* Introduction Olfactocentrism Jim Drobnick * Part I: Odorphobia * Preface Jim Drobnick * Polish and Deodorize: Paving the City in Late Eighteenth-Century France Rodolphe el-Khoury, California College of the Arts, USA * The Sociology of Odors Gale Largey, Mansfield University, USA, and Rod Watson, University of Manchester, UK * Immigrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA * Offensive Bodies Alan Hyde, Rutgers University School of Law at Newark, USA * Base Notes: Odor, Breath and Moral Contagion in Ilahita Donald Tuzin, University of California, San Diego, USA * Olfactory-Triggered Panic Attacks Among Khmer Refugees Devon E. Hinton, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, USA, Vuth Pich, Arbour Counseling Center and the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, USA, Dara Chhean, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA, and Mark H. Pollack, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA * Part II: Toposmia * Preface Jim Drobnick * Smellscape J. Douglas Porteous, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada * Vagueness Gridlocked: A Map of the Smells of New York Eleanor Margolies, writer and independent scholar * The Broken Cycle: Smell in a Bangkok Lane Erik Cohen, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel * Fragrant Signals and Festive Spaces in Eurasia Lucienne A. Roubin (author deceased) * The Stench of Power Hans J. Rindisbacher, Pomona College, USA * Environmental Fragrancing Peter Damian and Kate Damian, both authors and independent scholars * Part III: Flaireurs * Preface Jim Drobnick * The New Calculus of Olfactory Pleasure Alain Corbin, the Sorbonne, Paris * Sense and Sensibility Helen Keller, author deceased * The Dog Beneath the Skin Oliver Sacks, author and neurologist, independent scholar * Nostalgia, the Odors of Childhood and Society Alan R. Hirsch, Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, USA * I Know What I Like: Understanding Odor Preferences Rachel S. Herz, Brown University, USA * Part IV: Perfume * Preface Jim Drobnick * Another Memory Marcel Proust, author, deceased * Perfumed Obsession Mandy Aftel, author, perfumer and independent scholar * Accords and Discords: Perfume Reviews Luca Turin, CTO of the odorant design firm Flexitral * Perfumeros and the Sacred Use of Fragrance in Amazonian Shamanism John J. Steele, author and independent scholar * The Dialectic of 'Enscentment': Patrick Sueskind's 'Perfume' as Critical History of Enlightenment Culture Richard T. Gray, University of Washington, USA * Part V: Scentsuality * Preface Jim Drobnick * The Eros and Thanatos of Scents Richard Stamelman, Williams College, USA * Odor di Femina: Though You May Not See Her, You Can Certainly Smell Her Carol Mavor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA * 'The Roots of the Orchis, the Iuli of Chesnuts': The Odor of Male Solitude Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles, USA * Queer Smells: Fragrances of Late Capitalism or Scents of Subversion? Mark Graham, Stockholm University, Sweden * In Noritoshi Hirakawas Garden of Nirvana Jennifer Fisher, York University, Canada, and Jim Drobnick * Part VI: Volatile Art * Preface Jim Drobnick * A Wisp of Smoke: Scent and Character in The Tale of Genji Aileen Gatten, University of Michigan, USA * Eating Nothing: Cooking Aromas in Art and Culture Jim Drobnick, University of Manchester, Canada * Self-Portrait in Scent: Sketch #1 Clara Ursitti, Artist, UK * Digital Scratch and Virtual Sniff: Simulating Scents Mark W.D. Paterson, University of the West of England, UK * Part VII: Sublime Essences * Preface Jim Drobnick * The Breath of God: Sacred Histories of Scent Constance Classen, author and independent scholar * Bodies, Odors and Perfumes in Arab-Muslim Societies Francoise Aubaile-Sallenave, CNRS - Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France * Magic, Perfume, Dream ... Alfred Gell, author, deceased * The Scent of Memory in Hindu South India David Shulman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel * Olfactory After-Death Communications, William Guggenheim and Judith Guggenheim, both independent scholars

Urban areas feature olfactory palimpsests – layers of scent affected by weather, season, and human conduct. Such a palimpsest hints at the mixture of regimes influencing the atmosphere, from municipal policies and neighborhood activities to corporate practices and environmental regulations. Smells evidence the broader sphere of political decision-making, social priorities, competing interests, and varying levels of enforcement and care. The city thus constitutes a prime battleground for olfactory politics. This chapter focuses on artists’ projects that respond to situations in which negative smells portend social and environmental problems. These works not only demonstrate the activist potential within olfactory art – olfactivism – they also exemplify a genre of progressive artistic practice that focuses attention on the risks percolating in the air while employing that very air as the medium for critical interrogation. Through performances, community and relational works, landscape interventions, distillations, and technological hacks, artists since the 1970s have adopted a wide range of means to address the challenge of smells antagonistic to health and well-being. By linking odors to wider issues of power and ethics, I discuss three main olfactivist strategies used to impact and improve scents in the city: abjection, remediation, and empowerment.

'Volatile effects' is a phrase utilized by Walter Pater in his dismissal of architecture from the realm of the aesthetic. The 'white cube,' despite numerous challenges and critiques, remains the paradigmatic architectural form for experiencing contemporary art. Inodorateness is essential to the white cube's ability to assume a neutral status, and to its disassociation from the economic and social worlds. A curious development has been brewing recently regarding the inclusion of smell in the once sterilized realm of the museum. Postmodern museums are defined against their modernist counterparts by virtue of their heterogeneity. That is, they participate in and exemplify the postmodern trend towards ambiguously defined spaces, ones that combine multiple functions and behaviors. Despite the best efforts of architects, urban planners and sanitary reformers over the last two centuries to evacuate all odors from the built environment, it is nevertheless a fact that every place bears an olfactory trace.

