Archive
M:ST 3.5
Scentbar: Fragrances for Troubled Times
Essay by Anthea Black
In 1992 I attended a summer camp for girls who were interested in Science. We donned starchy white lab coats, goggles, then gloves, and gingerly held the beakers that we were given, as we waited to begin the experiment. After the prepatory ritual of getting into a costume just like the ‘real’ lady-scientist who would later lead us through the steps of our experiment, me and the other schoolgirls gradually mustered the confidence of a hypothetical army of budding female scientists. Through the week we mixed up a batch of nylon, separated chlorophyll by dissolving its various particles along a strip of white paper, and flew elaborately constructed paper airplanes with the precious cargo of raw eggs off the university balconies.
Some moments are more performative than others: I don’t think that the frisson of dressing in scientist drag during a camp designed to recruit young women into the ranks of a traditionally male dominated field was lost on me. Neither was the seductive smell of those powered latex gloves.
Scent has a strong potential to recall memories, call up incidental details from an event witnessed years ago, feed the flush of attraction, or solidify the intimate bond between a parent and child. What with this evocative territory in which to tread, it’s surprising that so few contemporary artists choose to manipulate the olfactory capacity of their audiences.
Scentbar begins when Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan get suited-up in lab coats and take up position at their stations. Dempsey sits down at a table with a clipboard, pen and fresh questionnaire, poised and ready to collect my data.[i] Millan waits for the results of my survey behind a bank of vials, solutions and measuring devices that she will use in the creation of my personally blended scent. A green target-logo brands the almost too-spacious installation of Dempsey and Millan’s hybrid laboratory-spa. Where most fictional labs and contemporary retail environments are all about maximizing storage while maintaining the illusion of minimal unclutteredness, and most galleries are ‘empty’ till the artwork (or artist) arrives, the discreet performative stations and lack of accoutrements situate Scentbar in limbo between science and aesthetics; between the pristine white gallery space, the laboratory and the salon.[ii]
Pierre Laszlo would suggest that the lab coat has many performative associations buttoned up within its history, as he traces the many readings of the lab coat as a costume that can be interpreted through its utilitarian, sociological, historical, and allegorical meanings. When Dempsey and Millan don scientist drag, they are calling on “the lab coat…as the emblem of chemistry as an experimental science.”[iii] This association probably also had a lot to do with my feeling of authenticity as I slipped the starchy white jacket over my kid-civilian clothes.
Despite Laszlo’s claim that “the lab coat has now become an almost extinct species,”[iv] it completes Scentbar’s sparkling picture of serious analytical research. The lab coat is essential here, because it allows Dempsey and Millan to assume the stance of the expert, and leverage our trust and faith in what we’re about to undertake as participants in the performance. Their costumes let us know that we are witnessing a performance of science.
The role of the “scientist as a demonstrator goes back to the Renaissance. At this particular time in history, science was indeed being performed as demonstrations. It happened…on the street.”[v] Science, in this sense, was a sort of amateur magical spectacle, designed to attract interest (and buyers) to what amounted to little more than the wares of a clever traveling salesman. The mix-up of scientific and capitalist interests can be traced from this 17th Century slight-of-hand all the way through adverts from the 50s announcing the ‘majority of doctors smoke Camel brand cigarettes’ to today, where like contemporary art, science has also been appropriated as convincing and powerful fuel for the aims of marketing, industry and global consumerism. Art and science lend meaning and greater significance to the irrational processes and drives of capitalism, and despite their altruistic demeanors they are often complicit with them.
--
The first time I ever went to the spa was a couple of years after settling into my first steady salaried arts job, and the other ladies were doing it, so I thought I might as well try it too. After herbal tea, a diagnosis of my skin type and taking off my shoes and jewelry, I was led to a small warm room with my freshly mixed aromatherapy preparation. I asked the aesthetician to describe the whole spa ritual to me in terms of its technical process – How does getting steamed and rubbed-down activate the essential oil? What were the specific properties of the special potion she was applying to my face and how did they work? How does aromatherapy affect the brain? How the heck am I supposed to know that this is working? I couldn’t get into it. Furthermore, I thought that being touched by a stranger in this way was vaguely creepy.
The experience didn’t get me off in the way that some women describe the almost orgasmic powers of the spa. Still, I can understand the impulse to search for a magic salve to soothe postmodern ambivalence, fill a spiritual gap by disposing of discretionary income, or take a personal time out from the rat race.
