  |
Royal-pine scented car fresheners used in an installation by East Village artist, Karla Roberts. (Courtesy Sarah Lewis) |
| Ironically, the installation at the corner of East Sixth Street
and Cooper Square evokes the value of a real forest, by offering
an intrusive synthetic one. by Craig Kellogg New York City residents have long complained that the East Village smells--and not necessarily like a pine forest. To remind them that there's still a little nature left somewhere on Earth, artist Karla Roberts and three assistants spent one bright morning last spring hanging 1,250 pine-scented paperboard trees on a chain-link fence. Ironically, the installation at the corner of East Sixth Street and Cooper Square evokes the value of a real forest by offering an intrusive, synthetic alternative. Roberts is not the first to exploit the iconography of the 99-cent trees. Brooke Shields' sitcom character recently wore one around her neck when her shower was on the fritz, and production designers for the 1995 movie Seven dangled hundreds of them from the ceiling of a room that held a fake corpse. While the movie designers specified unscented trees to keep the air on the set breathable, Roberts says a powerful odor was important to the success of her outdoor installation. The Royal Pine-scented trees she used, which were donated by the Car-Freshner Corporation, have been manufactured since 1952, and they are still strong sellers. (In fact, a third of Roberts' forest was quickly stolen.) But pine is not the company's most popular odor, as the artist learned firsthand from a woman with little patience for a paper forest in the urban landscape. Taken aback by the overwhelming chemical smell--closely associated with the stale air in taxicabs--the woman rasped: "How about using the Vanillaroma next time?" |
Keywords:
pine fresh, forest, paperboard trees
