Sandrine Videault

It is not as through there are hundreds of fragrance artists, but there are some, and the passing of Sandrine Videault is a great loss to that small group.

Videault was a kind of anthropologist. She was born and lived on the impossibly beautiful tropical island of New Caledonia. In an interview with Perfume Shrine's Elena Vosnaki, she spoke of the indigenous tribe there, the Wallisians, who frequently rub perfumed pastes into their skin. She included some of their ingredients — Frangea, a white flower, sandalwood, Javanese vetiver — in her 2009 fragrance Manoumalia. She left some things the Wallisians used out, though;  most notably the hea seed, which she called “too rancid for the Western nose.”

So, we can see that Videault did assemble a perfume, not a reconstruction. A fragrance to be worn by Westerners on skin, to enhance, to make more beautiful, the wearer’s day. Is this art? I think it is.

So often, written descriptions of “olfactory art” seem kind of silly to me. It could be that all forms of  conceptual art have that in common. Perhaps they are better by far observed, or participated in, than read about. Videault composed olfactory art pieces as well as fragrances. Among them were an olfactory “happening” which included releases of metallic bubbles, presumably containing scent to be released when the bubbles burst, and “The Song of Senses,” an olfactory theatre with holograms. Both, I’d like to have seen.

Manoumalia, which I still have a drop of and am wearing as I write this, was a participant-observer fragrance, to use field-anthropology jargon. A student of the great perfumer Edmound Roudnitska, Videault knew how to construct a fragrance using naturals and synthetics, so although it references the Wallisians Tui-Tui fragrant paste, it is not the same thing.  Smelling the fragrance in its initial stages and in drydown, I perceive the unmistakable white flower essence, a little bit of rubber (common to tuberose) , a slight peppery quality in the middle, and the drydown just a hint of root and indole. On my skin, the fragrance is fleeting.

As is life.

I was happy that Sandrine Videault existed. I was waiting for more fascinating ideas and fragrances to come from her. But, like the Italian fragrance innovator Mona di Orio, she didn’t live long enough.

When asked by Vosnaki what one thing she’d learned from Edmound Rodniska, she replied it was that “we know nothing.”

That is a succinct description, the beginning, of inspiration.

Photo of Sandrine Videault courtesy of Google Images. Image may be subject to copyright.

Thanks to Scented Salamander for some of the material here.

Olfactory Art: The.Next.Big.Thing?

Winner of the samples, chosen using random.org is: Hilary!

Get in touch with me at the email on the left and I'll send them out posthaste!

Caro Verbeek is an art historian who specializes in art and the senses. In the most recent "ARTnews" magazine, she talks about how she became aware of the dearth of the olfactory sense’s place in contemporary art. In 1999,  she saw an exhibit  at the Venice Biennale which had an olfactory component.

“I smelled it way before I saw it, and I had no idea that this was a part of a work of art…." she says. "I thought, I am an art historian, but I don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t know how to understand this. I have no frame for this.”

Somewhere along the line, olfaction became the dirty sense. It was primitive and animalistic, connecting us to the lower orders. When performance and conceptual art met installation art in the Sixties, olfaction, with its ephemerality, would have seemed a natural match. That didn’t happen. It may have been that perfume was already seen by the art world as a grooming product, too commercial even for Andy Warhol. Perfumes were and are marketed not as art or even craft, but as sexual attractants. This led to some pretty silly advertising, then to all those wonderful celeb-u-scents and the frivolous reputation personal fragrance enjoys even today.

 Olfaction-based art has made some inroads lately, though. In fact, it’s one of the lead stories in the March ARTnews, the venerable glossy publication aimed at those who buy, sell and (sometimes) make art. 

The article, titled “Scents & Sensibility,” has a broad reach. This piece covers many bases, from an artist’s eponymous perfume (Kiki Smith’s “Kiki,” which she created with perfumer Christophe Laudamiel), to an exhibit at the New Museum in New York, in which visitors are exposed to scents in the air and left alone to interpret them, to a performance piece in which artist Gayil Nalls infused cardboard pieces with scent and dropped them onto New Year’s Eve revelers in Times Square, to a retooling of old vending machines to dispense mood-altering essential oils, to the collection, then distillation, of dancers’ sweat.  And more.

There are some familiar names here. One is Chandler Burr, who is the curator of the new Center for Olfactory Art in New York, whose first show “The Art of Scent, 1889 - 2011,” will open in the fall of 2011. He states his intent to focus upon designer fragrances for this show. Such fragrances, he believes, meet the criteria by which the other arts -- sculpture, music, architecture and film -- are judged. 

Meanwhile, over in the fine-arts department, it appears that olfactory art is not completely new. Marcel Duchamp filled a room with burnt coffee grounds as part of a Surrealism exhibition in Paris. Ed Keinholtz’s reconstruction of the bar at the L.A. roadhouse Barney’s Beanery also used olfactory components: bar smells, like cigarette smoke, booze and urine (in this case, his own...uh-oh, here comes the goon-squad Right Wing: put the torches down, boys! Not a nickel of tax-pay-uhs’ money was spent. The exhibit is housed in Holland, okay?)

Ahem. Well, as with most installation/performance art I’ve seen -- and I’ve seen plenty -- these works range from profound to original to baffling to lame. Like most art of this type, the justifications -- the artists’ “statements” about their works -- tend to be written in tangled, esoteric verbiage that excludes ordinary mortals from understanding it. That comes with the art-world territory. I believe Verbeek meant that when she said she didn’t have a “frame” for olfaction’s place in art. 

Art magazines, and articles like this one, exist to “frame” a trend, or a movement; they legitimize it. They influence the pickers and choosers, the gallery owners and curators, who influence critics, collectors and each other. 

If the art is what happens in the viewer’s mind, which is one definition of conceptual art I’ve read, then olfactory art certainly fits that paradigm. Curator Yasmil Raymond’s thoughts link these ideas neatly. “The work, when it smells, enters the realm of a human being. This life component enters into it -- which is very different from looking at a Monet.”

Up to this point, olfactory art has been staged mostly in museums and alternative art spaces; after all, a gallery can’t sell a smell to match the sofa.  People who follow perfume know that there are small houses like Soivohle, CB I Hate Perfume and Etat Libre d’Orange who make concept scents as personal fragrances already. And, as the world will soon know, Lady Gaga plan her own celeb-u-sent to be based on blood and semen, assuming that her idea makes it past the first marketing meeting at Coty. (It’s been done -- ELdO's "Secretions Magnifiques" -- already, anyway.) So I’m wondering what the new Center for Olfactory Art will really be about and who will fund it. 

Any ideas, anybody?

The article “Scents and Sensibility,” by Barbara Pollack, appears in the current (March 2011) edition of “ARTNews (volume 110, Number 3). Quotes are directly from the article.

Sssshhhh...don’t tell anybody -- next week I’ll be starting a drawing for a brand-new full bottle of something new, gorgeous and very high-end; stay tuned!