The Perfume Counter

I had a dream the other day in which I was at a department store of the Macy’s variety.  One of the workers there invited me to tour an art exhibit (which was later revealed to be more of an experiment than exhibit) in a hidden part of the store. The worker, a woman, led me through the exhibit. The rooms were huge, every wall smooth, dark gray concrete; massive square pillars holding up the ceiling, so high up you didn’t notice it.  The rooms were not uniformly lit, but had focused lighting from sources nearer half-way down the walls.  Each room was filled with artworks very similar to the one pictured, except they were more muted in tone, much rougher in execution, and in a variety of forms: paintings; drawings; small, bas-relief sculptures or assemblages.  These were large pieces hung on the walls in the first couple of rooms; the later rooms held many, many small pieces.  None were duplicates, although they looked anonymously made, as if they were the work of many hands acting to one vision or format.  The pieces in the final rooms were for sale.  They were stacked up on display tables; drawings on paper; small canvases; slabs of wood covered with attachments and pencil marks.  As the woman walked away from me in the last room, I started to wake up and take conscious control over the dream.  I stole one of the drawings, folding it up and putting it in my pocket.  When I opened my eyes I immediately put a name to the exhibit: “The Perfume Counter.”  I also realized that all of the other people attending the exhibit might have been in on the experiment: window dressing— the whole thing staged to see how I would react.  Was my theft of the drawing a monkey wrench in their plans?

The interesting thing to me about the dream is the sheer processing power of the human brain to conjure up such a plethora of images during the semi-conscious state of dreaming.  I was amazed that I put together this little movie in my mind seemingly out of nothing really.

A day or two later I came across a Crate and Barrel catalog with the above picture in it.  It struck me how similar it was to the artworks in the dream: amorphous, meaningless, non-representational, yet pleasant all the same.