24Electric

Smell rebelled for one split second and I was deeply
suffering. You might have had similar nostalgia being
thrust upon you involuntarily.
Smell’s strategy of rebellion is to use the inadequacies
of our memories against us. Yet, ironically,
the strategy manages to elucidate the captivity of the
senses, rather than generate any liberation. Even the
moment of defiance itself is dependent upon the existence
of our experiences. Smell cannot escape the
“I” in us any more than we can escape its desire to be
rid of our purpose for it. We place suffering on smell
so that we might suffer ourselves.
Until we manipulate smell for our own use, it is
merely a chemosensory phenomenon—a “non-sense”.
Our primary reason for the subjectification of scent
is so that it can have industrial or utilitarian purposes.
Occasionally we enslave it for seductive or indulgent
tangents (which may in the end be utilitarian as
well). But we are never really interested in what smell
would be without us.
I can’t blame smell for trying to resist the mechanization
of its essence any more than I can blame myself
for resisting the absence of “I”. It would require
me to sever my alliance to suffering.
I accept that from time to time smell might inconveniently
provoke my memories from their slumber. I
am confident that this coup d’état will only result in
the reassurance that my experiences and memories
remain allied with my ego. Smell will always maintain
its need to communicate through us—therefore,
never really be able to liberate itself. This dependency
is the perfect condition for human ego to continue
to subjectify the senses.
This duplicitous relationship ultimately denies my
access to the true conscious center of self—universal
knowing. But this impasse conveniently perpetuates
the condition of my suffering. It is a romantic quest
paying tribute to my desire for an anonymity that I
know will never really exist.
In précis—I am everything that chemosensory
interactions represent in their purity and “I” am
everything that corrupts their virginity. Smell was
non-sense until I came along and it will be non-sense
again when I am gone.
50
Juan Uslé
De Llerana y Grammarland,
‘In photography, the observer’s obsession is channelled
through a gaze eager for smells and lights,
linking the abstract with the real, enriching the landscape
from an intimate perspective. These flashes of
the everyday exist by way of the light and the darkness,
to convey the sensation and the essence of an
incomplete journey, of a tireless search.’
Galeria Joan Prats, 2001
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Lynne Cohen
The pictures are a kind of archaeology of fixtures and
furniture. You can almost tell from the smells associated
with the places I photographed. The early work
conjures up smells of ashtrays filled with cigarette
butts, empty beer bottles, Freon, wet dog hair and
air freshener. The later work conjures up smells of
chlorine, metal electric wires, gasoline, plywood and
formaldehyde. The smell of linoleum is a constant so
this method is not entirely reliable.
Also the early work is funnier, messier, more symmetrical,
warmer and less threatening; the later work
colder, tidier and more disquieting
Smells in my early work:
Ashtrays filled with cigarette butts
Old wax
Unwashed empty beer bott
Dog hair on wet carpet
Baby powder air freshener
Freon
Linoleum
Smells in my later work:
Disinfectant
Mold
Chlorine
Metal
Formaldehyde
Eucalyptus
Electric wires
Linoleum
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Juan Manuel Castro Prieto
A fantastic shadow in a church, disturbing. Another
of the virtues of Photography: reality becomes a symbol,
a metaphor, and we experience personal feelings
set apart from pure reality. The smell of incense floats
in the air… or is it just imagination?
53
Howard Ursuliak
What Continues to Leave
Vestige (trail)
The trays of “Japanese food” in the display case are
props. These items are synthetic and cannot be eaten.
The glass front of the display case is cracked and
is situated behind the store’s windows. The singular
trail of an odd white substance has been sprayed
across the surface of this window and the stone facade.
Vestige: what is left, what has been left of the past
in the present –a suspended present? This has been
photography’s historical edifice. The trace (a trail) –
what remains but continues to leave, to absent itself
toward its past.
To bring one’s senses to what is depicted in this
would involve the work of memory. This would be to
anticipate the way that something has become past
and has lingered on. Of all the senses, smell most
forcefully and immediately locates its source. It accepts
that it is of both the world and the body. That a
photograph can pose for the senses is because pictorial
space is composed of more than just what is seen.
It can offer touch and what is not visible can be felt.
Likewise, we cannot see time, but we feel its passage.
To remember is to anticipate the touch of what continues
to leave.
