I haven't even gotten to grief yet, still in rage mode. Watching the election returns, I thought of the Jell-O Art Show. That's what I always do with my heightened emotions, think about art, about how to access them, and how to use them.
My thought was that as always, we will want to act up about misogyny, as women, the eternal source of our rage. We joke about it, but being born in the fifties, I know way too much about how it is to be a woman in our world. To think we as a populace would take a woman seriously when there was a perfectly awful man to choose instead was a silly and foolish dream. What's more, she is a gorgeous, capable, brilliant, flawless woman of color. What she might do if she was handed some power. They'd have to spend all of their energy blocking her. It wouldn't have been fun to watch. We had no choice but to watch them burn her up though. Maybe we'll just have a bonfire on the grass in front of the gallery next March.
My operating theory today is that people are desperately in denial that our gorgeous world we live on is practically dead and they want to just get it over with. Kill the kids first, with their dreams and plans, and next the women, or all of them together, the old people, anyone who can't dominate, because it is the apocalypse and all that matters is the looting and pillaging. We worship domination and it doesn't even have to be real in the least. Why take it seriously? We're at the end of the world.
Satire does help, in a bitter way, in a way that makes things fun for a minute. We hate that we got hopeful once again that we don't indeed live in a racist and misogynistic country. We felt our last bit of hope, some of us. I remember not wanting to get sucked into the hopey changey thing with Obama. I resisted. This time the same. A lot of us remembered the morning in 2016 when Hillary got trashed. We thought maintaining a little emotional distance would help, but of course it didn't.
We feel betrayed, by each other, but really we should realize it was planned this way, when we were put into our media silos where we all got different news, saw different clips, heard different pieces of sentences. What looked like a Nazi only looked that way to some of us. Nobody seemed to remember his diapers, his adderal, his crimes. Well, we did, but we didn't realize how siloed we were.
So maybe we go full on with Hitler this Jell-O Show. Do the Producers. Truly what I would love to do is bring in White Supremacy Culture and address racism. It has never been something we could touch as we are mostly all white old ladies and not qualified. We've done lots of old ladies, from Queen Elizabeth to Paula Deen to Hillary...but we have to try to keep it light and racism isn't funny, especially today, but maybe there's a way. We could certainly do Cultural Appropriation.
I always want to do hard politics in Jell-O. I generally get talked out of it in favor of bathroom humor and the power of silliness...but I always want to. I always want to address the end of the planet, too, although that gets a little compromised by working in a medium made from cow hides. I mean, one less cow, less methane I guess, but somebody probably ate the cow and meat is murder, after all. There's really no purity in Jell-O Art.
Except that there is certainly a purity in art. I'm glad it's where my mind went in my despair and rage. I have a platform...I am a Queen of sorts. I have to use it. I will use it.
Jell-O Art season starts in January, so if you have any thoughts about it, come by and see me at Holiday Market. We need a theme, characters, and some things we can all laugh about. Today nothing seems funny, but it's part of the job to find the humor. It waits for us to find it.
