JELLY BUMS, 2025

Made for a live podcast recording at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, these jelly bums respond to Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s book Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. In Deviant Matter, Dr. Tompkins analyzes a porn screensaver titled “Generous Gesture,” by the Toronto-based artist dirtysurfaces. The screensaver is a grid of videos where each square shows a butt being massaged by a pair of hands. The flesh absorbs force of the hands and redistributes it, gives and springs back, calling to mind that other rheological substance: jelly.

A large table was laid with a jelly bum system. Over most of the table, a grid of napkins with little gummy butts were available for sampling, and in the center of the table rose a row of four double-dome Jell-Os, or big butts (abstracted into hemispheres, as befits an increase in scale).