Jell-O. It was the purest of comfort foods, cheerful and unthreatening, one of the major food groups of childhood. Not many of us are without some memory of its quivering, of carrot shavings dancing the tarantella in a lime- or rose-colored sea. Our mothers knew the power of this soothing primordial soup. They knew that when cooled and released from its circular cradle, it gave life to fruit cocktail. They knew its unlimited potential.
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It seems that Jell-O has now been given an even more existential meaning. For the opening of Randolph St. Gallery’s “Sex, Death, & Jello” show two weeks ago, performance artist Susan Wexler and two friends faced off in a room lit only by black lights and began to wrestle in a tub containing approximately 352 cups of Day-Glo Jello-O.
“Gee, it looks just like the Milky Way,” said one spectator.
“I like to do silly sex and death things,” Wexler had admitted earlier. “But I also want people to see something macabre and serious in my performances. Glowing bodies engaged in a grim but silly struggle in glowing goo . . . like dinosaurs in some swamp. The purpose is to make things beautiful and weirdly radiant.
The connection between art and life doesn’t escape her. Jell-O wrestling, she contends, probably represents “some sort of apocryphal food styling.”
