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brandneweyescd

they were right btw. you have to dig yourself out of your grave over and over again

choysum

Anne Boyer

primulaceas

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

sheshallfromtimetotime

National Poetry Month - Day Ten The More Loving One - W.H. Auden

The fact that Fountain is pissing off trads over a 100 years later is so fucking funny

fairyhaven13

As an art major, while I know Fountain is a valid piece of art that accomplished exactly what it set out to do, I also think it’s one of the stupidest things. We have a urinal in a museum display. I have yet to see a work I think is dumber.

inthefallofasparrow

punk-a-cat

The thing I love most about Duchamps urinal piece is that it was so “low cost” in terms of creative labour (compared to say, a large scale oil painting or sculpture for example), but it’s absolutely FULL of rage against the traditionalists and the world at that time and it’s SUCH a statement, it’s like, “oh just a mass manufactured item with a signature” but the reality of it is so many layers of meaning and without understanding the history at the time you don’t get it.

It’s an incredibly clever “fuck you” and I love it

xanderwithanx

An old professor of mine, an expert in Duchamp who has written several books, has a theory. In part, “Fountain” was a prank, a personal “fuck you” to the organization looking for artworks. It’s importance cannot be overstated, and this importance stems from the fact that “Fountain” is /ridiculous/. It is enraging, it is hilarious, and it is very fascinating.

Aside from Duchamp’s readymades, I love “Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even”. Pictured below, the work invokes a complex machine, one my professor spent a great deal of time studying. Eventually, he reached his conclusion. My professor had been pranked. He believes “Bride Stripped Bare” is a joke about masturbation, hidden to all except those study it excessively.

At first blush, Duchamp’s works are stupid. Upon further study, they’re very complex. And, upon true understanding, Duchamp is laughing at you. To me, it seems the closer you come to truly understanding Duchamp, the more he slaps you in the face with a large fish.

xanderwithanx

Let me rage about “traditionalism revival” here. This is a dogwhistle.

As a lover of art, there are many complex and technically impressive works being created today, which both embrace different artistic traditions and break from them. To ignore those is to ignore contemporary art.

Here, OP is raging against conceptual art, which stimulates thought and challenges tradition. He wants his followers to believe that art has “degenerated”, because the West has “degenerated”. OP is intentionally engaging with fascist ideas of “degenerate art”.

If OP wanted to be accurate, he would seek to restore the Salon System, the Beaux Arts Academy, and classical training in the arts. The collapse of this specific system allowed for Modernism to evolve. Of course, that’s not what OP is talking about. He’s evoking beauty as a moral standard, telling his followers to “restore Western tradition”, to fight against aesthetic “degeneracy” in culture.

(By the way, Duchamp is commenting ON MODERNISM with “Fountain”. Duchamp submitted the work to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, who would accept any work by any artist, for a small fee. In part, Duchamp is saying, “Is this what you Modernists want? A urinal? Look me in the eyes and prove this is not art.”

If OP dared to use his brain, perhaps he would agree with Duchamp here.)

riotsquirrrl

The thing is that it isn’t even a urinal! It doesn’t match any model manufactured at the time. Also Duchamp was an accomplished ceramicist. It’s likely that he made the sculpture and absolutely everyone is like “I know what a urinal looks like. This is sufficiently urinal-shaped for me to assume it is one without looking at it closely!”

Duchamp had other readymades, like his snow shovel, where if you actually look at the photos, the handle is square and the bowl is way too flimsy. Why would manufacturers make a snow shovel with a squared-off handle? It’s impossible to hold! Duchamp slapped the “readymades” label on all these items and the hoity-toity art people who were so good at looking at things didn’t see it (probably because they’d never had to do labor like shovel snow imo, amongst other things).

Marcel Duchamp. In Advance of the Broken Arm. Museum of Modern Art. (4th Version [Ed.!!!] after lost original of November 1915)

the-real-seebs

wait what. there… what?!?! IT ISN’T AN ACTUAL URINAL?!? or might not be anyway. what the fuck.

if the dude seriously did that, his troll game is out of everyone’s league except Leader Kibo.

foone

My favorite thing about Fountain (besides the fact it has been pissing off fascists for over a century, natch) is that the original was lost and he made a bunch of official editions to sell to various museums (after the original was lost, possibly on purpose).

And they’re different! If it was a real “readymade” he could have just bought some more at his local hardware store, but no. He changed them in OBVIOUS WAYS.

