Category Archives: Smell

Lee Deigaard, Vixen. Vector (2013-17)

 

““Vixen. Vector” is a photographic series and installation that follows a former street dog essentially exploring Cartesian geometry on the streets of New Orleans (as she defies Cartesian dualism). She conducts a visual conversation with me using her body (and secondarily, the lines of the leash) to underline and express fleeting alignments and discoveries within urban (but also natural) spaces. I take photographs, shot from the hip as it were, cued by her pauses and interactions. How she moves, and how I move relative to her reveal angles of discovery and an essential and consciously rendered geometry. ” (from email exchange, June 2011)

“Lee Deigaard, Vixen. Vector
An arrangement of photographs chronicling sympathetic alignments and other canine geometries.

Former street dog defies Cartesian dualism, illuminates Cartesian geometry on the streets of New Orleans.

In my work, exploring levers of empathy (particularly between species), capturing the incidental signifiers (gesture, transient expression) relies on a convergence of reflex and impulse, situation and timing. On daily walks, tiger dog moves through the big city, carrying nothing, wearing nothing; her body is her vehicle and her expression. Photographs from our outings reveal fleeting and yet deliberate synchronicities and alignments– of limb and leash, shadow and sidewalk crack– created by a dog finding her place and translating her role within it. Through companionate mirroring of animate and inanimate forms, she delineates subtle harmonies. Her everyday geometry, its ephemerality and its searching sequences, are both improvisations and statements. To see the city through her is to discover a cursive- of routes and scent trails, of scribbled street runes. It’s an experience of deep reading.

Rescued from the streets, she retains aspects of a wild creature, like a coyote or a vixen, and the decisions she makes about where to go– the ways she exercises her autonomy, posits her theories of whereabouts and motives, and hunts the evidence– carry added poignancy.

Lee Deigaard lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana and in rural Georgia. Her studio practice engages wild animals and collaborates with animals who are friends and family. Her work explores animal protagonists and the emotional spaces and physical landscapes where humans and animals co-habitate.” (credit)

Maraa Collective, The Olfactory Chambers of Ward No. 88 (2014)

an agenda

Credit: Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts

Maraa Collective (2008-)

This walk took place in Bangalore, India in October of 2014, and used the format of a tourism walk to critically examine the processing of waste and the caste system. The walking route followed the same route as the street sweepers and waste sorters. In India, the Dalits caste has been traditionally responsible for clearing excrement.

This work may remind some of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work in which she shook the hand of every sanitation worker in New York City, shining a light on their labor and demonstrating respect for their work.

CreditL

Kate McLean, Smellfie Kit (2015)

A smellwalking guide. The smellscape is the smell equivalent of a visual landscape.

people smelling a bench

This activity crafted by Kate McLean identifies 3 categories of smells:

  1. curious / unexpected smells are the short-lived, individually noted smells of the city e.g. books/paper, perfume on a passer-by, metal, paint, marshmallow, old books
  2. episodic smells reveal specific areas of town, these are localized smells e.g. wet fish, flowers, fried food, medicine
  3. background smells form a context, these are seen as a constant e.g. canal dampness, humidity and spicy cooking aromas against which all other smells reside

And identifies 3 modes of smelling:

  1. Smell catching (passive smelling)
  2. Smell hunting (active smelling)
  3. Free smelling (a combo of the two)

The activity walks participants through various descriptive reflective writing prompts. It provides a helpful chart for organizing observations and collecting data. It provides options for solo, pair, and group outings. Available via McLean’s website.

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Okwui Okpokwasili, Market Thrum (2016)

[credit]

Okwui Okpokwasili led a 9-person walk that explored the making of an “embodied collective” in the charged landscape of the South Bronx. Facilitating a multi-sensory exchange with each other and the space, the group slowly walked through the Gold Coast Trading Company (an African market) and worked toward an expansive group practice of dynamic movement. No previous dance experience was required.

Click here to see photos from “Market Thrum.”

[credit]

” “It a people market!” a woman shouted as nine of us slowly followed Okwui Okpokwasili through Gold Coast Trading Company in the south Bronx.

She was telling us this wasn’t our market. It is a place where Africans shop, gather, and commune. It wasn’t our place to create art. One of our participants — an African American woman — tried to explain our mission. The woman disappeared and left us to our ritual.

Walls of Bounty, Ajax, Goya, and West African spices hovered over us as we weaved our way through the market’s maze. Prior to entering the market, Okpokwasili explained women would cleanse the roads to the market, and we were symbolically going to do the same at Gold Coast Trading Company. At a walking meditation pace, we moved together as much as a unit as we possibly could contain.

