24Electric

changes profoundly and becomes a rich, sumptuous
apparel. A companionable smell. The light in a photograph,
as in a mirror, brightens some areas at the
cost of darkening others. The place of the spectator is
disturbing because it is uncertain.
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Douglas Gordon
On the matter of privileged or provoked senses:
the work of douglas gordon
Some modern artists understood that the new creative
processes, the so-called visual arts, could
embrace not just aspects of representation or reproduction
but aggressive and transgressive attitudes
that instead of conserving the established dispensation
led to its destruction, a radically new possible
form of the ambient reality. Everything we see is real,
but everything that we convert as such, to which we
give new presence, is also real. This artistic option
makes sense in as much as it offers real active presences
that oblige us to give them content, meaning,
even though it be unusual, unexpected, on occasion
obliged by the new coherence that must be ordered
from the senses so that what is presented is accessible
to the intellect. Douglas Gordon is one of those
assaulters of the immediate and of practice who
makes use of time but also — as in the present case
— of fire. A time or a fire that are controlled, handcuffed,
that suspend their action and activity when
the artist so decides, which is when he has seen to it
that the observer follows him and not the original object
that motivated the action.
These images thus suspended and interrupted in
time in his other processes, including the aggressive,
lend themselves, offer themselves to new functions.
The one in the olorVisual collection goes from being
an attacked photograph, for some subjective reason
or aberrant sadistic game, regardless of the disfigurement
achieved, to take on a new sense and meaning:
the nose has been altered and at this precise moment
what the image cries out for and makes manifest is
the imperative of smell. We are then led to wonder
— with or without the consent of the aggressor —
what basic sense he wanted to dispossess the image
of. That of beauty or that of smell? He has achieved
both and the second to excess, making manifest the
horrific and, for the arsonist, sweet smell of the fire
that burns or the stinking reek of burnt meat.
A worthy Turner Prize, Douglas Gordon.
13
Cecilia de Val
Arnau Puig
Recollections are imprinted on that kind of parchment
we call memory. The quickest and surest way
to probe it is by way of smells; Proust knew that, and
how to tell it in words. I realized it and wanted to express
it by means of an image by photographing the
place which, in the form of an old storeroom filled
with papers, represented my childhood. The papers
still retained the old smell of the tree from which they
were born, as well as that of amber and all the years
that imprinted their weight of dust, the smell of the
ink that gave them life, my tiny fingers discovering
the other realm that lives in the pages of what they
tell me is called book, the smell of the cedar that
was a pencil that marked the flat white paper which
could be, if it passed through my father’s hands, an
elephant or a giraffe. The smell of my memory is as
multifaceted and complex as that of paper.
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Jamie Baldridge
It is said that the sense of smell is most closely tied
to memory and for me this is most certainly the case.
A whiff of cheap, but respectable, department store
perfume can transport me back thirty years to the
comfort of my grandmother’s parlor, while the more
bohemian notes of patchouli and sandalwood will
instantly bring to mind the summer I first fell in love
and the small, moonlit breasts of my lover as she snored
softly beside me. I truly believe that smells can
transport us, not just in memory, but to places that
are uniquely divine.
My studio is a sacred place and I fill the air with
sacramental smoke while I work. In the corner of the
room, beneath my collection of odds and ends from
my travels, a censer oozes heavy tendrils of Frankincense
and Oud smoke, some of which reach slowly
heavenward, some of which puddle lazily on the tabletop
and mix seductively with the notes of tobacco
and hashish coating my fingertips. As the air in my
studio becomes a perfectly soft homogenous haze of
incense, I can transport my mind more easily into my
work and imagine a new reality. My religion is in this
place, without physical dimension, but tied inexorably
to the tears of boswellia and the divine infection
of agarwood. If a person were of a mind to occupy
themselves with my work more perfectly, I would
have them inhale these same earthly smells while
they considered my creations.
In the Morning, Trotsky smells to me of warm buttermilk,
lavender soap, and well trodden, well-aged
cedar floor boards.
15
Richard Billingham
My father out cold on the toilet floor at home. Oblivious
to stench and squalor.
16
Esther Ferrer
It’s with collard greens.
17
Roger Ballen
My sense of smell knows when nature is close.
