The harsh smell of scentless art: On the synaesthetic gesture of hospital atmosphere

Smell has been portrayed as the mute sense, difficult to pin down in words but also hushed for reasons of etiquette. This paper presents, discusses and conceptualises the curious incidence of a surprisingly high frequency of museum-goers who would, unprompted, address smell in order to describe the atmosphere of an art installation by the Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. In more than 20 of roughly 150 interviews, the atmosphere of the artwork was described with reference to hospital smell. Intriguingly, though, no smell was altered curatorially; neither did the artists intend any site-specific anchoring of their work. In this chapter, six analytical steps are taken in order to elaborate on this curious incidence: 1) it considers how olfactory sensations were tied to biographic life trajectories of visitors evoking a general trace of hospital atmosphere; 2) it debates the felt similarity of dissimilar sensation by pointing to the aesthetic attitude nurtured by the museum context; 3) it argues that the raised aesthetic awareness in the museum allows for the atmospheric similarity of the two settings – that of the hospital and of the museum respectively; 4) it elaborates on the possibility of strong smell sensations generated by ‘nonolfactory’ sensation; 5) it renders possible the nonolfactory experience drawing on selected ideas in gestalt theory pinpointing the holistic way of perceiving the environment; and finally 6) it opens for the discussion of the synaesthetic gesture of atmosphere in the museum as holding the potential of moving beyond the separation of senses towards synaesthesia in a lived experience