ART&RESEARCH

Questioned on the role of ‘the science of the hidden’ in his methodology in an interview, Jacques Rancière states: ‘The visibility of a form of expression as an artistic form depends on a historically constituted regime of perception and intelligibility […] Statements or forms of expression undoubtedly depend on historically constituted systems of possibilities that determine forms of visibility or criteria of evaluation […] In this way, the aesthetic regime of art… is a system of possibilities that is historically constituted…’[1] Rancière’s comments here seem to chime with the problematic relationship your work on smell has to traditional ‘visualist’ aesthetics, of a formal tension between the visible and the invisible in art, an aspect of your work which Jim Drobnick has written about for example, and you have talked in the past about ‘non-visual aesthetics’. Could you expand on this a little in terms of how did your work develop in this way, what do you perceive to be the value or contribution of non-visual aesthetics? Are there any contradictions you see developing in this context?

I think Ranciere echoes what a lot of thinkers and artists have been saying in different ways for the past 30 – 40 years, with his own slant. What we can categorize or value as art is historically and socially determined. I would argue our cultural context also has a strong influence on how we perceive. There is a really interesting anecdote in a radio interview with Claude Levi-Strauss, where he talks about how he found it problematic to discover that a tribe he was studying claimed to be able to see the planet Venus in broad daylight. He thought it must be a myth. He went to astronomers to see if this was possible, and they assured him that it was actually possible that some people could, given the amount of light Venus emits. He then went on to look at old treatises on navigation belonging to Western explorers, and found that sailors were able to see Venus in daylight. So he concluded, we could see Venus if we had a trained eye. So, in his case as a European social anthropologist, he needed the affirmation of Western astronomers and then the treatises in order to believe the tribe’s claims were true. I think this is really interesting to consider. There are things in front of us that we can only perceive if we have the framework.

Non-visual aesthetics is a bit clunky, but I can’t really think of any other way to describe it. Aesthetics is a very loaded word that is bandied around meaning a plethora of different things. By non-visual aesthetics, I suppose I am trying to describe a way of making and reading that does not privilege the visual, or that takes into consideration aspects of a work that are sensory in general. I am not thinking of taste or beauty. In the wake of conceptual art, perhaps even before arguably,,for some artists and theorists aesthetics went out of fashion, and is perhaps coming back into fashion again. For example, all the Venice Biennale literature had the phrase ‘think with the senses, feel with the mind’. What I like about the idea of aesthetics, as I see it, is that it tries to make a place for the primacy of experience in knowledge production. That is, it values the senses as a form of knowledge. This is why some feminists try to reclaim aesthetics, minus the notion of ‘universal’ experience. I think the different, subjective ways we individually perceive things is invaluable.

Technology has given us an extended eye. We can see events unfold live across the globe and in outer space, we can see what is invisible to the naked eye through medical technology and so on. I think the value of the non-visual is that it puts the body back into the visual – it has the potential to make the gaze less distancing, colonising and voyeuristic – the touching eye, hearing eye, maybe this is the contribution. It grounds you in the here and now, in three dimensions plus time. It compliments the visual. Given the way we are constantly visually bombarded by the media at home and in public space, this is really important. It’s too easy to consume and be detached.

Drobnick writes about artists who use scent in their art practice. He has been a great supporter of what I do and has written about my work as a challenge to the norm in art and culture, which he (and many other contemporary thinkers) see as visually dominant. He argues that practices that use scent challenge and critique this. I quote him as I don’t wish to make grand claims for my work, but would rather talk about how others read and or experience it. Perhaps it is challenging for some, as you suggest, because there is no visual element in some of the work to focus you. He thinks of scent as something that contaminates the pristine white cube with evidence of the body social – the visceral. I choose very specific scents that touch on the social and psychological. This is perhaps challenging for some, as the content of what you are smelling might make you uncomfortable. They are often intimate and sexual. So, it’s not just that I am using scent in a gallery. If it smelled of roses, for example, I wouldn’t get the same reaction. It could be an air freshener. The residue of the sanitation of public space with the rise of the middle classes still stays with us in the gallery today. A natural body smell is associated with the unhygienic - dirty. In one of Drobnick’s papers, he talks about how the social evolution of the museum and now the ‘white cube’ is one of a space that is empty of distractions from the primary act of experiencing the visual. They are anaesthetic and fear the corporeal. He cites an interesting example from the National Gallery, London, where in the late 19th Century:

The ‘empyrian air’ that one was alleged to breathe in the museum was…subject to corruption by the exudations of less privileged individuals…some claimed that the alleged malodours of the working class, ‘falling like vapour upon the pictures’ even threatened to destroy the artworks.[2]

I can vividly remember a director of a gallery actually putting an onion in front of the scent dispenser when she had experienced the work, because she felt the smell would be too strong for the public, and that the onion would somehow solve this problem! You would never do that with a painting or sculpture you found challenging. It would be censorship – a fig leaf! She could accept it as an idea, and was enthusiastic about it, but the physical reality of it was another matter.

