BY ALICE BUCKNELL
Memes are the democratizing
medium of our collective digital present. Easy to make, easy to share; instantly
recognizable and a little nonsensical; a hilarious and at times sickly-sweet
jab at the world’s blunders, scandals, protests, and hypocrisies. From pop
culture to politics, memes bubble up across our Facebook feeds, first roasting
a tone-deaf Pepsi ad and then manifesting as hand-scrawled signs at anti-Trump
rallies. In the post-internet world, nothing escapes the meme’s comic gaze, and
the form is being recognized as an artistic medium for this interconnected
online moment. High-art purists eschew the argument, but the aesthetic and
social sway of contemporary meme culture has roots deep in the pre-digital
art-historical canon.
“Memes are essentially 100
years of text art boiled down into your feed,” said professor Darren Wershler,
research chair at Concordia University, who argues that memes are a type of
“everyday Conceptualism.” Through an ironic and playful treatment of a
fragmented subject, memes break down high and low culture, disrupting ideas of
authenticity and originality. Wershler argues that memes should be understood
as the digital descendants of artists such as Man Ray, Walker Evans, and Andy
Warhol—all vanguards whose practices largely concerned informational and social
disruptions.
For a cultural phenomenon
with an attitude and aesthetic that feels so relentlessly contemporary, the
knee-jerk response to the idea there is a 50-or-more-year history of
“memecraft” that is not all LOLs and JKs is a hard “no.” Yet, that
skepticism—and the way memes subvert it—reveals how the artistic lineage of
memes is spun out of some of 20th-century art’s most revolutionary ideas.
Today’s meme culture adopts the techniques of postmodernist movements like Pop,
performance, and conceptual art to buck their precedents in order to subvert
the status quo.
Memes resist today’s
norm-culture in the same way the performative turn of the 1960s disrupted
Modernism. Like performance art of the ’60s, memes are hardwired with an
unpredictability and a “hackable” interface or template that can be easily
appropriated and overwritten—anyone can make a meme. Performance brought art
into the street and public spaces, leveling the gap between artist and
audience. Similarly, memes offer a highly accessible and interactive platform
of production that is ripe for challenge and dissent, with disagreements and
controversy only fueling the fire of a successful meme truly going viral. Other
memes crash and burn. So what? The ephemeral, low-stakes economy of memes
re-brands the form as a type of performance rather than a purely visual object.
Marrying graphic design and
memes with this performative mentality is at the heart of Action to Surface, a
new publication by The Rodina, an Amsterdam-based design collective. In it, the
duo lays out the political urgency of surface-led visual culture, wherein, like
performance art of the ’60s, memes resist today’s norm-culture. Tereza Ruller,
The Rodina co-founder, described the concept of the “democratized surface,” in
which design becomes an interactive, two-way mirror held up to society at large.
Through humor, memes incite a collective reaction to everyday life as well as
reveling in it, in a format no less playful than it is political, decoding the
murky structural screw-ups, paradoxes, and hypocrisies of our current political
climate.
In a recent project titled
“The Voice of the Netherlands,” The Rodina created an “anti-campaign” against
the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) led by Geert Wilders. In order to
ridicule its bombastic rhetoric and expose the hatred and xenophobia driving
its anti-immigrant manifesto, the collective made a series of spoof campaign
posters (rolled out as GIFs) that appropriated the language and graphic
identity of the PVV’s campaign. Accompanied by a roster of like-minded memes
spilling over social media under the hashtag #stopwilders, the parody flew
under the radar but bolstered resistance for those in the know, no doubt
contributing to PVV’s crushing defeat in the Dutch general election on March
15th.
But Wershler noted the
limits of political memes in isolation. “Narratives matter.…Pictures don’t
speak for themselves,” he said, arguing that memes are not just jokes, but
rather have the potential to be more sinister than what meets the eye. “Memes
aren’t an innocent process—they carry serious political weight, and not always
of the activist variety,” Wershler said, citing the website 4chan’s politics
board and other alt-right cyber-communes where hate speech has festered in the
form of memes.
Like The Rodina, curator
and digital connoisseur Maisie Post sees the authorless enterprise of memes and
its prioritization of narrative over material perfection as inherited
characteristics from art movements of yesteryear. Post points to similarities
between memes and the folk and pop art movements: All were quick to circulate,
and quicker to slip out of the spotlight. All share local, low-brow production
materials, as well as collective ownership. “Like modern art…our internet age
moves fast, BT Infinity fast, and people are always looking for the next big
thing and the next laugh. Jokes get old,” Post said.
Last summer, Post curated
the iconic exhibition “What do you Meme?” hosted by London’s insurgent art hive
Copeland Park. In explaining her selections for the exhibition—all female
artists, a mix of Instagram meme queens and IRL practitioners—Post spoke about
the subversive and sub-cultural power of memes in undercutting the role of the
artist, as was the case with folk art as much as postmodernism. Discussing two
of the included artists, Pantyhoe$ and Meme Gold, Post said the pair “took
memes offline, bringing the URL IRL; neither of them identified as
artists—there was no role for the artist to follow and no regulations,” arguing
this is a nod toward the subversive freedom of art icons like Marcel Duchamp,
Joseph Beuys, Sherrie Levine, and Jenny Holzer.
What memes expose today
matches the guerrilla-style insurrection of their delivery. From the surprise
attack delivery of the iconic Rickroll a decade ago, to curators tapping
today’s online activists to put on the next ground-breaking exhibition, meme
culture has its own (accelerated) history. But what memes owe to 20th-century
art and its discontents can’t be overlooked. It isn’t so much about visuals,
but instead digs deep into the cultural architecture of memes and their political
power as a networked critical resistance, where their abilities to incite and
inspire, to problematize and be problematic in equal turn, offer a mirror image
of our volatile present as much as their avant-garde heritage.
—Alice Bucknell
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-memes-owe-art-history
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