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’m half asleep and idk how much sense this will make but: relationship birds. you don’t choose them. they just show up. the size and rarity has no apparent relation to the depth or quality of the relationship. getting a phonecall like “so i guess it’s official” and you’re like “oh so you got one too” because you were both at work when a house finch showed up on your desks. different birds at different milestones, only some of them official. bird prenups. bird vows. at the end of every wedding you wait for your bird and hope to god it’s something manageable. getting married and almost immediately getting a divorce because you agreed to richer or poorer but you didn’t anticipate a silkie nesting on your head. it refuses to stay in the marital cage. “i’m sorry jimothy i just can’t live like this, i can’t” “i didn’t ask for this to be our bird susan!!! if we can get through this maybe our newly strengthened love will attract a new bird” “you don’t know that for sure and i can’t take that chance”
at the time this idea seemed worth waking up to write it down
in my dream this was really fake-deep with a lot of romantic imagery, and you can sort of tell where i woke up a bit because this post gets derailed about halfway through. and in retrospect this was probably a weird subconscious interpretation of a carpenters song. but anyway now that i’m awake all i can think about is The Worlds Worst Dating Sim
Dori peered suspiciously around her bedroom door before ushering Lilian inside.
“Okay, what happened?” Lilian asked.
“You need to be sworn to secrecy,” Dori hissed, wild-eyed. Short blonde hair went in every direction. Since it always did that, this meant nothing.
“Should I have brought my shovel?”
There was a peeping sound from near Dori’s bed. Or what might have been Dori’s bed, but was definitely a pile of blankets. It was hard to distinguish between furniture and indiscriminate piles of stuff.
Lilian’s eyes widened. “No.”
“Secrecy! Sworn to!”
“Dori. Is there a bird in here?”
There was further peeping.
“You can’t tell anyone about this, Lilian.”
“Oh my god.” Lilian’s hands went to her face, gleeful. “Oh my god! Who is it!”
“I don’t know.” Dori moved her blankets with a sigh to reveal a black-capped chickadee sitting on a pillow.
“… you don’t know?” Lilian asked, lowering her hands.
“I have no idea!” The chickadee peeped agreement. “I tried leaving the window open in case it was just lost and I tried throwing it out the window but it just came back and then I felt like a jerk for throwing it out the window and I had to give it its own pillow.”
Lilian scratched her head. “So do you think it’s like… a crush bird?”
“It must be, right?” Dori sniffled and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her hoodie.
“That’s good, though!” Lilian said. “That means they like you back!”
“I guess.”
“Who do you have a crush on?”
Dori turned red. “A couple people,” she muttered.
“That’s okay,” Lilian said, trying to find a safe place to sit. “We’ll just… we’ll figure out who of them might like you back! Right?”
“It’s embarrassing,” Dori complained.
“I tell you all about my crushes.”
“That’s different.”
“Just name them and we can figure out who the bird is with. And I’ll only make fun of you a little.”
Dori sighed. The bird peeped. “Okay, uh. I guess it could be Ricki, or Julian. Or Laura.”
“Okay, well–”
“Or Terry.”
“That’s–”
“Or Shawn.”
“Oh, god.”
“Or Olivia.”
“The library girl?”
“She’s mysterious!”
“Shawn?”
“He could have hidden depths beneath his muscly exterior! You don’t know!”
“There’s no room for depths! There’s no room for anything but more muscles!”
The chickadee flapped indignantly.
“Is there anyone in the entire school who the bird couldn’t be for?” Lilian asked.
“I don’t know!” Dori snapped defensively. “You? You don’t have a bird!”
Lilian was briefly taken aback. “I don’t – well. Yeah. I mean. Obviously. But, like. Is that the only reason, or–”
“I never should have told you about this stupid bird,” Dori said with another sniffle. “I’m just going to keep it in my room until it changes its mind and leaves and no one will ever know.”
“No, no, don’t be like that!” Lilian said. “Here, we can narrow this down. We know it can’t be Terry–”
“Why can’t it be Terry?”
“He was on that field trip last year,” Lilian reminded her, “he saw you eat that bug.”
“We were supposed to eat the bug!” Dori protested. “They were edible crickets! That was the whole point! It was for science, Lilian.”
“I don’t know what you ate, but it definitely wasn’t a cricket and I don’t think it was supposed to be in that bowl.”
Dori rubbed at her cheeks with the heels of her hands. “That doesn’t rule him out,” she mumbled. “It’s a classy little bird.”
“You know that has nothing to do with it,” Lilian said. “My Aunt Katy is like a little fairy princess, but she’s had a pelican three times now. Three different guys. Pelicans.”
“I guess.”
“Look, it’s obvious what we have to do.” Lilian crossed her arms. “We need to investigate every person you have a crush on until we find out who’s got a chickadee in their room.”
Dori pulled a comforter over the bird and her own head. Her voice was muffled and accompanied by chirps. “Maybe I can just lie here and wait to die, instead.”
“Tomorrow is Taco Tuesday.”
“Maybe I can just lie here and wait to die after tomorrow, instead.”
“maybe i can just lie here and wait to die after tomorrow instead
action movie about a guy who pretends to be a hitman and does the whole “25% up front and the rest when the job is done” thing but then just keeps the down payment, doesn’t kill anybody, and stops responding to the client’s calls, knowing that they can’t sue him for breach of contract without confessing to trying to hire a hitman. problem is now a lot of people who are comfortable with the concept of paying someone to kill someone else are mad at him
none of his former clients know his real identity, due to him using a fresh fake for each con, so he decides that his only hope of making it out of this mess unscathed is to land the inevitable contract for his own assassination and fake his own death. thus begins his deadly race against the clock and against other actual bounty hunters, former clients, and a smoldering ex lover, whom he must betray, persuade or kill. darknet: the catfish bounty
it has to be a comedy
because competent badguys won’t use someone who hasn’t been vouched for and/or got a good reputation, the former clients our pretend hitman is avoiding are all meatballs
dangerous meatballs but meatballs nonetheless
like those thieves in ‘snatch’ who have a dog that swallowed a squeaky toy, that kind of criminals
or like jamie lee curtis in fish called wanda
in fact i think there definitely has to be a dog involved
in fact i think there definitely has to be a dog involved
sparksoffandommagic 