oh how the times have changed
This is definitely worth reblogging.
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$LAYYYTER
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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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we're not kids anymore.
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Cosmic Funnies
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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Mike Driver

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@thoughtsflux-blog
oh how the times have changed
This is definitely worth reblogging.
always reblog these ads
Martin Margiela Hommes SS99
Photography Ronald Stoops, courtesy of Bozar
‘How To Talk To Your Teen’ Collection by Raf Simons, S/S 1997
Walter Van Beirendonck spring—summer 1994.
In the early eighties western culture saw its criticism reformulated. The dynamism of the avant-garde, the successive attempts at global solutions, each correcting the last, was watered down into a self-congratulatory bickering amidst the ivory towers. The new agenda was concerned with institutional ‘power-knowledge’, and began a radical questioning of its exclusion mechanisms.
'Many signs of new temperament, as for example Rei Kawakubo’s first catwalk show for Comme Les Garçons, indicated that even the institution of fashion could accommodate more than a limited number of dominant lines of beauty and taste. Like many of his generation, Van Beirendonck seems keenly aware of these exclusions. (Anyone who spent part of his youth subject to the 'law and order’ of a boarding school would certainly be sufficiently confronted with them, even if only in a rudimentary form.)
Whereas at this juncture Martin Margiela opted for an 'archaeological’ movement which would once more question and deconstruct the assumptions of fashion analytically, Van Beirendonck sought confrontation. In other words, his criticism was based not on a detailed examination of the question but on a confrontation of the question with a barrage of other, 'subjugated’ questions. He introduced marginal, 'rejected’, codes in dress, such as SM attributes or science fiction suits. His next answer was a radical reintroduction of mythology. As a fully-fledged 'mythographer’, he called up images and stories from our collective memory and then short-circuited them with elements from contemporary techno- and cyberculture. The fact that they all join together seamlessly seems to prove that attitudes to highly contemporary technology, such as the Internet, and to the things that happened in ancient myths are not too far removed from one another. Where once the gods threatened us with a deluge, today we face a hole in the ozone layer.
Sputnik Magazine 1998
Photography by Ronald Stoops
Makeup: Inge Grognard
Avant-Garde
Quote : " Artists adhering to the modernist notion of truth to materials at the start of the twentieth century were united by a common mission to return to simple and organic forms, as well as a common desire to purify art of its narrative element."
- Yevgenia Petrova, The Origins of early twentieth-century russian art, in Origins of the Russian Avant-Garde
Organic Social Change
After reading much about American Architecture in the 20th century with a few references to Le Corbusier’s modern principles and the Athenes Charter, I am wondering if the intellectuals of this world will once think about changing the world in a more organic way, starting at the ultimate start point which I believe is the state of mind. I am here answering to the whole 20 and 21st century’s ideals where the masterminds thought that changing the living territory, mostly urban ones, would give the people a fresh image on which to base a new form of living. Frank Lloyd Wright, fort his part, Notably in his Broadacre City, considered that the new way of living would start in the family and in the house, and that the rest of society would organize itself through a natural and organic economical order based on the family’s creative work. Even though his ideal would’ve ask an automatic-almost-transcendental massive conversion process from the population because of the radicalness of his principles, where he failed the most is at building practical strategies to apply those well researched and strong values based principles of new living. He said it himself, if he had 80 years more to live he would've been able to change the world. Changing a world to a perfect world implies to reach the very base of every human’s functional system : the values. In a recent Roko Belic’s documentary “Happy”, many answers to happiness presented were similar to Broadacres ideals : family, creative work, nature, community life. Though the sources here are very short listed comparing the importance of the statement im making here, it is to say that I am mainly talking of out feeling and intuition. So I’m thinking, in this back-to-nature need we are experiencing now in 2016, has anyone thought of bringing back the principles of one of the greatest american architects of all time (FLW) and develop an applicable method to apply them to our contemporary needs ? ....Which would mean to create a social change by working with the values that create happiness, thereby creating a life that grows organically from strong bases instead of imposing re-directional massive buildings that, even though built from a humanistic approach and for a free-humanistic and better living objective, oppresses our liberty to develop a world we want, as humans. It was Oscar Niemeyer’s moto when he helped building Brasil’s new monumental capital Brasilia. He was not looking to shape a form of living, but to build a patrimony to which Brasil’s population would be able to identify. Thereby Brasilia and its monuments were symbols of the country’s emancipation and of the colonial years deletion. To him, life was more important than architecture. He said himself that Architecture can't transform society. To project a social architecture is an illusion, because a real change depends on revolutionary mouvements of economical et social systems in place.
