Monthly Statement:
August 2006

*I will continue collecting soap indefinitely after the official ending of this project in September. If you are interested in contributing soap or stories to my continued efforts, please email jillgreenberg27@hotmail.com or mail slivers to the address at the bottom of this text.

I Looking Back
In the final months of the project I found myself reflecting on what this unusual endeavor has manifested in my life, and though I risk sounding tastelessly irreverent, as I mentally review the kindness, humor, generosity and just plain indulgence that people have shown for me and my oddball request, I keep returning to the words of Anne Frank, out of context as they are: “… I believe that people are really good at heart.” And it’s essential to express how healing it has been to relish the warmth of the simple gifts that so many people have given me this year: slivers of selves in the form of well wishes, shared stories, hand-written notes, photographs, fresh perspectives, compliments, encouragement, energy, recognition, appreciation, congratulations, opportunities, small abstract forms in all shapes, sizes, colors and scents, and–oh yeah—soap! I’ve known practically from the start that I will continue this project on my own after the official Accumulation Project ends.

Another thing I learned is that most people cling vigorously to their personal washing practices. If a person says, “Oh, I use my bar until it’s all gone,” or “…but I fuse the sliver onto a new bar,” no amount of cajoling or goading will get them to give up the goods. Likewise, no soft soap user will switch to bars even if I promise to include their slivers in a mosaic on the altar of St. Peters! And don’t get me started on my buddy Dave Bastian who wouldn’t consider even a temporary switch from white to pink Dove, (which makes a beautifully shaped and colored sliver) because “pink is for girls.” All I can do is spread the word, and the soap slivers will come from whomever, whenever, and wherever they come. My job is to be patient and grateful, like a Buddhist monk walking the village in the morning bearing his empty bowl, awaiting sustenance in whatever form it appears.

II Last Call
That said, I put considerable energy into getting the word out. This month I sent out a couple of “Last Call” emails to everyone whose address I had, and, as a result, there was a prodigious flurry of contributions in August. My friend LaShinda Clark of Trainor, PA didn’t consider that the US Post Office’s cancellation machines subject an envelope to a merciless pulverizing when she sent her delicate white slivers without any padding, and as a result I received two tiny baggies of Ivory Snow that had a street value of… ?????

Another friend, Galen Warden sent a 29-year-old bar of soap in its original wrapper, a souvenir from her less-than-perfect honeymoon. I am not sure what to do with it—on one hand, it seems so invested with negative memories, that I hardly want to touch it, let alone wash with it, but on the other hand I’m fine with including the soap of Milwaukee County Jail’s finest hardcore criminals in my artwork. Go figure.

While in London, Galen procured my only international slivers while wandering amidst some ruins by the old Roman wall. She reports spotting:

“two halves of a bar of soap in two little nooks of an ancient, roofless cathedral. Right there on the ground was a hose connected to a faucet, perhaps used to care for the gardens that decorated the chapel ruins. I could only conclude that the homeless of London are sanitary folks and enjoy their outdoor shower among stone columns and flowers. I only slightly regretted pilfering one of their soaps, content that they were still left with the twin to keep themselves with the dignity of cleanliness.”

Though Galen’s theory that the soap was shared by vagrants is colorful, I am inclined to believe it belonged to the site’s charming, ruddy-faced elderly caretaker, to whom I’ve assigned the name Bertram.