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Our Guest Editorial interview this issue is with Associate Professor Jim Drobnick, who reached out and suggested a possible collaboration. ‘Ficto-criticism’ is an assignment in the course he teaches in the Masters in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University, and involves a creative act of writing that subverts traditional ideas of art criticism. Look out for this exciting collaboration in the next issue, where JAWS will host a special section for ficto-critical work!

Attending to Presence: An Interview with Ann Hamilton. An article from journal RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review (Stay Still: Past, Present, and Practice of the Tableau Vivant), on Érudit.

Living display articulates a practice generated at the intersection of the body and exhibition. At root is the recognition that corporeality serves a complex site for the inscription of knowledge and the enactment of cultural processes.' :Human exhibition constitutes a protean genre of cultural activity that raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of display, the porous division between art and life, the conventions of aesthetic engagement, and the problematics and possibilities of presence. As can be seen by the range of articles in this issue (7.2) and the next (8.1) of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, living displays can be located in multiple historical and geographical locations, and can convey a heterogeneity of significations. The quality of the framing may vary greatly, yet living displays share the aspect of emphatic bodily presence. Exhibitions of living people may involve simple pedestals or platforms upon which people are singled out for public viewing, as in the conventions of a circus sideshow. Or they may entail more elaborate installations such as in the construction of villages that simulate particular cultures, whether a pioneer town or Disneyland. Living display may also be mobile and self-validating, as in the practices of dandies, activists and fashionistas. Whether occupying department store windows, museums, arenas, architectural niches, living room parlours or street corners, these practices of self exhibition strategically frame the body for compelling meaning and affect.

Her research focuses on exhibition practices, affect theory, and the aesthetics of the nonvisual senses.Her writings have been featured in anthologies such as

Alcohol has gained a notable prominence in contemporary art, particularly in artists’ bars and other convivial situations at biennials and art fairs. What happens, though, when an artwork features alcohol that cannot or is not meant to be drunk? If the point of drink in contemporary art involves engaging spectators in sensorial, embodied encounters, what remains of the specialness of alcohol when it stays in the bottle? This article examines artists’ multiples and distillation projects where drinking is teasingly possible but downplayed. In these works, partaking is less important than the inebriating affect, in which drunkenness is experienced at a remove, and so infuses the imagination to instigate thought beyond the act of drinking. Even when contained, the intoxicating potential of alcohol has the ability to disrupt norms and aesthetic conventions, as well as to make compelling comments on art and society.

This is the more precise term for what many

The increase in terrorist attacks over the past two decades has generated a proliferation of images distributed across a wide range of media. Tragic scenes of bombings, shootings and their aftermath are screened over and over to the point of hypnotizing viewers by the excessive repetition. Yet not all forms of terrorism lend themselves to visual spectacle. Smell-related attacks—what I call odoterrorism—utilize noxious compounds to inflict harm and inculcate fear. What differentiates odoterrorism from other terrorist tactics is that visual evidence can be slight and so offers little to news media eager for dramatic footage. Odoterrorism, however, not only typifies the actions of malevolent agents to weaponize air, it can also serve as the means for a growing genre of performance using smell. War remains a preoccupation of contemporary artists, and odours are a potent means to introduce disgust, abjectness, decay and sometimes danger. Through a discussion of four olfactory works—by Critical Art Ensemble, Santiago Sierra, Survival Research Laboratories, and Clara Ursitti—this article explores how artists mobilize olfactory-based actions to destabilize normal viewing practices and to convey the vulnerability of the body. Nauseating smells effectively introduce viscerality to shock visitors into a state of intense sensory presentness, and to short-circuit rationalizations about war that gloss over its manifold horrors. Through strategies of simulation, participation, intervention, and post-performativity, these artists formulate pungent critiques of war and violence through its olfactory dimension.

Alcohol has acquired unprecedented prominence in art and performance during the last two decades. Drinking in the art context is more than just entertainment, it is an embodied practice, but with an edge: alcohol’s potency renders it a paradoxical consciousness-altering agent, capable of creating feelings of cordiality as well as releasing chaotic energies. This article analyses the performativity of alcohol from a threefold perspective: drinking as a performance methodology to produce artworks, events and behavioural states; alcohol as an inherently performative substance that is both the product of transformation (fermentation and distillation) and a transforming (intoxicating) beverage for those who consume it; and alcohol as a relational performance medium through its role in lubricating sociality, which is especially manifested in the burgeoning phenomenon of ‘artists’ bars’ appearing in numerous exhibitions, museums and art fairs. By focusing on the performativity of alcohol in recent videos, process-based artworks, performances and participatory installations, this article explores how embodied encounters can combine pleasure with contemplation to address complex social and political issues.

Bodies are missing, but identities hover throughout Mike Nelson’s exhibition, Amnesiac Hide. The “Amnesiacs,” a fictional motorcycle gang invented by the artist, evoke a kind of peripatetic forgetting. The seize-the-moment spontaneity of biker culture bears similarities to the state of amnesia, whereby both are unfettered by the bonds of the past. Members of Nelson’s imputed gang are not shown, but they are conjured by traces discernible in the sensorially charged elements of the installations, which consist of readymades, sculpture, photography, and prints. Despite the “hiding” implied in the title, various presences populate the exhibition through veiled narratives of journeys, autobiography, and mortality. The five works in Amnesiac Hide hint at obscure motorcycle gang activities, lifestyle, and personae. Upon entering Jim Drobnick teaches at OCAD University, Toronto. He edited Aural Cultures (2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (2006), and is co-editor of the Journal of Curatorial Studies. jim@displaycult.com