Sissel Tolaas
Sissel Tolaas
Stinking in a Chanel Dress
She considers herself more of a researcher than an artist, but handily uses exhibitions for her experiments. Sissel Tolaas is a much sought-after expert on smell and an ambassador of a sense that most people gravely neglect. For most people in the West, odour is an unknown continent. Drenched in cologne or after-shave, we have lost touch with the most important of our senses. Our word ‘genie’ has an Arab root, djinn. Yet the original doesn’t mean wizard but rather ‘invisible-being’ or, most notably, ‘odour’, which accounts for the expression ‘once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s impossible to put it back in’. Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian researcher living in Berlin, has made it her mission to open all bottles, to experience all scents, and to initiate her peers into the inscrutable universe of odour. With thousands of smell samples archived in her lab, Sissel Tolaas’s work transverses the worlds of high-end commerce, research and art. Having become one of the world’s leading scholars on the science of scent, Tolaas is regularly invited to work with major brands such as Comme des Garçons or DaimlerChrysler, prestigious research centres like the Harvard Medical School or Stanford University, and contemporary art venues such as MoMA, Tate Liverpool, Hamburger Bahnhof or dOCUMENTA (13).
I heard this intriguing story about how you once attended an embassy party wearing a heavy body odour. It made me think of a Dadaist gesture, a performance if you will…
‘I wouldn’t call it a performance, but if you see it that way, that’s fine! I do a lot of experiments in the field of smell that are thoroughly integrated in life, be it in the city or in a special situation. I put scents on display in several contexts, which can be academic or commercial. Some of the scents I even try out on myself, for instance to experience the reaction when you smell different than you look; that was the purpose of the experiment you mentioned. It was part of a research project where body odour per se is the focus of attention. What kind of information does the smell contain in terms of who a person is or how a person is identified? How does that affect the reaction towards that person and the communication with that person? For me, art is just another platform to present my questions. Art is also the only platform where you can ask whatever you want, where you can be whoever you want, as long as you deliver. In science, you have to dedicate yourself to a specific discipline and remain within that discipline. You do move forward, but always within that discipline. At the end of the day in the best-case scenario, you will present a paper that maybe someone will publish. Art provides a completely different definition of research, and this freedom is very important for my work. But I don’t work with art in a commercial sense; I don’t work with a gallery, for instance.’
Wouldn’t you also relate to the concept of ‘art’ in the sense of a critical praxis? I mean wouldn’t you say that there is an unstated political dimension in wearing this certain scent in this certain setting? Since body odour has a clear connotation with poverty and exclusion, isn’t it going to cause confusion?
‘Of course it’s going to cause confusion. That is exactly my point. There is this Caucasian kind of cliché definition of cleaning things up, so what I am trying to do is say: Listen guys, the way I look doesn’t necessarily correspond to the way I smell, so what happens if I don’t smell as you expected? Do you still respect me? Do you still pay attention to me? Can one still communicate?’
And how did the people respond?
‘Funny enough, women got furious and men got curious.’
How did they express their fury?
‘They gave me too much attention, came too close, gave me strange looks and invaded my space. It was very exciting, because it says a lot about the society we live in and how much we are hung up on how we look. My work is very much about going beyond the look, about what hides under the surface of things. We live in a world in which we sanitize, deodorize, and pasteurize everything, for your own protection, kind of, but we are missing out on a lot of information by doing that. That is why I ask what happens if you let in someone like me: I was wearing a beautiful Chanel dress and I smelled like a homeless person. People feel something is wrong, but why is something wrong? So I lead them to ask a lot of fundamental questions.’
Heidegger said that it was atonal music that taught people how to hear sound, not the sound of something, but sound as such, that atonal music created the dimension of pure sound that didn’t exist before. I was wondering if there is something akin to pure sound when it comes to smell. Can one talk about abstract smell, not the smell of something but just pure smell?
‘We have amazing software – as I call it – in our body. If we don’t keep it fit and updated, of course its capacities decrease. In the case of the nose, this is a really serious problem. We never learn how to use the nose for any other purpose than breathing in and out. We never learn it in childhood; we never learn it in school. As a result, we have no clue about what the nose knows and what the nose can do. The fact is that we only communicate smell in our societies through perfume ads. Marketing took over where science left off. If you speak about white noise, you are in a realm beyond sound. In smell, you have a lot of these “white” molecules that are hardly definable, but you need a trained nose to identify them. As long as we haven’t developed any trained noses, we won’t have a clue how to perceive them. There are a lot of incredible molecules out there that contain amazing information about their situation and composition. But you need to prepare yourself, to learn how to experience smell. People talk about soundscapes and I talk about smellscapes. I make smellscapes – like for instance the one that was just presented at Grand Arts in Kansas City – that contain thousands of molecules or maybe just a few. If you have a trained nose, you can identify individual molecules.’
