Against Slickness
The Why of Tgirl Video Postcard Club
“I miss electroclash,” I pouted over dinner. Lauren had been discussing the uncanny way that contemporary nostalgia was reimagining our coming of age era — the mid-2000s — from a series of disparate threads into a unified aesthetic dubbed indie sleaze. This process happens to everyone as they age and have to watch their earlier lives enter the imaginary of younger people, but that doesn’t make it any less funny and unnerving. I think now about the plastic flower power beaded curtain I had my Mum replace my closet door with in the late ‘90s, its own reinvention of her generation’s moment in the sun.
But there’s something more than reminiscence in the way that I miss electroclash. I don’t miss much about my life back then — though, perhaps, I miss the way I could slip through the world invisibly as a trans woman when people simply did not have the eyes to see — and, while I still love much of the music itself, it’s not precisely about that either.
Starting in the late 90s and reaching its zenith around, say, 20051, Electroclash was a brief explosion in a music world then dominated by over-produced pop stars, the yachts-and-money era of mainstream hip hop, and rock’s self-serious last gasp of relevancy as a repository for Bush-era animus. A mixture of rough synthpop, harsh but catchy drum machines, and vocals anywhere from flat to French, electroclash was cyborg punk for artsy hipsters, queers, and post-riot grrls. It wasn’t just a sound, but an aesthetic and a scene: neon lamé leggings and bandeau tops, razor-jagged haircuts, crusty not-eye-safe glitter, glow in the dark makeup, and the general detritus left behind by the club kids that congealed into warehouse parties in Brooklyn, Berlin, Toronto, London.
Despite — or, I would argue, because of — it’s unpolished nature, the mainstream swooped in and tried to subsume it. Madonna told interviewers about listening to Peaches at her pilates classes. The indie club kid movie Party Monster breathed fresh air onto its soundtrack with a handful of new electroclash songs, turning the film into an instant cult classic. And with its punk DIY ethos, suddenly everyone you knew had their own briefly lived electroclash act. Chicks on Speed, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Kids on TV2, Miss Kittin and the Hacker, Peaches, Princess Superstar, Larry Tee, Team Gina, Athens Boys Choir… It was the sound of underground clubs, queer parties, and a great deal of speed.
It’s this do-it-yourself attitude that made everything feel so fresh and alive in contrast to the expensive and over-produced mainstream. There was nothing slick about electroclash, it revelled in its raucous urgency, it’s defiant irony. Electroclash said you didn’t have to be able to sing, look like Angelina Jolie, or even play traditional instruments — all you needed was a dirty beat and an unreasonable amount of rockstar self-possession.
In their 2003 anthem, Chicks on Speed shout “We’re standing on stage with our microphones, but we don’t play guitars!”
Crab Jesus is evangelizing your parents’ Facebook feed. Set loose upon the internet by wolfish tech companies who care desperately little about the political and environmental consequences, generative AI bots are in an arms race to the very edge of intelligibility. We’re told that soon AI generated images will be indistinguishable from reality — that the sixth fingers and nightmarish garbled texts will fall away like vestigial tails to make way for the realer than real AI future. But for now, we are just about able to make out the difference, if we care to look closely.
A thousand thinkpieces over the past three years have asked us to consider: if robots can become artists, will there be any need for human artists? The AI argument goes that generative AI is the great equalizer — talent and originality are obsolete and anyone can simply enter some prompts into a programme and create art that is at least as “good” as the Renaissance masters3. And further, that by ridding ourselves of those expensive and highly strung artists, everybody from film producers to ad agencies to art galleries can achieve ever-greater profits.
But so far the AI art pieces have developed a remarkably consistent style, influenced by the constant flow of algorithmic trends, what gets the longest views and the most likes4 shaping each iteration. Cartoonish colours soak through hyper-photorealistic worlds in which everyone is uncannily symmetrical. The images look glazed in silicone oil, the feeling that if you touched them your hand would come away slick with grease.
But is this uncanny perfection any surprise after a decade in which everything became more slick under the watchful Instagram panopticon? Though obvious facetuning and overfilled pillow faces have fallen out of fashion, their aftereffects are everywhere in culture. Soulless billion dollar Marvel movie after soulless billion dollar Marvel movie. A seemingly endless battering of pop star world tours, each more expensive than the last, charging for VIP experiences and light up wrist bands while producing more fossil fuel emissions in a few months than entire countries will in decades. Glass skin makeup influencers promising to take you beyond flawless into the valley of the perpetually baby-oiled. A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but it’s slickness that makes the money flow.
Some artists have brilliantly embraced and subverted this tendency towards slickness. SOPHIE gave the immaterial girls permission to cry. Pat McGrath and Maison Margiela have singlehandedly revived haute couture with a seven layer ceramic dollface look. But for the most part, the art and culture worlds are flush with slick products, everywhere you turn. Not a speck of grit to grab hold of as we slide from one overpriced experience to the next.
Everything is perfect, and I hate it.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, when I first started publishing writing and making art, there was a certain freedom of movement: no one was looking, so we could do anything we wanted. Without the burden of perfection, we grabbed what we had at hand — webcams, creaky makeshift stages, literal garbage, outfits cobbled together from thrift stores and stripper outlets. Nothing was sponsored, little was funded, and everything felt alive. Most of it was terrible, but it was ours.
My own practice as a writer, artist, and general multi-hypenate, hasn’t resisted the changing times. I find myself so busy putting hours, weeks, months, and even years into projects (film, TV, podcast) that require sign off from rooms full of cis moneymen whose sole interest is profitability. The buzzy joy of creating and putting work out into the world just for the sake it, for being in conversation with the world of artists and writers I admire and feel lightly competitive with, has all but dried up while larger projects move glacially toward their eventual release.5
It struck me in May that I hadn’t published almost any new writing or podcast episodes in the past two years since our film Framing Agnes and book Boys Don’t Cry came out. I miss that feeling of connection, exchange, and wonder of creating work just for the sake of it — and, I must admit, the instant gratification of releasing things into the world. It was with this in mind that I dreamed up TGIRL VIDEO POSTCARD CLUB: a one-to-one festival of new video art by trans women/fem artists around the globe. Artists will make new work in July 2024, and exchange it for one other artist’s consumption in August.
Video art is a perfect medium to resist slickness. It’s short and experimental nature make it hard for the mainstream to digest on its own, without reinterpretation as stage visuals or music videos. Much like electroclash, at the end of the 2000s, the artist milieu I came into was heaving with rough and invigorating video work. Its very nature drove away the prying eyes of capital. You didn’t have to have much money to create it, no need for film school, nor fancy equipment thanks to the sudden availability of iMovie and cheap digital cameras. Queer and, especially, trans artists at that time had little hope of mainstream success — a frustrating situation, but one that also opened up a vast field on which to dream underground. And it’s onto this field that we projected our small cinematic visions.
In a slick world, there’s freedom in choosing the unprocessed.
Tgirl Video Postcard Club, for me, is an opportunity to recapture that resistant spirit of queer creativity and DIY underground sensibilities that inspired me to make work in the first place. With over 70 artists registered to take part across six countries, the vibe seems to be resonating. There’s still time to sign up, registration closes on July 1st, and videos must be sent for exchange on August 1st (whatever their stage of completion). Those who have registered will get a welcome email with a reminder of the guidelines of creation on July 1st.
xx
M
What am I, a historian?
A claim that, so far, has not borne out, despite the industry hype and anime icon Twitter dweebs.
And, though the tech companies would be loath to fully admit it, the limitations of the software.
To be fair, when everything I’ve been working on eventually does come out, “you’re going to gag” as the children say.