Belle Haleine, The Scent of Art.

A museum asks about smell

From 11 February to 17 May 2015, Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, presented Belle Haleine, The Scent of Art, curated by Annja Müller-Alsbach. It covered more than 1,200 square metres and brought together more than forty artists.

Its question was short: what does art smell like? And what happens when the nose suddenly plays the leading role in how we meet a work? A museum is a place for eyes. Here the eyes had to make room.

According to the museum, the exhibition looked at smell as an artistic material, and at the links between smell, memory and emotion. It also touched something harder to talk about: our ambivalent relationship to the human body and its natural odours.

The title recalls Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, the perfume bottle Marcel Duchamp made in 1921, its label carrying Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy in a photograph by Man Ray. Duchamp was among the artists. A bottle made to be looked at, not smelled, stands at the start of a history of smell in art.

Breath, excrement and forerunners

The historical section moved through artists of the early twentieth century, with works by Man Ray and Carlo Carrà from the 1920s, and even works by a few Baroque era artists.

Then came Piero Manzoni. In 1960 he made Fiato d'artista, the artist's breath blown into balloons. In 1961 came Merda d'artista, tins said to contain his own excrement. Neither lets you smell anything. They only make you think of the smell, and feel uneasy for thinking it.

It is an interesting starting point. Before real smells entered the gallery, smell was already present as an idea, a reminder of the body that formal art tended to push aside.

Twenty years of smell in art

The core of Belle Haleine was work from the previous twenty years or so, in which the sense of smell was genuinely put to work.

Cildo Meireles showed Volátil, made between 1980 and 1994, a walk in installation of talcum powder and synthetic odorants. Bill Viola showed Il Vapore, 1975, a video installation with eucalyptus vapour. Jana Sterbak showed Chemise de Nuit. Sylvie Fleury showed Aura Soma, 2002. Sissel Tolaas showed The FEAR of Smell, a project running from 2006 to 2015.

The list went on: Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Carsten Höller, Ernesto Neto, Oswaldo Maciá, Peter de Cupere, Clara Ursitti, Valeska Soares, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Meg Webster and more. Jean Tinguely, whose name the museum bears, was there too.

Side by side, the works showed that smell is not a genre. It is a material, like colour or stone, and each artist takes it somewhere different: some make us afraid, some make us remember, some simply surprise us with how sharp our noses still are.

Why Belle Haleine stays with us

The exhibition went beyond the galleries. There was a Pheromone Party on 14 February 2015, Valentine's Day. There was an interdisciplinary symposium on 17 and 18 April 2015, and a series of workshops.

What stays is the range. Belle Haleine did not tell the story of one artist or one movement. It placed Duchamp, Manzoni, Viola and contemporary scent artists in one line, as if the use of smell in art had a history of its own worth writing.

And it did so in a museum named after an artist of machines. Tinguely's machines clatter, move, sometimes destroy themselves. Smell also moves and dissolves. The two met in Basel in the spring of 2015.