The Olfactory Present: By Means of Smoke
The Olfactory Present: By Means of Smoke, socially engaged artwork launched at Linda Vista Community Park. Designed by Brian Goeltzenleuchter, featuring chef Tessa Leibman, and commissioned for the City of San Diego’s Park Social initiative.
Foodways Paintings from The Olfactory Present: By Means of Smoke. Watercolor and gouache on Arches cold press paper, each 89 1/2 inches x 30 1/4 inches, 2022.
Project Notes
The Olfactory Present: By Means of Smoke locates the contemporary (i.e., the present moment) through the sense of smell. The project takes a variety of forms: transcripts of ethnographic interviews, a cooking school, four large format watercolor paintings, and an artist-made cookbook.
Funded by the Park Social grant from the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, this project began with a one-year sensory ethnography of home cooking. Through extensive interviews with four home cooks, artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter researched how knowledge is conveyed through food. The stories told and the recipes shared informed a series of Foodways Paintings (below) which begin to articulate the efforts taken by immigrant cultures to maintain culinary traditions in new environments. Goeltzenleuchter invited the cooks he interviewed to teach a class at the cooking school. At the By Means of Smoke Cooking School, students learned recipes and foodways from members of the Eritrean, Filipino, Iraqi, and Mexican communities.
Working with Brooklyn-based chef Tessa Liebman, Goeltzenleuchter designed the temporal and social form of the cooking school to exemplify choreography and chaos, listening and learning, and working with strangers to solve problems. Every person came away with an artifact--a recipe--that was artist initiated and personalized with their own notes. After each lecture and demonstration, students co-created an object — a nourishing dish made from the recipe — that was consumed on-site by all involved.
Catalog Essay
UP IN SMOKE!
Dorothy Abram, Ph.D.
For many people of the Western world, this expression—up in smoke!—indicates the finality and futility of a particular effort. However, such an interpretation is far from accurate for diverse cultures around the world. Far-removed from futility and worthlessness, smoke actually signals entry into higher and more expansive levels of consciousness.
These experiences of engaging with our diverse local olfactory communities offered today by artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter’s project, BY MEANS OF SMOKE, enliven us, because the contemporary marketplace world of consumption and consumerism trains us to reject intense and unfamiliar smells as unpleasant and impure. Our stores are stocked with foods and products that claim to have no scent while being over-perfumed—but with the “right” sort of synthetic odors. This creates an existential crisis within: that is, it produces a divided sense of Self whereby our embodied understanding of the world conflicts with our real-life experiences. This is what psychologists might call cognitive dissonance on the sensory level. My immigrant, refugee, and first-generation friends suffer with the difficulty of obtaining aromatic substances that define their culture and compose their recipes and rituals.
It creates a crisis of divided identity for all involved.
Goeltzenleuchter, artist, professor, and scholar, has created a compelling aromatic opportunity in BY MEANS OF SMOKE to engage with these concerns through foods, smells, and, importantly, with people from our diverse communities who are adept in these domains. He taps into ancient olfactory practices and ways of knowing. For example, in sacred scriptures of the Judaic-Christian-Islamic traditions, the smell of roasted meat after the Flood secures God’s forgiveness and promise that the human world never will be threatened again with annihilation. The smell of the smoke of the dripping fat of sacrifice is said to have “pleased” God like a favorite perfume that brings back memory, compassion, and reconciliation. Indeed, the etymology of the word perfume refers precisely to the burning (fume) through (per). The evanescence or transitoriness of the smell of smoke, paradoxically, is connected to the timelessness of an unseen world.
Perfume, the pleasing scent, began with smoke: woody resins, herbs, spices, and flowers thrown onto the holy fire to create a column of smoke that reaches into the heavens. Homes and clothes are impregnated with these rich aromas that derive from plants from all over the world and serve to memorialize the encounter with the Divine through aromatic smoke. These are scents that we encounter as we travel through ethnic neighborhoods. As I climb the staircase to the third-floor apartment of my Nepali-Bhutanese refugees, the aromas of their cooking waft through the hallway, becoming more intense as I approach their doorstep. When the door opens, I know that I have arrived to partake with my beloved friends of a sumptuous meal of deep fried sel-rotis, smokey curries, and spicey vegetables.
The honor of being invited to an Eritrean coffee ceremony is fragranced by the smoke of burning frankincense and coffee beans being roasted on a special fire. There is no rush at the coffee ceremony; in fact, the experience is dependent on taking your time, relaxing with your hosts, and breathing in deeply the fragrant scents of the Horn of Africa. A domestic ritual, the goal of this smoldering performance is not to commune with the gods, but to experience a deep sense of community with your group of friends and relations. There is, accordingly, a sort of spirituality created by relaxing to appreciate others’ company in a fragranced setting.
This is what artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter, the creator of this project BY MEANS OF SMOKE, calls the “olfactory present.” Something magical happens when we can encounter the world of the “Other” through smell to enliven our senses in a society that is so sensorially-deprived.
Breathe deeply!
Park Social is a citywide initiative introducing social-specific public art into San Diego’s vast and varied park system. Held for six months in 2022, Park Social engages with a broad and constantly shifting audience of park goers through responsive artistic projects. Visit sdparksocial.com for details.
Credits: City of San Diego; photography by Jeffrey Robins; video by The David's Harp Foundation / Warehouse Media. Artwork by Brian Goeltzenleuchter
