Brown: Stop and smell the corpse flower

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

The line extended out the door into the pouring rain. We stood as one wet mass of humanity waiting our turn for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This wasn’t a flash sale on a secret trove of Nintendo Switch 2s or even a hip new beverage bar selling something called “Hot Snock.” We were all here to see the corpse flower, a gigantic smelly plant that blooms rarely and only for a few days.

Last week, “Frederick” the Amorphophallus titanum, aka “corpse flower,” stopped blooming and returned to the back rooms of the Como’s Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in St. Paul.

But over three glorious days in late June, this odiferous 81-inch plant attracted thousands of visitors to the conservatory’s lush Palm Dome. Last summer, people lined up to see his brother, “Horace.” Jealous that I couldn’t get there at the time, I would not miss a second chance.

Why would I, and so many others, drive great distances to see a plant? Not just any plant, but one that smells like a raccoon died in the air handler last Christmas?

For me, these rare tubers, native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra, represent the transformation, beauty and sheer improbability of life itself. If you think stinky 7-foot wiener flowers that take seven years to bloom are weird, well, check out us skin bags walking around checking our work email at the picnic. That’s weirder still.

When I visited the corpse flower on June 26, I didn’t just want a picture, I wanted to embed the smell into my mind as a core memory — something exotic to spice up my fever dreams. But the line was moving fast. When I got to the front, a worker said I could smell the bloom before she would take a picture of me with the plant.

I leaned to breathe deeply of the fetid flower. But nothing happened. I smelled and smelled, to no avail. Literally hundreds of people were waiting, some looking at me through the greenhouse windows like sad fishermen in the monsoons. I began to fear my nose was suffering performance anxiety. Did I have COVID?

Out of time! I turned. The lady snapped a half-dozen unfortunate full-body shots with my phone before handing it back and sending me along. Only when I began to walk away did the smell hit me. By then, a family of four had taken my place.

My sister Alyssa, who lives in Florence, Italy, got a kick out of this story. Now, people get excited when I say my sister lives in Tuscany, imagining her as some yoga princess food critic. In reality, she was a baker in Duluth before love whisked her away to a small Florence apartment and a job at a grocery store. But she loves the museums, and laughed because what happened to me at the corpse flower is just what it’s like for scads of international tourists looking at Renaissance art.

People spend more time looking at art through the selfie mode of their phones than seeing the art itself.

Is this what we’ve become? Are we no longer capable of reflecting on beauty? If we can’t enjoy art and nature without social media, are we even human anymore? Truly, we must stop and smell the corpse flower.

I had to know how widespread this had become, so I talked to Henriette Huldisch, chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, home of the famous Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture. If you don’t have a spoon and cherry selfie in your phone, you’re probably from Wisconsin.

“It’s fair to say we’re facing a crisis of attention,” said Huldisch. “Social media has been a part of bringing this on. Speaking for myself and our work at the museum, we maintain that art has to be seen in real space. There is a tactile, dimensional experience that you won’t see if you don’t see it in its space.”

Size, dimension, texture, color. Pictures just don’t tell the whole story. But on the other hand, Huldisch acknowledges that public engagement with art is important. And selfies are a way for people to show that they were there to see it for themselves.

“We welcome people taking pictures of our shows and sharing online because it’s a way to spread the word,” she said. “We provide aesthetic experiences for people in the world. Of course, our work is also directed toward people who might want to spend more time to contemplate and slow down. In our current social media culture, this can be an antidote, and it’s important for people.”

It’s hard to predict where art and culture are headed in coming years, but Huldisch imagines more interactive media and sound in public art.

“A lot of people are really intrigued by things they can participate in or respond to,” said Huldisch. “I think that we will see a lot more of that in 20, 30, 40 years’ time. I also think that there will be things people are looking at in space.”

People have been looking at the Mona Lisa for hundreds of years, after all.

The Walker Art Center is currently preparing an installation that will launch Nov. 20 called “Show and Tell,” an art exhibit for kids and their families. Full of interactive experiences, the exhibit will also let adults and children alike sit and think about what they’re seeing.

And don’t forget the corpse flower. Its next bloom will be in 3-5 years, if we last that long.