Peeling Ancestors: Jell-O as Archive and Anarchive Noelle Herceg Committee The University of Oregon Amanda Wojick (Chair) Master of Fine Arts Thesis Report Charlene Liu 2022 Colin Ives 1 2 In the cold-lit stale rooms of IDEAL LIVING, her food tray is brought up as close as it could be to her chair, and my grandpa sits behind it. He picks up the spoon and scoops up mush— brown mush, with a little bit of green mush, and then to the whitish orangish mush. Lifting the spoon to my grandma’s mouth, he waits. Sometimes she was able to barely open her mouth, her lips quivering as if taking all of her strength just to move them a centimeter apart. Sometimes he’d push the spoon right into her lips, and chunks left around her mouth and dripped onto her chest, which grandpa would carefully wipe away with a napkin. Some days she couldn’t open her mouth, some days she probably didn’t want to. But even if she wasn’t hungry, she’d always have room for her red purée juice. Grandpa would place a straw into the cup and hold it to her lips, sometimes needing to place the straw into her mouth, but she would suck that sweet red juice right up. I’d watch it move from the cup into the straw, going up and up until it reached her. It was thicker than I expected the first time I saw it, jiggling a little bit if you shook the cup. Jell-O—soups, sits, and sets—undergoing transmutation from fat and solid to powder to liquid to a semi-solid once again. As a sculptural material it is intrinsically linked to the idea of “leftover,” a cast born from the mold, the shadow shape from a stencil, the daughter and the mother. Both a leftover in its physicality and materiality, Jell-O also could be deemed a leftover through its literal and metaphorical traces encapsulated—containing extracted and skimmed fat and collagen from boiled bones from other mammals. Jell-O houses both known and unknown histories of the lives used to make its form, while also holding the cultural, societal, and gendered known and unknown histories of its 125-year life as “America’s Most Famous Dessert.”i I am interested in how Jell-O at once is both archive and anarchive. 3 4 Noelle Herceg, Residue Medallions 2/23/21 - 3/23/21, mixed media, wine, coffee, cyanotype, and glue, 2021 5 6 My printmaking work has had a close correspondence with the sculptural world, lifting quasi-copies and impressions from found and produced leftovers. Before discovering Jell-O as a sculptural material, I was using glue—another transmutational substance, changing from liquid to semi-solid, with the ability to peel. From the floor, I lifted large sheets of glue that were once puddles, and when they dried marks from the floor were carried with them. I directly peeled up traces of the floor’s architecture and history: impressions of cracks in the concrete, blue artist tape, and marks and drips accumulated over an unknown span of time. The glue layer became an outermost skin of the studio floor, and as I peeled up large layers I was immersed between the floor and its ghost, between the two outer layers of skin. I felt an uncanny connection to the artist Heidi Bucher, who had teared embryonic latex peelings from her parents’ home in the 70’s. She even called her own peelings “skins”, and like my glue, the latex would retain its Heidi Bucher, skinning her house in Switzerland, 1980s resilience for a while and slowly harden, darken, wrinkle and congeal.ii The glue as binding agent holds dust, crumbs, scraps, and impressions from the concrete, while also containing a history of previous makers in the space made known through stains and paint marks. I soon became curious in how to archive not only my direct environment, but my own body, collecting my leftovers. Lint peeled from the lint catcher of the drying machine. Fallen and pulled hair that sits in the shower drain. Dandruff and other dead skin scratched and accumulated into layers of dust on the many surfaces around my house. These leftovers become indicators of both presence and absence of the body, of my body. In The Scatter: Sculpture as Leftover, Briony Fer examines the leftover in Eva Hesse’s “studio leavings” and Gabriel Orozco’s tables. “Leftovers are part objects in time rather than space. Leftovers suggest fractured rather than continuous time. They are cut off from both a past Noelle Herceg, peeling floor of the Washburn Gallery, University of Oregon, 2020 7 8 and a future…This is neither an archive nor memory bank of a few days, bacteria would begin to grow and feed of the things.”iii In this way, not only are the lint, sweepings, and nutrient media—and colors would mix wildly, “like a stains leftovers and markers what was once-there, but the act of miniature action painting that’s constantly changing and the pour and the peel of the glue skin instills a different kind of making itself.”iv The nutrient is