sniff art by una chaudhuri and jessica peri chalmers
TRANSCRIPT
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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)