Brief excursus on Wonky

Before going any further, this post won’t signify an abandonment of the usual inaesthetic trajectory of NTBD. Rather, it’ll be a brief visual aside, dedicated to and inspired by an interesting discussion with Rouge’s Foam after his recent post, which sought an aestheticization of Wonky’s post-dubstep audio-visual terrain.

User generated video fed through an EGA video adaptor.

RF argues – drawing a striking comparison between Rainbowmonkey’s squint-3D-collage for Débruit’s Let’s Post Funk release, and Raoul Hausmann’s bricolage bust The Spirit of Our Age – that ‘wonky can be read as a neo-modernism or a “little modernism.” And gives several provocative reasons to support this claim, the most interesting of them points to Wonky’s usage of technology. Specifically, that the praxis of Wonky in sonic and visual terms represents a continuation of classical modernist sensibilities – but with contemporary materials. Or in RF’s words: ‘it’s enabled to a significant extent by the personal computers and software without which the early twentieth-century modernist artists, musicians and architects could only go so far, thus it picks up where they [the modernists] left off.’

Mercury’s Rainbow, Zomby (2009)

Here is, however, another reading of Wonkified aesthetics. Re-using the examples of Hausmann’s wooden sculpture and Rainbowmonkey’s digital montage; what I can only see is a simulacra of classic modernist techniques; a photoshopped assimilation of what was new in Hausmann’s aptly-titled figure rather than a declaration of anything actually new – an instance of Wot U Called it 1920? The new exhibited here manifests itself only by variation of the extant, re-reifying legacy Ideas. The exhilarating psychedelia of its sonics are better served in recognition of its, spatio-temporally local, late-capitalist palette. A nostalgia driven innovation in an assault on the 1980s-90s archive … namely, post-1980 generation hi-def-hi-res re-stagings of that-which-genuinely-excited-8/16-bit-childhoods, the aura surrounding: the primary-coloured innocence of Enhanced Graphics Adaptor (EGA) sprites; the startling dawn of Video Graphic Array realism; the 12-voiced polyphonic arrival of Creative Labs’ Soundblaster sound card; and every console game associated with them etc etc etc. Of consoles it was Gemmy, citing SEGA, that made this notion most explicit. But it is also present in the videos, sounds, and tour projections of Zomby, Flying Lotus, Joker, The Gaslamp Killer etc…

‘Your insults are real, ours are fake – Perfect for P-UNIT!‘

P-Unit Mixtape, Paper Rad (2006) [excerpt]

…and everything else by Paper Rad.

All of those innovations are historically anchored and ontologically commemorated by the time of their rupture: the 8/16 bit event. Perhaps, it’s because of this, also, that that new risks foreclosure to latter generations, since, the rush, now, is found more in its phenomenological mimicry; aping its historical audibility-visuality rather than gripping what was immanent of its truth. Perhaps, and to be slightly harsh, this aesthetic’s success can only be gauged by how well it re-enacts the modern of before, fetishizing the appearance of the 8/16bit event through accumulated excesses of technology rather than innovation. A revelry in a partial-jouissance, in that, what actually gets performed is an ironic marveling in how new technology used to be. Does this not sound more like, again, postmodern solipsism rather than a neo-modernist return? These remarks are not aimed at the dismissal of how enjoyable Wonky is, merely it notes what most postmodern pleasures are: a type of masochistic gratification amidst _scapes of vivid ephemera and loss. Really, there is nothing new being said here, these sentiments and much more, have already been brilliantly set-out on several occasions by Splinteringboneashes. I can only re-emphasise its postmodernist colours, and attention to decay, a transfixion in gazing at ‘the strangeness of a blooming irridescant corpse‘ – despite stopping short at SBA’s encouragement towards a full-blown nihilism.

Video for Welcome to Heartbreak by KANYE WEST feat. Kid Cudi (NABIL, 2009)

Perhaps, best embodying Wonky’s techno-cannibalistic imperative, aesthetically, is the digital video editing technique known as Datamoshing (aka. “Pixel Bleed“) – a digital version of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002). Applying massive amounts of data compression to sound and visual footage, it deliberately forces the wholesale production of “Compression artifacts,” glitches, and data loss in order to fashion a volatile but weirdly beautiful image. Other than Paper Rad, the technique finds its exponents in visual artists such as Takashi Murata and Antoine Catala.

Umbrella vs. Zombie mashup, Paper Rad

Should this technique be considered something truly new as modernists should really maintain, or another clever postmodernist trick?

Addenda:

(i) Teenocide,

(ii) Paul B. Davis in ‘Intentional Computing’ at Seventeen Gallery (2007)

(iii) Paul B. Davis in ‘Define Your Terms (or How Kanye West Fucked Up My Show)’ at Seventeen Gallery (2009).

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You’re currently reading “Brief excursus on Wonky,” an entry on Nothing to be done

Published:: August 6, 2009 / 6:48 pm

Category:: art, theory

Tags:: Aesthetics, Antoine Catala, Bill Morrison, Datamoshing, Paper Rad, Paul B. Davis, Pixel Bleed, Takashi Murata, Wonky

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The art which is and which is to come should be as solidly united as a demonstration, as surprising as a night attack, and as elevated as a star. Here is what these three images as abstractions confirm.

The work to come should be as solidly united as a demonstration, because it should oppose to the perpetual market mobility of the imperial world an inflexible principle of consequence. The work to come spurns relativisms and suspects doubt. It explores its affirmation to the very end.

The work to come should be as surprising as a night attack because it makes an event of the ignored real. It imposes this real violently, this piece of the real on whatever it seizes. It does not make it circulate, it does not communicate it. It imposes it, with a necessary small touch of terror.

