blue arabesque

Vin Ganapathy

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

you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:

All of these things exist on continuums. There is no clear binary here, except ones we force ourselves unnaturally into.

There is no need for a “biological sex binary”. Literally. None. If your doctor needs to know what your genitals are for whatever reason, you can tell them, or show them. If they need to know something about your chromosomes, well you’re gonna have testing anyway. If you know what’s up with your hormones, you can tell them, if you don’t, and it’s pertinent, they can do tests. They’d be doing tests anyways, if it’s important.

and on top of all that the whole “separation of sex and gender, sex being immutable and gender being the thing you can change” is employed hugely by TERFS to delegitimize, harrass, and brutalize trans women, because their “biological sex” is “male”. It also harms intersex people, as they are often surgically altered before they can consent to any such thing, to fit into this arbitrary standard of binarism.

From the Library of Congress collection, 1930’s-1940’s in Color. 

Autumn Afternoons,Sunsets, Evenings and Woods  of Ernst Samuel Geiger

German 1876-1965

-  Sun Going Dawn  1904

-  Autumn Afternoon, 1918

-  Autumn Evening on Lake Biel, 1915  

-  Evening Landscape on Lake Biel

-  Sun Going Dawn over the Jolimont  

-  View from the Autumn Woods, 1916