The aesthetics of smelly art

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 65, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 273-286

  Shiner, Larry ^a   Kriskovets, Yulia ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT SPRINGFIELD   (United States)

^b Classika Synetic Theatre   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049363506     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00258.x     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. Apart from the occasional use of odors to accompany theater productions, smells only began to turn up in installation and performance art with some frequency in the 1970s. See Jim Drobnick's key essay surveying recent olfactory art and issues in its criticism, "Reveries, Assaults and Evaporating Presences: Olfactory Dimensions in Contemporary Art," Parachute 89 (1998): 10-19.
2. The most careful philosophical analysis of the issue of smell and its aesthetic significance is found in Frank Sibley's essay, "Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics," published in his posthumous Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 207-255.
3. Unfortunately, Sibley does not discuss actual olfactory works of the kind we take as our subject. A brief but excellent recent treatment of the aesthetics of everyday smells can be found in Emily Brady, "Sniffing and Savoring: The Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes," in Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, eds. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 177-193.
4. Much of Carolyn Korsmeyer's Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1999) is also useful in thinking about the aesthetics of smell because much of what she has to say about gustatory taste and the issue of food as art is relevant to olfactory art and perfumes.
5. For the aesthetic issues surrounding the everyday experience of smell, there is Brady, "Sniffing and Savoring." On the aesthetics of Kodo, which involves the ritual passing around of incense, see Yoko Iwasaki, "Art and the Sense of Smell: The Traditional Japanese Art of Scents (ko)" Aesthetics 11 (2004): 62-67;
6. and Aileen Gatten, "A Wisp of Smoke: Scent and Character in The Tale of Genji," in Jim Drobnick, ed., The Smell Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2006), pp. 331-341.
7. For a good overview of the use of odors in the theater see Sally Banes, "Olfactory Performances," The Drama Review 45 (2001): 68-76, especially p. 73.
8. On the attempts to use odors to accompany films and computer messages, see Mark W. D. Paterson, "Digital Scratch and Virtual Sniff: Simulating Scents," in The Smell Culture Reader, pp. 358-370.
9. At the beginning of the twentieth century, some Futurists and Surrealists talked of using smell in artwork, but as Constance Classen points out, few actual works were ever produced; see her The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 110-128.
10. One can see photos of Neto's installation and read an interview with him in Rochelle Steiner, Wonderland (St. Louis: St. Louis Art Museum, 2000), pp. 84-89.
11. See also the review by Jan Garden Castro, "'Wonderland': St. Louis Art Museum," Sculpture 20 (2001): 56-57.
12. Jim Drobnick, "Reveries, Assaults and Evaporating Presences," p. 15. The example Drobnick gives is Gretchen Fausts's moss and velvet cabinet Sachet: Luxury (1989) that used fragrance to create an atmosphere of comfort and reassurance.
13. For a description and photos of Actual Odor, see the Arizona State University Art Museum website at http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/disfunctional/r19. htm. A much earlier conceptual work, Adrian Piper's politically charged Catalysis (1970-1971), involved walking in the street wearing clothes soaked in vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod-liver oil in order to appear in "deliberately confrontational outcast states";
14. Drobnick, "Reveries, Assaults and Evaporating Presences," p. 18. A more recent political work, Rise (2001), by Michael Rakowitz, commented on New York real estate speculation and gentrification by rigging a ventilation duct 125 feet upward to bring the smell of an adjacent Chinese bakery into an exhibition held in a building that had just evicted its Chinese residents and shops;
15. see Jim Drobnick, "Eating Nothing: Cooking Aromas in Art and Culture," in The Smell Culture Reader, pp. 349-350.
16. Koan-Jeff Baysa, "Cleveland Calling," NY Arts Magazine 8, no. 3 (2003).
17. Also see Amy Bracken Sparks, "Scents and Sensibility: The Seven Deadly Sins bottled at CSU Gallery," Angle: A Journal of Arts + Culture (2003), available online only, at www.csuohio.edu/art/gallery/2003.htm.
18. De Cupere has documented his works on his web site www.peterdecupere.com.
19. For a video image of Black Beauty Smell Happening, see www.smartprojectspace.net/works/181.xml.
20. A review of several of his olfactory works by Jos Van den Bergh appeared under the title "PETER DE CUPERE. (Van Laere Contemporary Art, New York City, New York," Artforum International 38 (1999): 152-153.
21. Margaret Morse, "Burnt Offerings (Incense): Body Odors and the Olfactory Arts in Digital Culture," conference paper, 2000. We are grateful to Margaret Morse for sending a copy of her full paper. A briefer version is available at http://www.thing.net/jmarketo/textsby/incense.shtml.
