Devotions on shame, Anne Imhof, and learning to lead with my nose, after Yūko Tsushima
The surface tension has shifted in recent weeks. It is as though you could cut the air into many fragrance notes, distilling them all. Facades divide the room again and again, until it can be cupped into your palm and raised to your nose.
Scent hounds, as distinct from sighthounds, are hounds trained to hunt by smell rather than sight. They are trained for stamina rather than pure speed. To train such a hound it is recommended that you soak a dead bird in water before dragging it over open fields. As each blade of grass brushes past, the smell of death will cling to it, ready for the dog to follow. In a hunt, the scent hound will have to learn to arrive at its prey alive, but until then the connection remains severed.
Growing up I was not taught to understand shame, and the form it assumed was equally as severed from its feeling. Unlike scent or a carcass, shame cannot be so easily divided or concealed by facades, nor hidden behind trees. Walls and facades may function to mask or muzzle the scent of shame, but the smell remains beyond them. If you were to press your nose against the wall, it would still permeate through.
The scent of language lingers and I try to hunt it — to distill it — but before I can write it down, I have forgotten the words I had once smelt and lost their trail. I return with my tail between my legs.
Rather, what I did not understand as a child was the resolve that shame might bring, and in turn did not understand discipline. I moved head down, as a scent hound would, but let myself move through fragrances without direction. Whilst the smell of smoke rises, shame is a fragrance that clings to the ground. I had grown accustomed to chasing my own tail. At the start of Anne Carson’s translation of Bakkhai, she writes a note; ‘I wish I were two dogs then I could play with me’. I think of an olfactory tightrope, shaped into a circle, or otherwise a circular yoke. When I try to write this, I cannot settle on what ring best fits: as if precision has been lost. The scent of language lingers and I try to hunt it — to distill it — but before I can write it down, I have forgotten the words I had once smelt and lost their trail. I return with my tail between my legs.
Like smoke, shame fills the air I breathe, and grips me by the head that hangs. It is a smell I had come to forget, until recently its odour renewed itself, Proustian and uninvited. My throat has felt clogged with it in the heavy London air since. Even in fragrant moments of tenderness, or what feels to near it, I am left with anosmia. It is a shame that says if you came close enough to touch, I could still not smell you over it.
Anne Imhof's Faust, 2017. Performance at the 2017 Venice Biennale
Cynicism as a train of thought began at the height of Greek culture, as a dialectic response to its cultivation. The cynics called for a return — a path that they clung to like a bird between their jaws. They learnt to live without shame, not through debasement, but instead by being beyond modesty. It was this doggedness that earned them their name: cynic is Greek for dog.
In the performer’s absence, the pavilion feels like a showroom that has been emptied of its stock. Paraphernalia is spread across the sparse glass house, second-class relics of the performers it once housed.
A long scream draws silent, and a blow of the hand strikes its target. There are many ways to discipline a hound. An embrace seizes up, dissonant and no longer tender. Through the glass we hear muffled fists [faust(s)] banging on chests. It is unclear if this is a tender heartbeat or the performer is trying to blow through the wall of their ribs, their arm rebounding mechanically.
Facades exist at the heart of Imhof’s work: the facades of architecture, but also those of pretence. Within Imhof’s work, there is a dependence on the accidental: accidental as in containing gestures and objects without their ontological being. Scent trails are cut short and we cannot necessarily follow. Often in interviews Imhof dismisses fascist imagery and condenses the aesthetics of production and of marginalised labour present in her work into being merely about aesthetics and abstraction. She is similarly dismissive about her use of the Faust title. It is art for art’s sake. Hunting for sport. Overhead are platforms for the performers to stand on, poised like trophies.
Why I write here about Faust is because, emptied of its performers, what I really remember is the caged dobermans outside the pavilion — their barks and their pleads. If I were to return, I should like to free them.
I found myself drawn most to those scents described as phenolic. Thick and sweet, medical — almost tarry. Phenolic scents are used most in perfumery to create a leather-like smell. The kind of smell you can hold between your teeth.
