Sonic the Warhol
Elwyn Palmerton
I hate zoos. It’s not just that caged animals are depressing. It’s the sycophantic posture that the visitors are reduced to, wandering cattle-ike through a transparently artificial environment purporting to represent the "natural" one. Based on the evidence of Sonic the Warhol, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph must feel the same way. Their new video depicts a couple of guys (played by two of their friends) wandering through a zoo. Their faces and those of the resident animals are obscured by static images of, variously, still photos, cheesy clip art, cartoon and video-game character images, as well as "Smileys" (the graphic Smiley faces available for emoticon-type usage in Internet chat forums). These static cut-outs float, like those black censorship boxes that they insert into R-rated movies on network TV, over the moving heads of their respective representative animals in the video. It’s a trick from John Baldessari’s book, transferred to video, and reverse engineered as a negative tautology (different images of the same thing are "not equal") while drawing attention to the subtle ways that the juxtaposition of images can subvert their usual connotations.
Accompanied by a score that ranges through the artificially symphonic, purely electronic, faux-Eastern to a "digital jungle" montage of animal sounds, drones, noise and ominous xylophone, the net result is ingratiatingly ironic, ugly, a bit art-schoolish and totally mesmerizing. It feels like an overwrought science documentary trying to appeal to kids by being "cool" (science is fun!) but more sinister and inverted: the combination of electronica and cheap documentary style is appropriated specifically for its noxious hollowness. It’s also reminiscent of the low-budget techno music videos that used to run on MTV late at night, and a distant secular cousin to those creepy landscape, biblical verse and classical string music videos that play on the Christian channel. The chintzy corporate-ness of the aesthetic is transformed into low-fi knowingness.
The juxtapositions of images often manage to be creepy, hilarious and playfully ambiguous. Many of the sequences here, a static and surly ape accompanied by drum-and-bass techno, for example, are discomfiting and uncanny. Generally, they play the line between formal weirdness and comedy: a trio of ridiculous otters, a snake with a blush-cheeked cartoon face, and hapless cartoon-faced pigeons, for example. They also highlight the "wrongness" of their device; necks on overlapping heads usually lead in opposite directions, or frontal face shots are superimposed on the backs of heads. Other times, their references are more specific and recognizable: a giraffe, for example, is overlaid with the Toys ‘R’ Us mascot’s ("Geoffrey’s") head eating leaves (the branches disappear under the treacly cartoon head); a mouse’s head is masked with the familiar three circled silhouette of its famous relative.
The human characters’ faces are represented by a wider range of avatars: Smiley face icons which include a pixilated cheeseburger, a smoking Smiley, a question mark and an animation of two Smileys repeatedly puking green slime onto each other. The nifty juvenile trick here is the use of emphatically trite signifiers to embody Big Ideas: Smileys or similarly styled icons appear representing doubt ("?"), mortality (a dying Smiley turns into a skull), and evil (a mustachioed Hitler Smiley) as well as the human capacities to conceptualize time (clock), appreciate beauty (flower) and attribute order to chaos (cheesy animated fractals). The overall effect is comical and bathetic: the reduction of cosmological narratives to the level of greeting card aesthetics. It takes advantage of our cheapest gut reflexives while it (mostly) avoids hitting below the belt. This is after all–they seem to say–the meager way in which we really do look at the world: equating beauty with flowers and evil with Hitler (generally speaking: the confusion of symbols with things, images with reality, and manifestations with phenomenon) but that’s alright; it’s both unavoidably human and inadvertently hilarious.
Sonic the Warhol investigates our tendency to project onto both animals and images (with apparently equivalent effects). Humans are differentiated but not elevated over their caged relatives. That the Smileys various vapid expressions correlate nicely with the emptiness of zoos suggests an equivalent critique of digital communications: our willingness to interact using corporately packaged symbols is implicated as pathetic (we might as well be in cages too), but Payne and Relph allow another possibility; we can re-appropriate from corporations what they originally stole. The video itself isn’t just commentary on its kitschy appropriated materials, but also their liberation and redemption.
