Politics in Person

 

Ack. I just realized that we are scheduled to have the Jell-O Art Show the same day as No Kings III, which is likely to be a huge demonstration and may impact people's ability and interest in making silly art or coming to see it.

Most of our troupe are political, even radical perhaps, some of us forged in the Vietnam War protest era. Last year if you were there you saw us get pretty jiggly with it. 

We tried to keep it silly despite our passion and many of our rehearsals had interludes where we caught each other up on the latest outrages and tried to address things obliquely but honestly. 

If you read my posts you might remember one late at night where I addressed some of my despair, and it was a hard year last year. But this year, we have no idea what to do about our emotional landscape. We're immersing in singing and writing clever lines and hoping we can at least deliver some moments of laughter and joy by creating the sacred space of art.

We plan right now to keep it light and happy as a respite for people, but obviously our crowds will be smaller than usual and anyone trying to make and deliver their Jell-O will have a harder time doing so. Do let me know if I can take your piece to the gallery and I will do my best to do that. 

No Kings Jell-O Art will be appropriate and it will also be fully acceptable to distance yourself from reality for a few hours and let things go, for the collective health of our community. You can't really fight all the time. You have to have some joy in the mundane and we've done this Jell-O thing for almost 40 years. So, no, we can't cancel. We even made a zoom video in 2020 when we had to stop mid-March and drop our nearly completed rehearsals. The film we made in 2021 was at least a way to gather without getting too close to each other, and we had a kind of bubble to protect ourselves while we put it together. We thought maybe things were "back to normal" after last year. Alas, there is no normal.

I still have the gold Jell-O wig and orange tie. I took it to Market a couple of times but without the costume and context it is just uncomfortable to wear and easy to break. I will probably bring it as part of my art submissions, as I generally bring several of the old pieces to show people what can be done with the dried stuff. I hope to have the ability and time to make a piece that can easily be as inflammatory as I want it to be. 

One year I used a real AR-15 to make a mold to make a Jell-O version of it, some magazines and bullets, and I posed it in a casket being swallowed by dirt and flowers. It sat on a pedestal of legs dressed in camo and I think I had some poetry or something. Since feminism is political, nearly all of my pieces have been that on some level. I never used a Barbie without irony. 

Last year I used the t-shirt design as a platform and I will bring bandanas with that same Banksy-inspired image but without the lettering. I put it into my regular inventory of what I can protest bandanas which were nearly all images from shirts I made in the Bush era, twenty-five years ago. Remember that election when Roger Stone funded that fake protest in FL about stopping that steal, which resulted in the Supreme Court anointing Dubya instead of Gore? Fuckers. That was the summer I made this one: 

 Sometimes we concern ourselves with trying not to offend our public appreciators who do come to our shows, and we try to make things family-friendly and also respectful of our hosts at the gallery who may not share our politics. We try...but then we always have something in there that offends someone. I mean, I'm offended by jokes about body functions and not everything we say is fully informed to avoid racist, sexist or plain ignorant views. We are predominately white people in the US. Woke, but imperfect and subject to mistakes.

Like scheduling a show on a day when we all should be in the streets. Darn. It wasn't our fault. We'll see what we can do to ameliorate the harm. 

Ohhh...I just got an idea for a shirt design. We'll see. 

Trying to Be Serious About Jell-O

I finally did go through with making some Jell-O but not what I had thought I would do. I have to create some space which involves a couple of projects and maybe getting rid of some things, which I do not enjoy. I'll get there.

I did make these boingies which are fun to play with, though I don't have an immediate plan for them. I just thought if I started with something fun, it would get me going. It's like the trick of leaving some part of your work undone at the end of a session so you have a quicker start the next time. 

To make these, I use the strong gelatin recipe (3 oz per cup of water) and spread it about 1/4 inch or so thick in pyrex pie plates (after adding dye.) Then I let it sit about 6 to 12 hours, (less time is better) and use a sharp exacto knife to cut through it in a circular, spiral pattern to make a long, continuous narrow strip. I gently take it out of the pan and put it on another, or a plate, or any surface really, and twist it and turn it to have some interesting bends and shapes. Not that it will follow your directions, but you get more chances to shape it. You'll want to turn it over as it dries, or maybe drape it over something, when it gets firm enough to not break itself. 

Later, you can get a section wet if you want to bend it differently or make it do something even weirder than it chose to do on its own. You can always get this dried gelatin wet or damp and it gets flexible, so you get lots of chances to shape it the way you see it. I like to glue the end of these into a flower or in another place on a hat, and when you move, it moves, though it can be hazardous for anyone you want to hug or converse with. But it's something to try. It can be very rigid so you could make some kind of support for something, but it is hard to dry things that are thick so that can be limited. There's a lot to learn about physics, strength and gravity when you try to build things out of Jell-O. 

