The Stylistics of Olfactory Art as an Idiolect of the Atmosphere
Madalina Diaconu
“How can social critique and emancipatory aims be incorporated into the phenomenology of the atmosphere? How can art spaces be adapted to host exhibitions on olfactory art? It is obvious that far from being complete, the aesthetics of atmosphere need to be set forth and adapted to specific fields of application, including olfactory art.”
Volume Two, Issue Two, “Senses,” Essay
Carleton H. Graves, Coffee plantation showing the berries, Jamaica, Gelatin silver print, 1899. The J. Paul Getty Museum. Source.
The man pictured here shows the plump cherries of a coffee plant while surrounded by some of its last fragrant, white blossoms. The typical coffee drinker won’t usually mull over the process of cultivating these fruits for bean production as they inhale their favorite roast. Likewise, the colonial history of the exploitation of people and land as a result of the coffee trade is typically forgotten in the consumer’s olfactory experience. What can aromas reveal through atmospheric, aesthetic mediums? As Madalina Diaconu illustrates in a pertinent example using Peter de Cupere’s Stay Awake (Coffee Room Installation), olfactory art—when explored through rhetorical terms—can bring materiality and affectivity to the fore. The caption of this photograph, “Coffee plantation showing the berries, Jamaica”, could be read as a synecdoche; the man and berries stand-in for the coffee plantation itself, whereas the plantation workers are not seen. What metaphors can aromatic atmospheres evoke? Diaconu’s insightful pairing of rhetoric and the sense of smell recasts conventional approaches to olfactory art within the philosophical aesthetics of atmosphere.
- The Editors
Both olfactory art, defined as the art that uses odorous substances or alludes to smells, and the aesthetics of atmosphere, which focuses on emotional ambiances, are rather recent phenomena. In 2007, Larry Shiner and Julia Kriskovets claimed that olfactory art “is still in its infancy,”
The Rise of Atmospheric Studies
The past few years have recorded a significant growth in the atmospheric humanities in several disciplines, from literary studies to media, film and theatre studies, and from architecture and design theory to economic psychology. The first theoretical examinations of the atmosphere (Fr. ‘ambiance’), however, were authored by German phenomenologists, and only the English translations of their work produced during the last decade have allowed for the international breakthrough of this approach. At present, it is even possible to diagnose the beginning of a third wave of the aesthetics of atmosphere, after the German and the European wave, characterized by the emergence of cross-cultural approaches.
The phenomenological notion of atmosphere was first used in 1964 by Friedrich Otto Bollnow in a pedagogical context.
Theoretical and Methodological Challenges of the Atmosphere
While atmospheric feelings, mainly a mixture of confused fear and ecstatic entertainment, seem to capture the spirit of our age, the notion of atmosphere poses at the same time remarkable challenges to its philosophical theory. It is not only the polysemic concept of the atmosphere which remains vague, but the phenomenon itself is diffuse. Already Hubert Tellenbach pointed out in 1968 that atmospheres are integral units that resist analytical approaches and push the descriptive function of language to its limits.
In general the theory of atmospheres is confronted with internal tensions and specific paradoxes. For example, the dynamics and situational dimension of atmospheres counter the traditional primacy of the classical ontology of things in the Euroamerican world; atmospheres are more like qualities and “events in which action and effect coincide.”
A Language of the Atmosphere
Despite the recent explosion of atmospheric studies, the possibility of relating the concept of atmosphere to contemporary olfactory art has been overlooked so far. My present approach connects these fields using analogies with the language, which appears to contradict the olfactory experience (capable of affecting a person immediately, by circumventing language and thinking) as well as the atmosphere itself (given the difficulty to put vague moods into words). Indeed, Böhme explicitly criticized the logocentrism of traditional aesthetics, with its fixation on verbal judgments and semantics, and saw in the concept of atmosphere a chance to retrieve a primarily emotional and perceptive subject. Nevertheless, I argue that the complex intertwinement between the atmosphere and olfactory art can be described in linguistic-rhetoric terms without any further general implications. In particular, when I use in the following the names of figures of speech in order to illuminate the aforementioned relationship, I do not make the claim, following Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, that only language can be interpreted and that whatever becomes the subject of interpretation builds a kind of language.
