Belgian artist Peter de Cupere has decided that what the world needs is to embrace the stink. And the stinkier the better, because just why not? Body odor can surely be art, right? But of course, if you can produce it from an orifice, someone might as well smell it and remark on how ingenious it is that you, a human being, can produce a smell for mass consumption.
Art. It’s all about giving it your all, with your armpits. No! With your thigh-sweat…No! Well, with something.
Yes, it is said De Cupere creates smell paintings, smell installations, smell moves and smell performances that toy with the relationship between scent and sight. The Huffington Post reports that De Cupere’s works reminds them of the “poetic powers resting in our nostrils. Scent, more than any other sense, directly affects our limbic systems and prompts a visceral, almost uncontrollable reaction.” This is very true. However, that doesn’t mean I want the smell of a taxi cab at 2am on a Friday night thrust at me in an art piece. Regardless, De Cupere believes there are little stinky fetishists out there who would maybe curl up in it and rub their faces on it like a cat to nip. Or maybe he’s the only one running around with the notion of trapping sulfuric emissions and calling it, “Flatulence: A Study.”
In “Sweat,” De Cupere collected the sweat of dancers wearing plastic suits as they performed a choreographed dance. He then bottled the sweat and applied it to a wall at the dance company’s home base, where it is open for visitors to smell. Okay, well, this sounds like being trapped in the ass panel of a leotard and then asked to comment on the aroma. Be we probably shouldn’t judge. It could be terribly poignant, thrilling and decidedly cathartic to smell another person’s excretions. We may have no idea what we’re missing.
In order to provide some reasoning behind his discoveries, the work draws off of “De Cupere’s recurring fascination with the social guidelines regarding the shame of our natural body odors and the precautions we take to eradicate sweat and stench.” Why do we think De Cupere may be a bit of a smelly guy in person? Nonetheless, people of the world, you should totally open your mind and go smell some funk.
Check out the rest of his art featured in the slideshow of the HuffPo article. Don’t ask us about the strawberries.