When hunting with some scent hound breeds, such as German Bracke, American Foxhounds, or coonhounds, the pack of dogs are allowed to move freely whilst the hunters wait for the dogs’ call, announcing that the game has been ‘treed’. The hunters then walk to their prey, guided not by scent but by the sound of the dogs' baying. Treeing allows for the quarry to be assessed, fixed in a room with its four invisible walls dictated by the sonic spatiality of the hound’s barks. Its life is evaluated from the ground — before a shot is released. The dogs are selected for their instinct to not cease barking at the prey above them: a cacophony halted only as the prey falls limp to the ground. It is from this practise that the phrase ‘barking up the wrong tree’ originates.
In a clearing I reach a wall wider and higher than I can imagine. It is the facade I had built for myself. I know not if what is behind the wall is still alive.
There are many ways to discipline a dog, none of which could not in some capacity be called cruel. Dog’s nature is like clay, to be moulded — not like alabaster to be chipped away at and carved. Strike a dog enough times and shame turns to maladaptation. I saw this in my aunt’s dogs, who lived viciously but through fear, until their inactivity left them with legs that no longer functioned. I wonder how shame smelt to them.
Psychologist B. F. Skinner’s work on behaviourism outlines the current approach to training a hunting dog. Skinner divided discipline into four methods that might shape the hound. These were positive reinforcement (Good dog! Reward), positive punishment (Bad dog! Strike), negative reinforcement (Good dog! Striking ceases), and negative punishment (Bad dog! Reward taken). Connecting an action to an outcome, almost any behaviour can be trained. Sometimes after the hunt, the hound is not rewarded at all, instead made to keep its nose down and to follow a new trail. Empty hands fall on desiring mouths.
Deprived and debased, a hound can come to expect little. Cynicism as a train of thought began at the height of Greek culture, as a dialectic response to its cultivation. The cynics called for a return — a path that they clung to like a bird between their jaws. They learnt to live without shame, not through debasement, but instead by being beyond modesty. It was this doggedness that earned them their name: cynic is Greek for dog.
I find a video of a factory arm carving alabaster and marble statues with water jets to imitate fine Grecian works. The sun lights up these jets as they carve, kissing the mist that fills the room. Imagine light filling every crevice and mark across the stone that forms as the muscular legs of a hound are carved out.
....This small canal of bone is where scent is processed and traced against memory to recall both comforts and dangers.
Earlier this year I took to learning olfactory notes: their descriptors, their chemical compositions. Shame, like scent, is something that must be learned. Or rather, it must be moulded. It is not an innate sensation. Differences between a smell that is phenolic and naphthalenic are slight but perceivable to the trained nose.
I found myself drawn most to those scents described as phenolic. Thick and sweet, medical — almost tarry. Phenolic scents are used most in perfumery to create a leather-like smell. The kind of smell you can hold between your teeth.
In my long, listless days, with my nose to the floor, it became necessary for me to become well-versed in a myriad of scents — scents of desire — to know which trail to follow, even if it meant that I could no longer pick certain scents out. Scents that I began to fixate on were fresh ink on paper and the smell of summertime flowers, which only thickened the urgency.
Most scent hound breeds have large nasal cavities, which helps them scent better. Their moist lips are said to further assist in trapping scent particles. Hounds have 300 million olfactory receptors: fifty times that of humans. Some scents cling for longer or more closely than others. Certain surfaces hold fragrance for longer than others. To name a fragrance allows us to hold it to our lips for longer. I say it over and over.
Reading further about olfactory receptors in dogs and other mammals, I discover that the ability to distill scent is written in the bones of the skull, in the cribriform plate. Bone however, like marble, can be carved in the same way the land is shaped by the river that flows through it. It can be reformed so that it takes to different scents — shaved and tuned like a reed. This small canal of bone is where scent is processed and traced against memory to recall both comforts and dangers. I read that the best scent hounds can follow a scent trail across running water, even when it is several days old.