I remember this one piece that was a breakfast, with a suspended syrup bottle and a straw filled with "syrup" and I think you could do it without the straw, perhaps. Not to support the bottle though. I don't quite remember how they did everything in that piece. I'll go through the archives and see if I have a good photo. Food is always a good subject to render in Jell-O, particularly if you want to make some type of political statement about food. I like to use candy molds to make little shapes, which can be gummy-like or just hard and inedible, depending on your purposes. I think gummies do use gelatin, though I haven't researched that. 

 Here's the photo from 2012. It looks like the plastic straw supported the syrup bottle, emptied enough to weigh the right amount I think. Great use of props! Can't read the artist's name, and don't know if this one from 2013 is related. 

I suppose technically you could make breakfast foods that are garnished with or made from Jell-O, if you are weary of actual breakfast foods. 

And don't stop at breakfast if that is where you want to work. I made some sushi with Jell-O strips inside instead of cucumber, etc., which was actually tasty. Taste is not lacking with Jell-O, as you can make anything taste great with the right chemicals and expensive food scientists and factories. It has a great texture as well, and the brilliant transparency is a most seductive quality. That's some of the joy of Jell-O and why people keep coming back I guess.

I have a book called Jell-O a Biography by Carolyn Wyman which lists the many slogans used over the years, which are sometimes hilarious and endlessly useful when writing about and creating Jell-O. There are of course lots of old memes like the stapler from The Office and "nailing Jell-O to the wall" from corporate parlance. We need some new memes I think. The phoniness and lack of food value in Jell-O is fair game, as is the fact that it is made from hides and hooves of slaughtered cattle. One reason it is such an old food is that people liked to use everything from their livestock and it was probably easy to accidentally discover the gelatin from cooking up the waste parts. Also why it was mainly a savory food for a long time. You don't normally make desserts from animal products. But wait...dairy is an animal product. So much for that theory.

 I think I'll read back and see what still needs to be said about last year's show, since it is way too cold to go outside today. I will have to bundle up and go to practice in a couple of hours. I suppose we are lucky to not have snow. But snow and Jell-O! Wouldn't that be fun.  

Jell-O Jamboree

 

Yes, indeed, it is Jell-O Art season again, and I am as usual a little bit late to the party. After the Xmas retail season I need a vacation so it takes about this amount of time to get the decorations put away and get to thinking about the show, my art, and my goals for this Jell-O year. It makes the timeframe really short! The Show will be March 28th. 

Our show has landed at the beginning of spring break for the last couple of years (this year it is at the end of spring break), so that the gallery where we have it can hang and take down their other, month-long art shows that are their real business. We get to suspend all that art world business to be completely irreverent and bring out silliness into their space, for one Saturday evening that somehow takes months to prepare for. The gallery is at Maude Kerns Art Center, at 15th and Villard in Eugene. (You can go tho their website for lots of photos of past shows.)

Art on glass by David Gibbs

We decided on Jell-O Jamboree for this year, feeling like everyone in our sphere needs some simple, childlike fun, and we as a troupe need to regroup with less of a narrative and more of a variety show. The Jamboree evokes celebration for its own sake, with a touch of nostalgia. It's likely that many people immediately think of Boy Scouts, and that's okay, because we do plan to bring together all of the many troops of artists and appreciators who are linked through Jell-O.

However you want to use it, Jell-O remains a silly, gorgeous, uncooperative art media that can be taken in any direction. We're an art movement that defies structure. First time, 37th time, all are welcome. Whatever you want to make, how ever you want to do it, theme or not, pretty or not, we want you to have fun with something irreverent, impervious to judgement, outside of the critical structure of the money-art world, and just pleasing to the eye and spirit. I know some people still eat Jell-O...I generally do not, but again, make your own rules. If you want to make something edible, be safe in your preparation, but you can choose to put it on a pedestal or carve it up for the Tacky Food Buffet.

This was Tacky Food, and delicious

 

We try to pick a theme with a lot of latitude and interpretations,  so you can comment on art, politics, our local scene, or anything you want. Focus on the Jam part if you want---Jell-O Jam. Turn Boree into Boreal and make a tree. Gather up your own scout troop and make some together. 

Nothing is banned or inappropriate, although we do ask that no one make a big mess if possible. Throwing Jell-O can only be done if you clean it all up and the white walls don't have to be repainted. People have done that...we either had a kiddie pool with wrestling in it or it was someone's idea that never got to the final stages (Jell-O is cold, by the way, making wrestling in it not as fun as you might think, as my next-door neighbors found out one summer. Also it takes a giant amount to make something thicker than water, and the price has gone up no doubt.)

