What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (25 page)

The uptick in scented exhibits is evidence of museums’ eagerness to be less intimidating and more consumer-friendly, less like temples of culture and more like theme parks. Some aim for what the art critic Jim Drobnick calls “aromatopia”: a total-immersion, firing-on-all-five-senses sort of experience for the paying public. In doing so, they go head-to-head with Las Vegas casinos and other venues, which, as we’ve seen, are heavily into sensory engineering.

P
RESERVATION IS A
priority for the fragrance industry, which bases its prestige on a long and continuous history of trend-setting creations, and which it expects its new recruits to learn. The world’s most extensive perfume museum is the Osmothèque in Versailles, France, founded in 1990 as part of a training institute for fragrance, flavor, and cosmetics. There are more than 1,400 perfumes in the Osmothèque’s collection, including 500 that are no longer manufactured. Despite having worked in the industry, I find it hard to get excited about visiting a perfume museum—how many little bottles can one stand to look at? (take one down, pass it around, 1,399 bottles of scent on the wall…) To some people, a vintage bottle of
Halston
is a fetish object; to me it has the emotional resonance of an empty Coors longneck. Still, 500 samples of extinct juice might be worth a stop, especially if they were presented in a compelling way, say a vertical sniffing (“From
Obsession
to
Euphoria
—A Calvin Klein Retrospective”), or a vintage sampling (“Backlash: Transparent Top Notes in the Post-
Giorgio
Years”).

Touring a perfume museum would be a testosterone-draining ordeal for most men. As a gesture to them, if nothing else, I would suggest the museum include a hormone-stabilizing Hall of Technology. Displayed in a spotlight under a glass dome would be the first spray bottle invented by Jean Sales-Girons in 1859. Sale-Girons wasn’t thinking about perfume: he wanted people to be able to inhale the allegedly therapeutic mineral waters of French spas. Later, his “vapeurisiteur” was adopted by physicians to spritz medicine into a patient’s nose and throat. Other uses were found for the classic spray bottle with the rubber squeeze-bulb, and it soon became standard equipment for dentists, chemists, barbers, and other manly professionals. The atomizer underwent a dramatic sex change at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878. It was at this gigantic industrial trade show, according to the atomizer historian Tirza True Latimer, that it crossed over into consumer culture and became feminized. When Guerlain and other French perfume manufacturers at the show spritzed their latest creations onto the passing crowds, women immediately saw that misting was an excellent way to apply perfume—evenly and with no dripping onto clothes. By 1890 the atomizer was on ladies’ dressing tables around the world, and remained so until the invention of the pump spray.

My ideal Hall of Technology would feature significant contributions to science and technology made by the perfume atomizer in masculine hands. Wilhelm Maybach of Germany, who was designing the first internal combustion engines in the late 1800s, needed to get gasoline into the cylinders in a way that would maximize its explosive force when ignited. His wife’s perfume atomizer provided the inspiration for his invention of the carburetor. A few years later a University of Chicago graduate student named Harvey Fletcher was working with physicist Robert A. Millikan to measure the charge of the electron. They had been suspending particles of water vapor between two conducting plates, but the water was evaporating too quickly. They decided to try oil instead. Fletcher went to a jeweler’s for watch oil and on impulse bought a perfume atomizer to create a fine vapor of oil droplets. The experiment worked and Millikan received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923.

The Hall of Technology would not be complete without an exhibit honoring Gale W. Matson. She was an organic chemist at the 3M company who was looking for new ways to make carbonless copy paper in the early 1960s. She ended up inventing scratch-and-sniff technology instead (both processes encapsulate tiny drops of liquid inside a burstable shell; ink in one, fragrance oil in the other.) Scratch-and-sniff was an immediate hit with children:
The Sweet Smell of Christmas
(1970) is still in print, along with dozens of smelly baby books. Beginning with a June 1972 ad in
McCall’s
for
Love’s Lemon Fresh,
scratch-and-sniff was used for perfume ads until higher-fidelity methods came along.

