Dada

I do remember my closest working with Tom Schiller was Sprockets because he shot Mike's stuff.

And I totally got what they were doing, that Dada-esque edgy thing.

I thought it was really, really fun.

So I think that was my interaction.

You know, it's really weird to mix the word meditation with some of just the grotesque, you know, imagery that has just, you know, been in front of our eyes for so long.

But I imagine when you sit down to work on a piece that there is this really strange meditation because you isolate yourself, you freeze yourself in the moment, you've determined, you've decided that this image is fucked up enough or something was... strong enough and moving enough to isolate it pull it from you know the media you know from instagram you know wherever you're getting it from you know where we're all getting it from essentially and then putting it in you know this you know this romantic um analog um original format if you would because You know, I'm sure you know, you know, back in the 20s, you know, when you had like the Dada movement, like those dudes were like wearing suits in Paris.

Some of them just like sophisticated gentlemen of their time.

But these guys were fucking psychos and were making fun of, you know, the Nazis then.

So the grouping is a real one, but it describes a set of overlapping literary and social circles rather than a movement with manifestos or meetings.

Think of the surrealists or the Dadaists or even the Bloomsbury group.

In the UK, these are kind of literary movements or artistic movements that set them and go, this is what we're, or the Pre-Raphaelites, this is what we want to achieve.

This is what we're going to do.

And look at it as an uprising that parallels a lot of other things in the early 20th century that exploded between the two world wars.

Because noir is a kind of cousin under the skin of modernism and surrealism and Dada and, you know, You can't really think hard about what's happening in Chandler's sentences without thinking about F. Scott Fitzgerald.

And you can't really think hard about what's happening in Hammett's sentences without thinking about Ernest Hemingway.

And that it means also Gertrude Stein, who I think is in the mix there.

A lot of people find this challenging.

But I was really moved by Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists and the ready-mades.

Are you familiar with what the ready-mades were that Marcel Duchamp came up with?

No, tell me about it.

A century ago, artists responded to the horrors of World War I by creating deliberately irrational anti-aesthetic work.

Dada rejected the cultural logic that had led to industrialized killing.

In its own meme-driven way, brain rot refuses to participate in the attention economy on the economy's terms.

The joke is that there is no joke.

All right, you're gonna turn me into a commodity, Mark Zuckerberg? You're gonna try to, uh, monetize every minute of my day, try to trick me into thinking that your fake artificial digital universe is somehow real? I'm gonna watch Skibidi Toilet.

So it's a rejection in some sense.

It's Dada.

It's, it's Duchamp in the fountain installation.