........
I just can’t keep myself from being outraged at realizing that we build conceptions and systems on an already underlying system that we don’t question because it is imposed to us as the way of life. The only part that bothers me really is the one where we are told to go to university as fast as we can to finish as fast as we can to make money as fast as we can. In that set of life, the human doesn't question his ambitions, wants, needs, interests. It just does what should be done. In other words, it EXISTS and WORKS for a system that isn't his instead of LIVING HIS life.
High league and Low league education
Why is there Ivy league schools ? Why aren't we spending our energy in spreading the right form of teaching and knowledge to a larger scale instead of putting all great teachers, students, knowledge into only a few schools? Why is there a need to cultivate a higher class of education? Shouldn't the best education be available to all?
What is contemporary?
When I started my degree in Art History, I had already heard a few times the word “contemporary” or “contemporary art”, having actually no idea what it meant. With time I figured it is suppose to mean in popular langage “of his time”, but I am still getting confused when teachers call contemporary a work, either of art or literature, that was done in the 80′s or 90′s. Because what is being done right now is different than what was done in the 90′s, isn't it? Maybe the aesthetic differences are not as relevant as if we would compare actual work of arts (2016) with Renaissance paintings, but there is still a 10 to 20 years gap between now and the 80′s-90′s, and don’t tell me it is not far away enough to rank it outside of contemporary, because we all know that much enough has happened since then, not only in arts and literature but also and specially in geopolitics, socioeconomics and technological matters. So, that being said, what is contemporary? I’ve always had myself the need to detach from the present and analyse what was going on around me to understand the present itself. According to philosophers Nietzsche and Giorgio Agamben, that is truly what being contemporary is: “ One that really belong to his time, the real contemporary, is one that doesn't coincides perfectly with it and doesn't adhere to its submissions either. He/She is thereby define as outdated, archaic, but specifically for this reason, precisely by this gap, this anachronism, he/she is more apt than others to perceive and seize his/her time.” (Agamben, What is contemporary? p. 9-10) This definition speaks to me loudly, but I do find that there is too much of a wide gap between this philosophical definition of the term and what it really means in the everyday dialog. The difficulty is found in the word itself, in the fact that its related to the present, the “present” not being fixed in time. Thereby, the word “contemporary” doesn't determine a specific era, it doesn't belong to a specific time, it is “with” time; it is, just like the “present”, not chronologically fixable. Someone who isn't putting those concepts in question can apply the term “contemporary” about probably anything that he/she identifies as of “his/her time”, and it would be considered as correct. But for one who is interested in the History of the Contemporary, the history of his time, needs to understand the concepts deeper.
In that sens, It needs to be applied and understood in a historical context, like an Art History context. One that needs or want to understand it’s time has to put himself in “a situation of the contemporary”. Let me explain myself here. A contemporary work of art, let’s say a painting, is produced in its present and is expressing something about the present. But by transforming something as ephemeral as a feeling or expression into an art form, a physical form, it is fixing it in time, and thereby it already belongs to a past, it is not “contemporary”, because it is not of this time anymore - since time goes on, it is of “his” time, it is locked in “his” time. In that sens, a contemporary art historian has to detach him/herself from the present because the present itself is never fixed in time, neither is the contemporary; it is not chronologically fixable. And a contemporary work of art, being of “its time”, is anachronistic in the future, because it still exists, but it is not evolving or transforming with time.
