Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
Smelling, Hearing, Tasting and Touching Art
Convenors:
Fiona Candlin (Centre for Education and Museum Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London,Tel:+44 0207 631 6610. f.candlin@cems.bbk.ac.uk)
Major exhibitions such as Audible Light (2000) and Sonic Boom (2000) indicate the increasing interest in sound-based art, but there are also numerous art practices that involve smelling, touching and tasting (multisensory art). For instance Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion\'s The Most Beautiful Thing (1995) used perfumed cards, Rirkrit Tiravanija art installations have included food and drink for visitors, while Marina Abramovic\'s quartz sculptures are made to be touched. Like much conceptual art, artwork that utilises the non-visual senses questions the assumed connections between art and vision, but it also raises wider questions for art history, aesthetics and for institutional practice. In addition to discussing multisensory art in relation to current theories of embodiment, memory, perception, and cognition, this session will also consider the specific issues concerned with producing, exhibiting, conserving, documenting and consuming art that is made to be touched, heard, tasted or smelled. In particular, the session will ask to what extent does multisensory art re-figure different institutional spaces.
Ontology of the Olfactory
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris (London, England)
Here we will discuss the emotive impact of smell and its relationship to live performance in reference to research we are currently undertaking for a project \'On the Scent\'. Funded by Wellcome Science on Stage and Screen award \'On the Scent\' is a live art installation which investigates the emotive and cognitive influences of smell, particularly how it acts as a trigger for memory and emotions. The project uses the forum of live performance/installation to investigate the potential of smell to trigger memories and emotions, and to discuss the largely unsuspected but nonetheless tremendous impact of the sense of smell on cognitive or \' reasoning\' processes. Because this project takes the form of a live art performance/installation the audience are actively involved and participate in the smell investigation. It is the aim of the project that the audience have increased awareness of the connection between smell and memory. We are collaborating with olfactory scientist Dr Upinder Bhalla, from Bangalore, India and this paper will also discuss the dynamics of art/science/artist/scientist collaborations.
She Loved to Breathe - Pure Silence
Deborah Cherry (University of Sussex, England)
In Zarina Bhimiji\'s She Loved to Breathe-Pure Silence photographic panels were suspended above scattered spices. My paper will consider a range of concerns prompted by this work: issues of spatiality and history engaged by the contrasts between its installation in a gallery and its present place in the photographic collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the problems of the conservation and archiving of sensory art works; the conjunctions and disjunctions of sensory incitations in installations, between vision and smell as well as to the body; the questions of voice and aurality for a piece whose title refers to breathing and to silence. At issue will be the complex relations between a poetics of the senses and a politics which addresses the entangling of racial and sexual discrimination in policies of immigration, questions of migration and diaspora, and the making of identities.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Clara Ursitti (Glasgow School of Art, Scotland)
As an artist I am literally led by the nose in that my practice over the past nine years prioritises the sense of smell and not the visual. I work with biochemist Dr. George Dodd, father of electronic nose technology, to create portraits in scent which are electronically dispersed in the gallery. Although I sometimes employ photography, performance and video in my work, the primary thrust both conceptually and physically, is the sense of smell. I am interested in the animalistic side of human nature, and what is considered taboo or uncivilised. Unlike sight, where we can name and identify colours, there is no language for smell. Consequently we often speak in crude dichotomies of good and bad, suggesting both an aesthetic and social judgement. Here, I will explore this dichotomy and what it excludes. The focus of my practice on the sense of smell has proved most challenging when exhibiting in group shows as it is difficult to contain a smell. In this paper I will present my work in relation to other artists who are working similarly and in the context of some of the issues concerning exhibiting, promoting and archiving olfactory work.
