»Kultur denken. Season 8 Episode 2: OLFAC with Brandon Woolf

00:00:14:

00:00:25: Hi again and welcome back to episode two of Kultur Denken, Thinking Culture.

00:00:31: The podcast of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Art & Design in Linz.

00:00:37: We are in Vienna at this symposium titled Oilfuck, Sensing Across the Humanities, Science And Arts.

00:00:44: Brandon Wolff is an interdisciplinary theater artist.

00:00:51: Both his scholarship and performance practice work to facilitate connections and collaborations between artists, academics and activists.

00:00:59: Concurrent with his scholarship, Brenden's artistic work investigates performances potential as a social practice.

00:01:14: Deodorizing Das Kar Wort In the presentation at The Eufach Symposium, Brendon makes the audience eat garlic and exhale fresh garlic breath directly into each other faces.

00:01:26: Please come, please.

00:01:28: Come all the way forward.

00:01:29: I'm

00:01:30: cutting enough because...I

00:01:31: am going to be distributing this in

00:01:32: a second.

00:01:33: Let's just get few.

00:01:34: That is one varietal.

00:01:35: let me get other varietals

00:01:36: oh yeah.

00:01:37: So we have music and red romanian

00:01:39: Probably would be enough.

00:01:40: A little more.

00:01:44: Just one more clove.

00:01:45: How many of us are here?

00:01:46: About

00:01:46: thirty people?

00:01:47: Yeah okay good i hope everybody

00:01:49: hungry Cool lets chop up.

00:01:53: We have specific pain receptors in the body, and they turn out to be uniquely sensitive to garlic.

00:02:00: Garlic...the

00:02:01: way it's designed?

00:02:02: It initiates a pain response at least in humans but probably in a variety of other mammals.

00:02:08: Now that doesn't mean all pain is bad.

00:02:11: You can have pleasurable pain And THAT IS CERTAINLY TRUE FOR GARLIC!

00:02:15: IT CAN BE IMPLEZANT IF YOU OVERDO IT But certainly on low levels.

00:02:19: it is pleasant Eric Block The world's most renowned garlic scientist, Emeritus.

00:02:26: If you're passing it around we'd love to smell but also taste it.

00:02:29: Pop it right in your mouth!

00:02:30: We need your garlic breath.

00:02:32: Can I smell somebody's breath?

00:02:33: You'll need another one.

00:02:35: Fill the room.

00:02:35: Come on.

00:02:37: Yeah yeah come on.

00:02:37: Let really let it circulate.

00:02:40: You can smell yourself already.

00:02:42: Now maybe if want be a little bit braver Turn toward your neighbor And smell their breath.

00:02:51: Now.

00:02:52: this is something that don't wanna do.

00:02:54: Brendan says, you are not alone.

00:02:56: Everyone has a story.

00:02:57: when someone else's breath overwhelmed them or when someone elses cooking smell got too much for

00:03:01: them.".

00:03:03: This is how Brendan research on garlic guts started.

00:03:06: here is Brendan.

00:03:09: So I lived in Germany from many years In Berlin and i found it extremely strange that I started to notice more And More A kind of let us call it German allergy To Garlic.

00:03:23: I lived in a veggie and a shared flat with A guy who's still one of my closest friends, And i was the cook-in-the-shared-flat.

00:03:31: And then slowly, I started to notice this more and more where you would say friends are going out on a date.

00:03:54: Then they make comment like oh well the person ate garlic at that day but i didn't want order something with garlic we couldn't make it right?

00:04:02: Or somebody will say there's too much garlic in this so can eat it.

00:04:07: So were unfamiliar about that.

00:04:09: No At all.

00:04:11: This is totally not from my cultural background.

00:04:17: In fact when my roommate said this to me, I thought it was a joke.

00:04:21: so just put garlic in the tomato sauce anyway.

00:04:24: Later on...I used to joke with him and say oh no that wasn't an anti-fascist gesture at that point.

00:04:28: And why?

00:04:30: So i got obsessed with this weird sort of German context because thats where were living.

00:04:36: what is going on here.

00:04:38: So started investigating but turns out that allergy goes back into middle ages.

00:04:45: I mean, by allergy.

00:04:46: A kind of Knobloch Hass like a hate-of the garlic smell.

00:04:51: and that garlic was in In The Middle Ages in Germany a metonym for the Jew this sort of dirty Eastern European Jew who smelled like Garlic.

