IN THE AIR The Smell of Your Practice

IN THE AIR is a practical and experimental workshop investigating scent, odor and atmosphere as extensions of artistic practice. Rather than approaching perfumery as a specialized craft, the workshop asks students to use smell as a temporary foreign language through which to reconsider their existing artistic research.

Smell occupies a peculiar position within visual culture. It is invisible yet spatial; intimate yet difficult to contain; capable of triggering attraction, disgust, recognition and memory before we have found language for what we perceive. An odor can announce something before it appears, remain after it has disappeared, contaminate its surroundings, or fundamentally alter how a space, object or body is read. Cultural historians of smell have shown that odor is never merely physiological: it is organized by social codes, hierarchies and systems of value.

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Across six half-day sessions, students will investigate how scent might operate in relation to an artwork: as atmosphere, extension, contradiction, prologue, epilogue, documentation, residue,
advertisement, counterfeit or misdirection. The workshop therefore treats smell less as an illustrative accompaniment than as a critical device capable of shifting the conditions through which an artwork is encountered. We will smell together, examine histories of olfactory art and artist-designed perfume objects, and consider the cultural politics of fragrance, body odor, hygiene, sanitization and deodorization. The supposedly neutral exhibition space is particularly important here: recent scholarship has described the museum or gallery as an “anosmic cube,” a space whose apparent lack of smell is itself culturally and technically produced.

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The workshop gradually moves from observation toward experimentation. Students collect, cook, infuse, combine and manipulate safe everyday aromatic materials connected to their individual practices. Rather than learning to formulate a conventional fine fragrance, each participant develops an olfactory proposition that translates, complicates or contradicts something essential within their existing research. The resulting scent must then acquire a body: a vessel, name, text, distribution system and mode of encounter. A scent might become a bottle, a leaking object, an atmospheric intervention, a piece of clothing, a commercial, a text, a performance, a tester or a product intended for reproduction. The Lab.Zone concludes with a temporary perfume fair in which each participant launches the resulting “fragrance of their practice.” Presented together as products, sculptures, advertisements and atmospheres, the works ask what happens when an artistic practice is condensed into something invisible that enters the air and, ultimately, somebody else’s body.

Working questions
• What is the sweat, perfume, residue or deodorant of a practice?
• What does the work attempt to mask, sanitize or keep at a distance?
• Can scent document an artwork without representing it?
• When does packaging become sculpture, and when does sculpture become a commodity?

1 Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994),
especially the discussions of odor, social order, power and commodity.

2 Charles Spence, “Scenting the Anosmic Cube: On the Use of Ambient Scent in the Context of the Art Gallery or 

Museum,” i-Perception 11, no. 6 (2020).

• What changes when an artwork is designed to be reproduced 10, 100 or 10,000 times?
• Can an odor contradict the visual reading of a work rather than confirm it?
• What kinds of authorship emerge when artists work with perfumers, chemists, manufacturers,
advertisers and brands?

Learning objectives
• Develop an expanded sensory vocabulary for analyzing artistic practice.
• Understand smell as spatial, temporal, social and political material rather than only as fragrance.
• Test translation between an existing artistic practice and another sensory register.
• Experiment with low-tech methods of extraction, infusion, diffusion, containment and display.
• Critically examine branding, packaging, reproduction and the artist-designed commodity.
• Produce an olfactory proposition and articulate it through text, image, object, performance or moving image.

Historical frame: from perfume object to olfactory artwork
The workshop does not propose a linear history of “scent art.” Instead, it follows several crossings: perfume and readymade; fashion and Surrealism; decay and anti-retinal practice; olfactory research and installation; bodily odor and institutional hygiene; scent as sculpture, archive and commodity. A short opening: Duchamp / Man Ray Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921) offers a concise entry point. Duchamp altered a Rigaud perfume bottle and label, replacing the commercial identity with a punning brand and an image of his alter ego Rrose Sélavy photographed by Man Ray. Perfume packaging becomes portrait, readymade, gender performance, trademark and artwork at once. For this workshop, its importance lies less in establishing an “origin” of olfactory art than in demonstrating how a fragrance object can operate conceptually even before its smell is discussed.

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Case study: Elsa Schiaparelli — perfume as a platform for artists Elsa Schiaparelli offers the richer model for this Lab.Zone because the perfume is not simply an artist’s isolated object: it is embedded in a fashion house, manufacturing, advertising, retail, celebrity, reproduction and a sustained network of artistic collaboration. Schiaparelli launched her first fragrance, S, in 1929. By the 1930s her maison was collaborating across fashion, art, photography, interiors and product design; the house itself describes this period through collaborations with figures including Elsa Triolet, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray.

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Shocking (1937) is crucial. The bottle and packaging were designed by Leonor Fini. Its dressmaker’s-mannequin body was modeled on the curves of Mae West, wrapped with a measuring tape and placed beneath a glass dome. The object therefore binds couture labor, celebrity body,

3 Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921. See The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection record and Museum Tinguely, Belle Haleine: The Scent of Art (2015).
4 Maison Schiaparelli, “History of the Maison,” and “Schiaparelli and the Artists”; see also Rosalind McKever, “Elsa Schiaparelli,” Modern Art Index Project, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2026).

Surrealist displacement, luxury commodity and sculptural display into a reproducible container. The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies both Schiaparelli and Fini as designers of the surviving bottle and notes that artist friends such as Fini and Dalí designed perfume bottles while Ilse Bing and Marcel Vertès contributed perfume advertising.
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The collaboration with Salvador Dalí pushes the question further. Dalí designed Le Roy Soleil for Schiaparelli in 1946–47; Baccarat produced the bottle in a limited edition of 2,000. Its sun, waves, rock and trompe-l’œil face make the vessel operate as a small Surrealist sculpture while remaining a luxury product designed for multiplication. Dalí also created imagery for Schiaparelli’s Shocking Radiance cosmetics line in New York during the Second World War, with works reproduced on labels, packaging and advertisements.
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Schiaparelli is therefore useful for asking a question that remains contemporary: where exactly is the artwork located? In the artist’s drawing? The bottle? The fragrance? The advertising image? The shop display? The edition? The consumer’s dressing table? Or in the entire system that circulates between them? This makes the perfume object a productive model for students whose practices already move between installation, performance, film, writing, sculpture, design and public presentation.