Notes on Perfume
Artist statement
Galerie Marc Jancou
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.