Spill Your Guts: Laura Pientka's "Royal Flush" at Olfactory Art Keller
Exploring disgust and degustation
Laura Pientka is the latest artist featured at the unique, fragrance-centric LES gallery Olfactory Art Keller. Pientka is a ceramicist; her installation consists of a gilded ceramic fountain in the shape of a large intestine, which continuously drizzles liquid chocolate into a bowl where it circulates in a pool that is viscerally off-putting yet tempting. The cloying smell of melted chocolate fills the small space of the gallery, its decadence both tantalizing and nauseating. On opening night, the artist provided a variety of cut fruits for visitors to skewer with toothpicks and dip in the chocolate fountain, a ritual familiar to anyone whose family received a fondue set in the 70s and dusted it off once a year to enjoy a messy chocolate feast. This nostalgic ritual lends an element of camp to the work and furthers the humorous push and pull between disgust and delight it elicits in the viewer. A sign near the fountain warns participants to eat the chocolate at their own risk. Later in the evening, someone tacked an addendum to the initial warning: “the chocolate is good and I feel fine”.
I did not eat the chocolate.
The gilding on the colon fountain and the pink shag carpet pedestal it’s placed on further the campy elements of the performance. The carpet came from the gallery’s previous exhibition, by photographer Elizabeth Renstrom entitled Basenote Bitch, which nostalgically celebrated late 90s teenage bedrooms and the fragrances found within them. It’s a happy coincidence that they could reuse the carpet for this work as it adds to both the bodily element of the sculpture (echoing our gooey pink innards) and the pastiche of a retro fondue party setting.
A fragrance by Rachel Barfield titled “SHAME” accompanies the sculpture. The fragrance is designed to use bodily notes to explore a similar disgust/delight dichotomy as Pientka’s work. The opening of SHAME was so stomach-churning I had trouble initially identifying the notes I was smelling because I could scarcely sniff it before gagging and I did not want to make the gallerist, Andreas, mop up my puke. At first, I thought the olfactory effect might be something like dick cheese or sweaty ballsack, but when I thought about it later I realized that it’s the smell of infection and decay. It smells like the time my childhood dog rolled on a dead groundhog in the middle of the night then wandered around the house spreading tiny pieces of rotting flesh everywhere in her wake.
I will admit, I might be particularly susceptible to “bad smell” claims in marketing. I am one of those weak-willed pussies who can’t sniff the opening of Secretions Magnifiques without gagging, though once the blood and adrenaline accord dissipates I do find the remaining lactonic/aquatic floral pleasant.
The same disgust-to-delight pipeline found in Secretions Magnifiques is present in SHAME. Once the initial vile notes evaporate, the rest of the concoction is a lovely light musky floral. I get a bit of hyacinth, rose, something a bit stemmy and fresh. It's a bit like Cacharel’s Anaïs Anaïs crossed with Bruno Fazzolari’s Room 237.
The two works in the show complement each other nicely as an exploration of bodily excretions and the taboos that surround them. If you are in the neighborhood this weekend I highly recommend checking out the show.
Hopefully you’re braver than me and you’ll try the chocolate.
“Royal Flush” is on view at Olfactory Art Keller this weekend, from noon until 6:00pm daily through April 21st.
Post-script: I returned on the evening of Friday, April 19th to snap a couple photos for this review and was alone in the gallery with the artist. She encouraged me to try a piece of fruit with the chocolate and I felt like I couldn’t refuse, so I had a single chocolate-dipped grape. I apologized for touching the grapes with my hands when I couldn’t extract one from the bunch using only a toothpick, which in hindsight is quite funny.
More soon <3