Interview about Eduardo Kac's solo exhibition, "Aromapoetry and Lagoglyphs," Black Box Gallery, Copenhagen, (May 17th to June 14th, 2013) .
Published in <http://kopenhagen.dk/magasin>, May 24th, 2013.
Friday evening and after an exhausting day's work, the promise of being transported to new olfactory dimensions via Eduardo Kac's Aromapoetry was appealing. Foolishly expecting to be greeted with a complex array of botanical aromas and an atmosphere akin to a wellness spa, it was therefore somewhat of a surprise upon entry to find not only the Black Box Gallery white-walled and fresh-aired, but to be welcomed by a flag and mock Parisienne street sign paying hommage to a fluorescent green rabbit named Alba. This disorientation saw me desperately Googling the definition of the second title of the exhibition—Lagoglyphs. Had the term escaped me my entire life? Should the meaning be obvious? Mistyping the term on the dreaded iPhone, Google says "did you mean..?" and so, accepting that Google could not be of further assistance on this occasion, I followed the magician-like-artist-poet (complete with the necessary white gloves for turning the pages of Aromapoetry) through the presentation of his works. Returning to Black Box Gallery the following week and armed with greater knowledge of Kac's much discussed transgenic work - GFP Bunny, I was ready to decode the fluorescent green bunnyscript and be transported to the idiosyncratic and fascinating universe that is Eduardo Kac.
by Alison Brown
Your exhibition Aromapoetry and Lagoglyphs at Black Box Gallery sees the convergence of two recent yet differing bodies of work, previously exhibited separately. Let's begin by discussing the most recent work, Aromapoetry which you have referred to as "the first book ever written exclusively with smells". What was your inspiration for breaking this new ground?
I am very interested in language and this expanded language that experimental poetry enables. I have a background in experimental writing that goes back to the early eighties so I was interested in pushing that further. I have worked with light for writing, I have worked with digital very early on... and smells are very powerful. They trigger memory, reactions and responses in very particular ways. It's a medium that is extremely volatile, quite literally. It resists printing, it resists being embodied and being transmitted as language does. There's no internet for smells, there are no books of smells... So I think this creates a very interesting challenge. This is about inventing new modalities of olfactory experiences. In other words, re-establishing the basis of an olfactory art. But in my opinion for you to do that, not only do the works themselves have to be interesting, but you also have to have material stability of some kind - which is a contradiction again because aromas are volatile, they fly in the air. So by employing for the first time a very specific nanotechnology, I was able to bond the smells to the page and as a result, allow them to be released very slowly which gives this work great longevity.
Can you elaborate upon the process you followed in the creation of each 'aromapoem'?
It's very subjective in the sense that I developed these works in a very exploratory way. This has no precedence. My goal was to create a book with twelve aromas. I was looking for a good balance between providing an experience that lasts a certain amount of time but that is not too long. So I arrived at the idea of twelve compositions which seemed like a good number, and having that, I wanted within that, variability because I did not want to give the participant... notice that I'm not calling the participant the "viewer"...
Yes, I was going to ask about that. Are they a smeller? A reader? A participant you would say?
Yeah, or a reader. You could use both. So the point was to not give the participant the false impression that somehow one work is part of another or reinforces the other.
It seems to me that our sense of smell is often the 'poor cousin' of the five senses. As I was reading the poems, I noticed that my sense of smell was awakened also to other scents that were present around me. Is this something that you hoped for? That Aromapoetry will heighten the reader's interaction with this neglected aromatic world?
Well, yes and that's one of my goals as well because we humans suppress our ability to sense the world through our olfactory sense. We do that somewhat spontaneously and unconsciously because we are fundamentally visual animals - it's our most acute sense. And of course, if we are for one reason or another deprived of vision, we heighten the other senses. This is a well established fact. We have what McLuhan used to call "Sense Ratio" where vision is dominant. For us, the olfactory sense is associated with the non-human animal and we have a long cultural history that has construed the notion of the non-human animal as 'the other', as 'the different', as 'the inferior'. So the moment that you heighten your ability to sense the world through smell, you're allowing the non-human animal in you to come forward. And once you realise how potent that experience is, it's difficult not to incorporate that in your life.
Let's move on to the second body of work in this exhibition, a series of artworks including prints, murals, paintings, an algorithmic animation and a satellite work created to be viewed in Google Earth. You have entitled this entire body of work Lagoglyphs. Can you explain the meaning of this term and the concept behind the series?
A 'glyph', as we all know, is a mark. 'Lago' is a prefix that comes from a branch of life called the lagomorphs which is that particular segment of lifeforms that include rabbits and hares and a few animals that are somewhat similar. So the lagoglyph is this glyph that resonates with the bunny - the bunny being Alba, the green bunny that I created in the year 2000. So much has been written about Alba that it was about time that she became her own idiom. So it started with the silk screens. The lagoglyph is this unit that I created, this double-sided unit that is green and black. I wanted to create unity through duality because she was green only under blue light, and most of the time she was white. And then I started to produce these near writing-like forms and from that everything evolved in the course of one year. I think that eight-hundred lagoglyphs were created and you can see them all flying in the animation... in a perpetual transformation and circulation of signs.
So how important was it for you to use the specific iconography of your previous and much debated transgenic work GFP Bunny as the reference point for Lagoglyphs? Do you think that the viewer needs to understand this reference to fully appreciate the work or could you have used any other image to transmit this idea?
I would say no and no, meaning that I don't think the viewer needs to know that necessarily because every artwork communicates on so many different levels. There are countless ways that any artwork, not just mine, could be approached. But I don't think I could have created this work with reference to anything else. The reason I arrived at this system is completely bound with the history of GFP Bunny. Really, the amount of response to this work is monumental. I still get mails from children in school discussing it saying their teachers are talking about it in class, philosophers have written countless essays on it, novelists have made her a character in their novel... So because I'm very interested in the notion of dialogue, I thought that because she (Alba) is absent, perhaps her trace on earth, the images that she left could become the generative source for a new type of system. Now to be quite specific about this, the lagoglyph system works in a manner that is the opposite of language. If you consider English for example, you have twenty-six signs from A-Z, so the number of signs is very limited. The number of signs to keep society together is fixed. In other words, meaning is endless, but sign system is limited. The lagoglyph is the opposite. The sign system is endless, and meaning is fixed. So it's always Alba, Alba, Alba, Alba. I'm like that crazy man walking down the street that says the same thing to everyone all the time: Alba, Alba, Alba, Alba.
But is the meaning Alba or is it something further...something about Alba, or is it simply... Alba?
For me fundamentally it is to restate her presence because she is absent. So the fundamental function of the lagoglyph is to restate the presence like when you pick up the phone and you say "Hello?". "Hello" doesn't mean anything in particular ."Hello" only means "I am here, are you there?" Or when you say "Hi" to somebody in the street what does "Hi" mean? Does it mean anything? It only means "I see you, do you see me?". That's what it means. So the lagoglyph basically says "she was here, she lived" - it's like a graffiti if you will - "nature didn't make her, I made her, she was present on this planet, she touched a lot of people's lives in ways that continue to resonate, and here she continues to leave her legacy".