Maxwell Williams. CNC Musk Factory.

An exhibition where scent is the punishment

In the summer of 2022, from 7 July to 6 August, Olfactory Art Keller, a gallery devoted to olfactory art in Manhattan's Chinatown, opened CNC Musk Factory. It was Maxwell Williams's first solo exhibition in New York.

The press text is blunt: here scent is the punishment, through BDSM sculpture and performance, and through sensual consent. The list of themes is just as blunt: constraint, pornography, the smell of chains, of malodorants, of power, of submission.

It sounds harsh. Read closely, though, the exhibition is not about cruelty. It is about rules. In BDSM everything begins with an agreement. Williams borrows that structure to ask about the human sense that is least often consulted.

Artificial leather, glass and a pillory

The main wall work is the series Constraint forever, from 2022. Each piece is about 24 by 24 inches, made of artificial leather, glass and scent. Eight scented leather fragments hang framed, like specimens. Visitors stand before them as before paintings, but what reaches them first is not an image. It is a smell.

The word forever in the title is not decoration. The leather is permanently scented. There is no washing it clean. The constraint lives inside the material.

Another leather work on the wall, Soul, is dedicated by Williams to Jimmy Camicia and Marsha P. Johnson, two figures tied to the history of New York's queer community. And in the room, visitors could take free scented soaps, a gesture dedicated to Félix González-Torres, the artist known for piles of sweets and stacks of paper that viewers carry away.

In the middle of the room stands something larger: a pillory, the old device that clamped the head and hands of the punished in a public square. This one has a smell.

An absolution by smell

At the opening, Williams performed Consent is sexy. The full title lists four bodily smells, with nothing softened. The press text calls it a performance linking scent and shame, a ceremony of absolution.

Guests volunteered to put their heads in the pillory. They were held there, noses facing the smells people usually hide most. Shameful bodily moments, in the words of the text, were faced through masochistic submission while consensually confined.

Williams attaches a question drawn from BDSM vocabulary: can the one who submits still lead from below? The question turns our picture of power upside down. The person in the pillory has not lost everything. They are the one who said yes, and they can say stop.

The nose and consent

What makes CNC Musk Factory memorable is that it picks the right sense. Eyes can close. Hands can pull back. Ears can be covered. But we cannot stop breathing for long. Smell always gets in, whether we want it or not.

So in daily life the nose is rarely asked. Exhaust fumes, the perfume of a stranger in a lift, the smell of a room. We take all of it without signing anything.

Williams builds a space where the nose, for once, is asked first. The smell is still unpleasant. But it arrives after a yes. That difference is small, and it is the whole work.

Later in 2022, in Los Angeles, Williams took another direction with Anosmiac!, where the nose becomes a villain's superpower. In CNC Musk Factory the nose has no powers yet. It only has the right to say yes or no.