Robyn Backen
During the French occupation of the Rhineland around 1760 the French troops quartered in Cologne developed a taste for one of its most famous products. A remedial agent and a perfume, it was alternatively ingested, smelt, or poured over soldiers' bodies. The scent, called after its namesake eaude- Cologne, became even more popular when the troops returned home with large supplies of it after the declarabon of peace. Its powers were to be no less prized by Napoleon who alone secured fifty bottles a month. Its fame comes down to us of course in the ubiquitously titled '4 711 '-itself merely the street number of a manufacturer located on one of the city's new ring roads devised by the French to confound their enemy.
The association of carnality and care is never far removed. The tender memory one has of mothers with bottles of 4711 appearing from their handbags to scent wrists and cool necks in summer on tiny handkerchiefs is also the same one that sees it daubed over lips to ease congestion. Here, aesthetics and beauty mingle with nostalgia and the sanitary. This collusion between the aesthetic and perfumery might seem odd at first. Hegel, after all, had dismissed smell from the proper appreciation of art on the grounds that it merely involved a process of wasting away. Modernity above all preferred to deal primarily with the theoretical senses of sight and hearing. But this has not universally been the case-for Cicero painting and perfumery were equally appreciated as pleasurable aesthetic arts which were grounded in the sensual.
Robyn Backen's installation "verge in rain" folds into three parts. On one wall a saline-drip releases immeasurably small amounts of