Last Wednesday was Art Day, so Sluggo and I went to see
Discovering Columbus, which was supposed to end on November 19 but has been
extended through December 2. The friend who gave us the heads-up about the
extension said it was because so many people missed seeing it on account of the
Superstorm; I haven’t been able to confirm that, but as soon as she told us it
was still on, I jumped online and got tickets for Wednesday morning.
The piece is easy to describe, but its effect is not simple.
Tatzu Nishi has built a living room up in the air around the statue of Columbus
in Columbus Circle. You climb up seven flights of stairs, and enter a hallway,
and then turn into some rich guy’s living room where the 13-foot–tall statue is
a knickknack on the coffee table. It’s delightful. A little girl who followed
us inside dissolved in a fit of giggles when she saw it, the kind of little-kid
giggles where you finally have to tip over onto a chair and kick your legs like
a bug. Then her dad started trying to teach her to say “recontextualize.”
It’s cool to get to see the statue close up; it’s cool to
see it in that context, which brings up thoughts of the 1% and private art and
public art. The furniture is mostly from Bloomingdales, but the wallpaper was
designed by Nishi himself, and features images of things he knew about America
when he was growing up in Japan: Elvis, Marilyn, Michael Jackson, Coca-Cola,
Malcolm X, Mickey Mouse. It made me think about how Columbus didn’t even know
he was in America, he thought he was somewhere else. Everybody’s always discovering
America, and nobody ever knows what it is. The big, flat-screen TV in the room
is always on, set permanently to Fox News.
After we discovered Columbus, I went across the street to
the Museum of Arts and Design for “The Art of Scent,” which had opened the day
before. It is the best museum show I have ever smelled.
I was lucky to get there the day after the show opened—it
really was delayed by the storm—before everything starts malfunctioning and
they run out of the perfumes. When I was there, the only thing that wasn’t
working was the player for the video interviews with some of the artists—no big
deal. Also, I was there at 11:00, right when the museum opened, and when I
walked into the main gallery, it was empty: empty of people, and empty of things.
It looked like a big, white, empty room, until I noticed some faint depressions
in the wall, about the size and shape of a row of urinals. This was the
exhibit: 12 scents, arranged in chronological order, from Jicky
(1889)—Jicky!—to Untitled (2010). You stick your head into one of the
urinal-like devices, and a puff of scent envelopes your face. The sort of info
that’s usually on a wall label is projected onto the wall next to where you’re
standing, then disappears. The exhibits lead you through a sketch of
developments in the art of fragrance—the introduction of synthetics and new
molecules and new ways to construct olfactory compositions. Although all these scents
were developed to be sold commercially, they are not treated as commercial
products, they are presented as works of art.
In a smaller room off the main gallery, there’s a long table
with bowls full of the 12 scents featured in the main exhibit. You’re invited
to dip a scent strip in each one and then use a tablet to enter two words you
think describe each. The words “hostile” and “unwearable” weren’t included, so
I wasn’t able to say anything about “Untitled,” but I took a scent strip from
each sample anyway. There were five slits along one wall, where cards were
dispensed to show four mods in the development of Tresor, along with the final
composition, and it was interesting to see how that happened and at what point
I thought they should’ve quit while they were ahead.
I’m probably not the average perfume-wearing DJ, in that I
would rather smell like the air from a bicycle tire (Bvlgari Black) or a stack
of wet cardboard (Dzing!) than a flower. Even so, I think you should go to MAD
for “The Art of Scent,” just because there’s never been anything like it. And
because you’ll get to smell Jicky.
