Obscene is unshowable violence in Greek theater, ob skene: off-stage, "not fit to be seen in the light of day". 

A stage, a forest clearing, a campsite, a playground, a midsummer day’s dream in a trash-bag-windows February of no-year, no season, no place, every place, every possibility, this world is anyone’s, virtuality is a crashing wave of potential.

Once upon a place -

Twice upon a time - -

Thrice upon a dream - - -

In a forest dwelt a -

In a cabin in a forest dwelt a - -

In an apartment in the WUI* zone dwelt three - - -

*Wildland Urban Interface: the expansion of the suburbs into wildlands, incendiary and trampling. The setting of “the woods” is questioned. The idea of “the great outdoors” as an escape from life’s pressures has a long history: “getting back to nature” to find one's true self or even god. Early Christian mystics decamped to the desert; Romantic painters showed the transcendence of man dwarfed by nature; National Parks promised access to the sublime. Eventually the song of domesticated landscape hums from every campground RV hook-up across America. 

Cabin-in-the-woods horror

Cabin-in-the-woods porn

Cabin-in-the-woods decor 

Cabin-in-the-woods costume party

Cabin-in-the-woods retirement plan

The parallel spaces of suburbs and wilderness, stage and offstage, the domestic and the unknown. The forest is an under-construction theater set of a futuristic campsite in a woodland clearing. The cabin is a barely furnished apartment inhabited by a throuple of CosPlay characters—Charmin bear, Skeletor and a costume tree—empty-inside fugitives from categorically imposed and reperformed presentations of “subjectivity”. And empty-inside might be everything-inside, or everything outside. Jack Spicer’s “practice of the outside”: a poetics that comes from outside the self, that “begins where the person leaves off – at the open end of what we are.”

We refuse a clear difference between “stage” and "off", acceptable and unacceptable, made and in-the-making, stasis and flux, good taste and bad.

We remember the theater of art-making and the performance of living. We remember the desire, the violence, the joy, the frustration and the tenderness of both.

Historical and cultural associations of the forest/wilderness are as sites of othering and banishment, as well as notions of freedom, autonomy and self discovery. The idea of wilderness itself is complicated by being necessarily contained within an idea of civilization. The idea of the forest holds both a desire for escape also the potentialities and pitfalls of envisioning utopian futures. The forest is where remarkable events happen: events that shake things up, whether it’s the medieval hunt for the unicorn, sabbats held and and rebellions planned, ET’s spaceship landing, Baby Suggs’ life-giving sermons, the anachronistic characters found amongst the trees of Godard’s “Weekend” who might be eating your husband.

This is a forest of paintings, drawings and light. A scene of flora, fauna, spirits, monsters and tent-humping. A time-travel-campsite with a space-age-cottagecore socially-proximate underlit double shitter. Piss-and-kiss! A neon note-to-self you can only see with your phone. What is nature anyway? Out here in the woods, anything goes.

The “cabin”: five zones of quarantined domestic life. A TV room, a reading room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a toilet. Rinse and repeat. 

Refried Acconci and Chill: the throuple gets friendly on the sofa while an internet bootleg of Vito's "Theme Song" plays on TV.  Exquisite corpses hang on the wall like family portraits. 

Next door, a "reading room": a series of drawings in which outspread legs become pages of books in order to seduce the reader. A library that grabs you by the knackers. 

Sexy vids in the bedroom—bureaucratic puppet sex in a virtual office, pillow-fighting in an golden-lit street, beating off a squelchy paint roller to a robo-list of US citizenship conditions, touching all the Teslas, and a ballistic stud in an infinitely looping splintery money shot—no wonder our domestic trio have frothed themselves into an orgasmic heap of ecstatic Polyfil immanence!

In the kitchen an LED board scrolls a parental guidance list of all the violent bits of a domestic-set horror movie. At the kitchen table a rudimentary AI drawing robot sketches a vase of flowers but every time it comes out as cock-and-balls.

The bathroom houses a reenactment of Sturtevant’s reenactment of Beuys' "Fat Chair" only the chair is a toilet and the fat is a fatberg. Two pages torn from a novel give the account of a middle-aged 18th English Earl and his wife taking their habitual morning shit together on a double latrine they have had custom made. A gorgeous photograph of sludgy accretion hangs on the wall. Maybe it’s a fatberg of the whole show, wiped up in a giant Wet-One and flushed away, the last vestiges of Skeletor’s blueness stuck to one corner. 

A flasher lurks backstage.

And as you return to the no-future-time-past, the press release from the 1999 BANK show "If Hope Was A Time Machine" staple-gunned to the back of a forest theater flat, as if fly-posted to a tree by previous wanderers.

 ********

OBSCENE is an immersive installation made by Olivia Mole and Shagha Ariannia, with work by Shagha Ariannia, BANK, Brontez Purnell Dance Company, Max Cleary, Anthony Discenza, Rachel Harrison, Stanya Kahn, Tala Madani, Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen, Olivia Mole, Alfred Riley and Chester Vincent Toye.

With many thanks to Dena Beard, Jasmin Blasco, Martineke Bloot, Jisoo Chung, Tim Gentles, Eleonore Hugendubel, David James, William James, Hailey Loman and LACA, Richard Matson, Miles Peyton, John Russell and all the artists who lent us their work.