Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance

Gwenn-Aël Lynn, Debra Riley Parr, Gwenn-Aël Lynn, Debra Riley Parr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst & Politik

This book claims a political value for olfactory artworks by situating them squarely in the contemporary moment of various forms of political resistance.

Each chapter presents the current research and art practices of an international group of artists and writers from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Thailand, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The book brings together new thinking on the potential for olfactory art to critique and produce modes of engagement that challenge the still-powerful hegemonic realities of the twenty-first century, particularly the dominance of vision as opposed to other sensory modalities.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, art history, visual culture, olfactory studies, performance studies, and politics of activism.

1 Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art

Hsuan L. Hsu

Why are Black artists absent from most critical accounts of “olfactory art”? Part of the answer lies in the whiteness of powerful art institutions, critics, and funding agencies and the fact that certain olfactory technologies and infrastructures are concentrated in Europe and the United States. But the exclusion of Black aesthetic practices is also a product of how critics conceive of olfactory art in the first place. Is olfactory art distinguished by chemically synthesized scents, conceptual deployments of scent, the irruption of scent into the deodorized spaces of Western art exhibition, or efforts to reshape everyday sensory experiences and environments?

Recognizing the olfactory experiments of Black artists requires reframing olfactory aesthetics not only as a conceptual practice whose interventions target the deodorized Western art world but also as a struggle over everyday encounters with smells that have profound cultural and biochemical consequences. Rather than simply adding “diversity” to existing accounts of olfactory art, the olfactory interventions of Black diasporic artists draw attention to vital political experiments whose stakes include suppressed modes of environmental knowledge, airborne contributors to environmental health, and the legibility of modernity’s differentiated atmospheres. Black olfactory projects underscore the importance of connecting conceptual art that incorporates smell with aesthetic practices that—especially among populations who have been marginalized and denigrated by the deodorized culture of Western modernity—have long offered tools for shaping the “weather” of the everyday (Sharpe 2016, 104). This chapter contextualizes Black olfactory practices as everyday political contestations over racial atmospheres. After establishing some theoretical and historical points of reference for thinking about the racial politics of olfaction, I turn to three aesthetic projects—syncretic Hoodoo practices and contemporary installations by Renée Stout and Rashid Johnson—that exemplify Black people’s efforts to transform everyday, racialized smellscapes.

Smell and Racial Atmospherics

Historical accounts of modernization as a teleological process of deodorization occlude the unprecedented odor of the slave ship’s hold—an odor situated at the origins of racial capitalism and its subsequent spatial arrangements (plantation, factory, city, prison). In his widely circulated account of the Middle Passage, Olaudah Equiano writes,

The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on sickness among the slaves, of which many died.

(Equiano 2003, 58)

Stowed as “chattel,” enslaved people became both victims and unwitting producers of “loathsome,” suffocating smells. In the hold, air was not just a medium of bodily subjugation but a tool of abjection: the enslaved were suffocated by their own perspirations, by “the stench of the necessary tubs.” The hold—where both slavery and racial capitalism were created—deployed air as a tool for inscribing racial difference in both symbolic and biochemical terms. In his play Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967), Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) included “Smell effects: incense … dirt/filth smells/bodies” to convey the smell of the hold: the play opens with a series of scents (“the sea … Pee. Shit. Death … n a total atmos-feeling…”) in “Black darkness,” punctuated by the sounds of screams and drum (Baraka 1978, 132).

The stench of the hold is a paradigmatic instance of racial capitalism’s atmospheric engineering—its production and manipulation of what Renisa Mawani calls “racial atmospheres” (Mawani n.d.). Building on Frantz Fanon’s provocative discussions of “atmosphere” and breath, Mawani pushes conversations about racialization beyond frameworks that emphasize bodily representation and biological essentialism. “How might we … reconceptualize race as a dynamic, mutable, and charged field that permeates and entangles humans, nonhumans, and things?” (Ibid.) Whether in the hold, the “slave quarters,” the tenement, the factory, or the penitentiary, Black bodies have been held in close quarters even when health experts believed that bodily “miasmas” were a major cause of disease. This atmospheric engineering of racial difference persists in the everyday, disproportionately polluted spaces in which Black people live, work, play, and worship. Nineteenth-century racial pseudo-science naturalized these associations between Black bodies and noxious odors: whereas Equiano found the hold’s stench to be “intolerably loathsome,” white commentators—especially when confronted with the possibility of racial integration—maintained that the smell of Black bodies themselves was not only distinct from that of whites, but “intolerable” (see Smith 2006, 31). Thus, the structural (and infrastructural) causes of malodor in Black spaces—which, like the stench of the hold, associated Blackness with misery, sickness, and death—were disingenuously attributed to putative racial traits such as poor hygiene and queer domestic habits.

Christina Sharpe’s influential theorization of the antiblack “weather” elaborates this connection between race and atmosphere: “the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (Sharpe 2016, 104). At once a cultural and material atmosphere, the weather draws attention “To the necessity of breath, to breathing space, to the breathtaking spaces in the wake in which we live; and to the ways we respond” (Ibid., 109). Sharpe’s concept invokes a continuum spanning spectacular deaths such as Eric Garner’s suffocation by police as well as “gradual strangulation and asphyxiation” occurring in “those quotidian experiences of unbreathability where really the ability to fully live in a Black body is continually curtailed, foreclosed” (Sharpe 2017, 52).

