Alexandra Hyde discovers a very personal sensory experience in a terraced house in London…
Pervasive Performance Art in Your Own Front Room.
By Alexandra Hyde
The essence of On The Scent is its intrusiveness, its inescapability. Artists Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, accompanied by Lois Weaver, are inviting small audiences of four to private domestic homes in London for an exploration of smell and memor
The first challenge to traditional performance is the setting. The viewer is not even permitted the status of voyeur — the lights are on, everyone is home, the audience are intruders and this time there is no fourth wall. This feeling of malaise is teased by an immediate encounter with Weaver’s obsessive scent-addict. She invites us into her boudoir of silks and lace, offers a chocolate before devouring it desperately herself, though many have been spilled out of their pink boxes and crushed on the fur rugs. You’re not sure whether to sit down, stand, or shut up, or to say thanks politely and ignore her social impropriety — are you inside or outside of reality?
Weaver drawls fading glamour through red lipstick whilst confessing her scent fantasies, to which the viewer is expected to contribute. At the close of On The Scent audience members are filmed recounting their smell memory of home or homesickness. This obligation characterises the exigencies of the piece: like the scents that physically invade each breath, On The Scent sets new standards of intimacy and impact for performance and permeates the consciousness like no other experience.
The three monologues that form On The Scent use smell to navigate around autobiographical, political, domestic and sexual issues. And smell proves to be an extremely good communicator. Hill is in the kitchen with memories of grandparents and an upbringing in New Mexico. Smoke from Lucky Strike cigarettes mixes with spitting smoke from a frying chop and the smoke from incense rising in a straight line.
Yet all together, the air is not that wholesome. The holy earth of the Sangre de Christo Mountains grow chillies which are dried into powder and snorted by Hill: a hit of faith that needs no serious thought, just oblivion. Hill reveals another side of New Mexico, Los Alamos labs and the development of weapons of mass destruction, as the smoke in the room gets thicker and the spitting chop louder, accompanied by the mounting chaos of Americana. A benign plastic primary-coloured popcorn machine in the shape of a duck starts spitting popcorn all over the floor. After, in the quiet, Hill offers two views of the achievements of her heritage: the death toll of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, and the corresponding White House press release regarding the "greatest achievement of organised science in history". Her point is accompanied by one final and uncomfortable scent as she cuts off a lock of hair and burns it to nothing.
On The Scent comes at you from all sides. Upstairs in the closed off bedroom Paris is home and ill. The smells change to clinical cold ones such as disinfectant and decongestant, setting and sustaining the tone of the piece and the audience’s emotional engagement with it: the smells are universally familiar. The audience sits at the bedside while Paris considers the stale boredom of being ‘off sick’, but then more than that – the faded staleness of domestic life once the children have left, when the marriage is old, when bed is a place we are ill and not active. Paris is concerned with habit and normality, family and the domestic facade. The bedclothes are 1950s parent’s-double-bed pink, the biscuits not too extravagant: Rich Tea or perhaps even Custard Creams. They leave an aftertaste like the lingering smell of medicine, or the trace of whiskey on secretive alcoholic lips. The way in which Paris balances pastiche and satire with tragedy and sympathy communicates a particularly maternal and extremely poignant grief. This is an extremely complex and thought provoking take on homesickness.
In On The Scent, Paris, Hill and Weaver explore new ways to communicate whereby the viewer can better identify with the art. The smells tap into the common subconscious and guide the viewer through the autobiographical memories and in turn to think about the broader political, sociological or psychological themes. Being in a home that could be any home, amongst sensations experienced every day, addressed directly and closely through eye contact and interaction, Paris, Hill and Weaver ensure exclusive entry into the minds of the viewer to maximum effect. An astounding work of art.
