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.