Last Friday, at the second annual Art and Olfaction Awards, in Los Angeles, four of the evening’s five Golden Pears went to traditional fragrances. Vegetal aromas fared particularly well. Black Pepper & Sandalwood (“a veil of Oriental spices”), Eau de Céleri (“a fresh celery blast”), and Woodcut (“an archetypal tale of man’s rape of the earth”) each claimed a trophy. Skive, an “animalistic” unisex homage to the process of thinning the backside of a piece of leather with a knife, took a fourth.
The real excitement, however, lay in the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Use of Scent, which was new to the event this year. “It’s named in honor of a miserable failure,” Saskia Wilson-Brown, the founder of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, told me. That failure was the German-Japanese poet and critic Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, who staged the world’s first scent concert, in 1902. Using the recently invented electric fan, Hartmann planned to take his New York audience on an imaginary journey to Japan. The performance was supposed to last sixteen minutes; the audience booed him offstage after four. “He looked weird and he was effete and a philosopher,” Wilson-Brown said. “Poor guy—he kind of sashayed out in a kimono and the audience was just like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”
An initial pool of fifty Sadakichi submissions was whittled down to five. Perhaps because of the particular technical expertise that is required in blending and delivering odor, only two of the finalists worked alone. The centerpiece of the Australian artist Paul Schütze’s exhibition, “In Libro de Tenebris,” was a scented book with ink-blackened pages. It took Schütze a year of experimentation to develop a formula that captured his intentions—both practically, since the perfume had to disperse from room-temperature paper rather than a warm body, and also conceptually. The result, a smoky mix of leather, old books, and exotic spices, has proved unexpectedly covetable. Schütze is now diversifying into perfumery, and will be launching a suite of three scents in September. The other lone-wolf finalist, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, was inspired by an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum to put smells to Matisse’s colors.
The team entries included “Crime and Punishment,” a smell-accented theatrical performance by the gallerists at the Soap Factory, in Minneapolis (I wrote about their haunted-house smellscape last Halloween), and “Catalin,” which is intended to capture the aroma of man-made ecological doom. (The latter installation, which was named after a toxic early form of plastic, includes seven odors, all made with water from icebergs, ranging from “watery sparkliness” to “formless wet muck.”) The fifth and final entry, “Famous Deaths,” by a team from the Netherlands, consisted of four mortuary coolers, inside which visitors could smell and hear the last four minutes of a celebrity’s life.
The anatomical peculiarities of olfaction made the Sadakichi category particularly difficult to referee. “A lot of us went back twice,” Bettina Hubby, one of the five judges, told me. “I certainly did.” Unlike vision, hearing, and touch, smell is not directly connected to the language centers of the brain; rather, it feeds into the amygdala and the hippocampus, which modulate emotion and memory. This explains why it often feels impossible to describe scents except as good or bad or like something else. Wilson-Brown provided a handful of evaluation criteria, focussed on how well the scent was integrated into and contributed to the success of the larger installation. (Unlike their counterparts in the perfume categories, the Sadakichi judges did not sniff blind.) Still, even for curators and artists who had worked extensively with smell before, the scoring process was a challenge.
On the other hand, the influence of smell over emotion is precisely what makes it an exciting artistic medium. “With scent, you can create a really immediate, really visceral response,” Allison Agsten, the curator of public engagement at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, and a Sadakichi judge, told me. This was certainly true of “Famous Deaths,” which ended up winning the final Golden Pear. The team deliberately chose deaths that were either visually familiar or easy to picture—Lady Di’s car crash, Whitney Houston’s overdose, Muammar Qaddafi’s beating, J.F.K.’s assassination. “Everybody has seen the Zapruder film,” Marcel van Brakel, one of the installation’s creators, told me. “But what we find interesting is what happens if you translate it in this way—does the perspective change? Are you able to get closer?”
Frederik Duerinck, lead designer on the project, described the narrative scent arc inside the Qaddafi cooler. “You would smell the interior of his luxurious car when he was fleeing from Tripoli. You would smell the explosion, the moment he came under attack. You would smell the sewer pipe he was hiding in, and atmospheric smells like goat poo and desert dust.” Finally, just as the rebel mob closed in, you would smell adrenaline-filled sweat and urine. The team’s setup—corpse-size stainless-steel drawers, augmented with valves, speakers, and a tank of pressurized air—is, in a way, the anti-Warhol, an attempt to grab the benumbed viewing public by its only remaining sensitive part: the nose. Wander Eikelboom, another of the project’s creators, said that his team was prepared for their experiment to go awry. Visitors are equipped with a panic button before being slid into the coolers, which cannot be opened from the inside. “The button has been used much less often than we anticipated,” he said.
