Dermot O'Brien Untitled 11 January - 11 February, 1995
Damask Rose, Wild Freesia, Water Lily, Ocean Mist were the four words on the front of the invite card for O’Brien’s show. Each colour was the same as that of one of the four different small coloured disks stuck to the gallery wall. Each disk was opened to release its own perfume, which was designed to deodorise a room, usually a toilet. They were attached in what might at first seem like a random pattern but as the viewer looked they could work out that it was some sort of code. In actual fact it was a text in brail, the language developed for blind people who run a finger over the raised dots in a book, to read the story. O’Brien’s work could not be read by sighted people or those who were blind. It text, it’s message its meaning lost to all. Yet the work was overpowering as the smell from the various disks, each named as per above created an overpowering chemical melange that did not speak nor smell of nature.
Contemporary art production is characterized by its multiplicity of different formal guises, coupled with a wide range of aesthetic, social and political concerns. There is considered speculation about the signified and the signifier in what amounts to an attempt to clarify the complexities of visual language. The visual form which an object or event is seen to take is usually encoded with some notion, or indeed absence of the signified, that is the content of the work. Yet at a time when much art practice prides itself upon its interdiscipinary and hybrid activity, and a return to the 'body' as locus of work has led to a wide exploration of our sensory faculties, artworks have tended to maintain their reliance on the visual.
Dermot O'Brien's installation at the Museum of Installation follows a path laid out by some of his recent works. In this event, the visual is coupled with the olfactory, creating a sensual hybrid. The exploration of smell as a powerful catalyst to emotional responses should not be seen as obscuring an intelectual framework. Smells, as Patrick Süskind suggests in his work "perfume", may be collected and archived as in the case of objects.
The resulting taxonomic system points to the existence of a hierarchy of value, as we find with all collections. But far from providing the viewer with a comprehensive display of smells, O'Brien selects but a small sample. This does not consist of elegant and exotic perfumes distilled from the laboratory of the alchemist, but instead provides us with smells which are available in the supermarket. In addition, these are usually employed to mask noxious household odours emanating from kitchens, bathrooms, or possibly smoke filled lounges. In short, these are modest odours which do not actually count as smells to be consumed - they are simulations of the absence of smell
Visually the installation manifests itself as a wall of small coloured discs, which are also olfactory carriers. They appear to form a pattern, but actually make reference to written language which remain undecipherable since it is encoded in braille. Both the words and the odours then act as masks for something which remains displaced. Ultimately the content does not live here any more...
Dermot 0'Brien Lives and works in the UK. Untitled, 1995 Installation view: the Museum of Installation, London. Photograph: Edward Woodman.