III Pseudo Slivers
Earlier in the summer, I had been invited to participate in a show in DC featuring installation and performance artists whose work defies being sold as a commodity. Each artist was given small transparent vinyl boxes and instructed to use the leftover materials from previous installations or performances to represent their work in a saleable form. Of course I would make a piece using soap slivers, but, since this piece was intended for sale, I could not risk using my official Accumulation Project soap slivers. In shopping for new soap in an appealing array of colors, I became acquainted with “Dial for Men,” a line of deodorant soaps available in “Full Force” or “Recharge” strength. It had a deep Yves Klein blue color I had never seen in soap before starting this project. Early on, when I saw the scarcity of slivers in a true pink color and the relative abundance and variety of greens, I realized that color schemes of soap change with the times just as in fashion, only not as quickly. I remember pink being a common color for soap in my childhood, but now, with the exception of pink Dove, peachy tones have become the norm. Back in the 70s, I remember TV ads heralding the advent of green soap with a campaign for Irish Spring that featured a saucy lass wearing a dress with a cleavage-enhancing bodice that she obviously borrowed from the closet of the St. Pauli Girl. She and her mate, a Chad Everett look-alike wearing tweed knickers and cap romped through a verdant pasture while our gal, a product of the sexual revolution, snatched the bar from his hand and asserted her entitlement to equality of sexual pleasure in the thin guise of comments lauding the soap’s fresh masculine scent and deodorizing merits (“Manly yes, but I like it too!”).

Left with the task of making believable-looking soap slivers from whole bars, I tried in vain to slice them thin using every kind of hand saw I had before resorting to the band saw at my workplace (shhhhhhh!) I snuck into the sculpture studio during the deserted dinner-hour and proceeded to gum up the blade with a waxy soap coating, simultaneously distributing a cacophony of perfumes into the air that caused the guy in the next studio over to poke his head in and ask who was messing with potpourri. After sweeping up all my “soapdust” and diligently scraping as much goo as possible off of the blade, I slunk out of the studio, feeling guilty as any abuser of power tools should.

That evening was August 31st, the 365th day of The Accumulation Project’s run, and I found myself around 10 PM bent over my sud-filled bathroom sink soaking dozens of 1⁄4 inch slices of soap in warm water and attacking their telltale uniformly thick edges with a veggie peeler. I had tried once, months before to manufacture “pseudo slivers” by chopping up a bar with a knife and wearing the pieces down with wet hands, but the results were too chunky—not convincing. The edges must be worn thin, and a veggie peeler, manipulated over the edge at a 35º angle was the way to get the job done. When I got to the batch of yellow dial slices, my sink looked like a bowl of shredded cheese at a taco bar. After all this work, there was NO WAY I was going to sell the piece I made out of these pseudo slivers in the DC show. I would keep them separate from the real slivers that people contributed, however, and decided to reserve a section of my piece for the final Accumulation Project show to be interactive—so that gallery visitors might arrange the artificially created slivers in a composition of their own, that might change and even grow if visitors decided to bring their own slivers to the gallery. I like this idea since the endeavor literally has, all along, been the work of many hands.

IV Cosmic Contacts
Another product I made for the show in DC, intended to commodify work that, in its original form is not practical for sale, was a collection of note cards featuring images of the soap sliver work in progress from my two previous shows. On the front of each card was an image of the installation and on the back was an explanation of the Accumulation Project with contact information for would-be soap contributors to reach me as I continue the project on my own. I will give sets of these cards to family and friends and see if their distribution generates any contributions.

In addition to the abundance of snail mail I received in August there were several interesting developments on the email front. Among these was a message from Ellensue Spicer, a nutrition educator from Bala Cynwyd, PA who has a website that features cooking, nutrition, health, and lifestyle articles intended to foster “midlife women’s physical, mental, and spiritual growth.” She named the site—dig this—“Menupause”! www.menupause.info. Ellensue mentioned that her site regularly profiles “…interesting women in all fields of life,” and would like to interview me. We plan to get together in late December, so it looks like I might be the January cover girl for Menupause; that’ll be a hot news flash alright! Ellensue kindly offered to include a link to the Accumulation Project in the interview, and since women of middle age and beyond seem to be my most prolific contributors, this exposure might prove to be a great generator of sliver donations. Cosmic forces also decreed that the week she initially emailed me, her site featured recipes using mango, so I was able to share with her the Hindu myth about Hanuman, the monkey god and the mango, that was the inspiration for the paisley motif in the two more recent incarnations of my soap sliver mosaic (see statement 4/06.)

