Postlude

There are certain places on California’s Central Coast where the scent from stands of eucalyptus can penetrate your car even with the windows closed, although the smell is so inviting you are tempted to open them a bit.1 You can have equally interesting scent experiences driving east through the California and Nevada deserts after a rain when you can inhale the pungent smell of sage and creosote bush. Or consider the fact that sometimes you can smell rain before it comes, first from the ozone in the air produced by electrical discharges, and then, especially if you are in arid regions, from the smell of geosmin released from the earth. As Cynthia Barnett points out, you can inhale an especially intense version of earth odors in some rural areas of India, West Africa, or Australia that experience the climatic extremes of months of no rain followed by stretches of monsoon. Back in 1964 two Australian scientists discovered that a major source of this odor were geosmin, a soil-dwelling bacteria, and terpenes secreted by plants. These kinds of molecules are absorbed by rock and clay during hot dry periods, building up great quantities that are then released by the sudden rise in humidity. The scientists nicknamed the smell “petrichor,” from ...

The Meanings and Morality of Scenting the Body

Chapter 13 begins with the views of Plato, Aristotle, Roman moralists, and the early Christian theologians on the ethics of wearing perfumes, views that have continued to reverberate down into the present. After briefly considering the absence of such moral suspicions in Asian and Arab-Islamic cultures, the chapter examines conflicting contemporary ideas about the meanings and morality of scenting the body. Dividing the contemporary meanings and motivations into externally and internally directed, the chapter first examines the objections to externally directed perfume wearing aimed at seduction, masking, or artifice. A second section considers such internally directed and motivated meanings as identity, pleasure, and spirituality.

Beautiful Fragrances

Chapter 11 considers the claim that the best perfumes should be classified as part of the fine arts. The chapter argues that from the perspective of contemporary aesthetic definitions of fine art, perfumes have all it takes to be fine art since they have complex structures that develop over time that can be used to represent ideas and express emotions. Yet the second half of the chapter argues that from the perspective of contemporary contextual and historical definitions of art, perfumes are more like design art than fine art. The contextual case against fine art status is based on a model of art and design practices that involves roles, intentions, media, norms, and institutions. If we compare the creation of a commercial perfume designed by a perfumer with a “perfume” commissioned by an artist for an installation, commercial perfume looks like a design art. Chapter 11 ends in an impasse.

Sublime Stenches

Chapter 10 discusses hybrids of odors with visual art genres or materials, works that are typically created by professional artists and presented in art galleries and museums under the rubric “olfactory art.” After surveying various types of olfactory or scent art, the chapter considers the question of whether “olfactory art” actually names a coherent category or art form, suggesting a tentative yes, based on historical parallels between olfactory or scent art and contemporary “sound art,” such as the fact that there are a number of artists who identify themselves as olfactory artists and have issued manifestoes promoting olfactory art and that some galleries and museums have recognized it as an art kind. The chapter then takes up some questions of ontology and interpretation, including the question of why “sublime stenches” are important in much of contemporary olfactory art.

Toward a Total Work of Art

Chapter 9 begins with the idea of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) and considers examples of odors in theater from the Renaissance to the present, arguing that the inclusion of odors in some types of theater production is appropriate. In the case of film, the chapter discusses the difficulties faced by the first serious attempts in the 1950s and the handful of recent efforts, arguing that the combination of images with sound is able to suggests odors, whereas actual odors are likely to create more puzzles than they are worth, except in the case of highly experimental “art house” films. In the case of music, the chapter focuses on Green Aria: A Scent Opera, presented at the Guggenheim in 2009, a work that combined narrative, odors, and an electronic music score and marked a decisive step toward the successful integration of actual smells with music and narrative.

Overview

Around the turn of this century, the artist Helgard Haug won a prize to create a public art piece for the Berlin Alexanderplatz U-bahn station, once at the center of the former East Berlin. The piece consisted in a distillation of the scents of the Communist-era station that was put in little souvenir glass vials and dispensed from a vending machine during the year 2000. The scent, called ...

Overview

Now that we have answered the charge that smell is too subjective and emotional to sustain aesthetic reflection and judgment, we need to refute two other claims that, if true, would make cultivating the sense of smell or developing an olfactory aesthetics seem hardly worth the trouble. The first claim, going back at least to Kant, is that the sense of smell is of little use to humans, an idea Darwin also held, viewing smell as little more than an evolutionary vestige. The second claim is that smell’s connection to language is so weak, and the potential of human languages for expressing smell is so poor, that serious aesthetic discussion involving smell would be extremely difficult if not impossible. To answer these charges, we will need to turn from a focus on neuroscience and psychology to several other disciplines—history, anthropology, linguistics, and literature—if we are to demonstrate that the sense of smell has in fact proved its usefulness in many cultures, including those of the West, and that peoples in many cultures are able to cogently articulate olfactory experiences, something even true of many Western poets and novelists....

The Neuroscience and Psychology of Smell I

Chapter 2 begins by exploring the biology of the human olfactory system, including the difference between orthonasal and retronasal smell, then surveys contemporary research on the characteristics of smell, as revealed by neuroimaging, that indicates its cognitive capacity for detection, discrimination, learning, and social communication. A special section on the “odor object” discusses debates within the current philosophy of perception on whether it is appropriate to speak of odors as “objects.” The sections on detection, discrimination, and learning show that current science indicates that humans have much sharper abilities in all these areas than is popularly believed. The topic of communication leads naturally to another brief interlude, “The Pheromone Myth.”

Prelude

The 2015 olfactory art exhibition Belle Haleine: The Scent of Art at Basel’s Tinguely museum included one contemporary picture: Louise Bourgeois’s 1999 drypoint, The Smell of the Feet, a work that juxtaposes a profile self-portrait with the bottom of a pair of feet under her nose. It seems that, as a child, she was made to remove her father’s shoes each evening, leaving the smell of his feet indelibly imprinted in her memory. Pictorial representations of the sense of smell are relatively infrequent in the history of the visual arts with the exception of cartoons and the older tradition of creating painting series portraying the five senses. In Western Europe, these series typically showed a female figure in a symbolic pose to suggest each scent, for example, an elegant young woman holding a flower to signify smell. In the famous ...

Odor, Memory, and Proust

Chapter 8, “Odor, Memory, and Proust,” draws together the previous themes of emotion and language and relates them to memory. The chapter begins by examining some evidence from the psychology of autobiographical memory concerning voluntary and involuntary memory and its relation to age. The second part of the chapter discusses psychologists’ use and misuse of the Proustian type of involuntary memory, exploring the way Proust at the end of Remembrance of Things Past expounds his idea of sensory epiphanies, which are signs of transcendence and many of which involve smell. The chapter ends by contrasting the Proustian literary epiphanies with the directness of two Holocaust memoirs that bring horrendous smell experiences to expression with a vividness that shows one need not be a literary professional in order to express smell convincingly in language.