The Smell of Risk

Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics

Hsuan L Hsu, NYU Press, 2020

Image credit: "Sweat" Peter De Cupere Olfactory Performance Art circa 2012

http://peterdecupere.net/

They definitely had me with that title, I'll admit. But after reading, I conclude it's just not my thing. I try to withhold my frustration with the author, the editor, the publisher, I don't know, whoever might be at fault when you're more than halfway through a book you really wanted to be really good but now you feel like you should go read a book on the science of deception instead because you've been duped.

This book is mostly about what I'll call racism, but through an olfactory lens. But I want something more. Or maybe just something else. Maybe it's me; maybe I'm the one without the PhD (I am), but sometimes I lose my patience for these circular ramblings, the circle-jerking, fart-huffing, pathological neologistic echo chamber of your own super sub-category of knowledge, where you've squeezed yourself so far into your niche that almost nobody else can criticize you because they have no idea what the f you're talking about. (The fact that you're making up half the words you use to describe said subject kind of works to that effect naturally.)

It's doubly ironic then, that here I am, a person who very accidentally, and non-academically, has a background in both olfaction and industrial hygiene, to read this work, otherwise insulated from criticism by sheer epistemological remoteness. My problem is that some of the material here is problematic from a public health point of view. There are arguments in this book that we should allow something like incense burning in the workplace because it's meaningful for certain people of certain cultures, and because it's not fair that colonizers took away the ability for us to express ourselves, to cope with our lives, and it's things like this that make racism and colonialism so bad. But again as a public health specialist, I have to clarify - are we saying that we should allow people to conduct relatively uncontrolled combustion activites indoors, with other people around, and in a workplace no less, which means some of those occupants are there not by choice but because they need to pay their bills, because some of these people miss being able to do that back where they come from? So I see less of a blurred line, a clear line in fact, pretty obvious, where things are "ok" vs "not ok". Exposing the public to partial combustion by-products indoors is not ok. I can't decide whether it's not racist NOT to do that, or to prohibit others from not doing that, so I have to leave that up to you, the public, and to academicians who use words that don't exist to reinforce their ideas.

All that being said, there are some interesting things in here: 