00:05:01: And then i started stumbling on etchings and drawings from the middle ages with Like a sort of hooknosed stereotypical Jewish caricature with a money bag in one hand and then a garlic clove on the other hand, piggy banks that look like this.

00:05:17: Beer songs from the nineteenth century in praise of Garlic—that's Knoblauch Ehrenlied which was just filled with Jewish stereotypes —and also became internalized by Jews who wanted to whitewash or integrate into White Aryan Teutonic society in the nineteenth century.

00:05:41: So this led us to discover all of these documents, including one that was in The Performance Lecture tonight—of the first ethnic rhinoplasty nose job.

00:05:54: so an ostensibly Jewish patient with his large nose is feeling depressed and conspicuous or visible on a society and comes to this doctor not because he has some medical condition but and he asked the doctor to cure his melancholia, right?

00:06:11: So

00:06:12: in this moment that like Jews start... In late nineteenth century starting to ban garlic from their diets.

00:06:18: To kind of integrate into bourgeois sort-of white society they also started cutting their noses off

00:06:25: Vienna, eighteen ninety

00:06:31: eight a medical theater.

00:06:33: I take the liberty.

00:06:38: While the general purpose of rhinoplasty is to cover nasal defects, to eliminate the effect injuries and especially pathologic conditions.

00:06:48: I was recently confronted with a task for transforming perfectly healthy but due its size in shape conspicuous nose into an inconspicuous nos.

00:06:59: briefly this case as follows The end January this year at twenty eight-year old landowner can

00:07:05: you sit up straight look like a land owner please.

00:07:07: thank Like a real bonzo, you

00:07:10: know.

00:07:10: just sit up.

00:07:10: A twenty-eight year old landowner appeared in my office.

00:07:14: He related that his nose was the source of considerable annoyance.

00:07:18: Wherever he went everybody stared at him.

00:07:21: Often he was the target of remarks or ridiculing gestures.

00:07:25: On account of this he became melancholic with drew almost completely from social life

00:07:30: and had the earnest

00:07:31: desire to be relieved

00:07:33: Of his deformity.

00:07:34: should we relieve them?

00:07:36: Come okay.

00:07:37: So look at this is where I need your help.

00:07:40: Okay, it's ok.

00:07:40: so sit back It's gonna be OK.

00:07:42: Just put you head a little bit.

00:07:44: Ok great and now we

00:07:46: just stick the mic right in here.

00:07:49: Turn it up

00:07:50: please.

00:07:51: Ok i promise

00:07:52: that isn't going to hurt.

00:07:54: Hang on one sec.

00:07:54: We need cup.

00:07:56: Don't worry don' t be worried.

00:07:59: Not right against it.

00:07:59: Just

00:08:00: get my fingers there.

00:08:02: You ready?

00:08:03: Here we go.

00:08:13: You're

00:08:15: looking great.

00:08:18: Hang on one second.

00:08:24: She'll everyone you beautiful nose

00:08:27: wonderful

00:08:28: Duncan medical assistant really appreciate it.

00:08:32: He was in a deep psychic depression and I was convinced that the patient could not be helped otherwise But by a surgical reduction

00:08:40: of his nose.

00:08:41: After the operation, the depressed attitude of the patients subsided

00:08:45: completely.

00:08:46: he's happy to move around unnoticed.

00:08:50: His happiness in life has increased.

00:08:52: his wife is glad to report.

00:08:54: It would have been an extraordinary pleasure for me to present the patient himself today.

00:08:58: Unfortunately,

00:09:00: he could not be

00:09:00: persuaded.".

00:09:23: And it turns out, in lots of contexts historically has garlic been used as a sort of means of creating an other.

00:09:32: Italians and Greeks and Turkish guest workers in Germany after the war are now Arab migrants or people with migration background in Europe but also at the turn of the twentieth century in occupied Korea like the Japanese were super sensitive Koreans as Knoblau Fressa, you know garlic eaters or in the Indian context like The High Class Brahmins thought of garlic sort of stinky and smelly for lower classes.

00:10:06: So we started to get fascinated that Garlic is a kind of trans-historical, transcultural phenomenon As means creating others And it had been weaponized on whole number different historical and ethnic contexts.

00:10:20: It's interesting because if you say, You weren't aware of the fear of garlic.

00:10:25: Were you aware?

00:10:26: Of the smell?