But what if a space and its owners do not want the roads to their market cleansed? What if they have a special place in their neighborhood in which Americans do not visit? As participants, we became performers for people who didn’t want a performance. They were confused, concerned. But we never felt unsafe.

One man, in a green cap with a red star, stopped and stared. He grinned, seemingly getting it, turned around, and headed down another isle.

But to other customers and employees, the ritual seemed sinister. Maybe it was a ceremony to bring bad juju. That’s what the market’s owner suggested to Okpokwasili after the walk as we stood outside and waited for her to finish negotiating with him.

Shalom said someone told him, “This is an African market. Not an American market.”

Outsider. Infiltrator. Other. For a change, I was placed in the uncomfortable position of feeling unwelcome.

Okpokwasili grew up in this neighborhood, and she wanted to share something from her childhood. The smells, the energy, the malts, and chin chin awakened a childlike joy in her. All she wanted to do was share a special experience in a special place with a small special group of people.

In the end, Elastic City decided it best not to return to the market and disturb them again. The remainder of Okpokwasili’s walks trekked through the Harlem Market.”

 

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin 1928

Walter Benjamin 1928

General info

“Walter Benjamin’s [1892-1940] importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis of Benjamin’s writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were a decisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of philosophy’s actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin’s efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht.” (credit – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Flânerie-specific info

“In the twentieth-century Walter Benjamin returned to the concept of the flâneur in his seminal work, The Arcades Project.  This weighty, but uncompleted, study used Baudelaire’s flâneur as a starting point for an exploration of the impact of modern city life upon the human psyche.” …

“In The Arcades Project, Benjamin puts forward two complementary concepts to explain our human response to modern city life.  Erlebnis can be characterised as the shock-induced anaesthesia brought about by the overwhelming sensory bombardment of life in a modern city, somewhat akin to the alienated subjectivity experienced by a worker bound to his regime of labour.  Erfahrung is a more positive response and refers to the mobility, wandering or cruising of the flâneur; the unmediated experience of the wealth of sights, sounds and smells the city has to offer.  Benjamin was interested in the dialectic between these two concepts and cited Baudelaure’s poetry as a successful medium for turning erlebnis into erfahrung.  As Benjamin wrote in his section of Illuminations entitled On Some Motifs in Baudelaire:

The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis).

Walter Benjamin, ‘Illuminations’

For Benjamin, the environment of the city, in particular the arcades of Paris, provided the means to provoke lost memories of times past:

it is the material culture of the city, rather than the psyche, that provides the shared collective spaces where consciousness and the unconscious, past and present, meet.

Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’


“What we can be clear about is that Benjamin does not just write about the flâneur but, in The Arcades Project, he writes as a flâneur.  As noted earlier, he metaphorises his textual practice into ragpicking, unearthing ‘the rags, the refuse’ from his extensive reading, his cutting and pasting from all manner of sources, into the text of this, his best known work.  The origins of The Arcades Project are in the textual detritus of Benjamin’s research; a method that echoes Baudelaire’s ragpicker and which he refers to when he writes that:

poets find the refuse of society on their street and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse. This means that a common type is, as it were, superimposed upon their illustrious type. … Ragpicker or poet — the refuse concerns both.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism’

The ragpicker is recurring motif in Benjamin’s writing and offers a useful metaphor for his textual methodology.  Benjamin focuses on the margins of the modern city, scavenging amongst the texts and oral histories that have been omitted or neglected. Literary ragpicking resurrects discarded texts, forming them into new texts.  Benjamin was interested not just in what is, but in what was and what might be.  He is looking for where the imagined city meets the material one.”

(credit)

Teresa Murak, Procession (1974)

woman walking in a plant coat

Teresa Murak, Procession (1974)

“In the very early spring of 1974, the artist put on herself a cress seeds coat grown earlier (the working method being a reference to the tradition of handiwork and “female labor”), and set out on a Procession through the streets of Warsaw, thus introducing the figure of Mother Nature into a realm specifically belonging to culture. This gesture, primarily referring to the relationship between the feminine and the natural being—also a main focus essential to feminism, albeit differently—present in corporal feminism, was at the same time a political one, an intervention in urban space which manifested a sensitivity extremely different to that officially valid in the People’s Republic of Poland.

The cress seed, a small fast-growing plant with a distinctive smell, became Teresa Murak’s trademark. Co-existing with the artist, in most cases the plant becomes the subject of her examination and the object of care while her art practice connected with the seeds is based on the idea of co-existence.

The action was documented on photos as well as oral history.” [credit]