UBS Arts Forum: Expanding the Notion of Sculpture

This fall, the UBS Arts Forum was devoted to contemporary sculpture. In this context, the program featured a lecture by Claus Noppeney on Expanding the Notion of Sculpture: “Mit der Nase in die Skulptur” and three scent sculptures by Christophe Laudamiel and Christoph Hornetz were exhibited at the Seepark Thun.

The piece Hemingway is inspired by a “short-short story” of the Nobel Prize Winner in Literature: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn”. Les Christophs translated the constraint of a story in only six words into a scent created of six ingredients: pine oil pyrogenated, iso e super, damascenone, ethyl levulinate, heptalactone gamma and ecadienol dimethyl acetate. The composition filled a red tent set up in the garden adjacent to the Lake Thun. The piece Chelsea Hotel Remembrance demonstrated the evocative power of the sense of smell. Laudamiel walked the corridors and apartments of the hotel shortly before it closed permanently. The scent captures specific epochs and serves as a cultural reminder of this once glamorous icon of New York culture. Finally, the red helmet Bucky Balls invited the audience to experience the ephemeral nature of volatile molecules that hardly respect any boundaries.

In his lecture, Claus Noppeney examined the role of the sense of smell in the broader context of the arts. In particular, he discussed how recent developments in olfactory art expand the notion of sculpture. Afterwards Dr. Karolina Jeftic, Director of the Arts Program at the UBS Conference Center Wolfsberg, moderated a panel discussion with Christophe Laudamiel and Claus Noppeney. The audience was eager to understand the artistic potential of the sense of smell. In his farewell speech Dr. Toni Schönenberger, board member at Wolfsberg, identified the sense of smell as a new dimension of three dimensional art and encouraged the audience to think about collecting scent sculptures.

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