You Say Vidal.(The Talk of the Town)(Not Vital)(Interview)

The sculptor Not Vital is an instigator of ridiculousness. For a 2004 work, "Camel," he commissioned silversmiths in Agadez, Niger, to cast sixteen smallish orbs, filling each, in a ship-in-a-bottle-like trick, with the remains of an entire dromedary. Vital, who is fifty-nine, spends part of the year in Agadez, where he lives in a mud house. Topping its exterior walls, like barbed wire, are the horns of hundreds of cows, salvaged from the local slaughterhouse. Recently, Vital escorted his latest series of metallic vessels to New York. They commemorate an assortment of famous people--including, it turns out, a long-lost relative--and, thanks to the increasing exigencies of airport security, contain mostly photographs instead of desiccated animals. An empty box, Vital explained, is considered a waste by his Nigerien compatriots.

Vital takes the folkways of his adopted habitat in earnest (when in residence, he wears a talisman), but he is equally beholden to Sent, Switzerland, where his family members, thought to be the descendants of Roman troops, have lived and died since the reign of Tiberius. To assist him in installing a show of new work at Sperone Westwater, downtown, he had brought along three kinsmen: Cla, Corsin, and Andrei, all skilled craftsmen of Swiss stone pine, a wood that, like them, is native to the Engadine valley of the Alps, and renowned for its heady fragrance and its purported ability to lower the heart rate.

As a power drill whined in the background, Vital ducked into a room the size of a sauna, which his relatives had constructed for the show of Pinus cembra. The area was suffused with an herbal scent. "The house I live in in Switzerland was built in 1642, and the sap still creates a strong odor," Vital said. "This show is a lot about smell."

Vital, who was wearing 501s, slung low, and a white short-sleeved shirt, stepped out of the chamber. He pointed out two floor-to-ceiling pillars. "I'm going to cover these in ground coffee," he said. Coffee is a common denominator of Vital's worlds: a product of Africa and a staple of Italy, where, in the fourteenth century, many of Vital's forebears migrated to open cafes and patisseries. (Vital, who plans to build a house on every continent, also has a place in Lucca.) He is partial to less homey aromas as well. "Certain smells that are really horrible I appreciate," ...