Are you familiar with the joke that says perfume can only communicate one of two things: either I am clean or I am available?
‘(Laughs) That’s a very bad joke; no wonder I never heard it. It perpetuates this cliché about how we communicate smell through perfume ads. You know the definition of clean is different in India than it is in my home country of Norway. The fact is, we can perceive thousands of different smells, yet all that we can communicate about them is “smells good” or “smells bad”; otherwise we use metaphors. What I try to do is move beyond the question of bad and good to approach smell differently.’
Do you also work with the linguistic dimension, trying to create a more apt vocabulary?
‘Yes, I work a lot with language. I not only attempt to replicate smell but also to challenge the language employed. The relation smell/purpose/communication is a very important one, smell per se and its purpose on the one hand, but also the relation between smell and communication.’
And you often exhibit in art institutions…
‘That’s right, I do most of my projects within the university context or together with museums, like MoMA in New York or SFMOMA in San Francisco, or recently the Serpentine Gallery in London and dOCUMENTA (13). Of course if they want to show my work they are welcome to do so, but I am part of so many worlds. For me, art is not the primal drive behind what I do; research is.’
Would you say that your work is susceptible to the context within which it is shown?
‘Yes, I modify the content of my work for all kinds of purposes. For example, I had a very classy booth at a high-end perfume trade fair in Florence in which I displayed the sweat from anxious men. Everyone else was presenting their most expensive perfumes. Also, Danish visitors at the Louisiana Museum responded differently than the Chinese visitors in Beijing to the sweat project.
If you ask me what I am, I would say I am a professional inbetweener or a professional provocateur. I am in between everywhere and nowhere, 24/7. I work a lot, I work in health care, I work in education, I do commercial projects. It’s hard to place people like me, but that is because I don’t want to be placed.’
And would you say that there is a more political or polemical dimension to your research than what we have been discussing thus far? I mean, in the way smell is always connected to representations of race, class, etc.
‘Of course. My definition of cleanliness and dirt is all about questioning the contexts that create these kinds of terms. Smell is a lot about politics, if you approach it from that perspective. For me, there is no bad and good, only interesting smells that have the right to be there and are there for a purpose. The bacteria colonies that cause this so-called bad odour are essential. Without them we would die, because our immune systems would collapse. If you are always cleaning or covering them up, you will never be able to know what their purpose is. How are you going to navigate in a city if all the “ugly” buildings are removed? The marketing is telling us what to do, but we all have a unique bodily odour, which is part of our Id, and is as particular as our fingerprints.’
Were you ever interested in forensics? Or where you ever approached by any governmental agency which was interested in your research?
‘Yes, when I did my research project at MIT – and the ancillary exhibition The FEAR of Smell – the Smell of FEAR at the List Visual Arts Center – I was approached by the FBI. I was also approached by the German police, who asked if I would be interested in training “police noses”. Yet there are certain borders, and I have a certain ethics and morality about what I do. I don’t want to identify a person’s smell so that he can be hunted down; I have an altogether different intention in mind when I identify smells.’
Which you would describe as educational rather than criminalist?
‘Yes, all my projects have an educational aspect. I have just come back from the American Midwest, where I have been through the states of Missouri and Kansas. In cities such as Kansas City, there are segregated neighbourhoods that have been completely forgotten, since people travel only by car. My project SmellScape KCK/KCMO was about rediscovering these neighbourhoods and seeing qualities that were not previously discerned. The project was presented last week in the form of “Smell Stations”, which sought to get the people out in the streets. I also did a full week of workshops with primary schools kids from 7 to 12 years old.’
Do you think these kinds of projects can counteract segregation?
‘Yes. This is a new tool for improving communication and understanding. Olfactory experiences are very important, once you move beyond the “good” and the “bad”, give up hierarchies and accept that this smell is as important as any other. And yes, it was unbelievable! People were experiencing their neighbourhoods in a way they never did before, even the rough ones, and they were shown that all these smells have a purpose. They are learning how to discover this whole new dimension, where there are no rules and you have to make your own. This playful aspect is very important to me. We also created an app for mobile phones that you can download and immediately run out to become a sniffer and win the “golden nose” by contributing to the smell experience. Both the kids and the grownups were completely excited! And it’s because smell is very essential.’
Did you also explore this psychoanalytic aspect of smell?
‘I have worked a lot with psychiatrists in replicating specific doors, to treat trauma, or to try to trigger coma patients to regain consciousness. The moment you first encountered a smell remains stuck in your subconscious for the rest of your life. What you have to do is to dig it back up, and in order to do that, you have to reconstitute that smell. That is also why I believe that children are extremely important. If I can help children to be more complex and tolerant human beings, then my job is accomplished.’
Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer from Lisbon, currently living in Berlin. She is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University Berlin, and contributes to various art publications.Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer from Lisbon, currently living in Berlin. She is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University Berlin, and contributes to various art publications.
Ana Teixeira Pinto
