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wroteonedad · 2 years

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Meme Culture in Art

I consider myself to be a shitposter. Especially on my Instagram stories. Everyone who knows me will know this. I like to post everything.

On my days off, I like to go on my silly little walks which is the exact same loop every time. I walk along the pier, film a little video of the sea, put a fun little song I like over the top and post it. Two hours later, I'm scrolling through TikTok. I see a video of a 3D rotisserie chicken; dancing, running, jumping. Headless. Over the endless clips plays earrape. Nokia phone ringtones, Quandale Dingle, 'have some more chicken, have some more pie'. I like it and then repost it to my Instagram story. One of my old managers told me that watching my story is a giant fever dream to him. He's right.

Memes have been used in various art forms for years, even before a meme became a meme. I'm talking about Dadaism, political satire, conceptual art, even some forms of performance art to name a few. The prime purpose of these works are to make fun of a situation, to depict something in a humorous way, and sometimes, they're made to make no sense at all.

Dadaism began around 1916. The reason they started the art movement was because a group of artists wanted to create pieces of works that depicted the horrors of the First World War. The works included performance, montage poetry; thus all designed to either form a satirical nature or be completely non sensical. At the end of the day, this movement was created to be political, to go against what others thought, and to evoke them. It was a short lived movement, but highly noted in terms of art history and the developments that followed shortly after.

Marcel Duchamp had to be one of my favourite artists from this movement. And why? Because his work was so simple, yet so effective. The way he thought to sign a urinal as R.Mutt and submit it into an exhibition is ballsy. As far as meme culture in art goes, I always immediately discuss Duchamp because he is a joke artist that works effectively. There is nothing offensive, cynical or mundane about the joke art he created.

Also, just the fact that to this day, you can go into an art gallery and just look at a literal signed urinal is hilarious to me. I think this piece alone has exactly the same energy as America by Maurizio Cattelan. Now I could go on about this man and his works forever. I could write essays about him. I tried to base my entire dissertation on one of his many controversial works. Ironically, the piece of his work I studied was not actually America. In fact, I never even mentioned the piece at all.

America is exactly what you would think it is. An 18-karet solid gold toilet created in 2016 that you could indeed use. It wasn't a piece of work that was displayed in the middle of a gallery in a glass case, unlike Fountain, it was in fact in a cubicle in the toilet. This was quite literally a piece of artwork that you could interact with.

This £4.8 million toilet was all fun of games to use, until the night it was stolen. I'm not sure what it is with Cattelan and his works being stolen or destroyed, sometimes both at the same time, but frequent misery follows with his works. The good news that came with this; the artist actually made three golden toilets. Perhaps he knew that this was going to happen, after all, you can't trust the Brits.

In other forms of Meme culture in the art world, we also have literal memes, blown onto small canvases and displayed in art galleries. This is Nothing Conceptual, works by Jesus Bubu Negron; a collection of memes that were created just for his friends. However, he ended up getting the opportunity to display them all in a gallery.

They're what I consider to be a very classic meme. Classic as in when they began to rise in popularity online in the early 10's. The artist says that submitting a collection of works to a gallery is like posting a video on YouTube and it going viral. These videos are typically going to be something out of the ordinary and something that is funny. It takes something absurd to get the attention of so many people across the world and I think this is something this body of work does so well. I would love for it to be a more common thing where you walk into a gallery and it is a carefully selected body of memes, all brought together in a gallery space to tell its own story.

Now, memes are easier to access than ever before. They're in your local gallery, they're on your Facebook as you scroll through your feed, they're even posted by tabloids on a YouTube live stream (goodbye Liz Truss. 2022-2022).

They really can be used for everything. Even for things as extreme as hate speech. Remember Pepe? The much loved disappointed frog that had a reaction image for literally any situation ever.

He started off as this little guy. Harmless. He was a character designed by Matt Furie in his comic series from 2005. Pepe began to circulate when Furie illustrated an image of Pepe pulling his pants down to have a wee and the image went around 4Chan with a caption that says 'feels good man'. Anyway, fast forward a few years, people begin creating images of Pepe looking distraught, captioning it with 'feels bad man'. This of course, became very popular within the 4Chan community. Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and even Donald Trump (???) have all posted memes on their social medias, using images of Pepe. Pepe began to be used as a hate speech meme for the alt-right after Trump chose to Tweet himself as a Pepe. He gassed it up and within a week, tabloids were classing Pepe as a 'popular white nationalist symbol', I mean isn't that insane? Dudes literally a little frog. The whole hate speech concept went so far that his original creator, Furie decided to kill off Pepe to get people to stop displaying and creating him in such a way. But what are you supposed to do when your beloved cartoon is suddenly being redrawn as Adolf Hitler and the KKK? I guess you've gotta draw Pepe in a coffin and tell everyone that he died so he can't be used as a symbol for anything anymore.

The point is, memes can and will be used for anything. For good and for bad. They started off way before the human race even became aware of what a meme was and they've developed so far ever since. Harmless fun memes are the way to go, but I'm also sure it won't be the last time that we become exposed to a character or an image that spins so far out of control that it becomes an image of something that is out of your wildest dreams.

I think I'll choose to carry on with my silly little shitposting on Instagram. At the end of the day, even if I wanted to, I can't post anything offensive online because all of my work managers follow me.

To finish off, here are a few of my fave memes.

#art review #writing #memes #liz truss #pepe the frog #marcel duchamp #r mutt #maurizio cattelan #jesus bubu negron #gigi hadid #liam payne #andrew tate #sonic #the rock #breaking bad #neon genesis meme

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