See the triangle of holes?

Here’s the one from the Tate Modern:

Oh hello, cross-holes. Fancy seeing you here.

SFMOMA’s edition has the triangle holes, but it also has a line of holes at the top that are completely different from either other version.

Here’s one from Moderna Museet. Line and a circular set of holes!

Duchamp definitely intentionally made these different on purpose. It’s a “readymade” but it’s not, really, each of these is a specific custom creation.

It’s not even clear if he made it! He wrote a letter to his sister claiming that a female friend sent it to him, and he just enrolled it in the art exhibit under his own name. There’s also a possibility that that female friend was himself, since he later had a female pseudonym of Rrose Sélav.

This whole piece of art is a fractal troll, and it’s a beautiful one.

roach-works

art is a creative statement.

sometimes that statement is ‘go fuck yourself’

bicreature

I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw, a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently

ecrivainsolitaire

Some types of unreliable narrator:

The Watson: is present for the event but does not have the same level of perception as protagonist

The Lemony Snicket: isn't present for the event, reconstructs the facts based on later research, can get things wrong or incomplete

The Ted Moseby: is present for the event but has romanticised and embellished their memory of it through nostalgia to an extent that you cannot fully believe it; is also prone to misremembering or outright forgetting details.

The Katniss Everdeen: is present for the event, is the protagonist, but is completely foreign to the world and out of their depth so they don't quite understand a lot of what is going on.

The Rose Quartz: is present for the event, but due to their personal agenda or feelings of shame hides and embellishes what actually happened in favour of a version that paints them in a better light.

The Big Brother: overwrites what actually happened in favour of propaganda.

The Jonathan Harker: is absolutely clueless about what is going on around them and the genre they're in so their perception of events is tinted by their own naivety.

The Goob: the narrator's own emotional bias clouds their judgement of what really happened.

The Tyler Durden: the narrator is suffering from hallucinations and doesn't realise it.

The Pi: the narrator has survived a traumatic experience and copes with it by turning it into a wonderful tale.

joytri

frankencain

The future is a benevolent black hole.

Sagittarius A* / Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates / Outer Wilds (2020) / Is There a God-Shaped Hole at the Heart of Mathematics? / Drain for overflowing water at Sambuco Dam, Lavizzara Valley / ? / Thomasin Frances, Hole Theory (15/10/2022) / Bryan’s Ground, a public garden in Herefordshire on the Welsh border. / odd, weird, strange and unusual / Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves / Evil (2019-2014) / Judas H., Overflowing With Empty / Illustration of the Annular Eclipse of 1836 from “A fourteen weeks course in descriptive astronomy”, Joel Dorman Steele (1836-1886) / @imdad_barbhuyan on Instagram / The moon’s Copernicus crater. Through magic glasses. 1890. / Kaveh Akbar / Dune (2021) / Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, The Camp is a Bait for Time / Darina Muravjeva, Hole / Hilde Heynen in Heterotopia and the City / x / Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers / x / Louise Glück, from Descending Figure / Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. / Caitlyn Siehl, What We Buried; from “A Letter To Love” / Lara de Moor, Orb (2014) / Sam Sax, Pig / The National - Wake Up Your Saints / Aleksander Rostov / Sanna Wani, from “Princess Mononoke (1997)”, My Grief, the Sun / Gregory Orr, [i want to go back] / Thomas Ott / ? / Judas H., Overflowing With Empty / James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room / Massive sinkhole swallows house in Florida / Edna St Vincent Millay, in Letters (1952) /Silent Hill 4 (2004) / @/vren-diagram / Anne Boyer, What Resembles the Grave But Isn’t / Law of Holes / Scarlet Hollow (2021) / Lucy Dacus - Cartwheel

(part one)

primulaceas

Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (translated by Megan McDowell)

primulaceas

Natalie Diaz, “Snake-Light.” Postcolonial Love Poem

lucidloving

@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

diabeticlesbian

Jenna Gribbon “Me Looking At Her Looking At Me”

metamorphesque

musings on november

― Donald Miller, Holly Warburton, L. M. Montgomery, E. M. Forster, Anne Sexton, Kaye Donachie, Anne Sexton, Emilio Hernandez Martin, Maggie Stiefvater, Nina MacLaughlin (The Paris Review)

˗ˏˋin case you’d like to buy me a☕ˎˊ˗