Scent and Subversion

by Barbara Herman

  Although I didn’t attend this show, I was able to get a sense of its power through mono.kultur’s Issue No. 23, which used the same microencapsulation on its pages, reproducing the same twelve men’s sweat. PLEASE RUB THE PAGE, I was instructed, and I did. I, too, was strangely drawn to Guy No. 9, smelling in his reproduced sweat, so far from its origin and context, the scent of Germaine Cellier’s Bandit perfume from the 1940s. Fascinating that a woman’s perfume that drew its energies from bodily smells and a kind of masculine energy (bandits, pirates, and violent imagery) would be similar to the sweat of scared men seventy-something years later.

  Sweat is of particular fascination to Tolaas, and if you think about it, sweat is our human perfume. Tolaas, in fact, has worn some of this panic sweat out to parties as if it were perfume just to see what jamming the olfactory lines of communication would do. Answer: People stepped away from her instinctively, whether because she smelled “bad,” or because her smell communicated fear, we can’t know. The closest she’s gotten to creating a line of perfume has been to discuss how interesting it would be to create a bespoke scent based on your own inimitable scent molecules as the base.

  So much of culture is about its relationship to smells and cleanliness. “People manipulate their olfactory identity and surroundings to establish or to maintain their class identity—to fit in,” she observes. “With sweat, it’s the same—they’re difficult smells for a lot of people. If you see a person and smell his sweat up front, you back off. But if I position the same smell in an aesthetic displacement, you approach it differently: You come back and you’re fascinated!” Her work, she argues, is mainly about tolerance.

  For the 2004 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, she and perfumer Geza Schoen created two maps of Berlin, one geographic and the other olfactory. They went to each corner of Berlin and gathered over 7,000 scents, and Schoen created scents that represented each one for east, west, south, and north, culminating in one final Berlin scent that blended them all together.

  In a project she did with the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University called “Synthetic Aesthetics,” bacteria and microorganisms become metaphors for culture and community. In order to explore how differences often separate us from “other” cultures, she worked with scientists to cultivate cheese from human sweat. Many intense-smelling cheeses have similar bacterial components as those found in stinky feet and armpits, and by creating cheese whose smell was similar, the question becomes, What happens when differences between us collapse—when the way we separate things in the world begins to seem arbitrary? In this instance, it is similarity in smells that bridges the gap.

  Ultimately, Sissel Tolaas’s project is to take the scent out of context so that we can reorient ourselves toward smell in an open way. There are evolutionary reasons, of course, why we don’t like the smell of decay or sulfur or excrement, but there are also ways of recognizing that many of our biases about scent are not only culturally determined, but also injurious to our relationships with others and with our own bodies, ultimately dampening our curiosity about the world.

  Martynka Wawrzyniak: “Smell Me”: An Artist’s Olfactory Self-Portrait

  NYC-based visual artist Martynka Wawrzyniak is no stranger to visceral experiences. For her video, “Chocolate,” the photographer and video performance artist endured having chocolate poured onto her face for nine minutes while submerged in a tub. In the ten-minute video, “Ketchup,” she’s the target of squirting ketchup bottles wielded by young boys. And in “Lipstick,” she and three friends smear lipstick over their faces in a grotesque parody of women’s beautification rituals.

  Last year, the Warsaw-born Wawrzyniak decided to take that interest in visceral experiences a step further by creating a work that combined her interest in self-portraiture with her lifelong interest in smells. Like Christopher Brosius, Martynka Wawrzyniak hates perfume. None of the products she uses are scented, and she’s never worn perfume. Yet scent has always intrigued her—from the abject smells of strangers on buses in her childhood memories of Poland, to the warm smells of her lover’s body odor.