22. The Paris simulation was installed at the Fondation Cartier in 2003. Tolaas has created an archive of thousands of pungent smells and has a special interest in body odor, although she has also simulated the smell of money and has a commercial client list that includes Volvo and Ikea, for whom she created "Swedish" smells; see Susie Rushton, "The Sweat Hog," The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 27, 2006, 150-152.
23. For an excellent discussion of the hierarchy of the senses with an emphasis on Plato and Aristotle, see Korsmeyer's chapter on the hierarchy of the senses in her Making Sense of Taste, pp. 11-37.
24. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), pp. 586-587 [Hippias Major, 298a and 298d].
25. Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 573-575 [De Anima 421a6-422a8].
26. Aristotle, Parva Naturalia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 210 [De Sensu 443b.26].
27. For a recent general discussion see Thomas K. Johansen, "Aristotle on the Sense of Smell," Phronesis 41 (1996): 1-19.
28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1985), pp. 80-81, 279. [Ethica Nicomachea, 1118a10-118b1 and 1176a1 ff].
29. See also David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 59-60,
30. and Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, pp. 18-24.
31. Donald McQueen, "Aquinas on the Aesthetic Relevance of Tastes and Smells," The British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 346-357, quote from p. 349.
32. See also, Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 57-58.
33. There are, of course, differences throughout the tradition on how far the lower senses are from the higher, why they are lower, and on the ranking among the lower senses. Sometimes smell is in the middle above taste and touch (Aquinas) and sometimes on the bottom (Kant). Although John Baillie declared that taste and smell have nothing to do with the sublime, Edmund Burke gave them at least a minor role, a description of "intolerable stenches" might produce a sublime effect. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. liv and 85. Condillac endowed his famous statue with smell first because it "seems to contribute the least to the operations of the human mind," but he then showed how smell, like each of the other senses, can lead his statue to all the higher operations; see Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations (Paris: Fayard, 1984), p. 11. Herder gave a significant role to touch, particularly in relationship to sculpture;
34. see Robert E. Norton, Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1991).
35. A brief and rather uncritical discussion of other eighteenth-century thinkers can be found in Annick Le Guérer, Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 164-178.
36. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 41-46.
37. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), quotes from pp. 39, 138, respectively. It is perhaps no accident that Kant and Hegel were writing during a period historians have described as the beginning of the "de-oderization" of Western society in the name of hygiene;
38. see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1986).
39. Moreover, smell's low cognitive status came to be reinforced by its low social status because hygienic de-oderization and perfuming were primarily available to the middle and upper classes. As Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno noted, "Smell is a sign of lower social strata, lesser races, and base animals"; Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 184.
40. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Random House, 1955 [1896]), pp. 68-69.
41. Edward Bullough, "Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle," in Art and Its Significance, ed. Stephen David Ross (SUNY Press, 1994), p. 465.
42. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 114.
43. On the topic of touch see, for example, David Appelbaum, The Interpenetrating Reality: Bringing the Body to Touch (New York: Peter Lang, 1988);
44. Stephen David Ross, The Gift of Touch: Embodying the Good (SUNY Press, 1998);
45. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses (Stanford University Press, 1996);
46. and Jacques Derrida, On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford University Press, 2005).
47. and Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food (London: Routledge, 1996). The exception to the general neglect of smell in philosophy are the essays by Frank Sibley, "Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics," and Emily Brady, "Sniffing and Savoring"; see note 1.
48. There is a detailed critique of objections to smell as an appropriate aesthetic object in Sibley, "Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics," and relevant discussions in Korsmeyer's Making Sense of Taste, chapters 1 and 2. Other useful critiques of traditional objections include the pages on smell and taste in D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929), pp. 60-68,
49. and the articles by Harold Osborne, "Odors and Appreciation," The British Journal of Aesthetics 17 (1977): 37-48,
50. and John Harris, "Oral and Olfactory Art," The Journal of Aesthetic Education 13 (1979): 5-15.
51. Brady, "Sniffing and Savoring," p. 180.
52. A typical example of the moralist view is Santayana's claim that "the pleasures we call physical and regard as law... are those which call attention to some part of our own body.... There is here, then, a very marked distinction between physical and aesthetic pleasure"; Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 39.
53. Cathy Newman, Perfume: The Art and Science of Fragrance (National Geographic Society, 1998), pp. 35-38.
54. In his summary of the characteristics of smell, Egon Köster points out that the fatigue threshold for smell is quite low. He is at pains to distinguish between "adaptation," the loss of sensitivity as a result of prolonged stimulation, and "habituation," the drop-off of attention due to the monotony of the stimuli. Egon Köster, "The Specific Characteristics of the Sense of Smell," in Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, ed. Catherine Rouby et al (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 31.
55. There is some controversy over Aquinas's reasons for claiming that taste and smell are aesthetically irrelevant. Donald McQueen claims it is because the lower senses are not cognitively complex or able to embrace so great an array of objects as vision and hearing, in his "Aquinas on the Aesthetic Relevance of Tastes and Smells," The British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 346-357.