To start with the pleonasm, the word “atmosphere” was initially confined to the aerial layer that surrounds the Earth and it still refers to a gaseous envelope in physics.
Clara Ursitt, Eau Claire, 1992-1993.
For example, Clara Ursitti distilled in Eau Claire (1992/1993) and Self-Portrait Sketch No. 2 (1995) her own body secretions, becoming one of the pioneers who transgressed this social taboo. Transferred again into the register of language, modern Western civilization imposes silence onto body odors : the ideal body is inodorous, and bodily odors are not a pertinent subject of conversation. Ursitti lets the (odorous) body speak, but at the same time she mutes this voice by closing her “essence” hermetically in a bottle. A second example is Peter de Cupere, who authored The Olfactory Art Manifest
Moreover, today the term “atmosphere” is mostly used in a broad sense and refers to a “surrounding influence, mental, or moral environment,”
Let us turn now to the olfactory art that really smells. When artists create atmospheres (in the sense of emotional spaces) with the aid of smells, they basically revive a dead metaphor and converge the two aforementioned meanings of “atmosphere” that usually function disjunctively: in these cases, it is the odor in the air that shapes a specific ambiance. From this perspective, far from being tautological, the atmospheric olfactory art represents a special case of the figurative language of smell. Such an example of reviving a dead metaphor is Meg Webster’s Moss Bed (1986, 2005/2015), which consists of a green layer of fragrant moss. The installation recalls the common wish to lie down on a bed of moss in a deep forest – a symbol of loneliness, deep rest, and clean air – but its artistic context makes this impossible. What remains for the visitor is to inhale the fresh smell of moss (which has to be regularly watered), but this enjoyable experience, too, collides with the idea that the Moss Bed may evoke in fact the grave of an unknown victim buried in the woods.
Fig. 1. Valeska Soares, Fainting Couch, 2002.
An even more penetrating natural smell emanates from Valeska Soares’ Fainting Couch (2002), which is explicitly construed upon a clash of atmospheres and sensory modalities. The image of a minimalist couch made of stainless steel, recalling a table for performing autopsies, interferes with a strong, almost narcotizing scent of lilies – flowers used at burials. These contrasting qualities – the light and cold steel on one side, the heavy floral odor on the other – and their shared morbid reference irritate and enhance the disturbing effect, producing, in rhetorical terminology, a hyperbole.
But Soares’ Fainting Couch is also a synesthetic work as are many other, if not most, objects, installations and environments belonging to olfactory art. For this reason, Shiner preferred to call olfactory works of art hybrids.
Let us take another example: Peter de Cupere’s Stay Awake (Coffee Room Installation), commissioned by the Städtische Galerie Bremen (Germany) for the exhibition “Olfaktor. Geruch gleich Gegenwart” (2021), and exhibited in the @thee.drops exhibition space. While the title conceals an anticolonial message related to the working conditions on African coffee plantations in former Belgian colonies, the subtitle acts as a descriptive functor: the installation is literally a room covered with coffee beans and ground coffee. Peter de Cupere’s work is not merely about coffee, but it transports a meaning through the material of coffee as a medium. At the very opposite of the conceptual “wing” of olfactory art, his Coffee Room (along with his Smoke Room, also displayed at the Städtische Galerie exhibition) epitomizes the symbolic power of materials and illustrates the recent scholarly turn towards the aesthetics of materiality.
