6533b871fe1ef96bd12d1c2b

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Le flair en images, ou comment est donnée à voir la communication olfactive

subject

description

How is the action of sniffing others, which has been depreciated by good manners and aesthetic standards, represented in pictures? In unveiling the theme of social sniffing, this essay aims to track variations around the odour of the body and olfactory communication in Western visual arts. This issue implies to examine the social roles of sui generis as well as artefactual human odours, and to assess figurative arts as a means to unveil historical trends in the forms and functions of the sense of smell in our culture. The corpus of figurative works consulted, far from exhaustive, stretches from medieval and classical allegories of smell to the visual language of perfume advertisements, through genre paintings, satiric caricature and installations of contemporary art. Despite centuries and changing models of society, visual arts have produced, and still produce, formal consistencies which indicate symbolic, sensory, emotional, and attitudinal invariants around human olfaction. Nevertheless, the representations of sniffing-at-others follow the historical trends in the logics of the body and of the society in terms of frequency, content, and realism. They contribute to the dialectics between reality and metaphor, primarity and refinement, and between the best and the worst, often in extreme terms. Finally, depicted more and more realistically, figurations of sniffing are embodied in olfactory installations which raison d’être is the very experience of inhaling the human body odours.