AIX Scent Fair.

Three days at the Hammer

From 6 to 8 May 2016, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles hosted AIX Scent Fair. It was co-presented by the Institute for Art and Olfaction and Luckyscent and Scent Bar. Like every public programme at the Hammer, it was free.

The fair itself ran on Saturday and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. More than fifty perfumers from many countries took part: the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Spain, Italy. Among them were Bogue Profumo and Mendittorosa from Italy, Brooklyn Perfume Company, DSH Perfumes, Imaginary Authors.

Most were independent perfumers, working in small quantities, with no cosmetics group behind them. They are rarely found in large department stores. The fair gave them a rare place to stand: not a cosmetics counter but an art museum.

The Institute for Art and Olfaction, often called the IAO, is a Los Angeles organisation devoted to smell in art. Luckyscent and Scent Bar sell and present independent perfume in the city. The two met at the Hammer: one side thinking of scent as art, the other living with it every day on the shelf.

Talking, smelling, making

The fair opened on Friday evening, 6 May, with a keynote by Lizzie Ostrom, known as Odette Toilette. A panel followed with Chandler Burr, Dr Avery Gilbert and Jacquelyn Ford Morie, moderated by Saskia Wilson-Brown.

They came from different corners of the world of smell. Writing and curating on perfume, the science of olfaction, technology and virtual reality. Putting them at one table showed the ambition of the fair: to talk about smell from several sides at once.

On Saturday and Sunday at 1 p.m. there were workshops in experimental perfumery, each limited to sixteen people with registration required. On Sunday morning there was Scent Lab, a drop in session with Persephenie Lea, open to families.

So visitors had three ways to meet scent. Listen to others talk about it. Walk between the tables and smell. Sit down and blend something of their own. The three moved from far to near.

An awards night for smell

On Saturday evening, 7 May, the fair hosted the IAO's third annual Art and Olfaction Awards. The host was the artist Zackary Drucker. The prize is called the Golden Pear.

There were cocktails, DJs, the air of an art evening in Los Angeles. But what matters is that it existed at all. Commercial perfume has many industry prizes. An award for scent as art, given inside a university museum, is far rarer.

The IAO went on to other projects about smell in art, such as the exhibition Storycraft: Twelve Olfactory Narratives. AIX was a marker on that path: the moment the organisation brought a whole community of perfumers into a major art space.

Why a fair is worth remembering

On the surface, AIX resembled a trade event. Stalls, brands, a shop. But its setting at the Hammer, free, with workshops and debate, made it something else.

In a museum we are used to standing before a painting and asking what it means. At AIX, visitors were invited to do the same with a smell. Not only whether it is pleasant, but how it was made, what place it recalls, what its maker was thinking.

It is a small shift, and an important one. Smell is usually filed under private life and the market. The fair at the Hammer placed it in public space, where it could be discussed like any other art form.