56. In a spirited reply, Neil Campbell argues that Aquinas' reasons concern a distinction between natural immutation (the body undergoes a physical alteration in receiving the form of a thing) and spiritual immutation (the body remains unchanged as one receives the form of a thing); see his "Aquinas' Reasons for the Aesthetic Irrelevance of Tastes and Smells," The British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 166-182. Santayana claims that the absence of complexity and structure in smells and tastes does "not allow such nice and stable discriminations as does the ear" in Sense of Beauty, p. 69.
57. Robert R. Calkin and J. Stephan Jellinek, Perfumery: Practices and Principles (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), p. 25.
58. Scruton, Aesthetics of Architecture, p. 114.
59. Frank Sibley makes a similar point in "Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics," pp. 224-225.
60. On the intellectual dimension of perfume creation, see Calkin and Jellinek, Perfumery, pp. 4-10.
61. The Edmond Roudnitska quotation is from, L'Esthétique en question: Introduction à une esthétique de l'odorat (Paris: PUF, 1977), p. 70.
62. Alfred Gell, "Magic, Perfume, Dream..." in Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism, ed. Ioan Lewis (London: Academic Press, 1977), p. 26.
63. Sibley, "Tastes, Smells and Aesthetics," p. 234-235.
64. For a review of recent research on the language and classification issue, see Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, pp. 45-116.
65. Köster, "The Specific Characteristics of Smell," p. 28.
66. So far, research has not justified the claim that emotional processing for smell differs radically from processing for other senses, although there is some evidence that olfactive memory may be more sensitive than other sense memories. There is still a great deal to be done in this area despite the 2004 Nobel prize awarded Linda Buck and Richard Axel for discovering the way receptor proteins respond to specific molecules. See the articles on recent studies of smell and emotion and smell and memory in Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, pp. 117-291.
67. These kinds of limitations on smell may be what led D. W. Prall, in an otherwise sympathetic discussion of smell and taste, to conclude that odors give aesthetic pleasure, but pleasures of the simplest sort. In the last analysis, Prall remains with the old tradition running from Plato through Aquinas to Hegel: "it is clear that smells and tastes and vital feelings are not the materials of beauty in the sense that colors are, or sounds ... for they are obviously not the contents of typical aesthetic judgments"; Prall, Aesthetic Judgment, p. 61.
68. See Drobnick's reflections on olfactory arts and the museum in "Reveries, Assaults and Evaporating Presences," pp. 18-19.
69. Nelson Goodman's classic statement is in Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976)
70. and Arthur C. Danto's is in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981), although Danto has continued to refine his position down to the present.
71. See, for example, Arthur C. Danto: The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press, 1986)
72. Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994),
73. and most recently, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
74. Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), p. 99.
75. Quoted from De Cupere's website for the Olfactiano: www.peterdecupere. com/olfactiano.html.
76. Ursitti initially worked with George Dodd in 1994 on a project for creating an olfactory self-portrait that became part of an installation called Chemical Portraits. Ursitti's actual formula for one of her self-portraits in smell can be found in The Smell Culture Reader, p. 357.
77. This should come as no surprise given the fact that, in the absence of an actual flower, some people are unable to identify even such common smells as that of a rose. Classen, The Color of Angels, pp. 154-155.
78. Sibley, "Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics," p. 249.
79. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma: the Cultural History of Smell, pp. 202-203.
80. See also David Howes, "Nose-wise: Olfactory Metaphors in Mind," in Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, pp. 67-81.
81. Moreover, perfumes are highly regarded in some Arab cultures where, rather than wearing scents, fragrance boxes are passed around among groups of women as part of a social ritual. Classen, Howes, and Synott, Aroma, p. 124.
82. Sentiments of the respected perfumer Annie Buzantian quoted in Newman, Perfume, p. 116.
83. As we have seen, Frank Sibley puts perfumes and flavors among the minor arts; see his "Tastes, Smells and Aesthetics," p. 249.
84. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, chapter 1.
85. Christopher Butler, Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music (Oxford University Press), 2005.
86. As a matter of fact, there are several sites on the Internet that do sell independent-label perfumes, and some of the sellers identify themselves as artists and their product as "olfactory art." See, for example, Lynne M. Zaun's site at www.FragranceBySesso.com.
87. It is highly unlikely that Chanel knew anything of Duchamp's readymades of the period 1914-1917, gestures that were barely known in the larger artworld and were not widely discussed until after 1950. Interestingly enough, just a year after Chanel No. 5 appeared, Duchamp created an assisted readymade through his Rrose Sélavy persona by pasting a fictitious label with his or her picture on a Rigaud perfume bottle, but Duchamp seems to have had little interest in what was inside the bottle. See Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 172-175.
88. Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: Century, 1909), p. 76.