00:10:27: or did you think it was something

00:10:29: delicious

00:10:30: comforting

00:10:31: totally delicious not

00:10:32: even being transformed and exhaled?

00:10:36: never occurred to me that there could be any kind of ethnic mapping onto it.

00:10:39: Or like anyone would care Like this?

00:10:42: There are so many other smells That one can talk about.

00:10:47: What is thing with the Garlic?

00:10:50: What do you mean?

00:10:50: You don't want to smell like garlic in front of your boss.

00:10:52: Why could that possibly mean, maybe wanna shower... There are all kinds other social norms right one thinks about but there was something about the garlic just like.

00:11:04: it really threw me off and then I was fascinated at this wasn't a merely German phenomenon.

00:11:10: That they were something that has inspired all of this weaponization, right?

00:11:17: And the sort-of creation of The Other.

00:11:19: Why do you think it is that universal... Do You Think It's Probably The Transformation Process That Is Uncontrollable?

00:11:27: What we learned from Eric Block –the garlic scientist–is that it does have like Allison has a particular chemistry Right.

00:11:34: other Alliums Have it as well.

00:11:36: But at the molecule of Allison that creates that stink which is actually the plant's defense mechanism put a garlic clove on your skin, it'll burn you.

00:11:44: And so the way that molecule works, it penetrates the membranes of the skin in ways other molecules don't and when humans eat it gets into the bloodstream right?

00:11:54: It comes out everywhere in the body Right!

00:11:57: So there is something about when you eat garlic...it comes outta your pores does produce a smell.

00:12:03: I wonder if theres just some interesting chemistry with this particular allium.

00:12:08: Does something to humans that then had all of this meaning coated onto it over time right in different cultural contexts?

00:12:15: You know, It still seems to me just like tell people about this project.

00:12:19: What what do you mean that This is the case with garlic?

00:12:22: I had no idea.

00:12:23: Right, you know I never thought About That he could have this sort of larger Meaning right or that it Could be used as a kind Of weapon or tool To make another.

00:12:30: i also don't think it's only The smell or the transformed smells.

00:12:34: i Think its awesome I don't know, probably also just the fun of eating it.

00:12:40: It's cheap, its delicious

00:12:42: Yeah but i wonder why is such a threat?

00:12:44: In the German context we can surmise that you have all these Eastern European migrating Jews in middle ages who have no money.

00:12:52: and what do they have?

00:12:53: They've onions and garlic.

00:12:55: so there are fear about this migrating.

00:12:58: others Just like the guest workers go oh!

00:13:04: It's the garlic stench.

00:13:08: These are the savages that eat the garlic, but what comes first?

00:13:12: Was the German cuisine already

00:13:13: super bland?

00:13:16: or is it made bland as a means of not wanting to be spicy or different because upset in your

00:13:23: system?".

00:13:24: I don't know.

00:13:25: Do you know if garlic was imported to Germany or was it always here?

00:13:28: That's a great question.

00:13:30: There were moments where we're trying origin roots of how it got here.

00:13:35: It's hard to do, there are a few books that map back the mountains in Afghanistan like pre-humans and then its on spice trade….

00:13:43: I don't know if this is Eastern European Jews who end up in Germany at middle ages or if he was already here?

00:13:49: I'm not able find

00:13:50: out.".

00:13:57: In his presentation Brandon refers to recent garlic cases in the US have been sentenced

00:14:03: In Reinebeck, New York which is upstate New York from where I come from.

00:14:07: From Brooklyn.

00:14:08: just last year a persistent neighbor with quote-unquote olfactory sensitivities complained so much about the smell of garlic coming from the Thai restaurant next door to her apartment that the city closed the restaurants down and The civic ordinance in new york state used deodorize the neighborhood reads

00:14:28: as follows

00:14:30: Section twenty four one forty-one, a mission of odorous air contaminants.

00:14:34: No person shall cause or permit the emission of an odorous air contaminant Or steam or water vapor if the air contaminate or steam or Water vapor causes or may cause detriment to health safety welfare or comfort Of any person.

00:14:50: A similar thing happened in Portland, Oregon on the west coast of The United States not too long ago as well where city code eight point three six point zero four zero noisome odors or vapours reads this follows.

00:15:02: No person shall burn upon any premise Or an any street alley or other place Any animal?

00:15:08: Or vegetable substance which will create and offensive or noxious

00:15:13: odor.

