I fucking hate that cis feminist post. The one talking about how they’d be making more money if they had a dick, like “sure wish I had a penis so i could make that remaining 25 cents on the dollar that guys do”. Listen, I’m a lady, I got a dick, and let me tell you it sure doesn’t help. Being a man? That helps. Being a man with a dick? Sure. Being a woman? Kinda sucks. Being a woman with a dick though, really fucking sucks. I sat here the other day just saying to myself like “If being trans were a choice, I must really fucking hate myself, because this shit is just unfair.” Like I truthfully believe that most cis people could not handle the strain of being trans. Discrimination in everything, depersonalisation, dehumanisation. And the worst part is we don’t even have safe spaces most the time. Most the ones we do have are fleeting because TERFs are laying in wait and poisoning our fellow women against us, encouraging our misgendering, social violence against us. Being a trans woman so often means wanting some peace and understanding but never even getting a break from the fight for your dignity because you’re always on guard.
Like, I’m not mad at you all for talking about the injustices of the patriarchy, of course not, I’m a woman, it fucks me over. But you gotta stop equating genitals to gender. Its 2016. Trans inclusive language is important and can only help your understanding of us and our ability to socialise.
If you’re not a dmab trans person, read this until you understand it. Then reblog it.
Quit telling me that careers in the arts are unstable ok??? i already know that….. it’s like honestly???? the recession hit us all hard ok…… news flash buddy……. even lawyers with big expensive degrees are having a hard time getting hired!!!!! if im gonna starve to death im gonna do it making art so go make some casserole or something and get out of my face!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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:
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.
i am a mess here; thinking abt places that are not good for you past a certain date. thinking abt doing things bc of love and not bc of guilt or perceived obligation, even if that might mean not doing those things at all. i need to get a grip on myself.
the goal this summer honestly is to create video works + stories that are wholly experimental and abt collaborating w friends and practicing the craft!!!!
