Aleesa Cohene, Lovey, 2015
Alice B. Toklas called Gertrude Stein “lovey.” Cohene offers her own portrait as a scent
emanating from a slot cut out of the top of a bust, based on the portrait of Stein painted by Picasso in 1905-06. Her new scent questions the time-sense of smell. Cohene wonders, “how…the mysterious and abstract features of scent open up new possibilities for perception and awareness? … Different scents reach our nostrils at different times so we experience delays in our neuro-response.” By its very nature scent is already a composition comprised of an arrangement of oils, molecules, and chemicals. In the perfume business scent is comprised of top, middle, and bottom “notes,” and this hierarchy of notes determine the sequence in which a scent ingredient reaches one’s nose. In a rather unconventional move, Cohene has composed her scent entirely from middle tones that approximate the scent of a rose, or, better yet, a not-quite-rose since all of her scent ingredients are everything but the actual flower: the scent of dirt, of thorn, of rot, of stem, etc. “Do we suppose that a rose is a rose. Do we suppose that all she knows is that a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” (Objects, 110)
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