Clara Ursitti, Bill,
installation, 1998

The Tower Studio sits on top of Queens College at Melbourne University, and to access it you must wind your way through corridors lined with closed doors. Behind these doors lie the rooms and lives of young students. Rarely seen, their presence is noted by the detritus left on neighbouring doors and the distinctive smells of the enclosed young and sweaty.

There is nothing to see on entering Bill. There is no sign of any art, save for a few small cream-coloured boxes sitting on one wall. The smell initially gently arresting as you climb the last few stairs into the studio, suggesting, in fact, that the smell is coming from one of the student’s rooms below. However, on entering the studio there is no doubt of its source. Those innocent looking boxes are emitting, at regular intervals, a thick and constant spray of sperm smell. Invisible to the eye, the smell fills the space and there is no escape unless you leave the studio, choose to stop breathing or take the stairs up to the rooftop garden.

It was recently noted that we may have learnt "more than we have cared to know" about the trials and tribulations of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The monumental amount of detail gleaned during the reporting of this affair has been phenomenal. Transcribed tapes, telephone calls, the dress, the stain and the whole sordid mess have become regular listening in the latter half of 1998. Against this mountain of babble and sorriness, Ursitti has chosen one lone element to confront and tease her audience; the scent of a man, more specifically, the scent of Bill.

High in her tower, overlooking all of Melbourne, Ursitti has been experimenting in quite a scientific manner with the biological and chemical properties of sperm. With a deft cultural twist in the addition of the single word Bill, she has turned her project into the smell of the most powerful man in the world. This brave, yet inherently sensible decision to fill an empty room with nothing but a smell does more than a thousand words or images could ever do. It forces the audience to consider what it is that they recognise and almost simultaneously alerts us to what we can never know. As a result, we have to think about what we have been told.

Ursitti has managed, with humour and simplicity, to comment upon a current affair that has, fleetingly or otherwise, occupied the minds of all of us. The use of the scent of sperm evokes, in a lonely and mournful sense, the actual human act that began it all in the first place. Life’s tough at the top.

Kate Daw
1998

© The artists and
Courtesy of the artist.