Drobnick, Jim

Bio Sketch

Jim Drobnick is a critic, curator and Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at OCAD University, Toronto. A Toronto-based scholar of the senses and of curatorial practice, he co-founded (with Jennifer Fisher) the curatorial collaborative DisplayCult (1998) and the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and served for thirteen years as an editor of Parachute, with research affiliations at the University of Manchester and the National Gallery of Canada. He is the editor of Aural Cultures (2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (Berg, 2006) — the founding anthology of Anglophone smell studies — and has published on the visual arts, performance, curating, the senses and post-media practices. His essay "Volatile Architectures" (2002), written for Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos (eds. Bernie Miller & Melony Ward, YYZ Books), is the wiki's founding text for the olfactory approach to architecture; he later returned to the museum-smell theme in "The Museum as Smellscape" (in The Multisensory Museum, 2014).

Key Works

• *Volatile Architectures* (2002) — the essay that rehabilitates Pater's "volatile effects" for an olfactory approach to architecture and coins heterosmia and aromatopia; originally in Crime and Ornament (YYZ Books, 2002), excerpted in Intimus (2006).
• The Smell Culture Reader (ed.) (Berg, 2006) — the founding anthology of Anglophone smell studies; cited in the wiki via Borch's Architectural Atmospheres (Drobnick's "Eating Nothing: Cooking Aromas in Art and Culture" on odour as consumer power, p. 346) — not yet ingested.
• "The Museum as Smellscape" (2014) — in The Multisensory Museum (eds. Levent, Pascual-Leone & Simon, Rowman & Littlefield) — the essay's later museum-smellscape development — not yet ingested.
• Aural Cultures (ed.) (YYZ Books, 2004) — the sound-culture companion anthology — not yet ingested.
• Co-founder, DisplayCult (1998– ) — curatorial collaborative with Jennifer Fisher for "creative and interdisciplinary projects in the visual arts"; co-founder, Journal of Curatorial Studies.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• olfaction — the olfactory approach to architecture; the neglected aromatic dimension
• heterosmia — his coinage: the postmodern museum's condition of mixed smells
• aromatopia — his coinage for the engineered five-senses totality
• smellscape — the olfactory-environment register his "The Museum as Smellscape" (2014, cited in Brown) titles and his regimes underlie
• multisensory-museum — the exhibit paradigm his museum smell-regimes (anosmia, heterosmia, aromatopia) theorize, built out in Brown's cases
• white-cube — the anosmic paradigm his essay works against
• atmosphere — smell as the neglected register of atmospheric experience
• exhibitionary-complex — the museum institution whose sensory regime his essay reconfigures

Relevance to the Core Research

Drobnick extends the wiki's sensory/phenomenological cluster (Pallasmaa's haptic turn, Böhme's atmospheres) into its least theorized sense, and gives the interior-design cluster a public-realm, institutional case: the museum interior as a sensory-political field. His essay supplies three named concepts (heterosmia, aromatopia, the volatile-effects rehabilitation), the political argument that countering visual primacy valorizes women's domestic labour and the everyday (gender-and-the-interior, everyday-life), and the museum-side counterpart of the wiki's spectacle critique — sensory saturation as marketing quick fix and "circuitous defence of ocularcentrism" as the mirror-image critique. His presence in the wiki pre-dates this ingest: Borch's Architectural Atmospheres already quotes his Smell Culture Reader essay on olfactory power, making him one of the few authors cited before being ingested.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Volatile Architectures (2002/2006)
• Architectural Atmospheres (Borch ed. 2006) — secondary presence: Borch quotes Drobnick's "Eating Nothing" (The Smell Culture Reader, 2006) on odour's documented effects on shoppers' behaviour and spending as evidence of atmospheric-sensory design as "subtle form of power."