Early this month I got an email from a charming 18 year old Jill Greenberg who answered the invitation I gave to Jill Greenbergs everywhere to contact me and share some bits of their identities (see statement 1/06.)

Hello! I stumbled upon your soap sliver website while googling "The Manipulator" Jill Greenberg. I myself am actually a Jill Greenberg, I've known about "The Manipulator" Jill for awhile, I found her while googling myself. I find it a little crazy that all of us Jill Greenbergs seem to be artists of some sort! …I'll be a freshman at SUNY New Paltz where I will be majoring in Art History. Thus far my plan is to work at an art gallery/museum, and hopefully one day be the director of one. Who knows, maybe then I can curate a show of the works of Jill Greenbergs around the world....

In a later email, she astutely observed:
I love the idea of the soap sliver collecting, I've always been intriqued by personal effects and the imagined history behind them. There is something about witnessing an item so intimate, so private.
And yes, I'd love to contribute some special Jill G soap slivers to your collection. And I don't even use bar soap. But I will, just for a fellow Jill G.

Ahhh the comfort of a kindred spirit! And to top it off, this Jill Greenberg, in her willingness to temporarily change her washing habits for the sake of collaborating in this project, disproved my aforementioned assertion that a liquid soap user won’t switch to bar soap just to have his/her possessions immortalized in a work of art. A true pal. She hasn’t produced a sliver yet, so she has missed the deadline for inclusion in the OFFICIAL Accumulation Project show, but I trust her to come up with the goods sooner or later.

Doppelganger Jill, on the other hand, (see statements 1/06, 3/06, 6/06, 7/06) has not been so forthcoming. The friendly letter of introduction I sent her in late June has gone unanswered. Because she does not publish her email address online and I do, I continue to get fan mail of a variety of types intended for her. I happen to have an email address for her, but do not give it out. Rather, I explain the mix-up to the senders, tell them a little about my project, encourage them to send soap (awww what the heck!) and let them know that I will forward their emails. The first time I forwarded fan mail to her I got a polite one-word response: “thanks!” Since then, she does not respond. There could be many reasons for her silence, and I will not speculate about them here. But I hope she finds some amusement in the situation, and someday steps forth with a friendly “hello.”

The tally of misaddressed messages I have received so far (today’s date being December 4th) is eight: three emails from guys who find her work amazing, two emails from female high school students desperately requesting information about her for school projects involving artist biographies, one Austrian girl, also of high school age, asking permission to use some of her photos of in the graphics of an online role playing game, an old friend of Doppelganger’s from her school days at RISD, and the publisher of a magazine called Blend, produced in the Netherlands. Among these, the last two were of the greatest interest to me. On November 17, the publisher of Blend magazine emailed merely to see if he had the correct email address for Jill Greenberg. It was a long shot, but since I had recently sent images of my soap sliver work to Europe for consideration for the Szpilman Award for Ephemeral Art www.szpilman.de, I was hoping that he might have been involved in the jurying of the competition and, though I wasn’t chosen as a finalist, perhaps he took an interest in my work. It was worth a try, so I responded with a cheery email stating that he might have the right email address if he was seeking a talented mixed media/installation artist with a penchant for used soap. I took advantage of the opportunity by sending him a few jpgs of my work, giving him permission to pass them along as he wished to anyone who might be interested, should he instead, be seeking my doppelganger. In closing, I mentioned that at his request, I would forward his email to Doppelganger Jill. He never responded. Lame.

