There is some music which gently caresses, drawing
us into its warm embrace. Some music attempts to inspire and invigorate us,
driving us on with its upbeat pace and harmonic sound. And then there is my
selection for this assignment, a piece which attempts neither. Merzbow’s “T-2000”
draws us away from the traditional and shocks us out of our comfortable reverie
of self-centeredness, something which I attempted to recreate through imagery.
It was through this process that I began to learn a simple truth: more often
than not, we are too caught up in the small moments of our day-to-day lives and
fail to recognize the suffering of those around us.
In Dillard’s essay, “Seeing,” she explains through
her experiences that we often pass through life failing to notice the things
around us and that real effort is required to see. Although I generally concur
with Dillard, I feel as though sometimes we need an extra push to shock us into
realization and seeing. “T-2000” does just this by ignoring conventional music
styles and instead painfully bruising our minds with a barrage of atonal sound.
This forces us out of our comfort zones and makes us consider why we listen to
what we do.
It was with this in mind that I began to craft images.
I decided to create visuals that played off of this. In general I took
photographs of normal occurrences and objects: swimming, smoking, an apartment.
I then inserted various images of victims of the Syrian war. (It is at this
point that I feel I must insert the disclaimer that, yes, I do have political
opinions, and yes, they are present in this work.) Just like Otto Dix’s “The
War Cripples,” this juxtaposition of the normal and the shocking is to show how
often we forget the suffering of those around us because we are too caught up
in our own lives and to shock us into noticing the brutalities in the world. In
each of the images, there is no recognition between either the actual or Syrian
subjects. The two do not overlap.
The final image, however, breaks from the
traditional mold, in that it shows a statue of a woman giving a man a loaf of
bread. At first, this image seems to stand alone by showing a positive action
of giving. It was not with this intent, however, that the image was placed with
the others. Rather, the statue is just that: a statue. The inedible loaf of
bread almost mocks the starving. This can be taken further by showing that we
venerate and honor the generous, but (as the other images show) just don’t have
time for being generous right now.
Through Merbow’s “T-2000” and my images, I have attempted to highlight the universal truth that we are too caught up in ourselves to notice those around us. Unfortunately, this may fulfill one of the most harrowing anonymous quotes ever written: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”
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