Sounds in the Gallery: Aesthetics, Sensibility, and the New Spaces of Art
David Cunningham (University of Westminster, England)
This paper seeks to investigate critically the emergence of \'sound art\' as a particular cultural form. The paper argues that the emergence of sound art has to be understood in the context of the shift from the specific (modernist) art of painting to a form of \'generic\' art in 1960s Conceptualism, insofar as the insistence on going beyond any purely \'visual\' definition of art has meant that sound has come to have as much claim to legitimacy as \'art\' as any visual form does. One result of this shift is that it strengthens the extent to which the ontological space of art can no longer be restricted to the literal space of the gallery. While, however, such a move beyond the gallery had, in its earlier manifestations, a strongly utopian dimension - seeking a transgression of the institution which might close the gap between art and everyday life - its prevailing contemporary \'effect\', so this paper argues, is in fact a re-confirmation of this gap, as the assignment of art status to other forms and practices requires their insertion within a recreated ontological space of art which transfigures and colonises the \'everyday\' spaces that it then occupies. In the case of sound art, it is therefore argued that there is a need for a properly critical consideration of what happens when sound is brought within this space of art, and, in particular, how this relates to its alternate situating within the \'space\' of music as a \'specific\' art form.
Suspended Expectations: On Performance with Audience
Andrew Stooke (Sherborne School, England)
Recent sonic works by Matsubara Sachiko, Otomo Yoshihide and Tosimaru Nakamura have pared apart the relationship of performers with the devices of performance. We thought of the basic concept and composition together. We still don\'t know what Filament is but it is something from us. Claims made about performances by these sound artists have emphasised the attentive and motionless audience. Through an approach to Bion\'s early work on hallucination I argue that such performances dramatise a louche relation between artist and audience. The sonic and the spectacular content of the performance are displaced; how may the stillness and quietness of the audience be understood? Recognition of the mechanism at work may be found in a reading of Bion\'s account of the patient suffering from hallucinations, \'as if his stream of associations were by way of being a prolonged evacuation.\' The audience appears to be responsible for completing the work but they are manipulated by the performers, who, like Bion\'s analysand, dump part objects away from themselves in the performance space. In other current works of visual art the spectator is similarly held in an eroticised pose orchestrated by the artist.
Fiona Candlin (Centre for Education and Museum Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London,Tel:+44 0207 631 6610. f.candlin@cems.bbk.ac.uk)
Major exhibitions such as Audible Light (2000) and Sonic Boom (2000) indicate the increasing interest in sound-based art, but there are also numerous art practices that involve smelling, touching and tasting (multisensory art). For instance Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion\'s The Most Beautiful Thing (1995) used perfumed cards, Rirkrit Tiravanija art installations have included food and drink for visitors, while Marina Abramovic\'s quartz sculptures are made to be touched. Like much conceptual art, artwork that utilises the non-visual senses questions the assumed connections between art and vision, but it also raises wider questions for art history, aesthetics and for institutional practice. In addition to discussing multisensory art in relation to current theories of embodiment, memory, perception, and cognition, this session will also consider the specific issues concerned with producing, exhibiting, conserving, documenting and consuming art that is made to be touched, heard, tasted or smelled. In particular, the session will ask to what extent does multisensory art re-figure different institutional spaces.
Ontology of the Olfactory
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris (London, England)
Here we will discuss the emotive impact of smell and its relationship to live performance in reference to research we are currently undertaking for a project \'On the Scent\'. Funded by Wellcome Science on Stage and Screen award \'On the Scent\' is a live art installation which investigates the emotive and cognitive influences of smell, particularly how it acts as a trigger for memory and emotions. The project uses the forum of live performance/installation to investigate the potential of smell to trigger memories and emotions, and to discuss the largely unsuspected but nonetheless tremendous impact of the sense of smell on cognitive or \' reasoning\' processes. Because this project takes the form of a live art performance/installation the audience are actively involved and participate in the smell investigation. It is the aim of the project that the audience have increased awareness of the connection between smell and memory. We are collaborating with olfactory scientist Dr Upinder Bhalla, from Bangalore, India and this paper will also discuss the dynamics of art/science/artist/scientist collaborations.
