Smells of Whitney
by Fernando J. Contreras
Famous Deaths, an art exhibition hosted at Montreal’s Phi Centre, immerses visitors in a sensory experience crafted around the last four minutes of life of either Whitney Houston or John F. Kennedy. Unlike most artworks, this is not the kind you orbit while you scratch your chin and adjust your turtleneck. This work cannot be experienced collectively, the way we huddle around, say, the Venus de Milo. This art installation is a coffin, and to get in you have to sign several release forms.
Death? Me? Sign me up.
The stage room was surrounded by black velvet curtains. In the back, under a spotlight, the two metal coffins glowed like a dream sequence featuring a magician’s blade box. Metallic canisters, tubes, and valves were connected to the boxes. They provided, via an iPad, the scents in charge of evoking the final four minutes in the lives of these American icons.
Should Whitney Houston and John F. Kennedy be paired up next to each other? Of course, if you believe that fame is the greatest achievement possible — a single category in which singing and leading a country are both paths to the same goal.
“What’s the difference? I asked. The two facilitators wore an all-black attire, like Mike Myers in that Sprockets sketch. They looked fresh out of college, which in my book disqualified them from knowing anything about death. Or life. Ironically, this made the experience even more appropriate, as one doesn’t need to be sixty-five years old to feel pushed aside by the new waves of humans overflowing the planet.
“It depends,” the operator said.
“So it depends on how I want to die?”
“Yes.”
“So do I want to die from an overdose or shot in the head?”
“Yes.”
That’s an easy one: overdose. After signing the forms, I laid down on a gurney. The doors opened and I was handed an emergency chord, which I was to pull in case I panicked. The two Sprockets pushed me inside the coffin and tried to close the door, but I was too tall. So I had to bend my knees and fold my legs to the side. The door closed fine. My nose was inches from the top, and I couldn’t fold my arms or shift my shoulders. I took a deep breath as I laid in complete darkness. It was like being buried alive, but without that key ingredient: abandonment. So it wasn’t like that at all.
Then you begin to live Whitney Houston’s last moments through sound and smell. You hear Whitney getting in the bathtub. You hear the splashing, the sparking of a lighter, a wrapper being undone, the opening of a medicine bottle. You will also listen to her singing bits of her famous songs as she sniffs cocaine and inhales other drugs. The sequence is paired with smells of bath soaps, olive oil (she dripped it in her baths) marijuana, fast food, and crack. She sobs and sniffles, then whispers to herself, I can’t do this anymore. And then silence.
Light poured in and I got rolled out. “How was it?” The Sprockets wanted a list of sounds and smells. I recognized some, then they showed me an iPad with the correct order.
“Was that crack?” I asked them. “I’ve never smelled it.”
“Neither have we.” They said.
The vicarious nature of this experiment was not appealing to me for two reasons: 1) I like being me a lot, and 2) without the pain and the memories that led Whitney Houston to overdose, it was impossible for me to connect with her. Besides, why would anyone take pleasure in that?
The JFK experiment was doomed from the setup, since I was aware of an outcome that the President ignored at the time. There was no surprise, so the shots were sounds that I was waiting for, and their bang only signaled the end of my four minutes.
While it’s morbid and opportunistic to turn other people’s tragedies into a ride, it’s interesting to see this exhibit test the limits of art. To understand the work, the visitor must enter it, alone. Once inside, only smells and sounds come into play, making the art transient and its memory harder to recall. Considering that we are so visually oriented, it was refreshing and challenging to try to reproduce a moment in history with two of my duller senses.
Perhaps Dutch artists Frederik Duerinck and Mark Meeuwenoord want to give us, the nobodies, a chance to die tragically and famously. But much like King Tantalus, whose punishment in Hades is to stand in a pool of water, which recedes every time he bends down to drink — the torture of eternal curiosity and desire — , Famous Deaths attempts to bring us closer to something unreachable.
After dying a Whitney Houston death, I had to wait to try the JFK coffin. Less than thirty seconds later an alarm went off, and a man was taken out.
“Are you okay?” The female Sprocket asked.
He came out rattled. “I’m perfectly fine. It just didn’t do anything for me. It’s stupid.”
I was waiting in front of him, so I made sure he saw me crossing my arms and shaking my head. He straightened his shirt, saw what I was doing, and walked away very stately. Before the Sprockets could say, Next! I was already on the gurney. Then they pushed me in. It was time to get shot in the head.