So, in relation to another part of your question regarding the problematic relationship of the non-visual to art, if you consider that the main tool to promote and disseminate art in our culture is images in magazines, then anything that is not visual is in danger of being marginal or invisible – literally. Scent has a shelf life, it is time based and ‘performs.’ It cannot be easily captured in a visual image. Maybe a perfume can be, but a room with a scent is trickier. Magazines and institutions are the gatekeepers of the activity that we call art, and perhaps the internet subverts this slightly. There is often nothing to see in my earlier installations, just an empty room or the architecture of the gallery with a smell, and a title. However, consider this: how many times have you gone to an exhibition after reading about it in a magazine and seeing glossy promotional photos, only to find it disappointing in the flesh? Or to find it very different from what you imagined? There is no replacement for living and being with the work, in the space, place, time or situation. I really believe art is a multi- sensory rather than mono-sensory experience. Even if you don’t actually touch a sculpture or a painting in a gallery, the potential is there to do so, and that potential is not there in a photograph. The art and audience perform together in space and time.

Certain practices play with this. Tino Sehgal is interesting in this respect. Strategically, he never documents his work (constructed situations), but also makes a point of using the systems that exist to frame it – magazine reviews, press releases, advertising and so on. You can only experience his work in the flesh, or through second hand accounts of what happened. A kind of myth making. I sympathize with his drive not to document the work in order to enable direct experience. There are of course contradictions in what he does, as you suggest there may be with what I do, or the word I prefer to use, is paradox. It is a paradox in a sense to make work that is invisible within the context of art which in our culture is focused on the visual. But I am not the first person to attempt to do so.

I attended a lecture a couple of years ago, where the social anthropologist David Howes suggested that Western aesthetics separates the senses as it is unable to cope with the body, and that the whole history of the museum is about the sanitation of aesthetic experience, through this separation of the senses. We can’t touch works of art, for example, and they are in this pristine space where we are supposed to not be distracted by the ‘other’ senses in order to contemplate them at a distance. He went on to suggest that Eastern aesthetics, by contrast, is synaesthetic or cross modal, and he feels that this is a better model for understanding the senses.[3] I probably agree with him on that.

It is taboo to smell human. The perfume industry capitalizes on this through producing the perfumes and deodorants we wear to mask our human odour. We mask our odour with the sexuality of animals, plants and chemicals that simulate this. I want the audience to feel or experience something that might be difficult to articulate in words, or that escapes language. Scent has the power to do this. It is thought to be the only sense to have direct links to the brain, and to that part where memories and emotions are believed to be stored and processed. I want the audience to be effected on an emotional level, before they intellectualize something. Sometimes I am more successful at this than others. Tino Sehgal is perhaps more directed at challenging institutions. My work can and has been read that way. I think about it when making, but I would not say it is my only focus.

Last year you were the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellow for a project which involved periods of research at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University of Oxford and at the British School in Rome. Can you tell me about how this research and work developed?

In Oxford, my goal was to observe the observers. The multidisciplinary laboratory, led by Charles Spence, is currently a leader in the field and conducting ground breaking research on how the senses intermingle, and how one sensory modality (vision, for example) is influenced by another (touch or hearing). An easier way to explain it is as follows: Do you sneeze when you see sunlight? Around 35% of the population does, and in this case the visual is affecting your smell receptors. This is cross modal sensory information. It’s why pilots wear sunglasses, and the phenomena is called the photic sneeze reflex. Apparently we don’t understand the spoken word solely through sound, we also read lips to help us, without being conscious of it. And when we are listening to sound, even if we are visually impaired, the visual receptors in our brains are triggered.

Traditionally, it was thought that each sense modality (vision, taste, hearing, etc.) was processed separately in the brain, and consequently they were studied separately. However, with recent technical advances in the neurological sciences, it is no longer considered the case. So, what they are basically saying now is that we are all synaesthetes. Just some more acutely than others.

The research in the lab has had profound effects not only in their own discipline and in general neurological science, but it has challenged various philosophical discourses, particularly aesthetics, knowledge, perception and causality. It has questioned the assumption that there is a physiological basis to visual dominance in the senses and in how we perceive and understand the world. This is particularly of interest for me as I have a practice which does not prioritize the visual, and often instead prioritizes the fallen angel of the senses - smell. Philosophers and art historians writing on the senses and perception often quote Spence’s laboratory findings from the past few years.