00:15:14: How's your garlic breath you tasting it?

00:15:18: Has it working

00:15:18: way through your system?

00:15:19: Can everyone give like a big exhale.

00:15:24: You think there's similar ordinance here in Vienna, I wonder...I know that one is in Berlin.

00:15:32: Garlic odors of the neighborhood can get you

00:15:35: into

00:15:36: major trouble.

00:15:38: but what jumps out at me right now from New York State is the word comfort.

00:15:43: Where I'm from in New York City, I see uncomfortable people fleeing subway cars all the time to get away from someone's odor.

00:15:51: Um...I've done it my six and a half year old daughter Talia.

00:15:55: we got into the subway.

00:15:56: she goes Daddy!

00:15:56: It stinks in here.

00:15:57: can we go do other car?

00:15:58: Have you done it?

00:16:00: In Uban

00:16:02: on the bus?

00:16:03: Even if you've spent like many of us in this room, some are much of your professional life thinking and writing about these questions.

00:16:09: Did you notice the last time someone's odor made you uncomfortable?

00:16:14: Made you do something!

00:16:16: What did

00:16:16: you

00:16:17: do?".

00:16:18: This is crucial because here Brandon is asking why?

00:16:21: how we other and exclude people because their smell?

00:16:25: what cultural norms following?

00:16:27: where does that othering come from?

00:16:33: In his presentation, Brandon quotes a footnote in Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur where Freud discusses his theory that the olfactory became shameful when we started to walk erect.

00:17:08: We're

00:17:18: gonna get a little bit deeper into this now.

00:17:19: Isn't it interesting that our varied attempts to be less conspicuous, especially in turn of the last century Vienna meet at The Nose?

00:17:30: The thing we smell with and the way we smell.

00:17:34: Those of us looking to fit in, to integrate or be recognized as model bourgeois citizens started taking off our noses just as we eliminated strong odors like garlic from our cuisines And cultural consciousnesses.

00:17:48: Now has anyone reread Das Unbehagen in der Kultur?

00:17:51: Civilization and its discontents recently?

00:17:54: Yeah I was flipping through it more-or less by accident some months ago to find that Freud has this wonderfully provocative and stinky footnote in chapter four about the repression of olfactory stimuli.

00:18:07: So basically, incase you don't remember it goes a little bit like this he makes the argument That The whole process of so-called civilization comes at the expense Of olfaction as quadrupeds.

00:18:17: We were much more reliant on smell for sexual attraction And our noses we're sort of At the same height As our genitals so It's hard To miss.

00:18:24: You know when?

00:18:25: Its right there In front of your face.

00:18:27: but as soon and started walking on two feet, our genitals were plain to see but harder to smell.

00:18:34: And this is how arousal

00:18:35: —this is Freud's theory

00:18:36: anyway— shifted predominantly the visual cues instead of olfactory ones.

00:18:40: Our privates became public and publicly visible... ...and we felt embarrassed for the first time about body odor….

00:18:46: …about our genitals….

00:18:47: ..and about our excretions as we realized that we were naked, dirty & smelly.

00:18:52: Thus emerges The cultural idea of cleanliness A bodily hygiene in social taboos Against strong smells of bodily

00:18:59: fluid.

00:19:00: Civilization should be deodorized, but now that we're civilized were also deeply repressed because I just...I'd probably try to get my kids into every one.

00:19:08: these presentations—just like my two-year old son —were all still totally anally fixated!

00:19:14: So for Freud at least the widespread discontent of sexual repression might better understood as a kind cosmic revenge.

00:19:24: Brandon, thinking about the question how much he himself is othering people for their smell started making or factory art.

00:19:32: So that was sort of one thing we started to investigate.

00:19:35: then We started to think ourselves well How does it work?

00:19:38: Right you know and I was always interested in why smell And taste are kind of forgotten aesthetic categories at The Theatre.

00:19:45: right and Of course there are long histories In the history of performance Art and Barbara Kruschenbach Imlet, who's a performance study scholar has done some really interesting work on kind of remapping of theater history via taste in smell.

00:19:59: Right?

00:19:59: But in mainstream theatre like other than Romeo Castellucci Florentino Holsinga and some others, smell-and-taste aren't really sort of the – it remains a visual and oral medium.

00:20:12: Of course there are histories or performance art that go back to medieval feasts but also early twentieth century avant-garde.

