Tailgetters (2020)

A sculptural and audio installation shown in Trunk Show, curated by Jackie Rines.

Part of an ongoing project called A Bear Shits In the Woods, centered around three characters: Charmin Bear, Skeletor and King of the Forest. The three are descended from figures of consumer and popular culture—a bear who was created to sell toilet paper, the arch-nemesis of blonde beefcake He-Man from the cartoon Masters of the Universe, and a costume party representation of a tree. The shared characteristic of the three figures is that they are empty on the inside: beneath the carapace of their costumes is a deep velvety nothingness. Like dark matter it is simultaneously a perfect empty vacuum, and a dense generative darkness, starsubstance, filled with weight and possibility.

The project channels Jack Spicer’s “poetics of the outside” - in which poetry comes from outside the self and identity is shared and plural.

The three characters have absconded to “The Woods”*, living as a loving, free-livin’ thruple, fugitive from the bounds of their cultural and ontological origins.

* “The Woods”: 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 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 transcendence hums from every campground RV hook-up across America.

In the vignette Tailgetters, the three characters are entangled on a picnic blanket near their Odyssey minivan: a three-way-spooning tailgate listening party. A boombox plays a CD titled “The King of the Forest Recites Selections From Fifteen Propositions Against God by Jack Spicer. After Mike Kelley, after Walt Disney, after the dryad Eurydice”.

Mixed media.

Voice of King of the Forest performed by Alicia Adams.