This week I got out another book from the library after finishing Alan Licht’s, this one being less sound-oriented and more general to the arts, called Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art by Kieran Cashell. This was because of some ideas generating over the break concerning Noise and what I consider an issue, going back to an older idea regarding the Harmful aspect of it but also thinking about the aesthetic interplay between the Harm of the sound and the Harm portrayed aesthetically, with a lot of the 90s American Harsh Noise and more distinctly and ironically classic Power Electronics material being fully absorbed in aesthetics of harm, opting to use extremely violent imagery and mean spirited lyrics, samples, themes, etc, which are kind of integral to the genre. I guess I am just wanting to explore what the effect of fully absorbing a work in moral reprehensibility (which is an obvious “issue”) actually achieves within a work, and reading about the ethics of definitely more well-known works will ideally help me apply similar standards to the works I hold to a high standard even now.

Again, it feels pretty awful being noticeably behind where I should be at, with this week being the deadline for us to hand in the essay drafts to get feedback on, but I guess I am becoming more content that I just work slower than I would like to / am expected to. But I feel like writing about Power Electronics should be interesting, the only book I have that is strictly on the subject is suitably baffling and ridiculous (Fight Your Own War), as it is an oral history kind of book based on Zine Culture aesthetics, so some chapters offer actual history and insightful perspectives and some offer entirely self-absorbed or uninformed kind of journalistic “empty takes”.

So far the book has been quite interesting, the first chapter after the introduction and thanks is about Richard Billingham’s photo series Ray’s A Laugh, a documenting of his family situation in a council flat (and a sound connection is made with it being related to Pulp’s track Common People) as a response to the middle class fetishisation of middle class lifestyles by documenting raw reality. The work itself is interesting, I had heard of it briefly before but I enjoy what is extrapolated from the work more than the work itself;

“Lewis draws our attention to the perplexing image of Ray crashed out on the lavatory floor right beside the freshly stained toilet bowl. He comments : “One might notice that Billingham chose to photograph the old man and then publish the photograph, rather than immediately picking him up and cleaning him off. One might ask why he chose to do that, and what it implies.” Pg 23.

This is always a question that is present in morally difficult work I feel, especially with “harsh reality” kind of material, what is the person’s intent doing this and at what point is the threshold of exploitation, with this example being that the decision to photograph rather than immediately help implies something voyeuristic about the photographers approach to his family, or that with that in mind how much of this voyeuristic attitude can be applied to an audience and how much is ingrained into the role of a photographer, or recordist, documentarian etc. How much does involvement matter, how much does the approach of a “fly on the wall” and human detachment lean into exploitation of the subject? I think I particularly like this idea in the context of Power Electronics because I feel like the genre has a default mode of hostility toward a subject, the inclusion of the most mundane things would be interpreted with this framework because the perspective taken is most often that of a perpetrator or stalker, kind of revelling in the moral disgrace of the voyeur ambiguous recordings have as a means of creating a more hostile listening environment.

“…This pro-intentional view enables him to argue, like Gaut, that if a work fails to invoke the moral response intended by its producer, this constitutes “a failure in the design of the work, and therefore, is an aesthetic failure”.The example he uses to illustrate this thesis is instructive. Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho is aesthetically compromised, he argues, because the author’s intention that the work be interpreted as a satirical critique of the 1980s yuppie culture Reaganomics failed aesthetically because readers were unable to reprocess the lurid and baroque descriptions of the protagonist’s serial murders in ironically detached satirical terms.” Pg 31.

This interpretation of art is interesting, I don’t think it’s entirely correct but it draws on something mentioned earlier in the introduction to the book, with something deemed classically “aesthetic” is to be appealing through disinterested gaze, which I interpreted as being having a surface level appeal to the work that doesn’t need to be dug into to “get”. The argument is made that transgressive art is the antithesis to this, it gives the audience something immediately unappealing that becomes more appealing with more time spent with it, thinking about or engaging with it, but this view kind of strikes a balance between the two. It offers that work can be “aesthetically compromised” if the intention becomes too masked by, in this case, its “transgressive” element, where the extreme violence overshadows the subtext and the “point” is smothered. I find this with a lot of Power Electronics, funnily enough, with the more late Whitehouse inspired work that deal more with “researched topics” such as Martin Bladh’s work related to classical theatre, 2000s Sutcliffe Jugend poetry based works, Con-Dom’s work related to T.E Lawrence, the medium chosen’s absolute prioritisation of “extremity” destroys nuance and desires “blood”, and audiences will often not take away the nuance as much as they take away from its strength.

This is just what I kind of extrapolated so far from the book, the wording of it is quite fun in that it is very bound to classical philosophy (which is obvious because of the subject of the book being “ethics,” of course), but I am basically completely unequipt with a majority of these ideas but it isn’t frustrating weirdly, kind of exciting since it is still penetrable. The only thing I am missing is how to integrate practice into the work, since the practice is supposed to inform the research and vice versa, if my topic is to be Power Electronics then it would make sense to make a Power Electronics track myself to articulate its inner workings, but in my mind that would be asking too much of the person marking the work and a little ridiculous, possibly embarrassing. I will keep reading though and see if this is still working.