18
John Coplans
Coplans revisited
Coplans’ self-portrait photographs of his body evoke
multiple readings. In the large close-up of his hand,
which is precisely the one I have in front of me now,
I see a carnal flower whose spring is now a matter of
long memory: a Proustian madeleine. People put on
perfume to be remembered. John Coplans photographed
himself for the same reason. His perfume
is called Art, and tends to be more lasting than the
most penetrating of fragrances.
When I contemplate the lines of this hand, I think
of the years lived and of fresh flowers that are at the
same time dried out by time and its circumstances.
None of the five senses revives the memory like smell
does. Seneca thought that anyone who frequented
the perfumery, even if only for a short time, would
carry with them the perfume of the place. And that
is what is borne by that hand which also, though very
much his own, belongs, thanks to art, to me and to
all of us. A fragile flower, as brief and persistent as
the smell of violets; a smell that is the silence of a key
unlocking the door of memory. A smell that awakens
and provokes more than any sound. When I look at
and study that hand, I think how right that close-up
is that imposes itself on our retinas by virtue of its extra-corporeal
dimension. This is the first time that we
have seen from so close flesh so much the same and
so other than our own. In such conditions of proximity
we would inevitably smell the salts in the sweat,
musk, amber, muted testosterone, perhaps even
garlic, wine, amber and tobacco. But we smell nothing
of the kind in the inescapable image of a part of
our body that we never notice, since it has never risen
above its utilitarian level. That hand is converted into
art when its oldness and its fragility are exposed to
our absent-minded eye with detailed excess, while
we, in contrast, only give our hands to others as an
unavoidable part of social convention. Coplans’ hand
invites us to look at the nails, the hairs of the fingers,
like a forest razed by a pyromaniac. The creases of
the palm, from which a chiromancer could give us
a reading of the artist’s life, are hidden by the middle
and ring fingers. The oldness and newness of the
image compete on our retinas for a privileged space
in our consciousness, and out of this conclusion are
born the memory and the smell that is the smell of
the present. The smell somewhere between the old
and the new, the lived and the intuited. The smell of
memory and of art, with roots as deep as the lines of
this old hand resisting with all its wisdom the final
winter, is the smell given off by that language of signs
that are as hermetic as they are childish. An invitation
to play, a bittersweet code that, in a language that
is quiet without being mute, speaks to us of Expressionism,
Existentialism, Surrealism, photography,
perception, language, theatre, and a great knowledge
of art and its theories, along with the impossibility
of enjoying an eternal spring. The last time I
saw my friend Coplans, a couple of years ago now,
he still used as a tag to every phrase the words ‘as
you can see’, ‘as you can see’. He was already then
starting to lose the sight of one eye. Now that I think
of it, when I went to see him, first in his studio in the
shadow of the Twin Towers, in Cedar Street, and then
in the heart of the Bowery, sometimes in addition
to a bottle of wine I would take him some flowers.
‘Put them there,’ he would indicate to me with an
absent-minded gesture, while he concentrated his
attention on reading the label on the bottle. ‘Thanks
for the wine,’ he seems to say still, ‘and of course you
know that my cat thanks you for bringing the violets.’
19
Nobuyoshi Araki
Gabriel Halevi
Barcelona, 5 th September 2003
Araki is fascinated above all by the things that surround
him in his daily existence, be it buildings, flowers,
plants, women, food or the skies above Tokyo.
For Araki, everything in his environment is equally
picture-worthy, so he takes photographs without
making any distinction between subjects for their
supposed ‘significance’ or lack of the same.
The fascination of the female body, not least in a
state of abandoned ecstasy, is a constantly recurring
theme in Araki’s work. His ‘eroticizing’ gaze, however,
driven by the desire to lose himself and all his
senses in the subject he is portraying, also takes in
the sensuous surfaces of seductive foods or the intense
colours deep inside a flower.
Does Araki also portray the smells?
Bob van Orsouw
20
Zhang Huan
In most of the markets in China people can buy fresh
meat, smell fresh flavors. In fact. This scene is the one
that inspired me to create 1/2.
I like the idea of a cloth like this one covering my
body. The words represent the Chinese culture which
has never left my life. I also like having words covering
my body. I like the sincere heart but people need
something to cover the things.
21
Jesús Etxarte – Evru
If I am not, I do not smell,
If I am too much, I decant,
If I stop being, they will remember me for what I was,
I am not sure if I will be.
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