eventually used up and bacteria trace: Heidi’s peelings from her parent’s walls linger in the die, but as Larner states even though the culture begins to peelings from my floor; the glue peelings contain more than the purify and shrivel, some trace is always left. As Beau Rutland remains that meets the eye. describes them, these petri dishes attain a “funereal quality.” The work is defined by a temporal stutter or dislocation, In an ongoing sculpture series of casserole calendars, my always already dead and simultaneously in the process of leftovers are preserved in glue, coffee, tea, and other weekly dying—an everyday instance of death begetting rebirth (5). collections. The main ingredient (so to speak) are sweepings— Larner’s recent exhibition Don’t Put It Back Like It Was at The swept up detritus from my kitchen, bathroom, or studio floors. Sculpture Center includes these culture works such as “Orchid, Sweepings often compile of crumbs, dust, small scraps and Buttermilk, Penny” which have significantly changed since its peelings, and hair. What’s left over in a seltzer can on my desk making in 1987. Thirty-five years later, more browned delicate might get poured into one container, while the next week cultures are still alive and still dead, continually dying. gathered eggshells from previous breakfasts are added to another. The remainder of the coffee left over in my mug from the weekend gets poured into the soup; the bits of paper in my pocket are sprinkled into Jell-O. Once “calendars” are peeled out of their Pyrex dishes, the leftover bits/crumbs/spottings on the glass aren’t washed out, and instead become incorporated into the next, a perpetual stew of sorts.1 Sometimes the peelings themselves are reconstituted and added to subsequent stews. Ultimately, many layers of time are brought into one “layer” of the casserole. Sculptor Liz Larner works in a similar way, often re-ingesting materials from previous projects, referring to her process as composting. In her “cultures”, Larner would use three levels of differently colored nutrient media: red, yellow and blue. Within Liz Larner, Orchid, Buttermilk, Penny, 1987 1 In medieval cooking, a staple of medieval inn meals would be something soup,” it can be in the same pot for years if always above 140f, creating a known as ‘perpetual stew,’ which is a stew containing whatever is on hand perpetual cycle of adding and removing from it.1 and added to as needed. Also referred to as “garbage soup” or “forever 9 10 Noelle Herceg, casserole calendars I and VI, coffee, wine, glue, studio sweepings, and mixed media in glass Pyrex dishes, 2021 11 12 In another one of my ongoing series Jell-O Squares, the changing state of the material is significant to the work. Flimsy membranous sheets wrap to enclose leftovers, and day by day shift state, growing ever more delicate, brittle, vulnerable to being broken and re-collecting what has been inside. Translucent bright yellow-green gradually alters to a dull browned-green. These squares might also have a “funereal quality” to them—but through their slow deaths, I see shifting, and changing, weakly holding on for “life.” Returning to Fer’s essay, the leftover also comes to stand not for what once has been, but what will be. They suggest forever- fluctuating possibilities. What is kept as important and what is cast out as unimportant have always been mutually dependent. Focusing our attention on the leftover calls into question the value of what we choose to keep. The things that seem important at first end up being abandoned, and what is at first abandoned ends up being the most productive (228). I began collecting leftovers with the absurd intention to preserve the ephemeral. Actions such as documenting my combed-out hair every time I take a shower for over two years, or trying to collect my underarm sweat for nine weeks which I then drank in the video piece “Sweat Disposition,”—describe a certain affinity for the trace, more specifically traces of my body. Traces like the sweat are transient—evaporating as I try to collect beads. I am urged to “protect” matter within faux- shields of glue or Jell-O. The Jell-O as transient material becomes surrogate for my own skin. My body. My memories. Holding and containing what is and/or seems vital, while letting other substrate pass through. Noelle Herceg, Jell-O Square n/n, Jell-O with custard container, 6” x 6”, 2022 13 14 There remains a tension between containment and porosity; In her 2014 series of stomachs, Plexiglas encases resin-soaked fixity and unfixity. Encasing and embalming, transparency and tempura fried flowers, paraffin wax, stainless shelves, and vitrification. I am reminded of Anicka Yi’s body of sculptural chrome-plated dumbbells. The embalmed flowers, although “soap stomachs,” in which materials are encased in resin- bound in irreversibly