Scratch-and-sniff excels at bringing out the grosser, masculine side of life. Larry Flynt, the fabulously vulgar publisher of
Hustler,
was an enthusiast.
FIRST TIME EVER SCRATCH ’N’ SNIFF CENTERFOLD,
screamed the cover of his August 1977 issue. In smaller print at the bottom: “WARNING: To be smelled in the privacy of your home. Not to be smelled by minors.” (The actual smells were G-rated: banana, rose, and baby powder.) The film director John Waters, of course, gave audiences scratch-and-sniff cards for
Polyester
, his 1981 homage to Smell-O-Vision. One of the first “adult” computer games—
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
, released in 1986—came with a seven-item scratch-and-sniff card and a big floppy disk for the Commodore computer. At various points the game instructed the player to sniff location-specific odors: mothballs in the closet, perfume in the harem, leather in the boudoir, etc. Probably the most testosterone-heavy scratch-and-sniff ad was run by the BEI Defense Systems Company in
Armed Forces Journal International.
With the tag line “The smell of victory,” it touted the “battle-proven, state-of-the-art HYDRA 70 family of rockets” using the scent of burnt cordite.

I think the Hall of Olfactory Technology would be a major attraction, but something tells me it wouldn’t find a happy home at the Osmothèque in Versailles. It might work better in Paris, Texas, where weekend crowds could roll in on Harley-Davidson Fat Boys, and reminisce about the sweet, long-lost smell of leaded gas.

T
HE ADDITION OF
scent to museum exhibits raises a related question: where is the smell in traditional art? Olfactory art has never really taken off. Jim Drobnick suspects the concept is too novel to be accepted by museums and “serious” collectors. I disagree, given that the contemporary art establishment values the revolutionary, the challenging, and the transgressive above all else. Would not Andres Serrano’s
Piss Christ
—a crucifix submerged in urine—have been even more transgressive if it smelled like stale pee?

Unfortunately, olfactory artwork teeters between banality and pretension. The former was on display in an installation by Alex Sandover in a New York gallery. A video screen showed a woman preparing dinner in a 1950s-style kitchen. As she worked, wall-mounted diffusers released the corresponding scent: sage, apple pie, etc. The see-it/smell-it conceit was literal-minded and certainly not very transgressive. (If his housewife had vomited on camera, with a scent-track to match, Sandover would have been an art-world hero.)

Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian artist who lives in Berlin, gets closer to the mark. She collected underarm sweat from nine men who were in various states of fear and anxiety, chemically extracted their BO, had it microencapsulated, and then spread it onto large colored sheets. She mounts these enormous scratch-and-sniff panels on art gallery walls for visitors to sample. Her 2007 show is called “The Fear of Smell and the Smell of Fear.” It sounds creepy and probably smells worse. Sissel Tolass could go far—she has a firm grasp of the transgressive.

Artists have a hard time incorporating smell into the traditionally visual arts. Scent hangs awkwardly in the air and strikes viewers as an afterthought. (Jackson Pollock—now with peppermint!) Visual artists may have a hard time putting into practice the smells they create in their imagination; one solution is to work with someone who has the know-how. In 2004 SoHo’s Visionaire gallery paired celebrity photographers with perfumers and exhibited the results in a pitch-black gallery. Next to each backlit color photo was a nozzle and a button; pressing it released a puff of scent. In Karl Lagerfeld’s photo, titled
Hunger,
a naked guy holds a round loaf of bread in front of his groin. The accompanying fragrance, by Sandrine Mali, was rather mundane—neither yeasty nor beastly. Another entry, by celebrichef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and perfumer Loc Dong, called
Strange,
was a photo of a durian fruit split open to emphasize its resemblance to the female anatomy. The subtext was clear: “We double-dog dare you to sniff it.” I did, and found that the highly abstract scent didn’t carry through on the visual metaphor.

Olfactory art as performance art has the potential for embarrassing pretension. Mark Lewis’s
Une Odeur de luxe
(1989), for example, sounds like a pretty good junior-high-school prank that was taken seriously by the grownups, including Jim Drobnick. Here’s his account of it:

Lewis’s dialectical odours…attempt to expose and corrupt the ideology of sexual difference and what Lacan terms “urinary segregation.” By atomizing women’s perfume in the men’s bathroom and men’s cologne in the women’s, Lewis interrogates the politics of identity construction and its performative maintenance. These transgendered diffusions of odour, rendering each space (and each person within it) olfactorily hermaphroditic, forces a confrontation with architecture’s role in naturalizing sexual difference as an unproblematic binary opposition.