  Over the space of a year, Wawrzyniak and a team of undergraduate chemistry students from Hunter College became benevolent versions of Patrick Süskind’s antihero Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, who wanted to extract the scent of murdered girls for his macabre perfume. Under the aegis of chemistry professor Donna McGregor, they extracted essences from Wawrzyniak’s hair, sweat, and tears using perfumery techniques. Through a friend, she met some people from the perfume world who agreed to help her re-create those extracted bodily smells into scents. Scent director and self-described synesthete Dawn Goldworm of 12.29 (who worked on Lady Gaga’s recent fragrance, Fame) and award-winning Givaudan perfumer Yann Vasnier worked together to synthesize these essences into the four “perfumes” that would greet the visitor of Wawrzyniak’s installation: the smell of her hair, tears, night sweat, and Bikram yoga sweat.

  In the installation entitled “Smell Me” at Envoy Enterprises on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which ran for one month in 2012, visitors were invited to walk into a specially constructed scent chamber that dispensed Wawrzyniak’s four “perfumes.” In place of a visual self-portrait, as the installation’s name spells out, there was an olfactory one. Outside of the scent chamber, visitors were invited to buy the actual extracted Wawrzyniak essences displayed in chemistry vials, essences she reminds me are parts of her body that contain her DNA. (These cost thousands of dollars.)

  “I wanted to create a self-portrait that was completely stripped of the visual prejudice that we usually associate with judging a person,” Wawrzyniak has said, “or judging a woman specifically.” In place of the visual self-portrait, Wawrzyniak added a dimension that has largely had no place in the art world: the sense of smell. She didn’t want the smell to be about perfume, but rather the body itself, stripped of all perfumes, “like becoming more naked than naked,” she told me. “I was a little nervous at first at how absolutely exposing this was … it’s the ultimate level of exposure, the next level of a nude portrait.”

  In Ways of Seeing (1972), art critic John Berger says of the history of Western art that “according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but by no means have been overcome—men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), film theorist Laura Mulvey extends this critique by theorizing about gendered looking in cinema. In her enormously influential essay, she famously coined the term “the male gaze” to describe the way in which classical Hollywood cinema constructs its viewer—whether male or female—as a heterosexual male, by creating the female object on film as an erotic object to be visually objectified and consumed.

  Although Wawrzyniak felt more exposed by revealing herself in a self-portrait through smell, “Smell Me” actually subverts centuries of the kinds of male/female power dynamics in the history of the visual arts described by Berger and Mulvey, and it subverts those dynamics in a couple of powerful ways. Unlike her other art pieces in which her body—and things that are done to it—are visually front and center, in “Smell Me,” Wawrzyniak removes herself as a visual object, subverting the dictum that “men act and women appear.” (Wawrzyniak is, of course, already challenging that dictum by acting or creating, that is—being an artist herself.) And because of the physiology of smell, it is the visitor to the scent chamber of “Smell Me” who becomes the object, in a sense, of Wawrzyniak’s odors, passively penetrated—with all of the sexual and political connotations that verb carries—by her olfactory self-portrait rather than a subject voyeuristically gazing upon her as an object. To echo perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, her scent “goes inside” the gallery visitor.

  “I wanted to take the nude self-portrait to the next level of intimacy.”

  —MARTYNKA WAWRZYNIAK

  Wawrzyniak is clearly indebted to Sissel Tolaas’s pioneering 2006 work for MIT, “
The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR” exhibit. But her project, although clearly inflenced by Tolaas’s body-odor work, differs in several ways. First off, Wawrzyniak was both the sample provider and the chemist performing the extractions using chemical washes to remove impurities from the gathered essences to extract, as they say in perfumery, the “absolute.”

  “What we did is different from what Sissel does,” said Wawrzyniak. “She uses headspace technology, and we did hands-on essential-oil extraction. I really wanted to do that whole process and learn about it.” (She enrolled in a summer program in Hunter College’s chemistry department in order to get access to the chemicals she needed to do the extractions.) Second, it was her body whose smells would be on exhibit, which she describes as making her feel very vulnerable.

  “The process itself,” Wawrzyniak told me, “required this level of intimacy between myself and the people I was working with … I had to bring in my stinky, sweaty T-shirts, greasy hair, and tears, and I had to work with these three twenty-year-old chemistry students—boys from Hunter College! I had to have no shame left.”