On 11:55 PM on September 1, literally during what I considered the final 5 minutes of the year-long Accumulation Project (for some reason I view the official project dates from September 1 through the following September 1, rather than just until August 31) an email with the heading, “Hi Jill-greetings from a friend of your past” was sent to my address. The sender, Suzette, was a college friend of Doppelganger Jill’s who had apparently opened a shop of some sort in Soho called Lemon Grass, where Doppelganger Jill made some photographs of a display of candles. Suzette mentioned that she had relocated her store and manufacturing to Florida, and encouraged Jill to drop her a line sometime. I made my usual response, explaining the mix-up and referring her to the Accumulation Project website. The next day, she responded:

“Bizarre and interesting. Well you aren't the Jill that i went to school with but i do have more soap slivers then anyone you probably know as i am a soap and candle manufacturer. There is a reason for everything. You may email me, as when I saw the soap slivers it gripped me with so many emotions.
SC”
I think I’ll be emailing her again soon!

And the Beat Goes On and On and On…
Though the accumulation project is officially over, cosmic forces with a damn fine sense of the uncanny have set this crazy train in motion and it just keeps rollin’ on!
On September 25th I got an email from the widely acclaimed artist Donald Lipski, who had seen, and for some reason saved a listing I had posted in the Yahoo Public Arts Forum waaaaay back in February. He merely asked: “are you the jill greenberg who was sisters with gayle greenberg?”

Little did Donald Lipski know that this was not the first time our paths had crossed in this life. Way back in the mid-nineties, when I was a shooter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I had photographed him working on a project that involved rolling fabric printed with the American flag into large, spheres or balls. At the time, I didn’t know him from a hole in the ground, but I found his work striking and elemental. Today, he remains one of my favorite artists.

When I finally got around to grad school twelve years later, I found myself discussing Lipski’s work with critic in residence, John Yau, who years before had written the exhibition catalog essay for Lipski’s flag balls.

After explaining this and more in a lengthy email responding to Mr. Lipski, I proceeded to verbally morph into a full fledged fawning idiot:
“Oh--did I mention, I'm the President and full membership of the East Baltimore Chapter of the Donald Lipski Fan Club. Should you feel inclined to become one of the many contributor/collaborators to my accumulation project, I'd be overjoyed to receive a Lipskian soap sliver. I have no idea whether you have looked at my page on the Accumulation Project website, but your serendipitous introduction to the story is yet a further addition to the bizarre series of coincidences that this endeavor has manifested since its inception a year ago. The inclusion of a famous artist's soap sliver would grant it an undeniable cachet. I hope you will consider participating...”

Mr. Lipski responded promptly a day later:
“Nice….I have full brand new bars of soap, both at home and at the studio, but I'm confident that they will become slivers in time…
…Nice to be in touch. How do you attach soap--wax?
All the best,
Donald Lipski”
So Mr. Lipski I will patiently await your “celebrity sliver.”

August’s contributor/collaborators include:
Joy Berenfield, Jan Evans, Cincinnati, OH; Arlington, MA; Donna H, Philadelphia, PA; Sarah Rothman, Silver Spring, MD; Cherie Nelson, Arlington, VA; Dave Bastian, Glendale, CA; Galen Warden, Rockaway, NJ; Leena Kwon, Lathrop, CA; Joab Jackson, Laurel, MD; Jim Burger, Baltimore, MD; Brad Stapleton, Cincinnati, OH; David M Warren, Collingswood, NJ; Stephanie Robbins, Martinsburg W. VA; LaShinda Clark, Trainor, PA; Nancy Winchester, Rockville, MD; Jill Greenberg, Buffalo, NY; Suzette, FL; Ellensue Spicer, Bala Cynwyd, PA; Donald Lipski (address withheld)

To contribute soap, you may mail it to:
Jill Greenberg
1440 E. Baltimore St. Apt. 3A
Baltimore, MD 21231

Padding or a small box is suggested for thin or delicate slivers.
Many thanks,
Jill

Feel free to email me at jillgreenberg27@hotmail.com if you wish to contribute soap slivers to the project or to send a comment.

Washington Post article available here.

Process: I will be accumulating remnants of used bars of soap by soliciting contributions through networks of friends and acquaintances. I am also looking into receiving donations through local hotels and collection boxes set up in various locales.