Our big picture questions that were once answered by faith in a higher power are now explained in all their scientific minutiae and contemplated through the spectre of art. Relief is also available at the cosmetics counter or the spa, for a price. When a trained expert performs a precise treatment, it becomes akin to a spiritual experience deemed ‘good for the soul’ and the body becomes an object of worship, but also fits into a consumer narrative of continual self-improvement.
Dempsey and Millan use “the familiar trappings of a commercial experience to gain audience trust.”[vi] I would argue that this foundation of trust is also dependent upon the creation of a scientific mythology through the use of costume: even if the participant is doubtful about confessing their anxieties during the survey, they are willing to play along in the ‘service of science.’ Dempsey does describe the process as “a highly scientific process that is predicated on your answers to the questionnaire,” but in the tone of a telemarketer or call centre representative dealing with a customer who has too many pokey questions, she reminds me that “like all art there is some improvisation and interpretation.”[vii] “Scentbar gives the audience member the opportunity to reflect upon their hopes, fears and confusions and to express them to the intake worker who administers the questionnaire,”[viii] and this performative space relies on emotional exchange rather than objective knowledge.
Though the performance evokes the powers of science and consumerism to mediate uncertainty and offer transcendence, the dark side of the Scentbar experience is that our questions and lingering anxieties cannot be explained or washed away and the answers aren’t available at any price. When dealing in these uncertainties, laboratory technicians Dempsey and Millan don’t claim to provide empirical answers, they ask us how we feel about our own world. The most startling of their questions was “You are basically happy as long as you don’t think about it, or you are sad but soldiering on?” because of the emotional vulnerability that it creates.
When Dempsey conducted my Scentbar intake questionnaire, we chitchatted a little before launching into the numerous questions that would constitute my mixture. The process of discussing whether I enjoyed the camaraderie of other children, wish for a deluxe washing machine, or lie awake at night imagining how to wreak vengeance on my enemies is incredibly fraught: there is the sense that this test is yet another opportunity to fall short of an ideal, by delving into the past, present and future of your monumental failures. I wondered aloud if remembering the smell of a Laundromat is generational, because I attempted to conjure a vague image of sudsy cleanliness, but there was no memory attached to it. She said perhaps my lack of a potent association with the essence of ‘Laundromat’ was not about age, but had something to do with class.[ix] Was she suggesting that I didn’t know the smell of a Laundromat cause I was a rich kid?
--
We owned a washing machine. My Grandma’s smell of a lifetime’s worth of fried onions and pickling spices was still too strong for the laundry to wash out. Dad’s return from a fourteen-hour shift on the paving crew was announced by the smell of asphalt and diesel fuel in the fibres of his gritty jean jacket, shirts and boots. Mum didn’t throw his work-shirts in the wash with the rest of our family’s laundry, but when we greeted him at the door and buried our tired faces in his arms for a goodnight hug, the heady smell of the workday sent us off to bed.
I still adore the aroma of fresh road construction site or spilled gas as much as things that are traditionally pretty to sniff. This association flies in the face of what we know to be true about oil: gas-guzzling vehicles lined up in long waits at the pumps, crude oil gushing out of a breached tanker, or wars masterminded to secure oil for North America. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
If Scentbar’s questionnaire offered any clues on the interconnectedness of nostalgia and disaster, watching the promotional video on a bank of television monitors drives these connections home. The videos play in the sparse waiting room for ‘customers’ who are waiting to receive a tiny bottle of the scent that Millan is concocting. The meditative conversational mood that takes place during the survey is replaced by a solitary suspension of time as war, destruction, and histories that are marked by mass cultural anxiety are reduced to calm, poetic video images. These “highly aestheticized man-made disasters”[x] are fetishized by slowing found footage to an almost crawl.
In Every War Has Its Medium: The Evacuation of Images, Marina Grzinic suggests that “we are witnessing an ever more exact and complete aesthetic sterilization of the image.”[xi] She suggests that this process reached its postmodern height during the American Gulf War because the media transmitted clean, “vivid, engrossing” images of war, edited into easily digestible segments that were “wholly dislocated in both time and space.”[xii] The video spots in Scentbar that depict war and destruction achieve a similar effect, but like the hand-crafted scent we are waiting for Millan to mix up, the push and pull between fear and sublimation evokes a more complex emotional palate. For every image of horrifying destruction, there’s another right behind it that depicts tranquil beauty: an atomic bomb mushrooms into the reddened sky, a flower opens in slow motion like an explosion, and a prairie house is blown up while a woman bathes in a bubbling tub of rose petals. People pull gas masks over their faces during an emergency preparedness exercise, alternately, an ad-hoc parade of ladies pirouette in a grassy park.