  The students got to know Wawrzyniak so well that, one day, they remarked that her sweat smelled like chocolate; interestingly, it was during the ovulation phase of her menstrual cycle. In acts both clinical and intimate, they removed extracts from T-shirts she wore to bed several days in a row, and other T-shirts she wore to Bikram yoga. And in the most dramatic extraction—of Wawrzyniak’s tears—she would listen to Polish folk music her father brought back from her native land that would prompt her to cry, which she would do into a sterilized bottle for half an hour! Afterward, she would seal it up and jump on a subway to get to Hunter so that they could extract what small portion they could from this precious fluid.

  “I was basically a living, walking extraction sample for the whole summer, because I would collect my hair and cry into vials,” she said. “I still have jars full of hair in my room because I don’t want to stop collecting my hair. I had to sleep in a T-shirt for five nights or go to Bikram yoga class in it and then put it in a sterile Mason jar. Then I would go straight to the lab and wash it in ethanol to get all the sweat out, evaporate all the water and ethanol off, and be left with the essential oil of my sweat. It was pretty cool.”

  The extracted essences were not enough for a month-long gallery show, however, so Dawn Goldworm and Yann Vasnier stepped in to offer … their noses. After smelling the extractions, and supplementing them by actually sniffing Wawrznyniak, they came up with synthesized replicas that would eventually be part of the gallery show by puffing out of the scent chamber.

  In addition to subverting the way women have been represented in art for centuries, Wawrzyniak’s project is also fascinating if situated in the history of perfume. There was a time when animal scents were used as “olfactory corsets” to highlight the body’s similarly erotic, disturbing smells. As that fashion waned, the mania for soliflores (single-note perfumes) took over, and heavy, animalic scents redolent of bodies (animal and human) fell out of favor. Animal notes that recalled the body remained in the base notes of perfumery for a period, but almost completely dropped out in the 1990s, in favor of transparent, clean, and ethereal oceanic scents. Unwittingly, Wawrzyniak, with the help of her Hunter College students and Goldworm and Vasnier, returns the body to perfume’s trajectory.

  Martynka Wawrzyniak’s Four “Smell Me” Scents (2012)

  Perfumer: Yann Vasnier, with Scent Director Dawn Goldworm:

  Tears

  Notes: Black pepper, nutmeg, celery seed; watery floral notes: bourgeonal, calone, florhydral, indole, jasmine; green hexenols and styrallyl acetate

  Night T-shirt

  Notes: Indole, jasmine, honey, caramel, beeswax, oakwood

  Bikram T-shirt

  Notes: Sulfurs, bucchu oil, green pepper, coconut, tonka beans, butyric acid, decanoic acid

  Hair

  Notes: Skatol, civet, coconut CO2, costus, cumin, pepper, everlasting (immortelle), and watery green notes

  I had the opportunity to smell the scents Goldworm and Vasnier collaborated on together. They’re not commercially available but rather scented the “Smell Me” installation. It’s fascinating the way in which one can smell hints of twentieth-century perfumery in what is an attempt to replicate a specific woman’s homely and bodily smells. In the same way that some of Sissel Tolaas’s reproductions of men’s anxiety sweat reminded me of certain twentieth-century perfumes (namely, Germaine Cellier’s Bandit), Wawrzyniak’s scents—reconstructed as they were with perfume notes—were perfume-like and yet also naturalistic, recognizable body odors. Her hair smelled warm, lightly green, spicy, sebum-y, with a hint of gardenia. Her Bikram sweat smelled like musty peach and coconut, a not-unpleasant scent of stale, dirty clothes that need to be laundered. Night sweat had a delicate floral top note with a pronounced cocoa and nut scent in the base, and her tears smelled like black pepper with a light, transparent floral aspect. The body’s perfume isn’t so unlike perfume after all.

