The Concept of Conceptual Art:
“You are Here” and Not Here
First Installation
You Are Here: An Olfactory Map ofLife, 2008 (Chicago)1
Description: Six antique wooden boxes sit on top of six old, rusted, metal stools
in the middle of a large hall. Rope is tied between the stools, connecting them.
Wooden boards with arrows painted on them are tied to the rope every 5 feet,
indicating direction and flow to the “map.” Each of the six boxes is labeled:
Birth, Home, School, War, Truth, and Death. Birth is the starting point on the
map and it leads directly to Home. Home then branches off in two directions:
one path leads from Home to School, another leads ffom Home to War. Both
School and War eventually lead to Truth; and Truth flnally leads to Death. Each
of the six boxes has a toe-tag indicating the (fictional) contents, as well as a tube
coming out of the side of the box to which an antique funnel is attached. The
visitor takes up the tube and smells what is inside the box, with each smell
representing what it is to occupy that different Station in life. The smells are
created through a variety of hidden contents not listed in the exhibit description
(for instance, the Death box contains a rotting durian fruit, the School box
contains old library books that were left in a damp basement for several months
before the installation opened, etc.). Small, battery operated fans inside the
boxes blow the smells into the tubing and toward the extemal funnel to keep the
air, and thus the smells, flowing. The visitor navigates through the map and
through life by means of smell—but also, of course, by means of touch and
vision. The tags read as follows:
Birth Contents: “gauze, blood, bleach, hope, afterbirth”
Home (that never was) Contents: “cookies, soap, apple pie,
nurturing, freshly mown grass”
School Contents: “pencil shavings, textbooks, chalk,
conformity, Tater Tots”
War Contents