The editing of Scentbar’s spots highlights the artificiality of the images, rather than presenting them as natural or factual. They are pulled from history but seem to imply a tragic present-day irony of heading to the spa in one country while bombs drop in another. It’s not unlike watching late-breaking news about the current war on Iraq followed by flowery, lilting commercials for laundry soap, panty liners and moisture cream. Both manipulate our emotions, but together, they almost cancel each other out so that only a neutral feeling of vague unease remains. I’m watching the videos alone when I shrug and sigh. Dempsey isn’t sitting there attentively listening to my responses, hesitations or interpretations of the images with clip-board in hand, she’s working with the next ‘customer’ on their scent. At the moment where we need to hear the soothing tone of Dempsey’s voice, we realize how fickle the consumer relationship is.
When Dempsey says “advertising relies on fear to get people to buy,” the proof is in ads for cleaning products that exploit media-induced xenophobia and fear of microscopic invaders alike.
Sadly, ‘fear is everywhere’ could be this decade’s catch phrase: advertising, media reports and Presidential speeches would have us believe as much. Flash back to the simulated environment where Dempsey and Millan have left us waiting for the product: we’re ruminating on personal and global anxieties from the safe haven of Scentbar, and it’s no wonder that galleries, laboratories and spas seem fitting retreats from the climate of terror.
[i] Shawna Dempsey administered the intake questionnaire for Scentbar over the phone so I’ve taken the liberty of filling in the ‘real-time’ blanks. Thank you to Shawna, Lorri, and Cindy Baker and Megan Mormon, who participated in a past Scentbar incarnation, for their additional observations.
[ii] The 90s practice of naming the gallery ‘a laboratory’ and drawing parallels between the alchemy of art making and scientific experimentation seems to have reached its international-art-world culmination in the exhibition and publishing project Laboratorium curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden. Furthermore, the image of an artist standing ready at a table of ingredients and dabbling in their alchemy—think Rirkrit Tiravanija’s daily preparation of Thai feasts and Mireille Perron’s performance of the Laboratory of Feminist Pataphysics—has been a recurrent one in recent performance and relational art practices.
[iii] Pierre Laszlo, “A White Costume and A Blue Surprise,” Laboratorium, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden. DAP/Distributed Art Publishers, 2001, 203 – 205.
[iv] Laszlo, 204. He asks: “When is a lab coat worn outside of a laboratory? It is to display (make perceptible) a phenomenon to the public. In other words, the lab coat then identifies the scientist as a demonstrator.”
[v] Laszlo, 204.
[vi] Shawna Dempsey, email interview with the author, August 2007.
[vii] Shawna Dempsey, telephone interview with the author, August 2007.
[viii] Shawna Dempsey, email interview with the author, August 2007.
[ix] Research suggests that differences in culture, class and generation can produce varied responses to scents. This is probably because our response to scent isn’t automatic, it must be paired with experience in order to acquire its cognitive potency. For example, “While Americans generally enjoy the scent of wintergreen, which is found mainly in candy in the United States, the British find it unpleasant. To an older generation of British citizens, it smells like medicine, particularly an analgesic rub popular during World War II - an obvious negative association.” Whisking up a memory with a whiff. Rachel Herz explores the psychology of scent, Kristen Cole, http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol25/25GSJ05a.html
[x] Shawna Dempsey, email interview with the author, August 2007.
[xi] Marina Grzinic “Every War Has Its Medium: The Evacuation of Images,” in Situated Contemporary Art Practices. Art, Theory and Activism from (the east of) Europe, ZRC Publishing – Revolver Archiv Für aktuelle Kunst, Ljubljana – Frankfurt, 2001, 98.
[xii] Grzinic 100-101.
Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival Society
P.O. Box 22056 Bankers Hall R.P.O, Calgary, AB CA T2P 5G7
PH. 403.837.6678 email: info@mstfestival.org