I just checked bulk foods.com where I have bought my 25 pound lots in the past, and it still hovers around $10 a pound in big quantities, more in smaller ones. Agar-agar is more  but it says you need less, 1/3 to 1/2 the amount of gelatin. If you are just starting out you can play with Jell-O itself, but the name brand stuff, although cheap and usually on sale, has a lot more in it than gelatin, so you still need a lot. If you want to make jiggly Jell-O, you can certainly start with the brand-name boxes (and there are some off-brands too, if you like to support smaller producers) using less water for a firmer texture that may not need refrigeration. The bigger boxes of Knox clear gelatin have gotten very high-priced, and I think there is only 1/4 ounce in each of those envelopes, but it's somewhere to start. 

I use just plain gelatin powder, which I color with dyes that I have around from my other art forms. I generally work in dried gelatin, and my mix is 3 ounces of gelatin to one cup of water. It's pretty arbitrary, but I try to stick to it so I know what to expect. I put the gelatin in a quart canning jar filled to half, (that's 2 cups of water) and put in 6 ounces of gelatin, stirring well. I use cold water! It's a lot easier. Then after it "blooms" for about ten minutes (absorbs water) I put the jar in the microwave for about 2 minutes and melt it. 

Be careful as hot Jell-O is sticky and will hurt you. Then I put in the dye, pour it in thin layers in pyrex dishes, or molds, or whatever I am doing according to my plan or the lack of one.

Then I put it in a hot dry place like on top of the piano and tend it for a couple of days until it is dry like paper. I'll go through the process in a later post but I want you all to know how simple the process really is for the kind of art I have been making lately.

With the dried stuff, there is no jiggle, which is one of the best parts of Jell-O art, so you may want to reduce the recipe to use less gelatin and get that firm but jiggly texture that holds its shape and is workable by carving, molds, or stacking pieces together. Melted gelatin makes  excellent glue but you have to have a little patience as it takes a minute or so to go from warm liquid to cool adhesive. And of course if something doesn't work out, you can remelt it and start over. 

That's the basic recipe, gelatin and water, and you can use a lot of different things for color, including those neon food coloring kits and things like milk, candy coloring, metal powders and whatever you have around. Ink, paint, natural materials like flowers, you try it.

If the theme doesn't give you a workable prompt, play for a while and let your brain come up with something you want to do. I usually have some technique or end result I want to find out about. I've tried the gelatinas, which you make with syringes and other tools, and it is hard, but very fascinating to see and even eat. I'm made all kinds of molds with wax, plastic, toys and found objects. I sometimes like to go to a thrift store and see if there is anything fun I want to center around. Once I used a copper-faced pink breadbox to represent a house for Fishhead Barbie. Barbie has made lots of appearances with the rest of her family, including GI Joe. Props are just fine and many of us use them. 

Personally I like to make political statements and there will be those. It's a little tricky to know what will be funny or urgent in late-March, but you can make a good guess or just project. It doesn't matter. Your community of Jell-O Artists will like anything you make. Or they won't, but you won't know about that, because we have no winners, no Best of Show, no evaluation of success or quality. There is no bad Jell-O Art. It's just about having fun, and if it isn't fun, maybe you should make yourself do it anyway until you learn how to find the fun in there. That can be an artistic journey all in itself. 

The Radar Angels, the group of artists and creators who started this in 1988, wanted to stimulate the inner artist in everyone and give people access to participating in a gallery show. When you put your creation on a pedestal in a gallery, art shifts for you. It's not supposed to intimidate, but free us from the usual criticism we do to hold ourselves from really enjoying our creative lives without limits.

Jell-O will limit you, as it can be super uncooperative if you try to force it to do what it can't or isn't in the mood to do. I like that challenge, and although I don't know if I will find a new technique this year, I do plan to start today with some part of a project. I like to do props for the stage and I know of one that needs to be made. I'll be making some large sheets on the lids for big tubs. They are plastic so it won't be shiny like it is when I use pyrex, but the lids are flexible so it is easy to get the gelatin to release...sometimes it sticks to the pyrex and you have to know some techniques to free it. Read back to some earlier posts for tips or let me know what you want to learn and I'll try to write about it.

So get going! It's a perfect day for Jell-O. Internet research is also great fun...there are quite a few Instagram artists who make delightful gelatin (called Jellies in other countries) and there are even a few shows here and there, usually focused on edible sculptures, but look them up. You can try posting things on my Facebook page, Gelatinaceae, where I will try to keep up despite hating all things FB. Follow some inspiration on Instagram, which has more videos. I promise to share more. Maybe I'll even get around to my review of the art from last year, which I never did complete. 

Jamboree! Sounds fun.