00:20:20: But I was really interested in like, well oh for investigating smell.

00:20:25: might this be an opportunity to think about the use of smell and taste at a theater.

00:20:31: So then we started thinking about, well how does smell work?

00:20:33: How does olfaction work.

00:20:34: What's the science of olfacción?

00:20:35: and what is this...how does garlic actually work?

00:20:38: why does it stink?

00:20:39: And so we start interviewing garlic farmers and garlic scientists and Eric Block who I mentioned tonight.

00:20:44: you know Who spent his entire career trying to understand the chemistry of the allicin molecule which is a molecule that gets created when garlic is chopped or crushed and it functions in all kinds of interesting ways.

00:20:56: But what we realized was even as we did that, if you tried to rescue the garlic from its misappropriation historically by different cultures... We were still mapping all kinds meaning onto it And started asking ourselves What might the garlic want?

00:21:08: So this is a sort-of next phase where we start saying Well can we listen more deeply How does it take light?

00:21:14: how do they take water?

00:21:15: What's science for them?

00:21:20: So we start to think ourselves like, well what if we planted the garlic everywhere?

00:21:24: You know might this be a way of asking in performance our human colleagues more than human world seriously and different kind of ways.

00:21:34: Might it just be playful thinking about why we mapped all these meaning onto garlic or remap relationship with olfactory?

00:21:41: right What If we planted garlic everywhere?

00:21:45: How might we sort of remap olfactorysensorium to one another, the more than human or plant world.

00:21:54: How would that change how we engage in daily life?

00:21:56: The way you walk through street if I plant garlic here and am committed it will have a return too at its can change away go work is going changed where walked with city uh... it's gonna change.

00:22:05: my relationship took how i engaged nature and so of course there's a. this is all quite consciously, a kind of utopian gesture.

00:22:15: But we started to get interested in what if actually tried it?

00:22:19: So we started holding these planting workshops where would literally teach people how to plant and start literally saying hey go plant!

00:22:26: And send us coordinates.

00:22:27: let's remap the city.

00:22:29: Let see what that does one another It does happen be illegal In New York.

00:22:34: I did some in Vienna yesterday right infront of the Freud house had no idea its legal here.

00:22:37: The police drove by looked at me oddly, but they didn't stop.

00:22:42: But I think it was also this question of to say... Of course we're all exposed to different levels of precarity when it comes the police and in

00:22:50: U.S.,

00:22:50: right now there's a very challenging issue.

00:22:52: There are certain communities that are really exposed to ICE Communities-of-Color That have level exposure that i don't have Right?

00:22:59: So I think theres And This Question came up In The Presentation Tonight What Are The Ethics of Asking People To Go Out And Break The Law?

00:23:07: But there was also this sort of question to one another, if we're willing to go plant garlic everywhere and change our relationship with the city.

00:23:16: Is that an invitation to question or relationship authority?

00:23:18: And what else might want do afterwards?

00:23:21: How can I promote alternative networks of solidarity not only against cops but against bigots?

00:23:27: Tonight in performance everyone sit next to each other literally put their nose into someone's mouth after they eat all these garlic.

00:23:35: You could see people sort of disgust, discomfort.

00:23:39: The narrative I was trying to trace there was okay.

00:23:41: well this just happened in real time.

00:23:42: it's super harmless.

00:23:43: what's happening here?

00:23:44: we're in this privileged setting you know.

00:23:46: but how different is this from when you get onto the uban or the subway or the bim right and um there's somebody they are-you run away from their smell?

00:23:54: Is there an opportunity through this performant event to rehearse new modes?

00:24:01: or at least thinking about what you've done unconsciously in the past.

00:24:06: Like, oh well... What if I do smell this stinky person's neighbor next to me and his performance context?

00:24:14: And i do have the guts too like smell the stink of garlic from this persons breath?

00:24:20: Does that toggle something in my about some prejudices?

00:24:31: think about sort of cleanliness and neutral smelling as the way to be in the world.

00:24:36: That's all highly politicized, right?

00:24:38: And there is a history like what it means to assume a set of bourgeois norms that are sort of de-smellified society.

00:24:47: If we embrace or if theater stages an opportunity to be interested in and investigate smell kinds of pathways as we evaluate our own sort-of past behaviors and prejudices.

00:25:09: And might it be an invitation to think about doing something differently next

00:25:54: time?