hardened matter will nevertheless rot. coated blocks of hardened glycerin soap. Cyberbully 1 (2014) The transparent qualities of glycerin, resin, and Plexiglas do contains desiccant beads, vinyl tubing, acrylic paint, acrylic not open us into understanding but sink us towards “lucidity at rods, sodium silicate, and Prada moisturizer. Desiccant sucks the depths of torpor,” and “the work as a whole has the opaque up the moisture in glycerin and moisturizer while staving off meaning of a thing that is being eaten that is also eating, that is microbial growth in food—stabilizing the work while making devouring, that is being swallowed up, and re-creating itself in ineffective substances used to suppress the wrinkling of skin. vain effort to change itself into nothing” (30-31). “Dying—a The sodium silicate, or “liquid glass”, repels water and present absence—is encoded, and we are turned in the direction permanently hardened resin seals the soap.v In “Irreducible of the death of pure materiality that comes with understanding” Ambiguity,” Alise Upitis writes that the work occupies the (31). Death is both present and absent—and materiality has a space of dying, “it seems constantly regained as it is constantly power/magic/role in reminding this. Both Larner’s and Yi’s lost again…life that endures in death and maintains itself in it.” matter are in flux—the resin, Plexiglas, or photograph a means of false protection and/or preservation. Bodies of mold or fried flowers will continue to rot and shift states of being, although held in place by their outer surfaces. Anika Yi, In-Q-Tel, Glycerin soap, resin, wax, petri dish, acrylic paint, rubber tubing, acrylic frame, 2013 15 16 Noelle Herceg, Jell-O Square Series, 2022 17 18 Within the Jell-O, visible leftovers like coffee grounds, crumbs, or hair are kept in place. Beyond what is at first noticeable, the Jell-O is also a container for the invisible leftovers—the traces of animal collagen to make gelatin. It contains histories of labor in meticulous effort involved in its initial production and shifts in the product’s marketing campaigns across its 100+ year life as a bought and sold American food product. In Jell-O Girls: A Family History, Allie Rowbottom writes about some of these unseen layers with Jell-O’s history, including the impact the product made on her grandmother, her mother, and herself. These histories (both fictional and nonfictional) that Rowbottom addresses are only a I submerge my trimmed hair, peeled onion skin, clipped nails. few of the unseen and unknown layers within Jell-O. The gelatinous matter in this way is a container of both visible and The pink skin from the onion in the Jell-O has begun to mold, invisible. It is archive and anarchive. growing greener and more pungent each week. The anarchive. What Erin Manning calls the anarchive is “something that catches us in our own becoming.”vi Julietta Singh names it “the future archive. The archive of alterity.”vii And as “my own impossible archive.”viii The archive and anarchive go hand in hand. My collections of lint when I do the laundry for example, is an archive of lint: collected peelings of dust from the trap within a two-year time frame. But the anarchive of this lint collection is what cannot be collected. It is a resistance of the archive, an attempt to harness the process itself of collecting the lint while understanding it cannot be done. Erin Manning’s work with SenseLab involved seeking an alternative mode of capture, with hope to find “a practice that would allow action traces to become mobilized across other environments of collective experimentation,” but in trying so found the anarchive needs the archive. She looks to 19 20 Whitehead’s process philosophy for tools to understand how all leftovers and the leftovers of unknown others contained within experience is made of cracks and captures, archival and the Jell-O. anarchival at once.ix To Whitehead, a world of activity is one that creates the present by transforming the past, and by Reading Lars Spuybroek’s The Sympathy of Things, in which anticipating the future.x But this way of approaching he writes about the matter of ornament through “wall veils”, experience from the middle, or “middling,” resists past, drapery, and encrustation—I return to my Jell-O pourings and present, and future as linear time. Manning proposes then to peelings. Ornament encounters fusion of the petrified and the think topologically, to consider perspectives other than our fibered, the mineral and the vegetal, of stillness and liveliness. own, and to encounter these questions from the orientation of In the volume of Modern Painters, John Ruskin describes the the more-than-human (83). The anarchive then, is activating surface of the planet as “The Earth-Veil.” Being living but not and orienting—making it a collaborator in