She Loved to Breathe - Pure Silence
Deborah Cherry (University of Sussex, England)
In Zarina Bhimiji\'s She Loved to Breathe-Pure Silence photographic panels were suspended above scattered spices. My paper will consider a range of concerns prompted by this work: issues of spatiality and history engaged by the contrasts between its installation in a gallery and its present place in the photographic collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the problems of the conservation and archiving of sensory art works; the conjunctions and disjunctions of sensory incitations in installations, between vision and smell as well as to the body; the questions of voice and aurality for a piece whose title refers to breathing and to silence. At issue will be the complex relations between a poetics of the senses and a politics which addresses the entangling of racial and sexual discrimination in policies of immigration, questions of migration and diaspora, and the making of identities.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Clara Ursitti (Glasgow School of Art, Scotland)
As an artist I am literally led by the nose in that my practice over the past nine years prioritises the sense of smell and not the visual. I work with biochemist Dr. George Dodd, father of electronic nose technology, to create portraits in scent which are electronically dispersed in the gallery. Although I sometimes employ photography, performance and video in my work, the primary thrust both conceptually and physically, is the sense of smell. I am interested in the animalistic side of human nature, and what is considered taboo or uncivilised. Unlike sight, where we can name and identify colours, there is no language for smell. Consequently we often speak in crude dichotomies of good and bad, suggesting both an aesthetic and social judgement. Here, I will explore this dichotomy and what it excludes. The focus of my practice on the sense of smell has proved most challenging when exhibiting in group shows as it is difficult to contain a smell. In this paper I will present my work in relation to other artists who are working similarly and in the context of some of the issues concerning exhibiting, promoting and archiving olfactory work.
Sounds in the Gallery: Aesthetics, Sensibility, and the New Spaces of Art
David Cunningham (University of Westminster, England)
This paper seeks to investigate critically the emergence of \'sound art\' as a particular cultural form. The paper argues that the emergence of sound art has to be understood in the context of the shift from the specific (modernist) art of painting to a form of \'generic\' art in 1960s Conceptualism, insofar as the insistence on going beyond any purely \'visual\' definition of art has meant that sound has come to have as much claim to legitimacy as \'art\' as any visual form does. One result of this shift is that it strengthens the extent to which the ontological space of art can no longer be restricted to the literal space of the gallery. While, however, such a move beyond the gallery had, in its earlier manifestations, a strongly utopian dimension - seeking a transgression of the institution which might close the gap between art and everyday life - its prevailing contemporary \'effect\', so this paper argues, is in fact a re-confirmation of this gap, as the assignment of art status to other forms and practices requires their insertion within a recreated ontological space of art which transfigures and colonises the \'everyday\' spaces that it then occupies. In the case of sound art, it is therefore argued that there is a need for a properly critical consideration of what happens when sound is brought within this space of art, and, in particular, how this relates to its alternate situating within the \'space\' of music as a \'specific\' art form.
Suspended Expectations: On Performance with Audience
Andrew Stooke (Sherborne School, England)
Recent sonic works by Matsubara Sachiko, Otomo Yoshihide and Tosimaru Nakamura have pared apart the relationship of performers with the devices of performance. We thought of the basic concept and composition together. We still don\'t know what Filament is but it is something from us. Claims made about performances by these sound artists have emphasised the attentive and motionless audience. Through an approach to Bion\'s early work on hallucination I argue that such performances dramatise a louche relation between artist and audience. The sonic and the spectacular content of the performance are displaced; how may the stillness and quietness of the audience be understood? Recognition of the mechanism at work may be found in a reading of Bion\'s account of the patient suffering from hallucinations, \'as if his stream of associations were by way of being a prolonged evacuation.\' The audience appears to be responsible for completing the work but they are manipulated by the performers, who, like Bion\'s analysand, dump part objects away from themselves in the performance space. In other current works of visual art the spectator is similarly held in an eroticised pose orchestrated by the artist.