Brian Goeltzenleuchter. Smelling the City.

A question from a museum

In 2011, the San Diego Museum of Art ran a Summer Salon Series alongside a travelling exhibition on Gustav Stickley and the American Arts and Crafts movement. The museum put a question to its guest artists: what does a city need?

Artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter and poet Katharine Whitcomb took up the question. They did not answer with a plan or a lecture. They answered with two poems and two smells.

Stickley was a furniture designer of the early twentieth century. His pieces are known for straight lines, plain surfaces and oak with its grain left visible. For him a good house was a simple one, made of local materials, with nothing added for show. It was an ideal of living, not just a style of chair.

Goeltzenleuchter and Whitcomb set that ideal beside something of their own time: small prefabricated houses built from used shipping containers. Two ways of thinking about a home, nearly a century apart.

Two poems, two smells, one sheet

The first poem is Native Oak. Whitcomb writes about a Stickley interior, its open, clean design and native materials. The second is Cargotecture, a blend of cargo and architecture. It refers to Sunset magazine's 2011 Idea House, a home of about 192 square feet made from a single container.

For each poem Goeltzenleuchter made a scent. Both were sprayed onto blotter paper, the absorbent strips perfume sellers hand to customers. Each blotter carries both poems, printed as a two colour lithograph.

The reader can hold the sheet in two ways. Smell each scent with its poem, as two separate houses. Or fold the blotter so the two smells meet. Then wood and steel arrive in the same breath, and the question of what a dwelling really needs becomes softer and less certain.

The finished work exists in an edition of two. Each contains 50 lithographs on blotter paper, an artist's book and two bottles of artist made scent. The artist's own site dates the edition to 2013. In 2014 it was shown in the group exhibition Past Tense Future Imperfect at Art Share in Los Angeles.

Reading a city through the nose

Goeltzenleuchter is one of the American artists who work with smell most consistently. He has been an artist in residence at the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. In other projects he asks a city's residents about the smells of their neighbourhoods and turns their answers into bottled scents. Smelling the City is different in being small and private: not a map of a whole city, but two houses on one sheet of paper.

The smell does not illustrate the poem. It stands beside it, like a second line. The words speak of wood; the scent brings the wood close. The words speak of a container; the scent tells you how near steel and freight really are. The reader needs two senses to take in one poem.

What stays with you is how the work places a large question inside a small object. What does a city need? Big houses or small ones, new wood or reused steel, tradition or something temporary? The blotter does not choose for anyone. It lets two smells lie side by side, and then fade.

That fading is also an answer. What we think a home needs shifts over time, like a scent on paper. Clear today. Faint next week. Next year, only the words remain.