sniff art by una chaudhuri and jessica peri chalmers

8/2/2019 Sniff Art by Una Chaudhuri and Jessica Peri Chalmers

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The Drama Review 48, 2 (T182), Summer 2004. 2004

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sniff Art

Jessica Chalmers and Una Chaudhuri

It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil

painting and string quartets, who was to say they wouldnt respond to

an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not

an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?

Paul Auster, Timbuktu (2000:39)

On the Scent, a piece of installation-theatre by Helen Paris, Leslie Hill, and

Lois Weaver, was the surprise gift of a preconference, that odd institution of

supplementarity in academic life. A preconference is a parasite on a main

event. But its usually also where the action is. This was certainly the case with

the preconference sponsored by the Performance Studies Focus Group ofATHE in July 2003. This first-ever event, organized by CUNY graduate stu-

dents Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, was enthusiastically em-

braced by approximately 100 like-minded or at least similarly titled PS-ers. For

a day and a half before disappearing into the zoo-within-a-zoo that was ATHE

held in the Times Square Marriott Marquis, participants discussed their PS

identities as an ever-unclassifiable species.

In the evening, the entertainment supplements-to-the-supplement

partially soothed and partially sharpened disciplinary anxieties that had been

raised by the discussions of the day. This was because the shows On the Scent

and a playlet by Richard Maxwellturned out to be, well, exactly the sort of

thing that people in performance studies like. Our identity within academe

may be unstable, but we know ourselves well as lovers of theatre that is expe-

riential and site-specific.

Of the two shows, On the Scentwas the one that worked harder to make an

experience for the audience. Letting loose all sorts of scents and odors, Paris,

Hill, and Weavers domestic dream folded the sensory into the illusory like egg

whites into batter.

This is how the piece works. You and your audience-partner put yourselves

in the hands of three intent performers and let yourselves be propelled by them

through a small world of smell-filled rooms. You enter through the front door

of an apartment and proceed through its sights peristaltically, as if urged by

a thousand fingers. Each room is themed, with its own performer and array of

objects. When you enter one, the performer is activated like a doll in a win-dow. You sit very near as the rooms special olfactory scr ipt room comes to life.

You are immersed in its specific feel as the performer begins to speak in rapid

paragraphs about scents gone by, the lost scents of childhood, madeleines of

the nose.

To be alone, or nearly alone, in front of a performer performing, can be a

horror storyeven if the performer is not blatant in his need for your atten-

tion. Thankfully, the On the Scentperformers were virtuosic in their indepen-

dence, like cats, so we could enjoy the split-screen of their address, which

went both at us, and beyond. In one room, we were given a drink, in another,

the twinkle of a returned gaze. Recognition without participation, intimacy

without responsibility, and in half an hour we were out.


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Preconference attendees were invited to see On the Scent in the apartment

of Marvin Carlson, distinguished professor of theatre at the CUNY Graduate

Center. In his absence, his small and unassuming lodgings were overcoded by

the sights and smells of femaleness and longing. The living room surfaces were

crowded with tiny bonbons, droopy, voluptuous flowers, and heavy strings

of pearls. Our wary hostess, the gorgeously taffeta-ed Weaver, was leaning

against the wallpaper alluringly. Avon ladies, she threw out bitterly, casting

a sideways glance in our direction. Theyre temporary. Itinerant. Door-to-door. Was her bitterness for the carrot of the products in the Avon ladys bag?

Once offered and then bought, they are packed away for baiting new cus-

tomers.

The second room of t he tour was a Southwestern-themed sliver-of-a-New-

York-City kitchen. Hill was getting ready to cook as we entered and oil was

crackling on the stovetop for a pork chop-to-come. Nearby, a cigarette was

burning in an ashtray as if to be smoked. I dont smoke and Im a vegetarian,

but sometimes I just have to light up a Lucky Str ike and throw a pork chop on

the grill. Its like my Granny Parker is right there in the room with me. There

was barely enough room for uswe were in fact three, due to a last-minute

add-ona circumstance that intensified our immersion in Hills ambivalent

nostalgia about a New Mexican childhood near Los Alamos. At one point, shepaused a tale about the supposed healing powers of Sangre de Cristo chile in

order to razor an atomic pile of cayenne powder into three red lines. She did

not offer us any or challenge us to take it as it seemed she might. Instead, she

quickly snorted one thick line herself, followed it with a shot of tequila and

lime, and, without missing a beat, picked up her story where shed left off.

It was always important to us to be liked by the Indians.