That’s a tad more interpretation than
Une Odeur de luxe
can bear. I prefer to think of Mark Lewis as an art school Bart Simpson. Someone should make him write one hundred times on the blackboard, “I will not spray cologne in the girls bathroom.”

Freak Show

While museum directors ponder whether olfactory art deserves gallery space, one smell has proven to be box-office gold: the stench of rotting flesh. This putrid but profitable aroma is emitted by a giant flower stalk, which people are willing to stand in line to see and smell up close. It’s become the Lobster Boy of the olfactory sideshow.

The plant,
Amorphophallus titanum
, was discovered on the island of Sumatra in 1878. It spends most of its life underground as a large tuber weighing up to 170 pounds. Every two or three years it sends up a three-to-nine-foot-tall flower stalk called a spadex. Its Latin name means “huge shapeless penis,” which gives you a fair idea of what it looks like. The fast-growing flower stalk lasts about three days and smells of dead meat; in nature the scent attracts blowflies, flesh flies, and carrion beetles. After these creatures pollinate the blossom, it stops producing scent and quickly shrivels.

A. titanum
emerged from obscure, humid greenhouses to become a celebrity tuber. Dubbed the corpse-flower (allegedly the translation of its Sumatran name), it had limited exposure to the public before botanical gardens shared seedlings and made it into the porn star of the vegetable world. Its United States debut was at the New York Botanical Garden in 1937, but its big break came when a blossom at Kew Gardens in London drew 50,000 visitors in 1996. Four television crews reported on the specimen at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in 1998. Intense media coverage raised public expectations to unsustainable levels: “‘It smells a little like dirty socks,’ said John Allison of Marietta, who dropped by to see the bloom Monday with his wife, Joan. ‘We expected rotting human flesh.’” Charming folks, the Allisons. I guess they left Pugsley and Wednesday at home with Uncle Fester.

Giant, evil-smelling penis-plants are performing everywhere. Dates and venues read like a rock tour: 1998 Atlanta and Miami, 1999 Sarasota and Los Angeles, 2001 Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, with return shows in Miami and Atlanta. Media-savvy curators have turned up the hype. The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota posted blossom updates on its website. Not to be outdone, the University of Wisconsin put its bloom on a live webcam. As its popularity soared,
A. titanum
got an image makeover; the term “corpse flower” was quietly dropped and the plants were given personalities. In 2001 Miami named its blossom Mr. Stinky. UC Davis countered with Ted, followed by Tabatha in 2004. Cal State Fullerton trumped Tabatha with Tiffy. Tabatha drew only 4,000 live sniffing visitors, but pulled 52,000 hits on the website and 11,000 visits on the webcam. (This is puzzling: Why stare at Mr. Stinky online when you can’t smell him?) Merchandising tie-ins are only a matter of time: “Hi, my name is Tiffy. You can watch me on my webcam, and buy my fragrance online.”

Mapping the Smellscape

Rudyard Kipling memorialized the transporting power of scent in these widely quoted lines: “Smells are surer than sounds or sights / To make your heart-strings crack—/ They start those awful voices o’ nights / That whisper, ‘Old man, come back!’” Where Proust was concerned with time, Kipling was concerned with space. His theme was homesickness; one smell encountered on two continents. Kipling wasn’t being abstract—he had one particular smell in mind, and it shows up in the next, less quoted, stanza: “That must be why the big things pass / And the little things remain, / Like the smell of the wattle by Lichtenberg, / Riding in, in the rain.” The smell of wattle, which appears in all five verses, is central to the poem. What, you might ask, is wattle and why did it have this profound effect?

“Lichtenberg” is told in the voice of an Australian trooper from New South Wales who is riding his horse in South Africa during the Boer War. Golden wattle is a plant—a small tree in the mimosa family. It is also the floral emblem of Australia. In the spring it develops a spectacular, golden-yellow flower head that throws off a heavy, floral scent with a honeylike sweetness. Kipling’s inspiration was an incident that happened when he was in South Africa: “I saw this Australian trooper pull down a wattle-bough and smell it. So I rode alongside and asked him where he came from. He told me about himself, and added: ‘I didn’t know they had our wattle over here. It smells like home.’ That gave me the general idea for the verses; then all I had to do was to sketch in the background in as few strokes as possible.”