all takings-form. alive, dead but not passive, it is an enormous sheet stretched over the whole surface of the earth, a horizontal wall veil Manning’s use of the term “infrathin” also has resonated with composed of stone and foliage, encrusted and woven, ornate my work. Culling from Duchamp’s use of the word, the and alive, but also preserved and still.xv infrathin is the most minute of intervals, a quality of the in between, an interval that cannot quite be articulated.xi Similar My own Jell-O skins hang as curtains and veils—delicate to an anarchive or ghost archive, I view the infrathin as a layer ornamented sheets that droop and drape in similar nature to just out of reach, but still under your nose. Felt but not seen. how Ruskin describes The Earth-Veil: being living but not Perhaps it operates as intuition: a guiding force which is not alive, dead but not passive. Traces of unknown others’ are known but felt. Gilles Deluze writes about intuition as a contained in the Jell-O, with gelatin derived from collagen process not being in-time: “intuition is rather the movement by taken from animal parts. The Jell-O is then a living surface of which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make others’ deaths. The material quality of the Jell-O sheets slowly use of our own duration and immediately recognize the morph from malleable, translucent plastic-like films, to more existence of other durations.”xii What is most interesting is that and more opaque, crisp surface that grows brittle, darkens, and he states the motor of intuition to be sympathy. Sympathy is an breaks away. It is living but not alive through stilled objectivity focused not on inert matter but on matter a part of undulations of frozen drapery, but also in perpetual state of time, on matter as something transformable and ever- dying in that there is no “end.” There is no “final form” the changing.xiii My material engagement is bound to sympathetic skins take. As they darken, harden, and break apart, fragments modes of making, thinking, and dreaming. Akin to Sam are kept to re-melt and re-pour. Throughout my practice, Moyer’s proposal of softness—being beyond textural quality, materials often play a reciprocal role with one another in being as an approach to how you perceive and care for materialxiv —I a container, while also becoming that which is contained. work with a sympathy, a material empathy for my own Working with glue and Jell-O as surfaces that encase other matter, remnants are “preserved” yet are not completely 21 22 protected from being stopped in time. Cinnamon roll leftovers kept in glue or a dried clementine within Jell-O continue to gradually shift under the surfaces of these skins—while the glue and Jell-O outer layers also harden, warp, or grow brittle. The thing that is being eaten is also eating. The skins that hold pieces absorbed, are also absorbing. A living surface. A skin of seen and unseen layers. These peelings imitate layerings of time and protection found in my own dermises, while temporally existing as embodied actions toward my own skin—holding my urges to pick, scratch, and peel. My body as nail and hair clippings become material; and the Jell-O as material become body. The body that contains is also one that collects. Holding my blood, my organs, my cells and my breath, my body also holds metaphysical assemblies of traces: that/who which have passed through me and impressed into me, their smells, their stories, their urges. In No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh reflects on the body as both archivist and archive, as it gathers its own materials. In knowing the body as both a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter--the body archive is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies (29). Bodies extend into space beyond the skin, and as Nancy Tuana describes, the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world become entangled, porous.xvi In the example of drinking from a plastic bottle of coke, the parts of plastic become as much a part of her flesh as the coke she drank. Once that molecular interaction occurs, there is no divide between nature/culture, natural/artificial. As Singh puts it, the body is not and has never been singular, but an infinite collection of bodyings.xvii Noelle Herceg, decorticated, coffee ground and Jell-O on aluminum, 64" x 27", 2022 23 24 The body is many bodies—a collection of others’ traces. I want to point to a quote from Singh: “I begin to think there is no woman without the other woman—including the other woman that I am. Two figures that are also one, and also infinitely plural. She is an incalculable catalogue of traces that make up the body-self. Her accretions are infinite; I feel her, and I cannot stop from turning toward her.” And, “…I feel that I have become part of a womanish