The work to come should be as elevated as a star because it desires non-temporal indifference to its invented form. It is not fraternal, corporeal, it does not install itself in the lukewarmness of sharing. The work of art to come is detached from imperial commerce.

– Alain Badiou, Manifesto of Affirmationism.

Rouge's Foam 8.6.09 / 11pm

Hi, you make some very persuasive points. As I hinted on Twitter, I see two senses of ‘the postmodern’ in art. Firstly there’s the Jameson / Baudrillard angle, looking at late capitalist economies, commodification, spectacle and simulacra. The second angle, represented perhaps by Derrida, Lyotard and maybe Foucault is the more post-structural, this art is characterised by the old buzz-words: irony, deconstruction, textual surface, bricolage, pluralism (of style, for example) or straight-up pastiche. The two are certainly not separate, but do bisect and confuse working definitions of the notion of postmodernism/ity somewhat. The blogosphere I’m most aware of tends to favour the first angle and its position of critique, but I can see the positive aspects of the second.

As a believer in the second angle slightly more than the first, I have my problems with the notion of simulacra which I won’t go into, but I think I’d disagree that the rainbowmonkey cover and the music is a pastiche (to convert to my own parlance) of cubism/dada or electro-funk, there’s a resemblance but I feel it isn’t precise enough to be a mere reiteration or repackaging. I know a simulacrum needn’t be entirely faithful to ‘the original’, but I think that to see ‘Let’s post funk’ as a slick, plasticised rehashing of cubism/funk, while very understandable, would be too hasty. What if it really was something a bit new and we dismissed it as a ‘postmodernist trick’? There are things in the cover and the video, minor things, that even modernism didn’t actually do, its shapes and their movement and rendering are much more complex, for example.

Other 2nd angle pomo hallmarks seem absent – no irony (no mocking or double-entendre), no textual surface (no revealing that the image is part of an artistic medium, though regarding the rest of wonky music, bitcrushing, unquantisation etc, that one could go both ways), no pluralistic collage (the shapes are disparate but the style is uniform). Perhaps the lack of these criteria doesn’t wholly make ‘Let’s Post Funk’ modernist by default, but the material was original enough (albeit mildly so) for me to wonder at a sort of mini-modernism.

As far as the first angle goes, this mini-modernism is probably just a smaller eddy in the wider context of pomo late capital, and I left a space for the Jameson / Baudrillard definition by saying in my post “Sure, as a neo-modernism it’s smaller and more casual than the original project and it’s still perhaps subsumed by the wider macro-aesthetic currents and economies of postmodernism”. So in this sense, we can both be correct!

The main thrust of my ideas on this subject is somewhere in my earlier post ‘Loving Wonky’, but I also believe that to ‘define’ wonky as nostalgic music would be to undermine or ignore the genuine innovation that is also going on alongside it. I’m rather hoping that we can give fresh new meanings and connotations to 8bit sounds (eventually, of course, they’ll connote late 00s music to future audiences) with wonky other than 80s tech: why should it forever be 80s? The real nostalgic 8bit music is going on here, for example: http://www.8bitpeoples.com/discography#8BP017 (even there though, there is some originality) and wonky is something more… Having said this, your account of wonky as nostalgic exercise is one of the most compelling I’ve seen. Your parallel with pixelbleeding is fascinating too, especially as applied to the messier, more chaotic areas of wonky (Cupp Cave’s tracks, for example).

To sum up: I think wonky ignores the 2nd angle pomo characteristics and has an innovation of its own, making it modernist to a certain extent, but it does become an aspect of 1st angle pomo. Simulacra and nostalgia (a plastic modernism enacted through nostalgic codes) are very appropriate (if depressing) angles but I’d argue that wonky offers something more.

Edwin 8.7.09 / 11am

Thanks for the generous comments, RF. I’m enjoying your take on music-aesthetic related matters.

Yes, it’s clear we disconnect over the notion of postmodernism/postmodernity. While I understand the temptation to separate it into two more angles – possibly for the purpose of sparing its artefacts from critiques of the first – what’s clear is that I don’t believe this is possible. Perhaps this is a hard-line being pushed, simmered down, “a bit new” can never deserve modern categorisation, even with a little ‘m’. Actually, “a bit new” reads, for me, more like a kind of postmodern flirtation (a bit on the side of the new?); already it accepts compromise on behalf of the new. But the boundary here, unless seen through a pomo lens, is absolute. Viewed from the perspective of the void, say, Badiou’s inaesthetic horizon, there cannot be anything actually new in mere variation, particularly that in such proximity to processes of capital.

To diverge for a minute: isn’t this what we see when people floss their “new” trainer/sneaker colourways? What better postmodern trick is there than the Nike ID store? It’s a physical nexus between several related tropes: late-capitalist political economy (zeitgeist marketing and consumption) plugged directly into production-line novelty. Its irony is so well practiced – qua simulations of the “one-offs” – that for each of their clients what they wear even FEELS new. But just how new – beneath layers upon ostrich-skinned layers of inter-textual, deconstructionist, bricolage surface play – can a pair of Air Force Is actually be?

Also, perhaps the issue of generation divide is more important than I first thought. For the demographic whose childhoods proceeded the height of these innovations, first time round, these hi-def reconstructions of their delights will more likely than not be their first time round – and it’s probably even better this time. Those that were there before know this is nostalgia, but of course, an intoxicating and sophisticated one…

…this has turned out to be a brief but fun excursus!

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Brief excursus on Wonky

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