May – June 2010
1133 Broadway
New York City
In this site-specific installation, Revolution!, Lisa Kirk addresses the marketing of transgressive political and social practices through her development of a fragrance and an exploration of the system around its production and manufacturing. After conducting interviews with journalists, activists, and political radicals, Kirk developed a fragrance, Revolution!, based on their olfactory memories of insurgency. The resulting solution contains the odor of smoke, gasoline, tear gas, burnt rubber and decaying flesh.
This installation is two separate windows. In a large window, Kirk displays the imagined production site of the fragrance, a makeshift laboratory and anarchist hideout. The upside-down lab suggests the chaos of a terrorist hideout. The entire installation is inverted, with the ceiling on the floor and vice versa, suggesting the complete upending of our current political and social system.The smaller window features an illuminated, ransacked store display where the fragrance is displayed as a precious metal pipe bomb.
Informed by contemporary reality television culture, Kirk’s work is intentionally infused with an overflow of symbols that imply something “real” is happening; an actual fragrance, an existing advertisement, and a physical display case and lab. The artist inverts our perception of reality and forces us to confront notions of authenticity.
This installation was made possible with the support of Kew Management.