In the final room, Helen Paris was tossing uncomfortably in Marvin Carl-

sons bed. We attended her like three silent aunts in a row, witness to her rav-

ings. As we sat there in our assigned chairs, Paris talked breathlessly without

looking our way. Under all the racing intimate talk she seemed to be fighting

some form of disgust. Her disgust was for a turning point in life she describes

as when bad, cheap products (three-for-the-price-of-two anonymous fam-

ily soap) begin to replace the fragrant and the good. Her sick room was like

a memorial to Chanel #5 and everything it represents that gets extinguished

by ordinariness. She did a headstand into a cookie box. It was effortless, a sud-

den lift. At the end she dismissed us, thereby also addressing us directly for the

first time. She rolled back into her imprisoning sheets: I think you should

leave now.

With only a few exceptions, olfaction has proved

itself maddeningly resistant to art. Theatre artists are

especially challenged by it. According to a long-

standing and etymologically bolstered assumption,

the theatre is a seeing-place (Greek: theatron) a realmof vision, a site which privileges sight. As such it is

surreptitiously allied with an equally long-established

valuation of the human over the animal, a distinction

achieved by means of a hierarchy of the senses in

which sight is succeeded by hearing, taste, touch, and

smell. Freud supplied a major platform for this scopic

definition of the human when, in Civilization and Its

Discontents (1989), he located the origins of human

identity in an act of organic repression: raising

himself on two legs and beginning to walk upright,

the human not only distances himself from the earth

1. Leslie Hill sets hair on

fire in On the Scent by

Helen Paris, Leslie Hill,

and Lois Weaver. Marvin

Carlsons apartment, New

York, July 2003. (Photo by

Edward Dimsdale)


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and his own lower organs, but also distinguishes him-

self from the animal, who remains sensually earth-

bound. The diminution of the olfactory stimuli,

says Freud, makes what was once sexually stimulat-

ing blood, feces, earth disgusting, producing a

cultural trend towards cleanliness, one feature of

which is sexual repression. Repression eventually

leads, says Freud, to the founding of the family andso to the threshold of human civilization (1961:

100).

If sight holds sway at the threshold of human civi-

lization, the animal sniffs around that limen too. So

when performance (ever obsessed with brinks and

verges) begins attending to smell, it may also be

groping for a way out of the humanist prison-house

of visibility. Perhaps that is why On the Scent begins

and ends with a camera. And perhaps artists who

want to work with smell have to relinquish arts usual

investment in humanity, and explore instead the dark

underside of our collective organic repression.This is what the protagonist of Paul Austers Tim-

buktu does, as he devotes himself to creating an art-

work for his beloved Mr. Bones, the canine narrator

of the novel.

A host of questions and choices immediately pre-

sent themselves, as perhaps they did to the makers of

On the Scent: What was the ideal sequence of smells? How long should a sym-

phony last, and how many smells should it contain? What was the proper shape

of the symphony hall? Should it be constructed as a labyrinth, or was a pro-

gression of boxes within boxes better suited to a dogs sensibility? Should the

dog do the work alone, or should the dogs owner be there to guide him from

one stage of the performance to the next? Should each symphony revolve

around a single subject food, for example, or female scents or should vari-

ous elements be mixed together?

A more practicalthough no less fancifulversion of this art for dogs

sake was discussed by Philip Auslander at ATHE: a video installation, entitled

From Here to There, by Canadian video-artist Jana Sterbak. In the video a

puppy-cam chronicles the adventures of Stanley the dog in the City of the

Doges, as well as on the banks of the St. Lawrence River (Auslander 2003).

Considering the idea that the video is a visualrecord of Stanleys olfactory at-

tention, Auslander argued that although there is, of course, no way of en-

abling Stanleys human artistic collaborator and audience to share in or

understand his sensorium, nevertheless:

[B]y presenting images of the things to which a creature driven more by

smell than by sight chooses to give his attention in a way that traces the

trajectory of his shifting interests, the installation at least allows us hu-

mans to experience what vision looks like when it is subordinated to an-

other sense. (2003)

On the Scents domestic setting reveals the vestigial human attachment to

smell as inextricable from femininity and its discontents. It is therefore sur-

prising to learn that Paris and Hill, the long-term collaborative duo of this

2. Helen Paris does a head-

stand in a box of cookies in

On the Scent. (Photo by

Edward Dimsdale)


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trio, initially turned to the masculinist realm of science for inspiration. Ac-

cording to their web page, the two artists began creating On the Scent in the

laboratory of Upinder Bhalla, a computational neuroscientist at the National

Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. Although it is true that art

has increasingly looked to science for content and relevance, with the excep-

tion of Freuds continual evidentiary recourse to literature, science has seldom

looked to art for anything.

