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Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Scents Ability: How Somerset House made an immersive show about perfume
Creative Review: Perfume – A Journey Through Contemporary Scent is spread out across Somerset House’s East Wing galleries with ten rooms devoted to ten key perfumes from the last 20 years, each one representing a departure from what most of us probably think of as a wearable scent.
This is a very fascinating concept. We as humans respond differently to the world around us based on our senses and as the article points out the sense of smell is the least explored of all of the senses. It makes perfect sense, no pun intended, to me for a perfume company to explore the power a scent can hold. If you are familiar with psychology and the structure of the brain you will know that sense of smell is the sense that is the most strongly tied to memory. Once a smell enters the nose the smell is processed through the olfactory bulb and then heads to the brain by way of the hippocampus and amygdala (which are tied to memory and emotion). The other senses, touch and sound do not enter the hippocampus or amygdala which makes smell the most powerful in recalling memories and emotions. The Somerset House's attempt to make the scents something tangible and solid in the world is an interesting and abstract approach to perfume and immersive performance.
I love this article. It is so interesting how the curators and designers combined these two senses, sight and smell, to create one overarching experience that triggers all five of the audience’s senses. The design in the visual exhibition is so intriguing. In art every decision is deliberate, every addition and omission is a conscious choice made by the artist. And in this case the omission of the brand logo or the commercialization of the perfume was omitted from the exhibition until the audience had experienced it all. This choice is so important to the piece as a whole because if they decided to show the branding of the perfume upfront that would completely change the experience of the piece to an attention more focused on the capitalistic and commercial aspect of perfume and away from the focus on the sent itself and the reaction to the fragrance. This exhibit brings recognition to an industry that is often ignored. People wear perfume everyday, but hardly ever to they realize that someone had to design that fragrance with a lot in mind. This reminds me of technical theater. People experience theater and other forms of entertainment all the time. Whether that be TV, film, concerts, or theater, and they realize that the technical aspects are there because they know that the show would not be the same without them, but rarely ever do people think about the people that were involved in making it happen. That’s another reason while this perfume exhibit is so amazing to me; it brings the people who make life beautiful, in this case the beauty of smell, into the light.
How could I not comment on an article about the Somerset House. Last semester I took a class called London Architecture and Urbanism and my professor would always talk about Somerset House, it’s history, past uses, and the galleries that now fill the once army barracks halls. We often discussed the innovative exhibits that Somerset house would produce and their influence from the Courtauld Institute. This perfume exhibit seems to be right up their alley in terms of creative and new ideas. I would be really interested to see what the rooms are like visually. It is clear that there are physical objects but I wonder how much attention they take. It would be really cool if the rooms were totally empty except for the scent because then that would be 100% what is on display and not come off as an addition to the physical objects we always see in museums.
I think there are several things this exhibit addressed very well. It is inherently hard to present scent without bias, as it - at least in its aerosolized form - is invisible. Yet I think Somerset House addressed this predicament very well by giving each room character, without literally characterizing each specific scent. By deriving the presentation of each scent from more oblique sources, I think the exhibit supports each scent better in this manner than if an exhibit goer's experience of a scent was limited by a more obvious environment. So too, I think the exhibit is made much stronger by the fact that it focuses on ten specific scents. Timeline exhibits like this one that try to encompass a large period of change and development can often overwhelm visitors. This one picks scents that were not only seminal, but expanded and contributed to the modern perception of scent, and by extension perfume. By having fewer items to feature, each one was able to stand out in its own right, and benefit from a more intensely focused process regarding its presentation.
4 comments:
This is a very fascinating concept. We as humans respond differently to the world around us based on our senses and as the article points out the sense of smell is the least explored of all of the senses. It makes perfect sense, no pun intended, to me for a perfume company to explore the power a scent can hold. If you are familiar with psychology and the structure of the brain you will know that sense of smell is the sense that is the most strongly tied to memory. Once a smell enters the nose the smell is processed through the olfactory bulb and then heads to the brain by way of the hippocampus and amygdala (which are tied to memory and emotion). The other senses, touch and sound do not enter the hippocampus or amygdala which makes smell the most powerful in recalling memories and emotions. The Somerset House's attempt to make the scents something tangible and solid in the world is an interesting and abstract approach to perfume and immersive performance.
I love this article. It is so interesting how the curators and designers combined these two senses, sight and smell, to create one overarching experience that triggers all five of the audience’s senses. The design in the visual exhibition is so intriguing. In art every decision is deliberate, every addition and omission is a conscious choice made by the artist. And in this case the omission of the brand logo or the commercialization of the perfume was omitted from the exhibition until the audience had experienced it all. This choice is so important to the piece as a whole because if they decided to show the branding of the perfume upfront that would completely change the experience of the piece to an attention more focused on the capitalistic and commercial aspect of perfume and away from the focus on the sent itself and the reaction to the fragrance. This exhibit brings recognition to an industry that is often ignored. People wear perfume everyday, but hardly ever to they realize that someone had to design that fragrance with a lot in mind. This reminds me of technical theater. People experience theater and other forms of entertainment all the time. Whether that be TV, film, concerts, or theater, and they realize that the technical aspects are there because they know that the show would not be the same without them, but rarely ever do people think about the people that were involved in making it happen. That’s another reason while this perfume exhibit is so amazing to me; it brings the people who make life beautiful, in this case the beauty of smell, into the light.
How could I not comment on an article about the Somerset House. Last semester I took a class called London Architecture and Urbanism and my professor would always talk about Somerset House, it’s history, past uses, and the galleries that now fill the once army barracks halls. We often discussed the innovative exhibits that Somerset house would produce and their influence from the Courtauld Institute. This perfume exhibit seems to be right up their alley in terms of creative and new ideas. I would be really interested to see what the rooms are like visually. It is clear that there are physical objects but I wonder how much attention they take. It would be really cool if the rooms were totally empty except for the scent because then that would be 100% what is on display and not come off as an addition to the physical objects we always see in museums.
I think there are several things this exhibit addressed very well. It is inherently hard to present scent without bias, as it - at least in its aerosolized form - is invisible. Yet I think Somerset House addressed this predicament very well by giving each room character, without literally characterizing each specific scent. By deriving the presentation of each scent from more oblique sources, I think the exhibit supports each scent better in this manner than if an exhibit goer's experience of a scent was limited by a more obvious environment. So too, I think the exhibit is made much stronger by the fact that it focuses on ten specific scents. Timeline exhibits like this one that try to encompass a large period of change and development can often overwhelm visitors. This one picks scents that were not only seminal, but expanded and contributed to the modern perception of scent, and by extension perfume. By having fewer items to feature, each one was able to stand out in its own right, and benefit from a more intensely focused process regarding its presentation.
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