Jim Drobnick

Introduction: Sensory Aesthetics

As much as it is true that an interest in sensory aesthetics is now blossoming internationally, the hypothesis of a “sensory turn” in the visual arts to account for this phenomenon is something of a misnomer. The full spectrum of experience in the visual arts has always been multi-sensory, both in production and reception. Artists are affected by the empirical world they inhabit and incorporate sensory perceptions in their works. The studio where art is created is often a context of intense material (and therefore sensory) exploration. And exhibition sites demand that audiences use their bodies to perceive, if not also interact with, what is on display. The question is how to theorize this state. The tendency to prioritize the visual over other sensory modes can be attributed to the persistent ideology of modernist aesthetics during the last half-century. While modernism offered a compelling theory for the development of abstract art from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth century, its interpretative framework achieved this by reducing the estimation of many sensorially complex artworks to purely formalist exercises, or by truncating the entirety of artists’ engagements to the production of visual and collectible objects. Habits of modernist aesthetics effectively marginalized the non-visual senses from the narrative trajectory of + Jim Drobnick teaches at OCAD University, Toronto. He has published on the senses and post-media practices in Art, History and the Senses (2010) and Senses and the City (2011). He edited Aural Cultures (2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (2006), and co-founded the Journal of Curatorial Studies. He is preparing a book on smell in contemporary art. jim@displaycult.com