A Million Keys

Response to Sexual Onslaught /// Form Grows Rampant

This week I received an announcement for the upcoming Ramleh show. To be honest, I find the name “Sexual Onslaught” and the poster art pretty vacuous.

Clearly, I respect the abject in music, art and literature as valuable cultural critique. I consider noise and other forms of extreme music as yet another arena for the representation of the abject, which is why it’s important. Primarily because I believe music and performance are vital forms of ritual, and they have a transcendent and illuminative effect. Hence, why it’s subversive and politically charged. I also understand that the promoters are referencing the shock tactics Ramleh initially employed as a reaction to the political climate of the time and the commercialization of punk in the 1980s. But to rematerialize those same signifiers divorced from their original context means something different in 2007. On one hand- it’s an instance of base retro culture and, frankly, why is that interesting? Why even bother organizing a show like this? Live performance is an impermanent and transitory medium- and you can’t replicate an experience from 25 years ago. So why try? The other, more paramount, fact is that the promoters are using images and words representing the mutilation of women to advertise an event put on by men, performed by male performers, to a mostly male audience. Lame. I don’t care that Maya Miller, a woman, designed the poster. (And I normally like her art!) It’s a meathead move and it serves to reinforce the dominant hierarchy in a way I can’t support. It also goes to show how underrepresented and undervalued women are in the noise scene- which is unfortunate.

I had a very similar reaction to Form Grows Rampant by Peter Christopherson, which was included in the show Les Autres at Ratio 3. The video, shot by a white male British artist, erotically depicted self-mutilation rituals performed by young boys in Thailand. Ratio 3, in its current incarnation, is an exhibition space open once a week out of the gallerist’s house. For this reason, it has a very exclusive feel. The privileged nature of the screening room only elevated the feeling of a profound discrepancy in power between the subjects of the video- engaged in the destruction of their brown bodies- and the white, Western director who glorified it. It presented a colonialist and exploitative lens under the declaration of “other”- which it obviously was not. When paired with someone like Eve Fowler, whose work was in the same show, the contrast was distinctly apparent.

I mention both examples together because Ramleh and Christopherson, who was in Throbbing Gristle, emerged from the same place historically and philosophically. While, as I mentioned above, comprehend and follow what they’re doing, I also think there’s a limit to that framework. It can easily slide into a position where power structures are blindly reinforced, especially if the context or the message itself are not taken into careful consideration.