Smells like....I recently attended a function at the Fruitmarket Gallery on Edinburgh's Market Street. The concept of modern art as the 'emperor's new clothes' of contemporary culture is nothing new, of course, and there's nothing I like better than the amusingly- labelled contents of a modern artist's dustbin, but even I thought things had gone just a little too far when the exhibit which interested my fellow guests most that evening appeared to be an empty room. A totally empty room. I thought it was a storage cupboard.
In the main part of the gallery, a badly-assembled garden shed jostled for space with a series of drawings that looked as though they had been pulled out of a child's colouring book - with the exception of the titles. Imagine, if you can, a line drawing of the Start-rite kids walking off into the distance with the neatly-printed caption 'People enjoy relaxing orgasms'. Behind the shed, a beautiful collection of carefully scored-out scribbles on cardboard hung like snowflakes; beneath which a local bookseller informed me that a few weeks earlier Yoko Ono had planted a bare-branched tree in the gallery and invited people to tie scraps of paper with their wishes upon them to the branches until it looked as though the sorry twig was covered in leaves. The bookseller wouldn't tell me what his wish had been. And he refused to go inside the shed with me either. But he did set me straight about the empty room.
In fact, the room wasn't empty at all. It contained an exhibit called 'Bill - Scent' by olfactory artist Clara Ursitti. Finally persuaded to enter the room, I saw that it contained a small burner, not unlike the kind of thing you get for dispensing aromatherapy oils. The air in the room was thick with some kind of 'scent'. I thought it might have been floor cleaner. The bookseller informed me that it was in fact the scent of sperm.
In her artist's statement, Clara Ursitti explains that she is 'intrigued by how scents can trigger vivid visual memories'. Fascinated by the fact that while the sense of smell has such a powerful effect on memory, we actually have very little language for smell beyond whether something smells 'good' or 'bad', Ursitti set out to discover exactly what determines our judgement of everyday whiffs. She began by experimenting with a perfume constructed on the basis of her own body scent called Eau Claire. At exhibitions, the scent was dispersed electronically in an enclosed booth with electronic doors that activated the dispersal. The audience reacted strongly. In fact, Ursitti writes, 'Had the reactions of viewers to the scent been recorded, the piece could almost have been a scientific experiment. My work quite often has the clinical look of science. The scent was vaginal...'
Since her early experiments, Ursitti has linked up with olfactory specialist Dr. George Dodd to further explore the peculiarly Western taboo associated with body odour. Ursitti is also exploring the possibility of a dating agency called Pheromone Link tm that would link members through olfaction. Sounds crazy? Well, it makes perfect sense to me, as someone who once ditched a perfectly wonderful man because he started to wear the same aftershave as my Dad. But more seriously, recent scientific research suggests that, while we cannot consciously detect the pheromones and musk-like odours given off by those around us, our brains are actually able to use these signals to decode the state of someone's immune system and discover whether it is complementary to or stronger than our own immune system. If it is complementary or stronger, we may experience that other person as attractive since, to our selfish genes, complementary immune systems equal stronger offspring equal a good reason to get down to it. Disappointingly unromantic, eh? A woman's brain makes this calculation within just three seconds of meeting.
So, bearing that in mind, how did I feel about Bill? Well, once I had established that the scent in the room wasn't Mr. Sheen, I took a brave sniff. The bookseller who had hitherto seemed very attractive suddenly no longer held quite the same attraction. I had been determined to get him to show me the inside of the shed exhibit, but it no longer seemed such a fab idea. At the time, I thought it was because he had been putting up such a barrier to my charms, but in retrospect, perhaps the curious 'scent of Bill' suddenly stopped my juices mid-flow. Interestingly, a gay friend who also visited Bill's room was left feeling enormously horny by the experience.
Nevertheless, I came away from the Fruitmarket a convert to olfactory art. Clara Ursitti's work has certainly made me more aware of the primal nature of some of my responses to other people. It's both thrilling and frightening to discover the strength of what Ursitti reminds us Helen Keller referred to as 'the fallen angel of the senses'.
But I am left with one nagging question: if one were to buy the scent of Bill, exactly how does the artist propose to maintain it?
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©Chris Manby, 1999