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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 of ATHE in July 2003. This rst-ever event, organized by CUNY graduate students Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, was enthusiastically embraced 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-unclassiable 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 Maxwell turned 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 experiential and site-specic. Of the two shows, On the Scent was 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-lled rooms. You enter through the front door of an apartment and proceed through its sights peristaltically, as if urged by a thousand ngers. 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 window. You sit very near as the rooms special olfactory script room comes to life. You are immersed in its specic 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 story even if the performer is not blatant in his need for your attention. Thankfully, the On the Scent performers were virtuosic in their independence, 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.
The Drama Review 48, 2 (T182), Summer 2004. 2004 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts 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 owers, 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-todoor. 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 customers. The second room of the tour was a Southwestern-themed sliver-of-a-NewYork-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 Strike 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 us we were in fact three, due to a last-minute add-on a circumstance that intensied our immersion in Hills ambivalent nostalgia about a New Mexican childhood near Los Alamos. At one point, she paused 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 nal room, Helen Paris was tossing uncomfortably in Marvin Carlsons bed. We attended her like three silent aunts in a row, witness to her ravings. 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 ghting 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 family 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 sudden lift. At the end she dismissed us, thereby also addressing us directly for the rst 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 longstanding and etymologically bolstered assumption, the theatre is a seeing-place (Greek: theatron) a realm of 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 denition 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

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1. Leslie Hill sets hair on re 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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78 critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical and his own lower organs, but also distinguishes himself from the animal, who remains sensually earthbound. The diminution of the olfactory stimuli, says Freud, makes what was once sexually stimulating 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 and so to the threshold of human civilization (1961: 100). If sight holds sway at the threshold of human civilization, 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 Timbuktu does, as he devotes himself to creating an artwork for his beloved Mr. Bones, the canine narrator of the novel. A host of questions and choices immediately present themselves, as perhaps they did to the makers of On the Scent: What was the ideal sequence of smells? How long should a symphony 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 progression 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 various elements be mixed together? A more practical though no less fanciful version 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 visual record of Stanleys olfactory attention, Auslander argued that although there is, of course, no way of enabling 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 humans to experience what vision looks like when it is subordinated to another sense. (2003) On the Scents domestic setting reveals the vestigial human attachment to smell as inextricable from femininity and its discontents. It is therefore surprising to learn that Paris and Hill, the long-term collaborative duo of this

2. Helen Paris does a headstand in a box of cookies in On the Scent. (Photo by Edward Dimsdale)

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acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts trio, initially turned to the masculinist realm of science for inspiration. According 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 exception 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 with artists as a temporary relief from the fugitive nature of his object of study. Consonant 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 difcult 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, photographed, described. Even the words we use for smells words like pungent, spicy, heady, owery, overpowering, sulphurous do 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 re... 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. Memories of the day rush back: as at the PS preconference, you are suddenly participant and observer and scientic 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 (especially if, like one of us, you are in fact, hard-of-smelling). But even if youre not anosmic, the nal moments of the piece are difcult, 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 remain poised a long time, like souls [...] bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edice of memory. (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, academic, or all of the above.

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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 Conference, New York, NY. Auster, Paul 2000 Timbuktu. New York: Picador, USA.

Freud, Sigmund 1961 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited 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 currently 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 of Rachels 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 Theater magazine on Theater and Ecology (25:1, 1995).

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Cultural Divide?

Brett Bailey and Third World Bunghts 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)
The Drama Review 48, 2 (T182), Summer 2004. 2004 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology