Occupy Jell-O Art

I've been thinking what a big and wide-open theme the Occupy part is: what started at Wall Street has gone literally everywhere. I got the most juice out of a speech by Michael Meade about Occupying Your Soul. It was "Be Here Now" taken to a personal, political contemporary reality.

Free your creativity, your fears (let them melt into a sweet colored puddle), free yourself from the restrictions that tell you that you can't be an artist. Everyone is occupying everywhere...I just heard that the Irish will occupy the Vatican and call all the pedophilic priests and other religious criminals to accountability. Maybe we will soon be free to end religious domination of our culture and it will be up to us to cut the chains that we impose upon ourselves in trying to be good, to make it to heaven, to never sin.

Dessert is sinful, isn't it? Jell-O is so sensually delightful and gorgeous. Free the desserts! Free the dieting people everywhere. Make dessert your art form. Free Jell-O Art and Tacky Food for the taking. Oh yeah, you are supposed to pay $3 for your display but if you can't afford to put your art in the show talk to me and I will make sure you can get it in. You are also supposed to pay a donation to get into the show, to support Kerns Art Center. (Not really both...if you bring an exhibit don't also pay at the door-it's voluntary) If I get the t-shirts made, and I think I will, I have the opportunity to make money at the show. I generally sell so few that I don't even make my expenses, but if I sell them I will donate for you if you can't. I can't really speak for the Radar Angels or the Gallery, but I'm pretty sure it would be wrong for someone to be turned away for lack of $3. It's not supposed to be for the elite.

The beginning of the Jell-O Art Show was as anti-Art...an art form that is legitimate in itself, without evaluation of its goodness or badness, taking a common kitchen material and transforming it with pure artistic creativity. Putting it in a gallery elevated it, and us, into the world of real, capital-A Art, and it can't be sold or graded. I know I've broken out of this with the Jell-O Art I've sold at the Market this season, but the show is still pure creation. I think the decision to charge the artists and the public was in the spirit of supporting the gallery overhead and staff, so that they didn't have to do it for free just because we wanted to. There's always going to be a little cognitive dissonance when artists interface with *the establishment.*

But it isn't about money, and to be honest I usually end up giving the shirts away, even though I am worse than broke now that I have these awful medical bills. But since Occupy is a people's movement, I just want to make sure it is accessible to people.

And I want to make sure it is fun and easy. I don't know if I will manage to get a piece finished. I'm trying to get the shirts done and whatever else falls in place after that. But I will brainstorm and work over ideas on the theme while I wait to be mobile, and I hope you are working on your ideas too. If you have questions about technique email me at dmcwho@efn.org. or read back in the posts to see if you find answers. Or just experiment until you get the results you want. You can remelt it endlessly.

I got a plastic sandwich box at the hospital which will make awesome tiny tents. You could easily carve one from a square block too. You are of course allowed to use props and things that are not Jell-O. And if you can't find a way to interpret the theme or part of it, just do what you want.
Play. Enjoy. Create. Get lost in the flow. Embrace the jiggle. Put your soul into it.

The Poster!

Indi Stern did a fabulous job on this year's poster. I love the way she pulled up so many related images and made them make sense of the theme. This particular theme takes some creative thinking, since at first take the purported end of the world/Mayan calendar speculation seems fairly unrelated to the nascent political movement umbrellaed under Occupy.

But artists interpret and they often take seemingly unrelated subjects and lead us across bridges between them. So there may likely be many rich interpretations of the theme.

Or not. People may focus on one aspect only. It doesn't matter so much, as in this art show pretty much anything goes. Sticking to the theme is certainly not mandatory; it just provides a starting place for those who need one.

All my Jell-O is now shoved into the project room, out of sight though not out of mind. I just can't do it in the days between now and Thursday when I have surgery, and for the two weeks following the surgery I will have to be extremely careful not to injure myself. The flat sheets worked out sort of well and I might try writing on them instead of printing, since I can't get out into the shop. I could make an illustrated book-of-hours type of thing. That might be quite doable in my current condition.

Another idea is to let some other interested Jell-O artist or artists come over and play. The piece I really want to do is a diorama of the Jell-O Art Museum, and what I don't think I can do is hobble between the two rooms fetching art supplies and managing all the different pieces of it. What I might be able to do is construct the various pieces, but maybe with some help I can get it done in the couple of weeks between surgery and the show.

No Tacky Food for me this year I guess. I can let go of that piece. There is always plenty, and if someone wants to borrow my molds, I have tons of candy molds with which I make the little molded jigglers that are edible. It can be a lot of fun.

T-shirts are iffy, but I can work on a design. I kind of have one in mind. There I have the same problem of having art supplies and stuff in the next room, but I can be organized about that. I had just finished setting up my project room with shelves and got all the various arts accessible: sewing machine, silk painting supplies, paper arts, etc. I've started using baskets with handles to help me ferry things on my little trips to the bathroom and bedroom from the living room...I'm able to navigate fairly well on the crutches using the baskets to carry. So if I convince myself I can do it, I will be able to do it.

Not taking any chances though. I looked at some pictures online of what happens when people don't follow doctors orders regarding pins and plates in their bodies...just like fixing a door or something, if you tear out all the supporting substrate, you will not be able to get a hinge or hook to stay in the wood...it will just tear out more until there is nothing left to hold onto. It is a rather sickening image when applied to one's foot, so I WILL stay off my foot and let the bones completely heal. Even if this means missing all of the usual things I do in April, May, June and July, I will. No taking chances. There is way too much at stake.

So. Poster!

Complications

I broke my foot. My main job for this month was Jell-O: making an entry, some t-shirts, and some tacky food for the show. I do not know what I'll be able to do; it's too soon.

I won't be standing up a lot if at all. I can get around on crutches a little, but it's my right foot so I won't be driving. I go to the doctor tomorrow so I can get a prognosis and some idea of my real limitations.

So since I had no real direction with the sheets of dried gelatin I will probably have to abandon that exploration. I do have several pretty flat ones so maybe I'll find a way to use them. I was going to work in miniature which might still work just fine.

The show could go on without t-shirts, but maybe by the time the show happens in four weeks I'll be able to do a few. I never make more than a dozen or two anyway. Not extremely likely, though I'll probably go ahead and design them if I can.

We'll just have to see. People traditionally do Jell-O art about their lives and kidney stones and such, so I might find something amusing in my situation. For now I just have to Occupy my chair. With my foot propped above heart level in a big plastic cast pumped up with air. It's sleek and attractive. Life on painkillers is just great until you try to taper off and stop them and find out how much a broken bone really hurts. Should be an interesting month.

Experiments

When I heard myself telling someone it was impossible to make flat dried gelatin I heard myself accept a new challenge. Sometimes I think I have tried everything...but there's always somewhere else to go.

As a screenprinter, I have a surplus of old screens and have used them to make paper, which works admirably to make smooth flat sheets. I tried it with Jell-O, which is of course way more liquid than paper pulp, so presented some extra problems.

I leveled and covered a card table, first trying just a sheet of plastic and then deciding to pad it with cardboard and newspaper for a more resilient surface. The screen is a wood frame with polyester fabric stretched on it, and most of my old ones are a bit warped and the fabric slightly loose, so I thought I would weigh down the frame to press the fabric tightly against the plastic to keep the gelatin from flowing out the sides.

That resulted in the gelatin staying on top of the screen instead of under it, between it and the plastic, so I took off the weights and created more space under the screen. It seems that the thickness of the gelatin is crucial and will take some control. Part of the reason it doesn't dry flat is the difference in thickness and subsequent drying time. I took a plastic scraper and tried to remove all the gelatin from one side of the fabric, leaving a thin flat plate of it on the other side.

One I dried with the sheet of plastic peeled off, and one with it left in place. When it is left in place the gelatin won't dry, but my best case scenario would have been for the gelatin sheet to adhere to the plastic and not the screen, for easy removal. Ha ha. I was amazed to find that this worked on one piece, when I happened to hit the exact time it was ready, and carefully peeled it from the fabric. This did result in a few stretched places where it was still too wet.

Over a few days I tried many variations on the process and discovered that releasing the gelatin from the fabric was the biggest problem. If I gently misted the underside with water, I could get some of the gelatin to peel off the fabric, if I tried at the exact right stage of softness. This did result in some distortion with the final drying of the piece. I kept trying different things and made a lot of interesting discoveries.

I got one pretty flat, pretty smooth piece about a foot square (the top picture.) It's uneven in thickness and some parts are glossier than others, but it's flat and it's thin. The picture doesn't show it that well, since I tried to use a low angle to show the flatness. I'm going to try printing something on it with screenprinting ink for my next development.

That's right, I'm going to make printed Jell-O! This is quite exciting.

The problem will be controlling the amount of ink and getting a good print with no chance of do-overs. I'll probably find an old Radar Angels t-shirt image to use for the experiment. I visualize selling gelatin sheets instead of shirts, since no one really wears most of the shirts from the past. That's one of those ideas that will not fly, of course, but if I went to the trouble of shadow-boxing the art and making it into a high-value product, I'll bet it could be some actual fine art. Mayor's show, here I come.

When the gelatin did pull off the fabric, it took a faint image with it of whatever had been in the screen originally. The gelatin seemed to pull out the traces of ink that were left in what is called the ghost image. On the pink pieces this came out as an interesting texture kind of like fish skin, mottled spots. There were also interesting bubbles from spraying with water and not smoothing out the drops.

I tried to find more deliberate designs to use, by using a screen that still had the stencil on it, but while I did get some small areas of pattern, the release problems were worse with the partially stenciled pieces. You can kind of see the fractal pattern on the purple pieces, kind of a wavy watery pattern to begin with.

This would more properly be described as embossed, which of course is easy to do by just putting the gelatin on a textured surface, but it opens some possibilities too. I have hundreds of screens with lots of interesting designs and textures on them. File notes in "pending uses."

The flat gelatin is the most exciting thing I have come up with so far this year. I had been wanting to combine papermaking and printing with Jell-O art in new ways, and this is a step forward into new territory. Just a small step with no clear direction, but yay!

The Theme

The Radar Angels performing group is kind enough to start meeting early in the year and develop a theme for the annual show. I don't know how they come up with them year after year...it's a brainstorm of an advanced form. They consider songs to parody, costumes, who they can include and spotlight, and come up with a starting place in the creative process. It's a big help!

So they refined the idea and it seems to be graphically portrayed as:

OCCUPY JELL-O

2012...The End?

I don't know quite what they are thinking, but I'm guessing the end refers to the world and not to the Jell-O Show, though there might be somewhat of a retrospective in there. With the great slide show running in the side gallery there is always some history present, and the piece I am thinking about includes some archiving. But as usual the theme leaves things wide open to interpretation. Thanks, Angels!

Political Jell-O Art is fantastic. The irony drips like melted art as you try to make essential life statements in a silly food medium. The colors and transparency and joyfulness of the gelatin make it a great vehicle to talk about politics and passion and life and death. The Occupy movement is rich with life-affirmation and I am quite sure people will be able to Occupy the gallery and free up their enslaved wage souls with some ridiculous sculpture. I'm serious.

I take my Jell-O Art very seriously and devote my whole winter to it on many levels. I have not progressed very far into my ideas for this show...I'm in that messy gritty period when there are too many possibilities and none of them look very fun or attractive.

I heard myself telling someone it was near impossible to make flat dried Jell-O so of course I have to now try to make that, even though it amounts to a distraction, though you never know. I tried pouring some nearly gelled gelatin on a blank screen from my screenprinting shop. It is producing some thin flat sheets but not in a useable way yet. I may have to put the screen in the bathtub and soak off the remains. I was kind of trying to merge paper-making and Jell-O Art, which is a direction I will continue in, in a vague way.

I've done a lot of research, writing and thinking about Occupy so have lots of ideas about what I might say, but none are concrete. Sometimes it works to find a prop of some kind to center the project, like the copper-fronted breadbox I found the year I wanted to do something about remodeling my house. It made a good project for Fish-head Barbie to work on. (Yes, a Barbie doll with a fish head was my "avatar" for years, representing me in my pieces. She fell apart and was too limiting anyway, but the fact remains that Barbie is usually present at the show in someone's art.)

I used to go to the Goodwill As-Is store but any trip to Bring or any kind of re-use store could be productive. I've been sorting through my many boxes of little things I've collected to see if anything comes up. Cleaning is usually a good way to get started on creative projects, if for no better purpose than making some space for them. I've been doing a lot of cleaning.

For graphic ideas I go through books and magazines and sometimes the internet, though that is kind of like going to the library without a plan. I know I need to see a picture of the Mayan calendar stone and learn a little more about the cycle's end, and I'm always looking for cool lettering to use on the t-shirt. So I will sort through the art books and fill my brain with images. That's another part of my creative process that helps to firm up the ideas.

Sometimes people give me random ideas or items that seem Jell-O-like to them but usually this is far too early for most people to start thinking about it. It's also too early to get worried about it, so I trust my process even though right now it is unfocused and not productive. It will happen.

Usually I do spend a second or two thinking I won't do any Jell-O this year. Thinking I might do the miniature model of the Jell-O Art Museum is like that...it won't actually require very much Jell-O, and I have about 25 pounds of it. I know I don't want to do a giant thing like I did last year, or a lot of small things like I did the year before, and the year before that. It is always a fallback to just bring some objects from the past shows and call it a display...but that wouldn't be all that satisfying for the artist struggling to express.

So, thinking about it and playing around with a jar of gelatin. Hope you are too.

Jell-O Show details

Maude Kerns hasn't updated their website yet but it's fairly safe to assume that most things about the Jell-O Art Show will be the same as always. It is a one-night show, Saturday March 31, from 5-8. Note the early time. There is a performance at 7-ish by the legendary Radar Angels, and during that it is sometimes hard to see the art as it is jiggling too much from the laughter of the crowds. It is a small gallery and does fill up most years. If you really want to see the art at its best, come at the beginning.

To display your Jell-O creations, you have to bring them to the gallery at around 3:30 and pay a $3 entry fee to register. Nothing is juried; there is no bad Jell-O Art! People from toddlers to elders make entries. If you need tips on how to tame the medium, I will put some in the blog in the future. If you have a pedestal you can bring it, but the gallery has a goodly number of them for you to use. The lighting is pretty good in there, and if you are very special you might be able to use some electricity, but that is usually grabbed up by David Gibbs because he is definitely special.

The Tacky Food Buffet is also all-comers but it is asked that everything be edible and safe to eat. If you have any ingredients that might cause allergies, please make a little sign. Creativity is great here too, and the foods do not have to include Jell-O. "Tacky" is open to interpretation and the range can be wide. There is generally a lot of Easter candy like marshmallow peeps and the gallery staff brings crazy stuff like the cat-litter-box-with-tootsie-rolls-dessert kind of quasi-food. Often people make authentic vintage gelatin recipes like aspics and molded entrees and that can be delightful, especially when you are not sure if you really want to taste things. I've had chocolate covered brussels sprouts and tuna parfait and many odd and tasty treats. One of my most brilliant entries was Jell-O sushi which was real sushi with Jell-O strips substituted for the veggies and fish. Usually I just make plates of Jigglers using candy molds, most times the Christmas ones and things like the Virgin Mary so you can bite off her head. It's all in bad taste but one of the most fun parts of the show.

You have to take your Jell-O home at the end of the show at 8:00, because no one wants to throw away your art. There are literally no rules to your exhibit. Sometimes the actual Jell-O is hard to find among the props people use but generally it is the focus. You are certainly not confined to the theme, which this year is a combo of Occupy and the end of the world as seen in the Mayan calendar, or rather the popular conceptions of those two social memes. You can take things as seriously as you wish. I take my Jell-O Art extremely seriously.

There will be a donation to get into the show, usually like $2 or $5 per family, to support the gallery. The whole thing is a fundraiser for the gallery, by the Radar Angels.

Most of the Eugene artists do not make edible Jell-O creations, although we did have someone bring down some wonderful edible ones one year. Most of us do not even really use Jell-O brand gelatin for our art, because we need a lot. You can get the 32-envelope boxes of Knox for starters, for 8 or 9 bucks, but I have been buying it online for about $7 a pound and that is the way to go if you really want to get into it. You can remelt gelatin numerous times to start over, but I like having a lot on hand so I don't have to run to the store. I also use dye instead of food coloring because the palette of food coloring is so limited. When I make edible things for the buffet I do use the real Jell-O or the kosher variety of it, for the flavors and the traditional colors.

There are lots of techniques and tips and tricks and I'll get into those as we go. One thing I finally learned is that you have to let the plain gelatin "bloom" in cold water if you don't want it to get lumpy. I used to pour in hot water like you do with the dessert but it is much easier to make it in cold and heat it in the microwave for a minute. If you want it to be stable at room temperature you just make it a lot stronger than the package directions, i.e. less water. I use 3 ounces of gelatin per cup of water to make the dried stuff. It isn't a perfect science. There are many ways to do it right. Countless ways.

So that's a start. Stay tuned for the musings and development of ideas that can be so extra fun this time of year. I'll be working on it constantly for the next two months. That doesn't seem like long enough to do all the things I have in mind. Better make some today! (not a real slogan though it sounds just like one.)

I have a collection of Jell-O photos at photobucket in several folders if you want to see some delightful things from the past. Here's the AK-47 I mentioned in the last post. I know, you can't see it. You had to be there.

Jell-O Show 2012

Hurray! The date has been set and the theme chosen for this year's Jell-O Art Show. It will be at Maude Kerns Art Center as usual, on a Saturday night from 5-8 pm as usual, but unlike the past two years, it will not be the first Saturday in April! It will be March 31, which seems like divine intervention for this Saturday Market vendor.

Now I won't have to try to do way too much in one day. The Jell-O Show is already a very big day. Not only do I "have to" make some kind of remarkable personal piece, I like to make lots of tacky foods for the Tacky Food Buffet, and I also enjoy helping decorate the hall and assist the performers if needed. In addition I make and sell the t-shirts, and they have to be brilliant, which is a big project all in itself. March is always very busy, particularly that last week.

I might even make some jiggly Jell-O for my display this year. I love the dried and will certainly do something with it, but the jiggle is a big part of the fun too. The wet Jell-O is such a frustrating and bewitching art material that I kind of miss it.

The theme is Occupy/End of the World for 2012. That should be a fascinating merge and I can just picture the Radars rolling a giant Mayan calendar replica out onto the stage and puzzling over it like the apes from the planet. (I would even be willing to help make the replica, if any Radars are reading this.) We could build it out of protest signs and turn it around into the Occupy mode. I'm sure the performers are already making lists of songs to parody and thinking about apocalyptic costumes. It's the Jell-Occupyocalypse. Cue the bongos.

Lots of us Radar Angels are political activists or were in the past at least, and are still radicals, so it will be a fun opportunity to add our humor to the political discourse. Political Jell-O can be tedious and derivative and repetitious and plebian just like any other kind of political art, and I have done my part in making political Jell-O. I once used an AR-15 (AK-47-looking rifle) to make a mold to put in a coffin surrounded by flowers and Jell-O bullets and clips and had a whole thing going about burying violence. I dressed the mannequin legs in camo.

Speaking of the mannequin legs, I had my doubts when I used them in last year's sculpture, Hope. I need them back. This winter I started taking parts of the display and putting them to other purposes. The mask can stand on its own, as can the bird. The floral panels look great on the walls of my living room, and the little seascapes with grass and waves are presently being made into little mermaid perches. The figure itself, which I appropriated glibly from Celeste, might be restored to its original condition, though the additional snakeskin will probably stay on it. For it to be a part of the Jell-O Art Museum, it should really be in its original condition, which was elegant and graceful. Hard to dance covered with orchids. So Hope will be transformed. That's the theme of the beginning of the movement.

The Jell-O Art Museum concept is alive and well and I am designing a sign for it and have in mind to build a scale model of it. I probably won't be making either one out of gelatin though I will try to work that in. I don't know how much of it will be realized in the short winter period I have for Jell-O Art.

I also don't know where I am going with the Jell-O Art retail I tried last season. It wasn't a failure, and had lots of fun aspects that could continue to develop, but it's pretty distracting at Market and cut into my clothing sales I believe. At HM it was kind of cluttered. I don't know what to do with it. Last night I dreamed I was eating all of the shells and flowers, and they were nearly all gone when I realized it. Not that I would, but it was funny as a dream. Apparently I want to be done with them. Maybe it just means I am hungry for transformation.

Make some Jell-O, artists! At least start thinking about it.