Art lovers who wander into Dillon Gallery in Chelsea this week will have virtually nothing to look at, but plenty to smell—from a freshly grated lemon peel, to a musty cave, to a ripe banana layered with the feral odor of a ... monkey.
— From What's That Smell? A Fragrant Downtown Exhibit Makes the Case for Scent Art at the Wall Street Journal. The exhibit features "scent sculptures" by perfumer Christophe Laudamiel; you can find more details at the Dillon Gallery website.
Author Nicola Twilley talks about the development of her scratch 'n sniff map of New York City, and about related things of interest to perfumistas: smell preferences by gender, race and geographical location, the dangers of selective anosmia, the lack of a shared language to describe smells, Sissel Tolaas' smell maps, etc etc. Almost 17 minutes; recorded earlier this month at the Gel conference ("An event about good experience – in art, business, technology, society, and life."). Hat tip to Rachel!
International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) has created BlackRider, a new limited edition fragrance to benefit The Watermill Center (“Watermill is a laboratory for performance founded by visual artist Robert Wilson as a unique environment for young and emerging artists from around the world to explore new ideas.”). BlackRider was named for the musical fable The Black Rider…
Conceptual artist Cherry Tree has a scent of mystery about her. And the smell of urine. Her urine. And it's intentional.
— Yep, it's another artist making perfume from urine. Read more at Conceptual Artist Cherry Tree Makes Perfume From Her Urine. Many thanks to Scentred for the link!
I was breathing in the air and then I started thinking: Air cannot just be something abstract. It is out there so it must contain molecules and information. So what happens if I start to analyze the invisible?
— Sissel Tolaas, Mono.Kultur #23
Mono.Kultur is a German art journal that devotes each issue to a single interview with a notable figure. I’ve been meaning to tell you about their special edition on scent artist Sissel Tolaas for some time now, but when I pulled it out of the envelope this summer, the scent that rose up from its pages and rubbed off onto my hands was so subtly disturbing that after ten minutes I put it away again. A month later I tried again with similar results. And so it went, until last week, when I finally read it thoroughly, albeit never for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and never while eating.
By the time I ordered my copy, I’d been following Tolaas’ work for some time. In many of her interviews, she introduces herself as a “professional in-betweener,” and a “provocateur” and I can think of no better way to summarize her. She is a chemist who participates regularly in major art exhibitions, and a globe-trotting Norwegian fluent in nine languages who now resides in Germany, when she is not in New York, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, or Mexico City. Her Berlin lab is funded by International Flavors & Fragrances, and she has created scent logos (who knew there was such a thing?) for Adidas, Ikea, a credit card company — they wanted their cards to smell of money — and the couture line Maison Martin Margiela, but she has also used head-space technology to capture and bottle the scents of male fear, air pollution in Mexico City, the Cold War, and her own body.
She sometimes wears the latter (the ultimate bespoke signature scent if there ever was one) and describes smelling it for the first time as a shocking, fascinating, and ultimately revelatory experience that allowed her to discover herself as a human being. Then again, Tolaas is the sort of person who enjoys dressing up for a party — she’s a striking woman, tall and leggy with a chic platinum bob and bright red lipstick on her full mouth — and then spritzing on the scent of male sweat for the sheer nervy disjuncture of it…