Tag Archives: perfume as art

Perfume as art

“I like to think that every perfumer considers his or her work an art, and that a desire to create constitutes the motives for his work, because the perfumer is the first to appreciate the emotional investment he or she has put into the project. Unless freely chosen, collaborations with other perfumers can only do the utmost harm to a project.” – JEAN-CLAUDE ELLENA

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Re-awakening the Magic

The Perfumative. Perfume in Art and Design” was the title of an international conference at Zurich University of the Arts (8-10 November 2018). The conference seeked to open up a dialogue between perfumers, researchers, designers, and artists. Continue reading Re-awakening the Magic

“Scent Culturalizing” the end of an industrial era

Germany will shut down its remaining black coal mines by the end of this year. This plan seals the fate of the sector that powered the country’s industrial revolution and post-war economic miracle. Since its early beginnings in the early 1970s this fundamental shift has had widespread implications the former industrial heartland of Germany. Given its links to human memory smells are medium of choice to work on the end of an industrial age.

Thus, the Art Museum at Mühlheim an der Ruhr takes this opportunity to invite Helga Griffiths, an artist who has been working across the boundaries of science, technology and different media (including the sense of smell) for quite a while. We have previously wrote about her work.

For the upcoming exhibition (6 May – 16 September 2018) Griffiths starts with coal as a material for different transformative processes. Destillation technologies are used to arrive at the essence of coal. A special scent edition will be offered on the occasion of this exhibition (allowing the user to keep memories of this passing industrial age).

Tracing Smell in Art

In the context of upcoming research on the sense of smell in contemporary art practice, Ashraf Osman recently conducted interviews with two key players in the realm: Brian Goeltzenleuchter, an artist based in San Diego, CA, and Robert Blackson, a curator based in Philadelphia, PA. The interviews focused on the norms, processes, and institutions that promote or hinder the use of the sense of smell in art. Continue reading Tracing Smell in Art