Mawani’s and Sharpe’s work attunes us to the ways in which material atmospheres sustain racial boundaries through breath’s affective and biochemical effects. How have Black breathers responded to such toxic atmospheres? Is it possible to transform an unbreathable atmosphere? Is it possible not to? Sharpe introduces the concept of “Black microclimates” to gloss a range of actions that endeavor to produce more livable spaces within antiblackness: “certain kinds of acts can shift something so that you are not only being acted upon but you are also shifting something about what’s possible to sustain life in that place. You are creating microclimates” (Ibid., 53). These atmospheric modifications do not rely on the fantasy of pure, deodorized air: after all, campaigns for deodorization and “purity” have frequently displaced noxious air to poor, Black neighborhoods and stigmatized the idea of “Black” odors as health threats. Instead, producers of Black microclimates circulate atmospheric materials that support the (interconnected) health and collective memory of Black breathers. In affirming the smells of Black bodies and botanical products, these practices resonate with the embodied philosophy of “funk”—a term that derives from the Kikongo lu-fuki (“bad body odor”) but connotes “praise…for the integrity [of a person’s] art, for having ‘worked out’ to achieve aims” (Thompson 1983, 104). Framing funk as a Black epistemology grounded in embodied sensation, LaMonda Horton-Stallings writes that funk is “a rewriting of smell and scene away from nineteenth-century ordering and socialization of corporeal power that represses what stinks, but that does not mean it lacks intelligence or spirituality; rather, it provides other paradigms of intellect and spirit” (Horton-Stallings 2015, 6).

Tanwi Nandini Islam’s MALA podcast and perfume project—in which she creates perfumes that evoke the olfactory memories of formerly incarcerated women—conveys scent’s efficacy in producing both carceral atmospheres and Black microclimates. Drawing on her background as a novelist and perfumer, Islam provides a forum for these women to “retell their stories of survival & reimagine them as scents.” For example, Tasha describes the smell of prison as “dark” and “dry,” and reports that scents sustained her emotional and mental well-being:

It made you feel good to have something scented … it just made you feel like kind of free in the moment … because that’s what you do in the world: you find scents that agree with your chemistry and it makes you feel good [like] you didn’t lose everything you still have a little piece of … who you are.

(Islam 2018, Episode 1)

After spending 25 years in prison for a crime she did not commit, Claude now wears a variety of scents—including some inherited from her mother, a Vodun practitioner who created her own perfumes (Ibid., Episode 5). The women interviewed by Islam—along with the perfumes they create to materialize their memories of sustaining smells—underscore how olfaction’s powerful connections across space and time (its evocation of other times and places, inheritance, and even the cross-generational circum-Atlantic connections held in Vodun) help produce microclimates both within and in the wake of the prison’s alternately inodorate and noxious atmospheres.

Amid the manifold forms of atmospheric violence propagated by slave traders, slaveholders, urban planners, landlords, corporations, and the state, Black microclimates sustain breath, health, and well-being. Frequently unfolding in mundane scenarios of slow violence and atmospheric adjustment, racial atmospherics and Black microclimates provide vital points of reference for understanding Black olfactory aesthetics. Whereas genealogies of olfactory art tend to emphasize the olfactory irruptions introduced by Decadence, Surrealism, Futurism, and synthetic perfuming (see Burr 2012; Verbeek 2015), many Black olfactory projects are oriented by the history and continued reality of atmospheric racism, as well as the urgent need to breathe “otherwise air” (Crawley 2017, 1). Black olfactory aesthetics emerge not from the deodorized spaces of Western art galleries but amid racial capitalism’s varied and suppressed “archives of breathlessness” (Sharpe 2017, 109).

Olfactory Aesthetics and Black Microclimates

Because antiblackness has consigned Black populations to unbreathable and/or noxious atmospheres, Black olfactory projects frequently manifest as everyday practices of resistance and life support. As Andrew Kettler has shown, enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world incorporated odor into a range of syncretic traditions including obeah, conjure, and rootwork (Kettler 2020). Whereas slaveholders employed bloodhounds to track fugitives by smell, conjure or Hoodoo practitioners provided “powders designed to aid runaways by throwing tracking dogs off their scent” (Anderson 2005, 84). Instead of simply serving as an atmospheric tool of racial abjection, smells could be material agents of protection and support.

Although, to some extent, these syncretic practices became deracinated and commodified in the twentieth century, Black urban communities continued to access Hoodoo through a variety of media. As Carolyn Morrow Long has documented, scented products—including perfumes, incense, powder sachets, candles, fumigants, room cleaners, roots, and oils—circulated through mail-order catalogs and spiritual supply stores beginning in the 1920s and 1930s (Long 2001, 99–126). Consumers associated these materials with magical powers including the capacity to enhance charisma, improve health, ward off enemies, purge harmful spirits, inspire love, and even influence legal outcomes through the practice of “dusting the courtroom” (Ibid., 106). The “magic” of Hoodoo commodities, Long suggests, “resides in the color and scent of the products … In the early days of the spiritual business, preparations for ‘bad work’ had an offensive odor; now all products, regardless of their purpose, are highly perfumed” (Ibid., 103). Although commentators frequ...