Metabolic aesthetics: on the feminist scentscapes of Anicka Yi

ABSTRACT

Artist Anicka Yi has gained notoriety as a smell portraitist due to her collaborations with perfumers and her use of bacteria sourced from women’s mouths and vaginas. This essay explores Yi’s fabricating techniques, her thematic riffs on consumption, and her recycling ethos, to draw out the artist’s concern with three scales of metabolic interaction: the microbial, the interpersonal, and the ecological (re food systems). In outlining how Yi’s art attends not only to care work and cooking but also to metabolic support labor, this essay queers the parameters of reproductive labor to include as well the work of recycling the waste of one body or species into the fertility of another.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• odor
• reproductive labor
• metabolism
• food systems
• Anicka Yi
• feminism
• smell portraiture
• multi-species ecology
• Foxconn
• migration
• aesthetics

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the participants of the Edible Feminisms seminar and the two anonymous readers for invaluable comments and source references. Tony Wei Ling provided copyediting and citation assistance. Big thanks to Anicka Yi for permission to reproduce images; financial support for this article was provided by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Healthy Campus Initiative, and Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The 2015 show was inspired by the theme of “the female figure as a viral pathogen, which undergoes external attempts to be contained and neutralized” (Mendes 2016). The most consistent feature of these tents was their sheltering of other “stomachs” comprised of kitchen tools – a stainless steel pot, a metal bowl, a large glass water jar, a flayed kombucha scobie (or mother) used to brew up fermented drinks.

2. On the gendered dynamics of art institutions, Yi (Rosenberg and Yi 2015) notes that while “there are predominantly female students … very few stick it out. A survival mechanism kicks in … You tone down your femininity [or you] throw some metal on [your pieces to] make [them] more masculine … more powerful.”

3. Acts of eating, according to Tompkins (2012), provide a rich arena to explore not only the consolidation of whiteness occurring through the symbolic (and literal) consumption of (the labor of) bodies of color; but at the same time, the boundary trouble – the threat to integrity of the white national body – simultaneously heightened in these very acts of ingestion.

4. The imperative to mask metabolic smells has particular resonance for those in the Korean diaspora. Nora Keller (2001, 106) recalls that after a classmate tells her that she “smell[s] like [a Korean,” Keller avoids eating kimchee: “I wanted to be an American which meant having no smell. Americans, I learned from TV and magazines, erased the scent of their bodies with cologne and deodorant, breath mints, and mouthwash.” For more on how children of immigrants (dis)affiliate with their ancestral culture by way of gastronomy, see Jennifer Ann Ho’s Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge UP, 2013) .

5. At an artist talk at the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles (7/16/18), Yi expressly claimed that she had departed from humanism.

6. The framework of metabolism stands as a provocation for food studies to widen the aperture of investigation to both other commensal species’ assistance in digestive and cellular reproductive processes and, relatedly, the ablution and self-care which humans undertake to rid themselves of their gamey scents.

7. Here, I take inspiration from Martin Manalansan’s (2008a) work and his astute observations on the “calcification and naturalization” of emotional work and caring labor to cis-gendered women’s domestic service on behalf of others. Manalansan (2008a) also expands reproductive labor qua care work to include as well transgender women of color’s care of the self.

8. As the editors of Eating Asian America assert, for too many decades, the focus of scholarship on Asian American participation in food studies has been on their role in “food service” (Ku, et al, 5) e.g., as deliverymen for takeout, rather than as key “pioneers” (Ichikawa, in Ku, Manalansan, and Mannur 2014, loc., 5810) within the food and fiber system as a whole. This essay extends the important work of Asian American food studies to remark on Asian labor’s crucial role as metabolic support labor in the production of non-ethnically marked staple crops.

9. The illiteracy in olfaction appears specific to Anglophone culture (Diep 2014). Manalansan (2008b, 41) notes that Western discourses set up a dichotomy between aromatic cultures considered primitive and modern cultures characterized by olfactory illiteracy.

10. In turn, we might wonder the extent to which sexualization (as the bottom) haunts intimations of and eradication in commercial products of “cultural odor” – the influential concept coined by Iwabuchi.

11. The bodies (and diets) of “foreign” and dark-skinned populations are still framed as violating civility precisely when their tang or spice becomes perceptible to the white nose. See cases in 2018 and 2019 involving a University of Houston engineering professor’s advice to his South Asian graduate students not to eat too much spicy and garlicky foods at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/21/email-students-u-houston-about-body-odor-raises-concerns-about-how-broach-delicate.

12. Yi (2018) links her scent artistry with a feminist upending of masculine norms as they operate in human modes of apprehending the world and in the art world specifically. “Eyesight and vision,” she claims, “are associated with knowledge, discovery, power and the masculine. Smell is shrouded in mystery.”

13. My approach accords with the framework outlined by food-and-fiber system scholars, who favor a “beginning-to-end perspective of food system analysis” that includes “farming and livestock husbandry, harvest, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consuming, and disposing” so as to enable “the recognition of negative externalities, such as cost of pesticides or water pollution … as well as … changes in [and coercion in] the labor market” (Ichikawa, in Ku, Manalansan, and Mannur 2014, loc. 5789–5800).

14. Reviewers have aligned Yi’s fragranced art with Duchamp’s Belle Haleine (Beautiful Breath) (1820–40), Judy Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom (1972), Clara Ursitti’s Self Portrait in Scent Sketch, No. 1 (1994) and the Smell of Fear (1996). Jim Drobnick (2005, 273) reviews “volatile architecture” – the use of fog and mist as structural element in works such as Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s Blur Building.

15. The perfume is available for purchase online at https://shop.oogaboogastore.com/products/shigenobu-twilight last checked 4/1/19. Yi and Peng intended Shigenobu Twilight (2010) to be the first in a series of scent portraits that would include another on Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of a former Japanese prime minister (Jones 2015, 11).

16. Shigenobu formed the Japanese Red Army that carried out the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre near Tel Aviv killing 24 .

17. In this specific scenario, reproductive labor also includes both the “industrious” labor that provides the infrastructure supporting communication networks – such as Skype and digitized social media – as it also may include the (illegal, criminal) networks that broker stealth passage by which other family members can join one abroad.

18. Because I have not experienced first-hand Skype Sweater as it was exhibited at 47 Canal, I am unclear on whether the work was intended to have a fragrance component. Moreover, because of the poor regulation and hyper-fragrancing of consumer products, the scents Yi incorporates within her exhibits are always being partially masked and alchemically transformed by overpowering Tide-like smells worn by visitors to museums.

19. Reviewer for the NYTimes, Karen Rosenberg (2017), dubbed the scent as “not especially memorable … powdery and faintly sour.” Despite my deep inhalations and bending close to the canisters (for which I was reprimanded by a guard), I could discern no odor in the holding pen.

20. Wall text written by Brinson and Thompson (2017) describes the way in which “the ants navigate a network of pathways that are reflected infinitely across mirrored surfaces, evoking a massive data-processing unit in which their industrious movement embodies the flow of information.”

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for this article was provided by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Healthy Campus Initiative, and Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership.

Notes on contributors

Rachel Lee

Rachel Lee, Professor of Gender Studies, English, and the Institute of Society and Genetics at UCLA, who specializes in health humanities and studies of embodiment. As Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, she heads a multi-year collaborative research project, Chemical Entanglements, involving scientists, community activists, educators, artists, and “canary” storytellers testifying to the health consequences of sub-acute, chronic exposure to toxicants. Lee is the author of the award-winning book, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU, 2014).