sorta related but i dont like that tumblr has made “unhealthy relationship” mean “one person is an abuser and the other is a victim”
unhealthy relationship means just that. a relationship that is unhealthy. whether because a party is uninterested, both parties bring out the worst in eachother, theres just no more spark, etc
just stop using “unhealthy relationship” as if its perfectly synonymous with “abusive relationship”
abusive relationships are DEFINITELY unhealthy relationships but not all unhealthy relationships are abusive, ya dig?
tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism
I’d like to clarify:
dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.
dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)
so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.
but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing
in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.
so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.
related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this
tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal
a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:
you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:
shitposting is the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse through the use of the absurd and surrealism.
I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.
As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.
My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:
and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:
And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.
Aside from color palettes and materials used, I see literally zero difference.
This is one of the top 3 best posts I’ve ever seen on tumblr and I’ve been here for years.
Love
My grandmother took several classes on Dadaism, and I attended them with her growing up. Then I took plenty of art history when I got my BFA in Illustration.
This post is 100% legit in their observations. I’m seriously impressed.
Duchamp’s Urinal was one of the most famous, well known Dada pieces ever made, and he made it purely to prove that literally anything can be art. It was all about ignoring the Establishment’s rules of what art was and wasn’t, - this is exactly the same thing happening in real time.
"The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite."
funny how hot dogs come in packs of six but hot dog buns come in packs of twelve and also the united states has more blood on its hands than any other country in the world just by refusing asylum to refugees
ever notice how you park in a driveway but drive on a parkway and also the british nation remains proud of its legacy as the world’s most murderous empire in all of recorded history and refuses to acknowledge its massacres
"[T]here are female Conservative MPs who are happy to call themselves feminists. Why, they even wear T-shirts saying that they’re feminists, just so that we know. I saw a photo of Theresa May wearing one, right, and on the front, it said, ‘This is what a feminist looks like.’ And on the back of her one, it said, ‘Not really! I’m a Tory!’ And then underneath that, it said, ‘I axed the Health In Pregnancy Grant. I closed Sure Start Centres.’ That one had a smiley face next to it. ‘I cut child benefit and slashed tax credits. I shut down shelters for battered wives and children. I cut rape counselling and legal aid.’ Winking face. ‘I closed down all twenty-three specialist domestic violence courts. I cut benefits for disabled children. I tried to amend the Abortion Act so that women received one-to-one abortion counselling from the Pope before they go ahead with it. LOL.’ The back is much longer than the front, by the way. It’s a tailcoat, basically. The new Tory feminists are wearing tailcoats."
– Bridget Christie, episode 2 of Radio 4’s Bridget Christie Minds The Gap (via nowiamstrong)
Some racist hooligan assaulted a black couple who just came to Italy from Nigeria as war refugees. He killed the husband,
Emmanuel Chidi Namdi
, who was defending his wife,
Chimiary, after that man started calling her racial slurs out of nowhere. He is dead, the hooligan killed him WITH A ROAD SIGN. He hit him again and again, in front of his wife.
This happened in Fermo, Italy, twenty minutes away from where I live. This has shocked me so much. Racism is a serious problem in Italy, fascism and intolerance are escalating, horrible politicians like Salvini (the Italian equivalent of Donald Trump) are encouraging racism and are actively trying to block the refugees from entering out country.
Please don’t let this go unnoticed: tumblr is pretty US-centric, but people need to know the names of all the victims of hate, from all over the world. Emmanuel needs to be remembered and mourned. Please, don’t let racism win. I’m still shocked, this happened so close to my hometown. Don’t let them win. Fight this horrible hate.
And this is why I don’t fucks with Killary. As a Democrat she’s meant to be anti war. “We would be able to totally obliterate them”…I mean, get a grip, Hillary, you’re not in a Marvel movie.
She’s directly caused Bangladesh so much grief, & with the way media keeps trying to spin Jamaat’s dumbass fights as plans by ISIS, I’m pretty sure that’s her next war destination to ruin. By destabilizing that regiin, not only do you affect India, a strong player in the world who depends on the more liberal Muslim country for support, but also China and (cha-ching) indirectly Myanmar, a country no one ever has been able to fully conquer. It’s ingenious, but also right level of evil I expect from her.
