communities; People of Color radical collaboration 108–118 Radical Museology (Bishop) 191 radioactive materials 115–116 Rae, Paul 39 Raspet, Sean 68 Ray, Man 134, 135 Reconstruction – Smoke (Pittsburgh) 112–113, 112 re-enchantment 81–82 reflective experience see embodied experience Reinartz, Jonathan 101 remediating smells 81–87; cleaning 37, 82; sage smudging 86–87; urban environments 81–82, 83, 84, 85, 86–87, 94; see also deodorization reorientation through smell 32–35 repellent smells 149; see also malodors representation 4–5, 147 research 90, 108–109; see also Climart research project; Proboscis research team residences 40–41 resistance 56–64; definition 5–6; perfuming as 146–156; smelling and chewing and 63, 221, 223–224; smells and 22–31, 197, 219–220; spilling as 214, 215, 216; see also power; the political Résistances 225 respiratory perception see breathing responsibility and empowerment 72–73, 116 Rexroth, Kenneth 22 Rhoades, David F. 110 Rigby, Kate 70 Rimmel, Eugène 131 Rinck, Fanny 88 Riout, Denys 3 Risk Society (Beck) 65 rituals see sage smudging; spirituality Riviere, Joan 158–160 Robot Feral Public Authoring (2005) 89, 90 Romero, Buck 50–51 Rose Museum 25

Index 245 Rosen, D 119–130; IDOLATRY II (2018) 127; IDOLATRY III (2019) 128; Nourishment is a Plinth in Repose 122–123, 123 Rosenberg, Karen 117 Rouby, Catherine 88 Roudnitska, Edmond 2 Roughgarden, Joan 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 50 RuPaul 140–143 RuPaul’s Christmas Ball TV special 140–141 RuPaul’s Drag Race 132, 142 S, M, L, XL (Koolhaas) 40 sacrifices, as a signature fragrance 133 sage smudging 44–47, 50–53; commodification of 46, 52; Indigenous roots of 87; non-Native Americans 45–46, 50–51; remediating smells and trauma 86–87; sage cleansing 45–47, 48, 50–53 saliva samples 116–117, 163 sanitation see deodorization; hygiene; public health measures São Paulo (Brazil) 67–68 Scarry, Elaine 129 scavenger methodology 119 scavengers 119, 125 scent and story, Mansfield 169–181; Bliss 174–177; The Garden Party 173–174; Je ne parle pas français 178; Prelude & The Doll’s House 172–173 scent in art see olfactory art scent rituals, interspecies 124–129 scent trails 61 scented scenography 146 scentography 148 scents see odors/scents; perfumes/fragrances Schneider, Rebecca 4 school workshops 67–68 Schwabsky, Barry 24 scratch & sniff guides 68, 70, 72, 77, 137 sculptural artworks 70 Sebastian, Christopher 124 secretions see bodily fluids seduction 15–16, 15, 169–181 Sélavy, Rrose 134, 135, 136, 143 self see identity self-reflexive approach 94–95 semiotics 111–112, 148, 157–158 sense of sight see visuality sense of smell see smell, sense of sensitive people 18, 27 sensory hierarchy 57, 100, 158, 190; overcoming 195, 197, 207; smells from below 219–220 sensory territory see territory Sentir (Vignaud) 4 Sephora’s “Witch Kit” 46, 52

serotonin 230 Severns, Hayley 82, 84, 85 sexuality 170, 173–177, 195 Sharpe, Christina 11, 32 shea butter 16–18, 26–28 “Shea Butter Irrigation System” (2013) 27 “Shea Butter Three Ways” (2019) 27 short stories, scent in see Mansfield, Katherine Show of Strength / The Lively Vessel and the Contaminated State (2015/2018) 212, 213, 214 Sierra, Santiago 78, 79–80 sight see visuality Sillage (2011) 182–192, 184, 188, 189, 192 Simpson, Kathryn 175 simulated smells 224–225 Singapore 39–40 Sistah Vegan (Breeze) 124 Situationist theories 82 skins 35, 146 Skunk 58, 218 slaughterhouses 124 Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967) 11 slave ships see enslaved people Sloterdijk, Peter 225, 227 smell, sense of: in the contemporary museum 182–194; context and 164; damaged by pollution 88; disgust and 60, 102–103, 199, 219–220; early experiences with 210–212; impact on behaviour 150; influence of 212–214; instinctive reactions to 71; odorants and 185; orientation through 32–37; participation in 155; political potential of 197, 210–222; representation and 4–5, 157–159; smell as metaphor 67–68; speaking and 49; strengthening 61–62; subjectivity of 210; taste and 224–225; unmediated nature of 4–5, 216; see also aesthetics of smell; deodorization; gender; odors/scents; race; sensory hierarchy Smell as a Criterion exhibition 3–4 The Smell Culture Reader (2006) 1, 2, 4 smell games 62 smell management 59–60 Smell of a Stranger (1970) 229–230 smell of the other see otherness, smell of smell of the woman see women’s smell Smell PGH smartphone app 108 smell technology see technology smell tests 22, 63 smell tours 88, 89, 90 smell-based communication see communication smell-driven thinkers 100 Smelling Committee (2006 and 2007) 88, 89, 90

