Stinks to Heaven
An homage to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Janine Mackenroth & Camilla Nicklaus-Maurer
January 16 to February 22 2025
Opening Reception on January 16th from 5pm to 8pm
Olfactory Art Keller is honored to present Janine Mackenroth and Camilla Nicklaus-Maurer’s homage to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Stinks to Heaven, in the Project Room.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a Baroness, was a German Dada artist working in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1913 to 1923 who was connected to Marcel Duchamp and central to artistic innovations of that time, such as the ready-made. In her essay A woman in the men's room: when will the art world recognise the real artist behind Duchamp's Fountain?, Siri Hustvedt even suggests that the lodestar and origin myth of conceptual art, Duchamp’s Fountain was actually created (whatever that entailed) by the Baroness.
For Stinks to Heaven, the German artists Janine Mackenroth and Camilla Nicklaus-Maurer propose that even if the Baroness, “a wild woman who wore tin cans for a bra“ (Hustvedt), was involved or even responsible for the creation of Fountain, it needed to be "marceld" by the male artist, “a chess-playing genius of pure conceptual mind, a hero of high culture“ (Hustvedt), to become the most influential artwork of modernity. The artists use their homage to the Baroness to create a space for art historical discourse in the form of a heavily scented bathroom.
In the gallery’s Project Room, a letter by Duchamp to his sister Suzanne that contains the sentence “One of my female friends who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture” is projected onto the wall. The space is scented by four individual smells that overlap in the middle of the room to create a constructive olfactory interference. The scents combine the scent palette of American toilet cleaners with toilet cleaners of Germany, the country of origin of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Penetrating and persistent, the supposedly pleasant odors become aggressive and demanding. A typical American toilet bowl is on display, the switch from urinal to toilet bowl underlining the assumption of joint authorship by Duchamp and von Freytag-Loringhoven.
With Stinks to Heaven Janine Mackenroth and Camilla Nicklaus-Maurer have created a heavily scented, immersive art experience that invites visitors to take a fresh olfactory look at art history. The first joint exhibition by the two artists comes to Olfactory Art Keller from streitfeld projektraum in Munich, Germany and has been adapted to its new New York location.
Nail polish in the shade of “R. MUTT FOUNTAIN WHITE” in a bottle that serves as toilet brush is available for purchase.