54
Carmen Mariscal
Inside this cold and impeccably clean box are four
warm eggs which float in a circle. The eggs float
behind a transparent image whose smell is barely
perceived, like a soft fresh breeze. The image is a
photograph of a pregnant belly with hands that hold
it above and below.
In the synaesthesia that this piece produces, the
main smell that is perceived is the smell of newness,
clean yet at the same time warm, because it alludes
to the babies that will be born of this gestation. The
smell of a newborn baby makes adults want to hug it
and protect it. In turn, when a baby is born, its relationship
with the world is almost completely dependent
on the sense of smell. As Daphne and Charles
Maurer say in their book World of the Newborn:
‘His world smells to him much as our world smells
to us, but he does not perceive odors as coming
through his nose alone. He hears odors, and sees
odors, and feels them too. His world is a melee of
pungent aromas — and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling
sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and
sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could
visit the newborn’s world, we would think ourselves
inside a hallucinogenic perfumery.’
In the piece Gestation the four eggs make reference
to the life that is being created, to the factory of
humanity, and for me this smell of clean warm creation
awakens a feeling of hope and protection.
55
Álvaro Negro
Bather
The act of bathing literally involves submitting the
body to the influence of a physical agent that produces
an immediate effect on it. Perhaps the most obvious
is that of tempering our temperature, an effect
that produces an instant relaxation on the boundary
between the psychic and the somatic. Such a sensation
relaxes us and, nevertheless, sharpens a clearer
state of consciousness that brings us closer to the
famous eureka effect, as when Archimedes arrived at
the solution of the measurement of irregular volumes
while submerged, feeling the lightness of his body in
the water. It could be inferred that the relaxation of
the senses is directly proportional to the increase of
sagacity in discovering and understanding what is
disguised or concealed in reality, a question that also
concerns us artists, because what else is our obsession,
which pushes us into an infinite process of investigation
whose residue, the works, are barely the
tip of the iceberg?
The photographic image Bather has its intrahistory,
that of a bathe in the city of Basel. It was an intensely
hot and humid day in June, one of those that make
you faint. A group of us were walking down from the
Kunstmuseum towards the river and at a crossroads
we met some children bathing in a public fountain.
Being neither stupid nor lazy, we stripped off our mature
years and our clothes and immersed ourselves
in that singular improvised frigidarium. The children
looked on in wonder at our aquatic games: with all
the plunging and splashing, the happiness of the
moment overcame our inhibitions and we raised
quite a rumpus with some aquatic scenes that were
recorded on my video camera. Months later, going
over the images, I found the frame that ended up being
translated into the photographic image of Bather,
which appeared as an illumination, independent of
the other frames: it was a caesura in the evolution of
what was happening. The optics of the camera and
the quality of the video resolution itself combined to
convert a splash of water into a luminous gesture and
the saturated colours and the blurring of the motive
contributed to the image acquiring a presence that
went beyond what it represented.
After our bathe we went down to the bank of the
Rhine for a cold drink and a snooze. With my eyes
closed, I felt the sun on my eyelids like an orange chiaroscuro.
FAs I dozed, I fell into a dream that once
again immersed me in the water of the fountain,
which was now much larger; I dived and dived, and
suddenly everything changed in such a way that I
saw myself as a foetus in the womb. I do not remember
much more of that than a profound and limitless
gloom, and a powerful olfactory sensation: the
intense scent of lilies of the amniotic fluid. When I
woke up there were no flowers around, but the feeling
of the smell of lilies remained. My sense of smell
diminished, however, as my other senses awoke. I
took pleasure in the passing of the freighters and the
sound of the city, and finally I returned to the world.
Rome, November 24, 2017
56
Eeva Karhu
On a winter night temperature is below zero. Snow
crunches under my feet. Besides an occasional car humming
everything is silent around me. Street lights colour,
the view with different colours than at daytime. Air feels
crispy on my nose. Winter is freezing most of the smells.
Scents become more delicate: cold and sensitive.
Scent of a finished work is different than when
taking the photographs/pictures. Colours make me
smell fragrances that have not been there. To me
scents seem to behave like colours: By blending pictures
from my walk I combine continuous patterns,
shapes and differences between light and shadow.
Colours of my work are a mixture of different colours
on the path. They come from the nature and depend
on the season and the colour of its light.
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