Marble Dog / Cribriform Plate
I next saw Imhof’s work in Amsterdamn, at the Stedelijk, but was at the time unable to make the connection between the two shows and realise it was the same artist I had seen years before. Where Faust felt intimate, nose to nose, the Stedelijk’s Youth felt avascular — corporally consuming. It is as if you have entered another world: a world usually only seen on screens.
Here Imhof builds facades from a labyrinth of lockers, suggesting the absent sweaty bodies that ought to fill the space. An undressing — a shirt lifted slowly over your head, scent filling the room.
Anne Imhof's work in Amsterdam, at the Stedelijk
Overhead a speaker moves through the space on steel rails, baying, leading the viewer deeper into the maze. It leaps between imaginary trees, unable to be followed. As you walk around the periphery of the exhibition, you realise that you cannot enter. This does not seem to be a deliberate feeling, or perhaps rather it is entirely. It feels instead like you have entered a game full of invisible walls, impermeable to the body. You are stuck looping around a field of props, chasing a tail that you do not recognise as your own.
An institutional maze cannot be a real maze, due to the necessity for exit routes, fire escapes and access requirements. It is also a facade. When training a scent hound, it is recommended that you drag the duck downwind, in a U-shape, so that the dog cannot easily follow the scent of the body but must instead follow the trail. It is important early on to instil resolve within the hound from young. Otherwise, it will become tired before the end of a real hunt.
When the exhibition is finished and its season is over, all that is left is a wall of waste. Or otherwise, its walls are packed and shipped to form new facades across the globe. Such a modular standardisation feels inherently violent. If it were a film you could imagine that this scene would disappear when the curtain falls (season ends), but it is real life and the phenolic scent of rubber tyres saturates the air. The wall takes on its own scent, masking what lies beyond it. Watching Imhof’s films amongst the rubble; you find you cannot stand still. It feels like a loading screen. What I mean to say is that it’s experiencing something that does not feel like you thought it should — does not feel real.
How I long instead to be a sighthound! To be led by an innate fixation on movement; to mimic their boundless leaps; to be a silken hide stretched over the muscle and bone of the greyhounds on the tracks. To mimic their quiet stillness, and the precision of their footfall over uneven ground.
You see, it is not just the stamina for a single hunt that a scent hound must possess, but rather the ability to continue throughout the season, after many long days of following the scent of death. To fixate on the odour and resist olfactory adaptation, even as the hound’s nose becomes hairless and bloodied. Regardless, the hound must follow its prey. The huntsman fires, hitting the deer just behind its shoulder, and it bounds out of sight. The last thing I hear is the sound of a deer running into water.
To muzzle a scent hound is not to remove the scent, but merely to curtail it: to hide it from oneself, knowing not if it is still there. When muzzled, one can only smell the plate placed before them: allowing for the olfactory filling-in that taste needs, but without the feast. Running my fingertips through my hair, I convince myself I can still smell the fire long after it has died out. Muzzling a sight hound is not the same.
Shame holds a muzzled feeling. It is at once bruised and bloated: a mass in my throat like stone fruit. If you held the stone in your muzzled mouth, I would water it to see if it might grow. Last week I dreamt of fragrant blossoms being formed into entire pavilions — shelter as green and as wide as a home! Little plum, watch how its roots outstretch and reach through the basket, not to bite but to grasp, to reach for the blue sky above. Again the season must end and the trees will shed, and will shame return. But before then we shall gouge on sweet juices, like game between teeth.
On all fours, searching in the dark for a trace of scent, if only that, I reach a river. With fingers sinking into the soft soil on my side of it, and even across the water, I can still smell the trail.
On all fours I arrive at a wall, taller and wider than I can see. If I try to climb the wall, the hounds below would take me for game. I know now what is on the other side. I know not what I want from my future, other than [redacted(walled)].
Recently I have learnt that there is another form that shame may take: the shame of desire. The shame of a hound, rabbit between its jaws, that knows it should not have killed. That knows its desire to be too much… boundless, leaping… a hound with an insatiable appetite.
