But Marks argues that smell is one of the most potent ways to give museum visitors a visceral sense of the past, and to help them remember what they read or saw in an exhibit. Among the scents she designed for the docks exhibition was one inspired by a woman’s memory, in the oral histories, of her dockworker father’s damp woollen coat drying on an electric fire in the nineteen-sixties. Marks thought that the coat might have smelled like her own grandfather’s wool flat cap. He’d been a London cabdriver, and she’d loved it when he would pick her up from school in his black taxi and bring her along to hang out with his fellow-drivers. She’d kept his cap after he died. When Marks shared the odor she’d devised with some local families who’d lived near the docks, one woman found it so familiar and nostalgic that she cried and started excitedly describing the wallpaper in the house she’d grown up in. Marks told me, “If you get a smell and it sparks off a memory like that, you know you’ve got it right.”
There are physiological reasons why smell can trigger memories more effectively than other senses. The olfactory cortex is closely connected to the amygdala, a part of the brain that processes emotions, and to the hippocampus, a key region for memory. Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University who studies smell, told me that it is the only sensory system in which a sensation is produced and consciously experienced in the same regions of the brain where emotions and memories are made. “This uniquely direct neuroanatomical link,” Herz has written, helps explain why “odor-evoked memories” can be so emotionally potent. The flood of memories unleashed by Proust’s madeleine was as much a function of smell as of taste. Marks noted to me that, when we recall things we’ve seen or heard, we are always remembering the most recent time we remembered it, as well, and so the initial impression “dilutes over time—whereas with smell and taste it’s the same primal stimulus again.” Sniffing something that you haven’t encountered in twenty or thirty years—Play-Doh, fresh-cut hay, your grandmother’s laundry detergent—can be as vivid a sensory experience as it was the first time, while also being almost psychedelically nostalgic.
The experience of scent as a whooshing rocket to the past is more recognizable to some of us than to others. Herz explained that, from youth to old age, “females on average have a higher acuity for being able to detect odorants.” That acuity is heightened during ovulation and diminished during the menstrual phase. Herz noted, “There is a lot of information that can be gained from smell about the health and genetic compatibility of potential mates.”
But this can’t be the only reason for this female advantage, since it also holds true pre-puberty and post-menopause. In general, it’s probably been more important socially for women to smell good, and so being good at smelling is a skill they have had more incentive to refine. As Herz pointed out, though, this gender difference manifests only on average; there is “huge individual variation” in sensitivity—and partiality—to specific fragrances. There are male perfumers with exquisitely refined noses and women who can’t tell Irish Spring from an Irish spring.
Smell just matters more to some of us than to others. Certain writers make a feast of odors. Dickens’s novels brim with descriptions of smells, a tendency that reflects what the critic John Mullan calls the author’s “sheer sensory inclusiveness,” but also, perhaps, a particularly olfactory bent. Dickens’s former office boy remembered him as a “man who lived a lot by his nose,” adding, “He seemed to be always smelling things. When we walked down by the Thames he would sniff and sniff.” By contrast, I can hardly remember one olfactory moment in Austen’s novels.
Andy Warhol once observed, “Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting are just not as powerful as smelling, if you want your whole being to go back for a second to something.” He compiled a lengthy digest of scents that he noticed while walking around New York, including “the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth’s” and the “exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms." Warhol felt a special nostalgia for the way the lobby of one movie theatre, the Paramount, in Times Square, used to smell: “I would close my eyes and breathe deep whenever I was in it. Then they tore it down. I can look all I want at a picture of that lobby, but so what? I can’t ever smell it again.”
Tasha Marks’s work attracted my attention because, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with scent—not so much perfume as the everyday smells of the places I’ve lived and the people I’ve loved. As a college student at U.C. Berkeley, I’d sometimes feel homesick for long days of bodysurfing and tidepool-exploring on Southern California beaches with my family; I’d go to the Walgreens on Telegraph Avenue and open a bottle of Sea & Ski—our household’s sunblock of choice—and huff it right there in the aisle. I’ve been known to take an absent loved one’s unlaundered clothing to bed with me—my sister’s when I was a little kid and she went off to college; my husband’s when he was reporting from Sarajevo during the Balkans conflict and I both missed him and worried about him. A few months ago, I came across a letter I’d written to my sister when I was ten and she was eighteen, attesting to my weirdly ardent olfactory habit: “I take your dress to bed every night but it’s loosing it’s sniff. I’m disparate.” Sleeping with such items felt feral, doglike, and immensely comforting.
If I try hard enough, I can summon long-disappeared smells from my past: the damp, slightly sweet smell of mimeographed sheets from elementary school; the chemical orange of St. Joseph baby aspirin. For me, no scent will ever capture the promise of freedom and transgression and youthful reinvention quite like the sweet rot of New York City garbage on a summer night in, say, the East Village. I first encountered that intoxicating smell on a visit in the early eighties, when I was a suburban California teen-ager enamored of New Wave, old movies, and East Coast grit.
In recent years, many museums and other cultural institutions have been experimenting with a nose-forward approach. From 2015 to 2020, Caro Verbeek, an art historian, offered a tour of the Rijksmuseum during which visitors were invited to experience odors suggested by a number of works, including a giant historical painting depicting the Battle of Waterloo. (Among the olfactory elements that were blended to accompany the image: the smells of horses, gunpowder, burnt and moist earth, and “anxiety sweat.”) A 2022 exhibition at the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, offered visitors more traditional aromatic accompaniments—roses, orange blossom, jasmine—for an exhibition of early modern Flemish and northern European paintings, many of which included images of flowers.
A recent Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” had a minimalist set, but, at key moments, scents were dispersed into the theatre to establish a nostalgic mood—heliotrope, vanilla ice cream, frying bacon. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute show in 2024, a smell artist named Sissel Tolaas analyzed molecules extracted from the clothes and accessories on display in order to re-create how they had smelled on their original wearers. A reporter who visited the show for NPR said, “What I am smelling is the scent of a woman’s skin taken from the dress she wore around the turn of the last century. This is a completely different way of experiencing an object at a museum. Smell makes the women who wore these dresses feel present.”
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