  Goldworm’s assessment of Wawrzyniak’s extracted essences reads like poetry: “Overall, being a vegan, her body smells very wet and sweet, like lactones and coconut water, with an infusion of fresh green notes and spices … Her nightshirt smell is deep and warm like a small, delicate animal in hibernation … Her hair smells like a memory from my childhood.”

  Wawrzyniak’s project brings perfume’s modern history full circle. The body comes back to perfume as its own perfume. Although these scents made me appreciate bodily smells more, they also made me appreciate the way in which perfumery has been negotiating with the body in a fascinating dialectic, from the beginning. We can run from the body, but we can’t hide.

  A Brief History of Animal Notes in Perfume

  For those of us weaned on years of desexualized, clean scents, the idea that a woman would wear a perfume that enhanced her “not so fresh feeling” might sound scandalous, if not downright deranged. Although animal scents in perfumes largely fell out of favor after the 1980s, there are signs that a love for all things ripe in an otherwise odor- and germaphobic society may be making a comeback after almost two decades of the Rule of Clean.

  Just as the pendulum swung from florals to animalics and back in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, perfume lovers have begun to tire of polite office scents and perfumes redolent of fruit salad. Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker, in what may be described as a tipping point moment, vowed a few years ago to create a fragrance with a “palatable” body odor note. “I really like B.O.,” she said about her next perfume’s inspiration, “I think it’s sexy.” The name behind the successful mass-market perfumes Lovely and Covet also raised eyebrows when she proclaimed her love for the smell of skunk spray and dirty diapers.

  “Perfume should smell like the underside of my mistress.”

  —JACQUES GUERLAIN

  Parker is jumping on the animalic perfume bandwagon that was already initiated in the twenty-first century by perfume brands such as Serge Lutens (with the Christopher Sheldrake–composed Muscs Koublaï Khän from 1998); L’Artisan Parfumeur (with the Olivia Giacobetti–composed Dzing! from 1999); and Frédéric Malle (with the Maurice Roucel–composed Musc Ravageur from 2000). But as novel as it might seem for Parker to out herself as a skank-o-phile, a love for bodily or animalic smells is actually as old as perfume itself, and it seems to recur in generational cycles.

  Before they were replaced with synthetic ingredients from the 1970s, the animal-sourced ingredients civet, musk, ambergris, and castoreum served multiple roles in vintage perfume, and with the exception of ambergris, which originates from the intestinal secretions of the sperm whale, all of them came from or near the sexual glands of animals.

  Like all base notes or fixatives in perfume that have a heavier molecular structure, animal notes anchor perfume’s more volatile top notes and middle notes, making fragrances last longer. They also help to enhance or “exalt” the odors of citrus, herbs, and florals that comprise top
and middle notes in the same way spices enhance the flavor of food. But in their least analyzed function, animal-derived base notes contribute to vintage perfume’s complexity by adding subliminal, “dirty” bodily smells that prompted perfume writer March Moore of the blog PerfumePosse to coin a new scent category: “skank” perfumes.

  In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, before it was understood how disease was transmitted, it was believed that plagues were the result of the “odors of pestilence” in the air. Strong essential oils, including the excremental odors of civet, musk, ambergris, and castoreum, were carried in pomanders (containers with aromatic substances), worn on gloves, and applied to skin. The logic? Fight the “odors of pestilence” with even stronger odors! These animal scents were also worn as perfume by nineteenth-century men and women, and the inclusion of animal notes as fixatives (to make perfume last longer) carried over into the twentieth century.

  “A woman may buy a perfume made purely of flowers once, but she will never come back for another bottle. There is something in a woman, perhaps she is not conscious of it … that wants an animal odor.”

  —SIRENUS HERMLIN, GRASSE PERFUMER, AS QUOTED IN VOGUE, 1945

  Although perfume is often thought of as something worn to hide body odor, it also functioned in the past to emphasize bodily smells. In the twentieth century, before Western culture became pornified and graphic displays of sexuality became the norm, perfume was an adornment that helped women to express sexuality in an invisible, subliminal, and hence, socially acceptable way by emphasizing bodily smells with animalic perfumes.