I used to make sculptures from sugar. That’s when I started to incorporate scents made by wonderful perfumers like Jean-Pierre Bethouart and Thierry Wasser in my art.
In 1999, I used 5 tons of sugar and 50 kilograms of fragrance oil for an installation in Japan. Everyday during the exhibition, 2 kilos of scent created by Thierry Wasser was sprayed on the floor. The visitors to the exhibition left with the scent on their clothes and shoes. As a result, an old downtown neighborhood in Tokyo was scented for a several block radius during the exhibition, and the scent remained for more than a year in the former rice market which housed the installation. Surprisingly, there wasn’t even a complaint, and I was still receiving messages from people who wanted the scent a year after the exhibition.
Heh, I was going to ask if there were any complaints. My mind boggles at 50 kg of fragrance oil. You could swim in that! Or sink, I suppose. My browsers don’t like Quicktime, but the exhibit sounds wonderful. Must have been fun obtaining the sugar!
To have 5 tons of sugar in front of you is awesome. But finding someone to pay for it is not. Being an artist is sometimes a pain. Your are always looking for someone to pay for your ridiculous experiments.
This was fascinating. I have questions. Did I miss it, or in there somewhere did you mention what the fragrance was like? Did you use the fragrance oil in the sculpture itself? And what happened to the sculpture after the exhibition?
March, the scent Sugar Mountain is “edible sugar heliotrope musk floral orange flower.” It’s regressive and intimate.
The oil was sprayed everyday onto the boardwalk placed in the middle of the sugar-covered floor, but the sculpture wasn’t scented. I wanted the fragrance to literally spread out to the streets using the foot traffic. Some people reported to me later that the scent had stayed on their shoes for nearly a year.
What happened to the sculpture? It’s gone. All the sugar sculptures I made including the one in the movie don’t exist any more. They were in good shape while I kept them in my studio in Brooklyn. The studio was on the third floor of a industrial building. There were some drug dealers but no bugs. Later, I moved them to my barn in the country, and there they gradually disappeared.
Nobi — that’s so … beautiful. I was trying to imagine a fitting end. Having them gradually disappear from a barn in the country seems sort of perfect.
It was supposed to be beautiful (and in a way it still was), but the actual process was little bit like… the scene in the movie Perfume where young Grenouille smells a dead rat, and his olfactive vision sees hundreds of squirming maggots inside the dead rat.