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…
What does communism smell like? How about the Sun, or Cleopatra’s perfume, or the atomic blast that destroyed the city of Hiroshima? This booklet, published on the occasion of the exhibition