Imperfect Aesthetics: Lennon, Clerks, Space Invaders And Sister Ray

As a fan of trashy or off-kilter pop culture, it frequently occurs to me that the most interesting, attractive and iconic features of a piece of art are often the consequence of limitations - budget, time, technology, talent - exerted on the creation of that thing, or on the artist, rather than the consequence of a vision being fully realised. It is in the gap between vision and execution that the character of a work of art is found, in the falling-short of the grand design. The sound of Strawberry Fields Forever is a combination of John Lennon's sonic ambition and the limits of available production methods. The look of Clerks is a combination of Kevin Smith's visual ambition and the fact he had no budget to make a movie and B&W film stock is cheap. Would Strawberry Fields sound closer to the sounds in John Lennon's head if he'd had the chance to make it over - undoubtedly, and he spoke about re-recording Strawberry Fields Forever right up to his death, unsatisfied with the original recordings, hearing only the sounds he didn't get on tape. I mean, that's crazy, right? To be unsatisfied with the sound of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Early in my Film studies it was drawn to our attention that the development of sound, and then colour, were treated by many serious-minded filmmakers with suspicion. They argued that the lack of sound, or the monochromatic nature of film, were what gave cinema it's otherness, were precisely what made cinema a unique art form. Colour and sound were advances only good for making film more like real life - and this is an engineer's goal, not an artist's. On one hand, the attitude is almost unarguably wrongheaded, surely informed by sheer reactionary snobbery as much as anything else. But on the other hand, in a broader sense, I can see there was a legitimacy to their fears. I would point to video games as a perfect example of how a relentless, single-minded emphasis on making the product more life-like has robbed a medium of its drive towards...anything else? Space Invaders is iconic, it has a look all of its own. The reason it has a look all of it's own, and thus the reason that it is iconic, is that it was made using bullshit technology. Clearly it was cutting-edge at the time, but that isn't the point. The point is that it is distinctive, unique, and looks un-real, because available technology permitted nothing more / less. As consumers, we have been encouraged to base our criteria for how impressive we consider a video game's graphics to be on how 'realistic' they are - "wow! It looks just like a movie!" In painting, photorealism was a particular genre largely defined by a handful of American artists operating between the late 60s and mid-70s; in video games a focus on photorealism has come to define the entire medium, at least in the mainstream. Space Invaders is abstract by default, I guess in the same way that hieroglyphics were abstract by default. Are we waiting for a Playstation Picasso to break open the medium?

So on principle, I agree that an all-consuming desire for photorealism is unhealthy for any visual art form, just a desire for sonic perfection is potentially misguided in the field of pop music. Money and time and energy can be spent just as well on other aims. But I would argue that ultimately the anti-colour film brigade actually had little to fear, just as my concerns about video games are unnecessary. At every step of technological evolution, the gap between perfect life-likeness and the technical limitations preventing perfect life-likeness exists, and wherever that gap exists, however slender, a particular aesthetic is produced. The engineer's ideal of photorealism is, I would argue, inherently unachievable, it is doomed to failure, and therefore this window of aesthetic possibilities will always be available, even unavoidable.

Finally, I think it is worth noting that the imperfections of one artist's work often become models of perfection for subsequent artists. Contemporary pop musicians can spend their entire lives trying to make records that sound the same as Strawberry Fields Forever, and this cannot be achieved by exploiting cutting edge technology. It can only be achieved by being wrong, in precisely the right way. A young garage band who want to make a record that sounds like The Velvet Underground's Sister Ray must aim for gonzo, bug-eyed sonic imperfection on a grand scale. A recording session conversation is likely go along the lines of "No! The organ isn't distorted enough! The vocals are too coherent! I don't even wanna be able to tell if there are drums on the track at all! Muddier! Muddier!" The imperfections have become fetishised, idealised. What has persisted is the abject wrongness of the Sister Ray sound.

So these things go full-circle. The Jesus & Mary Chain, for instance, may have aimed for the perfect imperfection of Sister Ray, but they missed, they fell short of that ideal. In doing so, they minted a different sound, one filtered through their own experiences, talent & technology. Now kids are trying to sound like JAMC. They will also fall short, and so it goes, around and around, ever onwards - the Aesthetics Of Imperfection is an on-going dialogue between the present and the past.