246

Index

“Smelling is Telling” (2017) 198–199 “smell-mapping” and “smell walks” 62 smellscapes 23–24, 38, 59–61; see also Pollution Pods Smellscapes project (Tolaas) 72–73 Smith, Mark 23 Smith, Neil 79 Smith, Theophus 14 smoke 44–55, 112, 112; political potential of 44–55; see also sage smudging Smoke Cloud (2013) 69 Smoke Flowers (2017) 70 Smrekar, Maja 230–231, 231 smudging see sage smudging Snout (2007) 91, 92, 93 social belonging 196–197 social class 170, 172–174, 176–179 social identity see identity social intervention 29 social justice 99, 102–106 social sense of smell 32–43, 216 sociology of smell 146, 170, 173 soft power of (experiential) art 66–67 somatic resistance 225 Sommer, Laura 94 Soul, Maelcum 136, 139 Soviet bloc 49, 52–53 Spears, Britney 29, 140 speciesism, racism and 124 spilling liquids 212–217, 213, 215 Spinoza 223 spirituality 14, 18, 45, 50–51 Stamelman, Richard 120, 123 Standing Rock Sioux Reservation 44–46, 44, 50–52 statistics see knowledge status 177–179; see also class Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Haraway) 109 Steele, Jess 80 stench see malodors stereotypes 183 Stevenson, Richard 101 stink bombs 217–218, 217; see also malodors Stoddart, D. Michael 120 Stoermer, Eugene 70 stories 65–75, 169–181 Stout, Renée 14–16, 15 street smells 77–81; see also air pollution; urban environments subjecthood 131 subjectivity of smell 210, 212, 216, 218, 221 sublime experience 70–71 subversive identity statements 151–155, 220; see also Eat Your Makeup (1968) sulfur 217 surrealist marvelous 226

surveillance 57–58, 61–62; “skunk water” 58, 218 survival 56–64, 71–72, 109, 115–116 Süskind, Patrick 171 The Swing of the Pendulum (Mansfield) 177 Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeasts (SCOBY) 214 syncretic traditions 13–14 synesthesia 227 Synnott, Anthony 197 synthetic smells 224–225 Talking Nose (2009) 72–73 Tasha (perfume project) 12 taste, smell and 224–225 The Taste of Discovery (2009) 228, 229 taxonomy of aroma design 148, 151–152, 154 Taylor, Elizabeth 140 Tears (2016) 163 “Technologies of The Self” (Foucault) 41 technology: headspace technology 24, 58–59, 72–73, 80–81; power and 57–59, 218; techno-scientific impositions 225–226 temporality 5, 185–186, 188–189 territory 32–43, 82, 121–123 terrorism 225–226 theater 148, 150 300 Sheets and Wall Impregnated with Blattodea Pheromone (2007) 79–80 time, olfactory, chasms in 186–189 Titus-Carmel, Gerard 3 To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again (Nkanga) 26 Tolaas, Sissel 23–24, 29; Dirty No. 1 (2000) 80; (n)visible (2018) 149–150; Talking Nose (2009) 72–73 touch 126 toxic exposure see pollution trace of existence, smell as 36–37 trade 26–27 traffic smell see air pollution training techniques 126 Traité des Sensations (Condillac) 100 trans-corporeality 69–70, 225–228 transformation see cleaning; remediating smells transgressions of queer subjects see Eat Your Makeup (1968) transhumanist 225 transsexual people 159 trauma, remediating 86–87 tree installation 111 trigeminal nerve 212, 218, 220 Truth, Sojourner 25 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 109, 115–116, 119 Twombly, Cy 28

Index 247 Ueda, Maki 62 Uexküll, Jakob von 122, 129 Ultra-Red sound collective 46 Un mètre cube de beauté (2012) 159 unbreathability 11 The Undercommons (Harney and Moten) 119 UNESCO World Heritage, air as 92–93 unisex see non-gendered perfumes United Brothers see Arakawa, Ei and Tomoo urban abject see abjection urban environments 76–98; artist-made scents 182; disembodied smells 186–187; remediating smells 81–82, 83, 84, 85, 86–87; scents from 24, 76, 79–81, 87–88, 89, 90, 182; smellscapes 23–24, 72–73; see also pollution Urban Tapestries online platform 90 urine, working with 210–212, 213, 214 Ursitti, Clara 152–154, 153 vaginal samples 116–117, 163 Van Van Oil 13 Vaporización (2002) 99, 101–103, 105–106 Various Small Fires gallery 68 Verbeek, Caro 24–25 Vignaud, Jacques 1, 4 visceral aesthetics see enteric aesthetics visuality 4–5, 227; see also sensory hierarchy volatile airborne chemicals (VOCs) 109, 110–111 volatile effluvia 212 vom Ende, Marc 111 Voudun practitioner perfumes 12 Voulgarelis Illgen, Angela Rose 82, 84, 85 vulnerability, in artworks 71

Wadley, Shangela Laquifa 132 “wake” (fragrant trails) 183 Walker, Alice 14 Warhol, Andy 25 washing see cleaning Water Protector movement see Standing Rock Sioux Reservation Waters, John 136–137, 140–141; see also Eat Your Makeup (1968) weapons 57–58, 218, 225 Western culture, visuality in 4 What Remains to Be Seen exhibition 25 whiteness 28–29; see also art museums Whore … For She Who Is 140–142, 143 Whyte, Kyle Powys 109 Wiebe, Rudy 36–37 Within Our Gates (2016) 16–17 women’s smell 152, 157–168, 162; see also bodily fluids; gender wonder, politics of 187 Woolf, Virginia 158, 169–174, 179 workplace productivity 59 World Heritage, for air 92–93 writing, as perfume 133 Xyrena 142 Ya Basta Hijos de Puta exhibition 102–103 Yao, Amy 68–69, 71 Yi, Anicka 116–117, 163 You Can Call Me F (2015) 116–117, 163 Younan, Diana 87–88 Young, James E. 185 Zayas, Vivian 196 zoo enrichment programs 121