This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Consume Red, an album by Ground Zero. I still enjoy the use of analogy here, but I have no idea what I meant by "heaven forbid". This was clearly inspired by John Cage's writing and it appears to mimic his (bad) habit of impulsive dismissals of entirely legitimate forms of art. Isn't it didactic? If it were didactic, would that be a bad thing?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel has a thought experiment, I will relay only the story that forms its basis. One day in the public loo at his university he noticed a large spider trapped in a urinal. For many days Nagel looks for the spider every time he pisses, and he notices that the spider has to constantly deal with philosopher urine, never quite able to escape by way of a web before the next student comes by and disintegrates its escape route. Eventually Nagel takes pity on it and removes it with a paper towel, depositing it on the floor. Next day he finds the spider, exactly where he had left it, dead. Without the constant reassuring soaking with piss that it had become accustomed to it simply crouched in the impossibly massive expanse of that tiled floor and slowly waited for its own demise.
What does it say about 20th century life that things like this are the basis of our thought experiments now? Gone are the days of Descartes' Ball of Wax. I was born in 1996, the post apocalyptic present. I have never even seen a "candle" and haven't the faintest inkling what such a bizarre contraption could possibly be for. Only once we get into the nightmare realm of urinals filled with the remains of dismembered spiders blasted apart with piss do I begin to identify with these problems. Sometimes you need something disgusting, crude and ugly to describe the world. If we take great art to be something that mirrors nature in her mode of operation, then a kind of natural usefulness appears for Consume Red. A stupid exercise which begins in a place of Korean spirituality, a culture that the Japanese have bullied and oppressed for centuries, and ends up self immolating, becoming violence. This isn't didactic, heaven forbid. Nothing is being said about violence, but violence is acting here.