• Smells that don't smell (the "scentlessness" of the South Pole that inspired a soap manufacturer) and smells used to deodorize (soap).
• "Deodorization" is what seems to be the concurrent theme; could have been the title. 
• Somewhat like myself, perhaps like so many people who became fascinated by smell, the author's interest begins after one night of sleeping in an apartment freshly painted. It messes up his sense of smell, a partial anosmia that lasts years, but brings so much attention to an otherwise invisible sense. 
• Kant's Perfumed Handkerchief - Kant is infamous for his either vicious abhorrence or total ignorance of the sense of smell, but here he betrays a bit of his ... intolerance for others (then again is this just support for good manners; throughout the whole book this is a recurring thought in my head) ... "The man who pulls his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket treats all around to it whether they like it or not, and compels them, if they want to breathe at all, to be parties in the enjoyment. --Kant's Critique of Judgement
• [By the way, 14 pages in and we're at footnote 51, just saying]
• Sherlock Holmes often used smell in his investigations
• The Merck manual calls hyperosmia psychosomatic [but it is? not sure the point here]
• The American Southwest was in part settled by health-seeking migrants fleeing tuberculosis p52
• For conservation purposes, museum air is standardized by UNESCO, ICOM the International Council of Museums and IIC the International Institute for the Conservation of Museum Objects, and see the book The Museum Environment by Butterworth 1978 p88-90
• "Occularcentric" museum experience; "derecognition" of smell; "toposmia" is how a place enters our bodies through smell; "breathers" are participants in an olfactory art exhibit not like viewers or something passive like audience
• He mentions plenty of good olfactory artists: Boris Raux, Anicka Yi, Peter de Cupere (p87), but let's focus here: Sean Raspet is an olfactory artist, and this is nuts - Micro-Encapsulated Surface Coating 2014 - he puts a Summa canister in a gallery for a week, analyzes the ingested olfactory profile, then recreates it using the same chemicals found there, and releases it back into the gallery via a scratch-n-sniff paint that he made and put on the walls, all the while a negative air machine sucks out the present odors of the gallery. ... Very, very cool. But I'm suspicious as to whether the output = the input. Like there are too many other variables besides the molecular components, the most significant of which is the simple fact that for smells, concentration can change a smell to something otherwise unrecognizable. For example, skatole, the smell of shit, is added to perfume, because at very small amounts, and when mixed with the right ensemble, it smells friggin great. But then there's air movement, diurnal changes in building performance, I mean the variables are kind of endless. The idea is just totally nuts, in a good way, but the actual results; I'm skeptical.
• And here is an example of my problem with what I might try to call academia. Maybe it's got something to do with the humanities scholars, and not being required to think like an engineer or a scientist, or maybe even a lawyer. Like you will hear things being said as facts with no justification about how this or that causes this or that, but simply by the sheer fact that they came up with the association, and it sounds great as a series of words strung together, so it must be true? The author says, "[The exhibit] simulates hyperosmia, artificially enhancing visitors' olfactory sensitivity to the gallery air." (p101) But how does he know that's what happens? It's what the art tries to do, what it wants to do, but we don't know what it did to people unless we go and ask them, or at least monitor their behavior somewhat, and there's no mention of any of that. So again I would ask, how do you know it "enhances visitors' sensitivity"? What if they don't even notice? You want it to do that and the artist wants it to do that, but neither of you has any say, and apparently no supporting evidence. And for what it's worth, and for at least a few very different and mostly unrelated reasons, I don't think most people even notice, so I don't think it did "enhance" anything except your own perception of your own thoughts, because that seems to be what a lot of this is about. Then again, I am not the one with the PhD, granted. 
• Now here's some cool insight; but I'm not sure it belongs to the author originally - Kate McLean's Smell Maps circa 2014 is cultural preference (ie racist) because she calls "dried fish" and "cabbage" as bad smells, but they come from Asian neighborhoods, and to Asians, they aren't bad. (I might have to argue, weakly, that rotten fish and rotten cabbage are like two of the most representative bad smells of all, and so, only with the addition of "rotten", the author's argument fails.) p113
• Many of the references cited here are so tedious; they aren't books or articles but what seem to be random scraps of paper that make the citation style look like an alien language; I guess part of the point of doing esoteric research is to attempt to uncover some of this stuff that would otherwise be lost to history; but for much of this I'm left with the thought that maybe it should be lost. Also, I must be outdated because there seems to be a new way to do in-text citations, so that "Braiding Sweetgrass" looks like (BrS, 121) not (Braiding Sweetgrass, 121)
• There is an Israeli firm Odortec that makes "skunk water" for crowd control, but it didn't work in India. p159
• Paul Gauguin's memoir Noa Noa 1901 means "fragrant" in Tahitian
• Smudging, or incense I suppose, he calls "air conditioning" and a way of decolonializing smells; and it's kind of the opposite of the use of mustard gas on uncooperative populations
• "Atmospheric engineering and olfactory aesthetic interventions" p182
• Certain cultures want to use incense for spiritual and communal purposes but they can't because of smoke detectors, and this is where I'm like hold on, we need to stop somewhere, and this would be a good place to stop. Smoke detectors as systematic and persistent instruments of oppression? You're not getting a lot of people on your side with that argument, not anyone who's loved one's have died in a fire, not anyone who's had to save people's lives from a fire, and not anyone who's job it is to be responsible for public safety with respect to fire. p185
• Curators at the Museum of Natural History Department of Anthropology provided a space in the storage facility for Native American visitors who wish to smudge sacred objects in the collection (and interesting in light of the fact that much of these artifacts were historically dosed with insecticide, which continues to be a persistent source of occupational health hazard for museum workers) p185
• At the Natural Museum of the American Indian (is this the Smithsonian in New York City?), the Human Remains Vault is smudged with a mixture of tobacco, sage, sweetgrass, and cedar every week. 
• And ... certain museum practices like bagging, freezing, or low oxygen may be inappropriate for suffocating the living entity in the artifact.
• The idea of fragrance-free workplaces (also racist) vs working next to a highway; so the idea of forcing people to be exposed to dangerous environmental conditions like traffic pollution, while also prohibiting them from wearing perfume, is messed up. I like it when people express themselves, even if it don't like it myself, because I support creative expression, and I like perfume, but I also understand the need for and desire of a healthy workplace, so I'm stuck on this one.  
• The Yes Men Exxon Climate Victim Candles, omfg: They told 300 oilmen at Canada's largest oil conference that the real solution to climate change was to turn everyone who dies into fuel so that the all-important free market could continue to work well past doomsday. As volunteers passed out flesh-scented candles, a funeral tribute played for an Exxon janitor named Reggie Watts, who had graciously donated his body to be turned into candles as a test of the Vivoleum concept. (He was played by the actual Reggie Watts) ... good luck finding this video on your own, the United States government straight banned this permanently from the internet, well as best it could; you will absolutely not find this via a google search or on youtube. I can't even find it on the porn sites. The only place it's hosted is the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/The.Yes.Men.Fix.The.World.P2P.Edition.2010.Xvid
• And Anicka Yi's use of a stink bomb during a high profile meeting of these executives to scare the absolute living shit out of the big money assholes who were responsible for Bhopal. ... they thought they themselves were now being poisoned. I don't care about their feelings, that is genius, and that is what art is for.