1. Smelling memories
My grandparents lived across the Connecticut River in West Springfield (Mass.). I remember how different everything felt when we crossed over the bridge in the car to get there. The center of the town has two large terraces dividing the main street. Kitschy American bandstands were dotted throughout along with elderly oak trees. This was where the local A&P grocery store was, the library, the bank, and the post office. If there was an errand to run, this was where my grandfather would go. He ran all the errands because my grandmother didn’t drive and walked less and less. Partly because she was deaf, but also because it was easy to have Grandpa do it. She would yell out “Why-tee” in a voice, her own, that she never heard. It was always so loud, such a startle. He would run to her and she would give him instructions for whatever needed to be done. But he seemed equally happy for the distraction or excuse to leave, like he had evaded some much worse punishment for something and that this wasn’t all that bad. This was how my dad’s parents were.
I read or heard somewhere that smells are the sense that are most immediate to our memories. That’s certainly true for me. A scent will light up some long-dormant mechanical puppet scene in me. Suddenly all the tactile feelings, the undifferentiated, unresolved worries and fears, the whole matrix of thoughts and impressions fall on top of me like a heavy cloak. It’s always a surprise and can completely stamp out whatever I might be actually doing.
Recently this happened when an acrid, sharp scent hit me. It was a smell I associate with shit, but not quite shit itself. It had something to do with my son’s dirty daipers or the cat’s litter. Almost vinegary but also industrial, institutional. Then it hit me: Bondi’s Island.
My grandparents’ house was about a mile or so from Bondi’s Island. It was where all the toilet waste in the region was processed. You could see it from the highway on the way to their house from the south. I remember the bubbling brown water, examining the frothing and wondering if my piss or a turd I made was there somewhere. It was amazing to think that everyone’s piss and shit was all there, mixed up. Everyone knew this place and there were times when the smell would become unbearable. The neighborhood where my grandparents lived was one of the worst affected. When it was one of those days, usually a hot summer day, Grandpa would just say, “Bondi’s is out today.” Whenever it was out, I remember my cousins egging eachother on with displays of our disgust. The smell then was putrid. On winter days, when the air is thinner and uncovers the base notes of less pleasant scents, there was always a low-grade acridness that signalled Bondi’s Island. I remember vaguely it getting so bad that people began demanding that something be done about it. At some point in the late 90s or early 2000s, the problem was fixed. (Maybe not?)
That smell induced other smell memories: gas, bleach, car oil, petroleum jelly. Everything at my grandparents’ house was frozen in the 1950s. Things were either painted black or a minty, creamy green. How I loved the smell of stored gas in a garage or the metallic tinge of bolts freshly greased. My grandfather was a factory mechanic and he had any number of hand tools in the basement and garage. He also built go-carts for us. He fixed lawnmowers. He got a discount off of the rent for the bottom-floor apartment by taking care of the grass and raking the leaves. They were diligent about returning bottles for deposit. The side-porch entrance was used exclusively for this purpose, giving it a cardboard-sweet-beer fragrance. Neither Grandpa nor Grandma drank beer. They kept it for my father and his brother, who went to their house nearly every day for lunch. My dad’s office was close to them.
There is a smell for each of those memories.
2. Other people’s memories (at the Mattress Factory)
The elevator to the second floor opened into absolute darkness, but for the black and white map lit from above immediately in front of us. It showed the layout of the installation, including a few simple instructions. “Pause.” “Sit.”
The dark eats us as the elevator doors shut. It’s so thick and pure. The little circle of light around the map feels so safe. But we know that other people will eventually take the elevator here and everything will be different. I’ll have to hide this fear.
We feel our way through the pitch black through a hall to the left of the atrium where the first piece waits for us. It’s a fairly large room. We pause where the map told us to. The far wall has a flat screen on it, emanating low-grade purple-violet light. It’s masterful in its quiet opulence. It draws us in. As we step closer, there’s a texture to the screen that I hadn’t noticed. It’s analog, a gauze layer that’s neon-lit.
I’m sure of this as I bring my face only inches from it. I can’t see it. I need to know what it is, what the surface of this drawing, luring thing is. I don’t understand how it’s lit and it’s making me feel crazy. I need to know. I decide to touch it, only lightly, but enough to learn what I need to know. When I do, my hand feels nothing—it’s bathed in the purple-blue haze. There is no screen. There is no surface. It’s an opening into another room. Its contents is the light and the light alone, nothing else.