assemblage, collectively linked through our contact with S we comprise an archive of gendered bodies, dispersed across time and geography but no less entwined.”xviii With her words, I feel a vein, a root that attaches to makers, materials and mothers across time, which have intersected my body at one point (or many), whose routes are known and unknown. Heidi Bucher, Liz Larner, Anicka Yi—their processes and urges of peeling the imprint or pouring resin over matter which continues to decay—are contained in my own pourings and peelings. My glue and Jell-O work maps histories within (1) leftovers as parcels/materia, (2) leftovers of unseen bodies from hooves, fats, proteins, etc., and (3) leftovers as infrathin recollections from other makers across time and space. My current work operates as ancestorial non-chart. I map materials, mothers, and makers who are contained in visible and invisible ways. This map is an attempt to track intersections of intuition, such as crossings between Heidi Bucher’s latex tearings and my glue peelings, or ties between my grandmother’s mush and my jelly; grandpa’s fridge and my cabinets. Threads of time are tugged again and again, and the untraceable is still untraced. Noelle Herceg, Plastic Flesh, Jell-O, glue, and mixed media on plastic and aluminum, 2022 25 26 Consider our porosity. We are porous in our thoughts, our energy, our creativity, our storytelling/sharing/making. We both spread and share with others—human and non-human bodies. We are collections—of our unique histories and each other’s, of infinitudes of intersections. We are each leftovers. Our bodies hold remembrances, influences, and longings for others. We are collections, and a part of others’ collections. Maybe this is why we go on collecting—because the more fragments culled from other bodies, places, and time, the deeper our archive grows, and the wider our ghost archives reach. Noelle Herceg, PF2, Jell-O and nail clippings on acrylic, 2022 27 28 Noelle Herceg, detail of PF2, Jell-O and nail clippings on acrylic, 2022 29 30 i Allie Rowbottom, Jell-O Girls: A Family History. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. ii Anne M. Wagner, “What Women Do, or The Poetics of Sculpture,” in Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture By Women 1947-2016, eds. Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin, 78-91 (Skira: Milan, 2016), 89. iii Briony Fer, “The Scatter: Sculpture As Leftover,” in Part Object Part Sculpture, 222-233. iv Liz Larner, Interview with Richard Armstrong, in Mind Over Matter: Concept and Object, 118-122 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), 118. v Alise Upitis, “Irreducible Ambiguity: in Anicka Yi: 6,070,430K Of Digital Spit, ed. Alise Upitis, 26-33 (Cambridge, MA : Milano, Italy: Mit List Visual Arts Center ; Mousse Publishing, 2015), 30. vi Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). vii Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2018, 113. viii Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2018, 18. Additional Influential Texts: ix Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless: What Things Do (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 77. Bois, Yve-Alain, Krauss, Rosalind E., and Centre Georges Pompidou, Host xManning, 85 Institution. Formless: A User's Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. xi Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless, or the Value of the Infrathin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 99. Bolender, Karin. R.A.W. Assmilk Soap, chapter from Multispecies Salon, xii Giles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara ed. Eben Kirksey, published by Duke University Press in 2014. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 32-33 xiii Giles Deleuze, Bergsonism, 32-33 Derrida, Jacques., and Prenowitz, Eric. Archive Fever: A Freudian xiv Sam Moyer, “Material Empathy” in Feelings: Soft Art, New York: Skira Impression. Pbk. ed. Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago [Ill.]: Rizzoli, 2015. University of Chicago Press, 1998. xv Lars Spuybroek, “The Matter of Ornament,” in The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design, 75-144 (New York: V2 Publishing, Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the 2011), 86-87. Chthulucene. Experimental Futures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. xvi Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188-213 (Bloomington: Linn, Kathleen. Like water we ebb and flow across time and space. Indiana University Press, 2008), 198. Exhibition Essay for “Honey Long & Prue Stent: Touching Pool.” PDF file. xvii Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, 31. August 21, 2020. xviii Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, 91-92. Morton, Timothy. All Art Is Ecological. Dublin: Penguin Books, 2018.