SMELL: Olfactory Art Keller

Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

In February 2021, when Andreas Keller opened his gallery, Olfactory Art Keller, on Henry Street in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, the dumpling shop next door released steamy gusts from its basement hatch each day at dusk, there was a pungent fish market on the corner (since closed), and joss paper money was sometimes burned on the sidewalk as a funerary offering. But none of these smells—fish, pork, dough, scallions, smoke—bothered Keller; they were part of the scent profile of the neighborhood. In fact, a year later, the title of the gallery’s current exhibit is New York/New Fumes, a riff on the 1981 MoMA PS1 show New York/New Wave.

Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

Because the gallery opened before COVID vaccines were available, for his inaugural exhibit, titled Forest Bath, Keller pumped woodland scents out onto the sidewalk. As darkness fell, he projected images of trees on the window. Visitors and passersby were invited to “bathe” in this re-created forest from the urban sidewalk (dumpling smells notwithstanding). In a neighborhood populated by shoebox-size visual art galleries, Olfactory Art Keller offers a new, unexpected experience. “Everyone is looking, looking, looking,” says Keller. But here your eyes get a rest and your nose guides your perception.

New York/New Fumes consists of themed perfume bottles and scents by twenty-one local artists. Each piece is paired with a glass jar of infused cotton balls for guests to sniff (masks down). Because fragrances must undergo a rigorous certification process before being sold as perfumes, Keller has plastered the gallery walls in warning signs: “The Exhibited Scents Are Not Perfumes. Do Not Wear Them.”

Keller’s original idea was to focus on New York City–based smell artists, but as the open-call submissions came in, he found that several artists had crafted works that evoked their personal olfactory experiences of the city, from the literal materials of urban infastructure to its experiential underbelly. Some visitors are drawn to the artists’ decorative vessels; others begin by opening the sample jars and sniffing; still others read the decriptions first, letting each artist’s words guide their impression of a piece. Keller’s ideal is for visitors to smell no more than ten of the scents and to avoid trying to label each perfume with regognizable adjectives, such as “floral,” “citrus,” “grassy.” He’d rather you sniff and release the mind into more metaphorical and suggestive language—or avoid language altogether.


Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

Many people are drawn first to BRICK by Stephen Dirkes: a wall-mounted building facade. Dirke writes, “BRICK is New York City slang for very cold weather, as in, ‘It’s brick out there.’ . . . The cold ozonic air of water bound neighborhoods at the end of a long NYC Winter, metal, brick, concrete, paint, plastic, refuse, rot, and alcohol, that fills them, weave the tapestry of this fragrance.” The scent is cold and hard but also also invasive, porous, a little impolite—it’s New York City outdoors, walking. Dirke collaborated with a graffiti artist (who shall remain nameless) for the tag on the building and the bottle design. 

Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

Andy X’s description of New Kids, in a glass bottle slapped with Sharpie-scrawled washi tape, doesn’t reference particular smells; instead, it evokes an era: “The chords of 90s New York City’s nervous system . . . plucked by vibrantly androgynous fingers. The aesthetically infamous queers, the Club Kids.” Keller tells me he smells grass in it, but I say it smells “sticky.” It’s hard to know if the description of a club influenced my own language. But perhaps I’m getting a feel for the kind of synesthetic smell experience he’s hoping for.

 

 

 

Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

A perfume diptych titled August 23, 1970 by Hannah Marcus is a tribute to Lou Reed’s “oozing palimpsest of New York—a city that still peels away from itself relentlessly.” Marcus was inspired by a live recording of the Velvet Underground Max’s Kansas City, a steakhouse and countercultural venue. It consists of two leather Chelsea boots, similar to those worn by the band, one spattered with melted wax, which she says evokes “a moment frozen in time.” “What I imagined was a kind of archaelogical excavation of this place in New York,” she said in an interview with Keller. “I wanted to use scent as a way to bring the experience into a certain immediacy. What was a vessel that would express something grounded in a certain place? Boots on the ground.” Each boot holds a scent bottled in a salt and pepper shaker, a reference to those on the tables at Max’s. One is 2 Trans-6 Cis Honeysuckle and smells to me like baby powder, someone masking something with a claustrophobic musk; the other is Here Come the Waves and suggests worn leather, a dark staircase, stale air, descent, the end of a long city day. 

Keller is a scent philosopher, neuroscientist, scholar, and the author of Philosophy of Olfactory Perception. He has taught a master’s course on re-creating historic scents for Columbia University’s Master’s in Historic Preservation program, and he is currently working with Rockefeller University on developing Smell-RS, a diagnostic test of olfactory function. He decided to open the gallery when he began getting calls from museums asking for his help in working scents into their exhibits, and he realized there might be an opportunity for a gallery devoted to scent in its own right. With social and print media increasingly reliant on visual images, however, it’s been challenging to convey the gallery’s intangible and evanescent offerings. One can’t take a photo of a scent, and humans are notoriously bad at describing what they smell.

Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

Two of the pieces in New York/New Fumes pay tribute to the scents of a congested city that were lost during the lockdown and to their brief resurgence during the so-called “hot COVID summer” of 2021. Tessa Tiebman, the creator of Intimate City/City Intimacy, writes, “I felt that reemerging from the pandemic was like a new introduction to this slightly forgotten and very familiar world of nearness; smelling the alcohol on the breath of a fellow subway rider, recalling the fragrance worn by someone queuing up for toilet paper in front of me, brushing past the greasy hair of an exhausted line cook I recognize by their footwear and fingers.” Her bottle, appropriately, is a palimpsest of colors and textures.

Courtesy of Olfactory Art Keller

Morning of Drunkenness by Salvatore Barone “captures the rebirth of debauchery in NYC post-pandemic…. a skin/sex accord built around musks, civit and other animalic notes. A seedy dive bar accord filled with leather, cognac, aged whiskey barrels and sticky woods. The third accord alludes to the faint trail of perfume and cologne lingering within crisp, white sheets… This perfume celebrates the return to life, loudness and raunchy encounters that made us fall in love with the city.” The vessel suggests the bottom of a beer bottle to me, and the tape-sealed cork looks ready to be torn off and released, like the people of the city. Keller notes that despite the title, “it’s optimisitc rather than hungover: a new dawn.”

Keller says the gallery has been visited by guests who are visually impaired and those who have COVID-induced anosmia, or loss of smell: both bring different perspectives to the artwork. On this January afternoon, Henry Street smells like concrete, snow melt, cigarette smoke, cheap cologne, and cold metal. Oranges are set out in toppling cardboard boxes; glazed chickens hang in a nearby shopwindow. A young girl hurls Bang-Snaps onto the sidewalk, each releasing a hiss and a puff of fulminate as it explodes. The smell—the “fume”—is both intimate and distant, too close and too far away, much as the city and its inhabitants feel at this moment.

Sense & the City is a monthly blog exploring the hidden corners of New York City. Each month’s post is devoted to one of the five senses. Receive daily sensory impressions via Instagram @senseandthecity.

2 thoughts on “SMELL: Olfactory Art Keller”

  1. Caitlin, I think you’ve captured a lot of what this show is about. Great review.
    And I’d like to learn more about the “fistful of knives” episode referred to in your bio!

    1. Thanks! re: the “fistful of knives”: I spotted a knife-sharpening truck on our corner and swiftly gathered up all our knives, wrapped them in a towel, and ran out with a “fistful” of them so I could catch the sharpener before he drove to his next spot!

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