TBC
Quoting FLW on education
Les institutions éducatives transformes d’excellentes prunes en excellent pruneaux (quoted by fishman p.106)
Les pays en voie de développement
Il me fait rire d’entendre ce terme : les pays en voie de développement. N’est-ce pas une affirmation issue d’un esprit capitaliste de dire qu’un pays est défavorisé? Que celui qui ne peut manger est “pauvre” et que celui qui peut se permettre de gaspiller est “riche” ? Je crois fermement que cette vision du monde est issue d’une pensée capitaliste et qu’elle devient absurde pour ceux et celles qui prennent le temps de remettre ces termes en question. Loin de dire que la faim dans le monde est un phénomène naturel - quoiqu’il ne s’agit pas d’une idée aussi saugrenu que certain puissent le penser, et sans vouloir ignorer ce sujet je préfère ne pas m’y accorder trop longuement car il s’agit d’un phénomène trop complexe et tragique pour que je puisse m’y attarder dans un aussi petit texte. Ce que j’essai de dire ici c’est qu’il faut bien un monde dominé par le capitalisme et une démocratie faussée pour dire qu’un pays est défavorisé devant un autre qui est “civilisé”. Est-il nécessaire qu’un pays se construise un centre-ville, un port, un chemin de fer, un réseau électrique, etc. pour être développé ? Est-ce parce qu’il n’exploite pas ses ressources naturelles jusqu’à leur épuisement qu’il n’en retire pas une certaine richesse? Il me semble assez simple d’affirmer qu’il s’agit plutôt du malheur des pays capitalistes de ne pas être en mesure de conserver leur richesse. Car celui qui considère qu’un pays qui ne se développe pas n’est pas riche oublie de considérer qu’intacte et conservée est la richesse naturelle d’un pays non-civilisé.
Goethe, Nietzsche, Didi-Huberman
When I read stuff like that, I remember why I stayed in this Art History Program. I am doing research for a paper about Contemporary Art History, and in Didi-Huberman’s “L’image Survivante” I came to read a paragraphe that speaks to me and puts words on my blurriest thoughts:
p. 156 “Je hais tout ce qui ne fait que m’instruire, sans augmenter ou stimuler directement mon activité” (Nietzsche se base sur la pensée de Goethe pour élaborer sa philosophie)...Didi Guberman cite un passage de la lettre de Goethe à Schiller du 19 décembre 1798.
p. 156 L’histoire, “nous en avons besoin pour vivre et pour agir, [et] non pas pour nous détourner commodément de la vie” en accordant une “vertu hypertrophiée” aux choses du passé... Didi-Huberman cite Nietzsche 1878 II p.93-97
p. 156 ...L’homme trouve ne trouve son humanité que quand l’éclair lumineux de l’histoire lui apparaît, quand la force du passé est “utilisée au bénéfice de la vie”... Ibid. p. 98-99
An ad for George Eastman’s color process, Kodacolor, developed in 1928, which enabled people to take their own full color home movies.
MARKET-ing
Title says everything. I am fine with the art of Marketing, I believe it is at the bottom of amazing accomplishments done by men and women, and that it has brought some of us further or higher than just a regular B2C process would have done. There is definitely an ingenuity in manipulating the market networks to bring a product to the highest of its popularity. But, right now, I have a dream, a dream for a throwback to pure talent and art, when marketing was used after discovering talent to promote talent. It is not a secret that the evolutive process to success as changed from “promoting talent” to “promoting everything but talent and meanwhile trying to convince that there is talent”. What I am trying to say is that there is a hunger for realness in such a superficial world, which has to come to the apogee of its ability to promote. Indeed, The success of marketing was proved by the crushing victory of packaging-based products on content/substance-based products. *Claps*. But now there is a need and a demand for content/substance/meaning/matter/essence/significance.
There is, and I am convinced that by 2018, according to WGSN consumer’s report, this quest for meaning WILL reach it’s goal and become a norm. But till then I like to bring myself back to an imaginary of the past, and think about what it would be like to face pure artistic pulsion and talent without a market to consume it. What would it be like? I’ll let you picture that in your own imaginary world, I’ve just got to go on. David Howes, author of “Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society” gave a conference in my art history class back in October. The talk was about the need for humans to rediscover their senses in a society where only the gaze is sought - indeed, the human eye (the vision) is the first and foremost solicited sens in our image-based society. He finished the conference by a warning : “Our feelings, pulsions, likes; everything down to the reaction of a neurone is studied by marketing and science in order to control our consuming behaviour. Thereby, if you feel or like something, keep it for yourself and do not “donate to science” because they will use it to their own good and make it consumable, against you”. Indeed, our senses, feelings, needs are the most sought by dominant capitalist industries, but it is important to reverse this built-to-consume process. The need is not in a deeper research to understand how to manipulate a human being but to transfer all the efforts in producing meaningful and fundamentally significant art and products that last and serves the most of humanity.