Notes on Perfume

Artist statement

Galerie Marc Jancou

Zurich

1991

 

 

 

 

I.                   Smell is the perfect metaphor for the unrepresentability of “presence”. Smell itself cannot be pictured, no image or

description can claim to be identical to it’s referent. It can only

be “surrounded” by various descriptive categories- memory,

verbal equivalencies, thought images… For Foucault taste and

smell are the negative of universal classification, that which in the

subject resists discourse. Yet smell, like taste (which for Proust

could set off a massive chain of metaphorical substitutions) has

extraordinary evocative powers for the memory.

 

 

 

II.                The “art” here in these photographs is not simply the image 

captured in time, but an event (albeit one that cannot be con-

ventionally “proven”) with the intention being that the viewer

has the possibility to reconstruct a mental idea- Duchamp’s

cervelle – apart from the language of the mental world.