A good portion of artists now create spaces or situations that involve more than one of the senses. It’s often labeled as installation. I would argue a version of installation art has always been around. If you look at the image of the Renaissance Villa Falconieri, in Frascati, Italy [Fig. 1] for example, you can clearly see that the space of display was considered beyond the canvas / plinth / autonomous object, to even include the view from the windows which, were they open, would reveal a lush landscape that would incorporate the depicted interior. The fresco also displays a fountain, that visually plays with the actual fountain in the room, The fountain would have been working at the time. So, a laboratory researching the psychology of the senses seemed a perfect place for me to hang out to try and understand this more.

Fig. 1. Villa Falconieri, Frascati, Italy (courtesy Clara Ursitti).

In art school you learn how to look, or perhaps what to look for. This you could argue is the case whether the art school only teaches social realist painting, or a course that is non-media specific. It’s almost like learning to read. You learn this in relation to what that institution and the culture it is a part of values. This is an aesthetic judgment, and this aesthetic carries social and political ideologies. It is not separate from it, as Rancière points out. You fine tune your eye in relation to the expression of ideas. In a way, being in the cross modal research lab allowed me the opportunity to consider how to take into account the other senses in the act of looking and making. It also made me question and test my thinking/making which can only be a positive thing. It really is, as Paul Virilio suggests, a case that we are losing the ability to engage with the aesthetic because of technology, and this in turn has made us lose the ability to engage full stop with what we are looking at in front of us in the real world. Its like a form of blindness.

To try and understand what they were doing in the lab, I volunteered to be part of their test group and physically took part in their experiments. I was a subject, and I got free book tokens to do so.

- Where do I sign?

They are desperate for volunteers - I’ll send you the details later. As part of my own research I attended the weekly laboratory research meetings where the researchers presented and discussed their work in progress, I interviewed the lab members, and read any experiments or literature they suggested. I think I am still digesting a lot of this material. It was very stimulating and challenging for me, and I would like to go back at some point. One experiment described an olfactometer, an instrument that would disperse smells to the subject at different intervals for experiments. This sounded very exciting and I imagined what this wonderful piece of equipment might look like and what it could do. One of my first questions when I arrived at the lab was: Can I see the olfactometer? [Fig. 2.]

In Rome, I took a lot of what I learned about the senses, applied it to what I was looking at and tried to filter it into my thinking/making. I tried to be really conscious of how they made me feel, how a work, something that I was making in the studio, or a situation engages me through the senses. How something visual can suggest taste or touch. Rome is a candy store of art and artifacts, layer upon layer of history everywhere you turn your head. Oddly enough, being in a lab for that amount of time made me want to trust the intelligence of my senses more, it made me go back to my intuitions. I still think about what I learned at Oxford when I am in the studio. I think I’m finally digesting it now. It strongly influenced a video I made while I was in Rome, E.C.C.O. I suppose it made me more conscious of how the senses don’t work in isolation, but cross over and work in tandem. This challenged me, and helped me think about what to do next. How to push the scent work, or work with objects again in a more informed, or experimental way. These are all very formal concerns, to an extent, which is not my primary interest, but if you consider that the senses are thought to be too ‘subjective’ in philosophical discourse, and therefore often inferior to ‘rational’ thought, then I think these concerns become more melded with the social and psychological, which is what I am more interested in. They also can become political when you take them seriously.

Fig. 2. Olfactometer, Cross Modal Research Laboratory, University of Oxford (courtesy Clara Ursitti).

Many commentators feel that language is insufficient to capture olfactory experience, and that the entire language and scientific classificatory systems brought to bear on smell are largely a system of ‘nonknowledge,’ and that when confronted with the phenomenon of olfactory perception, ‘language must at least’ as Bataille puts it (in the context of a discussion on the sacred) ‘submit to a moment of suspension’. Your recent work, Cohabitation in a Flooded House and your work for Peter [Fig. 3], for the exhibition Communication Suite (Wolfson Medical Building, Glasgow University, 8 July – 1 Aug 2008) - based on research into interspecies communication with Dolphins - seems to articulate an aporia in the face of the insufficiency of language which seems to characterize much of your early work on smell also. What are the links for you between your work on smell and your work on dolphin-human intercommunication?

You can argue all communication is like this - we often misunderstand in daily conversation even within the same language, and trying to understand each other is a constant process of negotiation. Things are always lost in translation. The possibility is there, in this interview for example, that we misunderstand each other!