However, Dr. Bhalla seems to have welcomed the idea of collaborating withartists as a temporary relief from the fugitive nature of his object of study. Con-

sonant with sciences dream of taming and controlling the animal, the current

task of computational neuroscience is to map the nervous system by translating

neural signals into data. The informational content of smell has thus far eluded

researchers. As it turns out, individual smells cannot easily be isolated for study.

It is difficult to purify them for delivery to test subjects. Smells are hard to

control.

Of course, all of these are reasons that smell would be an attractive subject

for performance artists who work in the performance studies milieu, as do

Paris and Hill (they helped plan PSi6 in Phoenix in 2000). Like performance,

smells only happen once. They cannot be accurately recorded, photo-

graphed, described. Even the words we use for smellswords like pungent,spicy, heady, flowery, overpowering, sulphurousdo nothing at all to actually

produce the sensory experience they refer to. As Diane Ackerman writes in A

Natural History of the Senses, it is almost impossible to explain how something

smells to someone who hasnt smelled it (1991). Our languages have words for

all the shades of a color, she writes, but few for the tones and tints of a smell.

We rely almost entirely on comparisons and experiences: He smelled like a

garlic...; The room was full of the smell of a wood fire...

This is also one reason why, at the end of the piece, it is strangely unsettling

when Weaver reappears, sits you down, and turns the camera on you. Memo-

ries of the day rush back: as at the PS preconference, you are suddenly partic-

ipant and observer and scientific subject all rolled into one. Your complicated

relationship to performance is foregrounded: an academic mise-en-abyme.

Weaver asks for a story of smelling from you, something she can keep in a

growing archive of smells and their associations. Your anxiety grows (espe-

cially if, like one of us, you are in fact, hard-of-smelling). But even if youre

not anosmic, the final moments of the piece are difficult, melancholic.

There is something forlorn about that camera as it attempts to bookend the

remarkable set of close encounters in intimate spaces.

As Prousts madeleine reveals, the so-called lower senses connect us to our

deepest experiences in ways no verbal or visual images ever could:

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after

the things are broken and scattered [...] the smell and taste of things re-main poised a long time, like souls [...] bearing resiliently, on tiny and

almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of mem-

ory. (1970:36)

On the Scents most appealing aspect was how smell aided story in dramatizing

remembering as an ambivalent act.

Weavers self-dramatizing welcome, Hills earnest self-implication, Pariss

intense and moldering femininity were all variations of this ambivalence. As

are, of course, all of our responses, whoever we are: anosmic, animalistic, aca-

demic, or all of the above.


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The Drama Review 48, 2 (T182), Summer 2004. 2004

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

References

Ackerman, Diane

1991 A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage.

Auslander, Phil

2003 On Non-Human Performance. Response to papers on panel. ATHE Con-

ference, New York, NY.

Auster, Paul2000 Timbuktu. New York: Picador, USA.

Freud, Sigmund

1961 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed-

ited by James Strachey. London: Hogwarth Press.

Proust, Marcel

1970 Swanns Way. New York: Vintage.

Jessica Chalmers is Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. She is cur-

rently working on a performance about the 1963 demise of the Studebaker Corporation,

in conjunction with the Builders Association, scheduled to open in Fall 2004.

Una Chaudhuri is Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is

the author of No Mans Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genets Plays (UMI

Research Press, 1986) and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama

(University of Michigan Press, 1995), editor ofRachels Brain and Other Storms:

The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal (Continuum, 2001), coeditor of

Land/Scape/Theater(University of Michigan, 2002), and guest editor of a special

issue of Yales Theatermagazine on Theater and Ecology (25:1, 1995).

Why Did the Chicken Crossthe Cultural Divide?

Brett Bailey and Third World Bunfights iMumbo Jumbo

Judith Rudakoff

More than just a stand against materialistic rationality, this iMumbo

Jumbo must be a celebration of dream, ritual, Spirit, the unconscious

and the irrational; must actively empower these...it is about a world

pervaded by Spirit. The Spirit cannot be quelled, though scientists and

kings may thwart it for a while, though people may side with Big

Science. The victory is the Spirit. The ritual of Life. The play must

always remember this.

Brett Bailey, iMumbo Jumbo workbook, April 1997 (2003a:108)

sniff art by una chaudhuri and jessica peri chalmers

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