MERZBOW — Bloody Sea

"This is a time where external events slide by as glib advertisements, as Baudrillard remarked - there was no gulf war. We only had signifiers. There was no signified - by which I mean can anyone say why we went to war - without even declaring a war? The politician/corporate executive via overwhelming technological power, media subversion and staggering wealth is able to inflict devastation on a global scale. All of their actions in reality are destructive of life, truth and morality. Their texts, their whole culture - justifications, motivations, philosophies even! are only placed to take our attention away from their actual actions. A farmer through the sights of an infra red missile is a terrorist, humans and animals are political-exploitative opportunities and media foci - not anymore even useful commodities, third world famine an opportunity to not feed the world, but feed the pockets and egos of pseudo-political media personalities.. (and Noise is the nihilistic rejection of all this..) We have come along way from Gericault's raft of the medusa, we have even come along way from Gurnica and the ambiguity of The Weeping Woman- or the blatant hiding of the horrors of 1914-18 through a screen of an iridescent mist of water lilies. It was the artist Schwitters and now his Japanese doppelganger who refused both the exploitation of inhumanity, or a refusal to acknowledge it in an art as opium for the people. After all people are not treated by Merzbow as sheep - but as free moral agents with which the artist can engage in a dialogue, in which the artist's work is more than an opiate or merchandizing opportunity but a commitment to the idea of community which has to engage in ethical frameworks of cooperation and consideration of all life. Art cannot divorce itself from morality for as Wittgenstein stated- ethics and aesthetics are one and the same." (jliat)