Work Titles and Exhibitional Discourses
Looking back, it seems that the same blood, so to speak, flows through the veins of the atmosphere and olfactory art, both sharing the medium of air; olfactory art is in principle based on breathing and presupposes the subject’s corporeal immersion in the physical atmosphere. However, in practice, olfactory art and atmosphere rather behave like communicating vessels, and it is necessary to differentiate between various cases, such as non-odorous atmospheres in art (when ambiances are created solely with audiovisual means), non-atmospheric odorous art (mostly in conceptual art, in which emotional atmospheres and olfactory art behave like “false friends”), and atmospheric more-than-olfactory art. The various concepts of atmosphere and art (olfactory art in particular) are therefore overlapping. When artists evoke moods with the aid of specific odors, an ambiguous situation emerges in which the “aura” of such works can be partly explained by the intricate connection between smells, emotions and environments which have engulfing qualities.
The first one has already been touched upon and concerns the direct use of language and figures of speech in the olfactory art. Unarguably, as Moss Bed and Stay Awake have shown, the titles of the olfactory works often play with the language, like all the other artistic genres. In addition to the titles, olfactory artists integrate language into their works by writing manifests and other programmatic texts, like de Cupere, or by inviting visitors to pay attention to their daily olfactory experiences and describe them, like in Anne Schlöpke’s Smell diary (Städtische Galerie Bremen, 2021). Other artists count on the force of synesthetic associations. Svenja Wetzenstein’s interactive installation Gedanken-Duft-Labor (Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst Bremen, 2021) is presented as “a sort of word-factory”: visitors are invited to combine words, colors, and olfactory representations in order to produce new words and develop surprising combinations of (again imagined) odors. Imagination is also required for interpreting the work of Bernard Lassus, who installed a plate in a park with the words, “If west-wind, chocolate mousse”; one can detect the smells coming from a nearby confectionery factory under certain weather conditions.
Another domain in which analogies with the verbal language are promising regards the spatial arrangement of exhibitions in general. The visitor is invited to follow a certain route to view the displayed works, which are numbered. In L’Invention du Quotidien. Vol. 1. Arts de faire (1980), Michel de Certeau defined walking as a space of enunciation and unraveled its narrative structure; walking “acts-out” the (abstract) place and opens a (lived) space in a similar way to the spoken parole or the speech act that instantiates the system of the langue. He asserts: “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic ‘contracts’ in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an ‘allocution’, ‘posits another opposite’ the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action).”
The Idiolect of the Atmosphere
The concept of idiolect in linguistics refers to the language of an individual and is related to his/her personal expression.
❃ ❃ ❃
Madalina Diaconu is Dozentin for philosophy at the University of Vienna. She is a member of the editorial boards for Contemporary Aesthetics, polylog. Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren and Studia Phaenomenologica. She has authored ten books and (co)edited eleven collective volumes on the phenomenology of senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell and taste, urban sensescapes, sensory design, and environmental philosophy. In 2021 she co-curated the exhibition “Olfaktor. Geruch gleich Gegenwart” with Ingmar Lähnemann at the Städtische Galerie Bremen.
- Larry Shiner, Julia Kriskovets, “The aesthetics of smelly art”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:3 (Summer 2007), 282.
- Larry Shiner, Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
- For example, Max Ryynänen interprets the Indian rasa theory as a proto-aesthetics of the atmosphere, Takao Aoki detects affinities between atmosphere and the preference for vagueness of the Japanese culture, and terminological difficulties arise in translating the concept of the atmosphere into Chinese (Max Ryynänen, “Rasafication: The Aesthetic Manipulation of our Everyday”, The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 2019/1 (Spring), vol. 42, 165–169; Takao Aoki, “On the Aesthetics of Haze or Obscurity”, lecture at the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Belgrade, 24.07.2019).
- Friedrich Otto Bollnow, Die pädagogische Atmosphäre. Untersuchungen über die gefühlsmäßigen zwischenmenschlichen Voraussetzungen der Erziehung, Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1964.
- Hubert Tellenbach, Geschmack und Atmosphäre. Medien menschlichen Elementarkontaktes, Salzburg: Müller, 1968.
- Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie III.2. Der Gefühlsraum, Bonn: Bouvier, 1969.
- Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995.
- Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, München: Fink, 2001.
- Christiane Heibach, „Einleitung“, in Atmosphären. Dimensionen eines diffusen Phänomens, ed. by Christiane Heibach, München: Fink, 2012, 9–23.
- See the book series “Atmospheric Spaces” with Mimesis International. link.
- Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
- Rainer Kazig, Damien Masson, Daniel Siret, “A few words about the International Ambiances Network”. 3rd International Congress on Ambiances “Ambiances, tomorrow”, Sep. 2016, Volos, Greece, 29–36, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01428779/document [31.08.2021].
- This is how Gernot Böhme labeled the new stage of capitalism in which utility (Gebrauchswert) tends to be replaced by design and presentation (Inszenierungswert) (Ästhetischer Kapitalismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016).
- Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles. Spheres vol. I, Globes. Spheres vol. II, Foams. Spheres vol. III, all three translations published with Semiotext(e) in Los Angeles in 2011, 2014, and 2016.
- Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016.
- Tellenbach 1968: 56.
- Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären, Freiburg, Munich: Alber, 2014, 69 [my transl., M.D.].
- Griffero 2014: 5.
- Böhme 2001: 46–58.
- Ibid.: 59–71.
- Cf. also Griffero 2014: 120.
- On the concept of Patheur see Jürgen Hasse, Was Räume mit uns machen – und wir mit ihnen. Kritische Phänomenologies des Raumes, Freiburg, München: Alber, 2014, 45 .
- Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres. Architectural Environmental, Surrounding Objects, Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2006.
- Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, New York: Crossroad, 1992.
- Madalina Diaconu, Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken. Eine Ästhetik der anästhesierten Sinne, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2020, 442.
- Latin for “Do not touch me!”. These words were attributed to Jesus when he met Mary Magdalene shortly after his resurrection and gave the title to several works of the Italian Renaissance depicting this moment. This sentence refers here to the interdiction to touch the exhibits in museums, which inspired among others Marcel Duchamp’s Priére de toucher (1947).
- www.olfactoryartmanifest.com [1.09.2021]
- E.g. “Belle Haleine” in Tinguely Museum in Basel (2015), “DUFT, SMELL, OLOR, … Multiple Darstellungen des Olfaktorischen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst” in Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst in Bremen (2021).
- This information is not in the caption, but is mentioned by guides and reviewers.
- Richard Nordquist, “What Words Are False Friends?” ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/false-friends-words-term-1690852 [31.08.2021].
- “Atmosphere”, Online Etymological Dictionary, etymonline.com/word/atmosphere [31.08.2021].
- “A complicating factor in the case of olfactory art is that most olfactory works are hybrids that either use odors to enhance traditional fine art forms like drama, film, and music or else integrate odors into multisensory installation, performance, or participatory pieces.” (Shiner 2020: 146)
- The synecdoche refers to a figure of speech in which the whole represents a part or vice versa, or the matter stands for the object. This is the case when composers of perfumes are currently called “nez” (French for ‘nose’). This implicit or explicit synesthetic dimension has far-reaching implications for the understanding of visual arts in general, including the non-visual qualities of painting and sculpture.
- Christiane Heibach, Carsten Rohde (eds.), Ästhetik der Materialität, Paderborn: Fink, 2015.
- In this respect Tellenbach calls the atmosphere das Umgreifende (Tellenbach 1968: 56).
- Bernard Lassus, Couleur, lumière … paysage: instants d’une pédagogie, Paris: Monum, Éd. du Patrimoine, 2004.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley. Translated by Steven Rendall. Los, Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988, 97-98.
- Ibid.: 99.
- Ibid.
- K. Hazen, “Idiolect”, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, ed. by Keith Brown (Editor-in-Chief), second edition, vol. 5, Oxford: Elsevier, 2006, 512–513.
- Siegfried Krakauer, Theorie des Films. Die Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit. Werke Bd. 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005, 27–59.
Suggested Reading