The work is Danaë by James Turrell. The experience, in the moment, was incredible. How it reflected the myth of Danaë, I am less sure of because I’m pretty ignorant of Greek mythology. The artist—I don’t know anything about him—seems to be interested in the mystery and hiddenness of religious space. Probably influenced by the name of the piece, I felt as though I was walking in what the artist imagined to be a simulacrum of a pagan temple. I couldn’t rid myself of this thought and I wish I could have, knowing full well that another filter would have filled its place. But that’s just the thing, I felt the piece, the whole installation (there were two other pieces) wanted me to believe that I could experience the space “purely” as it was. That’s a notion I struggle with.
“My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.”
– James Turrell
Ultimately, that same demand I felt to “just be there” was in balance with the immense effort the artist makes to remove himself from the work as a product and as a semiotic communication. I struggle with that, too, since I know as a human being that I am walking around a highly controlled, fabricated space, a game that I am agreeing to play but whose rules I don’t know. I couldn’t help but feel that, instead of making the space my own, that I was very much in someone else’s, like Caliban’s island or the island from The Magus. I felt him there, hiding in the pitch black, watching us, the fools stumbling about in the dark, talking to fight off the eerie-ness. It was overbearing once I had that sense.
Whereas Danaë felt like a trap set by the artist, the other installation I liked did just the opposite. It was called All Is Not Forgotten by Patrick Robideau.
Light, in this piece, was used to illuminate fragments of an old house from the 1920s. The first thing you see (again, coming out of the elevator) is an exhibit display like you might see in an old science museum. (Visit the science museum in Springfield, Mass., and you will get a look at what one looked like in the 1980s.) Beyond the glass is a room full of sand. Sticking out of the flood of sand is the front façade of the house, with other domestic objects littered around it. It’s very softly lit, giving it a dream-like, crepuscular feel.
My first impression was, sadly, cynical. It reminded me of some movie (I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and seemed derivative. Our memories are like wastelands, the detritus of our lives, etc. But, as usual, I wasn’t appreciating the whole thing.
My two-year-old son had vanished. I panicked. My wife said, “He went down there.”
To the left of the museum case was a hallway. It was constructed of wood beams and gave the impression of a mine shaft. Utility lights hung along the roof of the entire length. Where it ended was another glassed-off display where a very dim scene of a room waited for inspection. It was the kind of thing that would stand up to endless scrutiny. Every detail was set, matching what I imagined to be a Depression-era living room. (Rocking chair, table lamp with a frilly cloth shade.) The incredibly dim light was cast by a flickering fire that burned somewhere we couldn’t see. A small tunnel led out of the room, back towards the first part of the installation.
That’s when we went back to something we passed over when we first walked down the hallway. Two tunnel entrances led off of the hall. They were big enough to crawl through, but only just. It felt weird. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to or allowed to. I crawled into one and I saw the flickering fire light coming from around a corner. When I reached the turn, I could see an old wood furnace burning. It was all so quiet. It felt odd and even claustrophobic. I was in someone else’s home, a Goldilocks, and soon they’d be back, but they’d be angry and, maybe, dangerous. What if they killed me?
All Is Not Forgotten was someone else’s memory constructed into navigable space (much like what the characters do in Eternal Sunshine). The invitation wasn’t to be free of influence and the artist’s power, as Turrell suggested in his work, but to become a voyeur of another person’s emotional memory. The sense I took was that this was an attempt to recreate a primal scene of something. Maybe it was a bad memory, maybe not. It didn’t feel like a nice place to me. Yet despite its interior, personal feel, the artist felt entirely absent, despite my anticipating that he should be biographically present (I assumed that this was his memory). Watching other people go through the installation in a different circuit from us also made me appreciate the lack of control exerted. There was no suggested way to encounter it, other than probably starting with the opening view of the house in the sand.
3. Useless memories?
I’m obviously not an art expert. But I like going to museums and thinking about the art. The filter I can’t shake when it comes to art in general is the philistinism I was raised with. In a museum, I vacillate between thoughts and ideas, on the one hand, and the punishing thought that it’s pretentious, arrogant, a waste of time. I have tried to shut one or the other down at different points in my life, but to no avail. So I just need to get on with them.
Despite my fear that it is pretentious, which surely it is, I will close with a few thoughts I’ve had recently after going to contemporary art museums. I’ve been to quite a few this past year.
- Art has become an exercise in the creation of curated situations that objectify otherwise subjective experience. The effect is psychedelic. It makes a connection between the aesthetic of psychedelic trips and that of everyday life as a consumer today.
- Some artists want to impress an audience of people that identify as artists or, at least, creative. Some embrace such an audience, others punish it.
- Craft in and of itself is no longer “enough,” so it needs to be embedded in a narrative frame that both creates an experience and conveys purpose or meaning.