Page 39 - Studio International - March 1973

Gerard Titus-Carmel

Notes by John Blake

Virgin Forest / Amazon 1971
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Three extractor fans mounted on chambers were
stationed in an otherwise empty room. Each unit
emitted a separate odour (green wood note, flower
note, stagnant water, humus and dead animal note)
produced by chemical synthesis. The odours
combined to simulate the olfactory space of a forest.

The Great Cultural Banana Plantation 1969
Aachen Neue Galerie
Sixty bananas were erected on sixty brackets
disposed in five rows of twelve brackets projected
from one wall's surface. Fifty-nine bananas were
artificial — thorough facsimiles of the one real banana
which completed the set. Initially, no pronounced
evidence distinguished this model from its 'copies' but
this guise naturally deteriorated; the real banana
began to display the signs of decomposition while the
copies appeared not to change. A relation binding
model to copy developed; what was initially common
to the model and copies had, reviewed on a suitable
time scale, grown to a relationship which both bound
and distinguished two related articles. The history of
the plantation cultivated the dialectical contradiction
`growing apart/growing toward'