A look at dadaism in the contemporary world
The internet has always been obsessed with memes. This isn’t an article on the rise and fall of memes, or the time-honoured classics such as the cake is a lie, or the YouTube masterpiece “Shoes,” but rather a new form of meme, a neo-dadaist meme. Born out of the disillusionment of the millennial generation, Twitter accounts such as @Dril and @Horse_ebooks, members of “weird Twitter,” seek to project inanity into the digitized ether.
Dadaism was a largely European artform which came to prominence following the events of the First World War. The historical context behind dadaism is of the utmost importance for understanding the methodology of dadaists. Essentially, dadaism came from a generation of artists baptized by the horrors of trench-warfare and civilian massacres. Their art explored feelings of meaninglessness, of nothing being anything, of reality being invented, or fabricated, or different from the reality in one’s mind. The art itself, plainly and simply, made no sense. It was art because they said it was art. These artists came from a world in which conventional logic and rationality led to a senseless and devastating global catastrophe. Dadaism sought to reject the conventions and ideological structures that brought about and even legitimized the war. Dadaist art was weird; some glued things to other things and called it sculpture, others threw otherwise incongruous images into a frame and called it art. The points are made up and the rules don’t matter, that kind of thing.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Born out of the disillusionment of the millennial generation…[/pullquote]
The proliferation of memes, comes of course, from the generation of the internet. Obviously memes can only come from us, because we’re the only generation of individuals capable of generating them.
An iron with thumbtacks nailed into the bottom renders it useless, and therefore, funny. Where’s the joke? There isn’t one, other than “I took this object and tweaked it just enough to make it incapable of performing its basic function.” The same happened with the bathbomb meme. Throwing a MacBook into a tub full of water and taking a photo of it is only funny because it’s so dumb. You want a real punchline? Here’s a sink with blue food colouring and glitter. Laugh it up.
Of course we make jokes that make no sense, we’re merely reflecting what we see—or can’t see—in the world into our comedy and culture.
What, do we millennials, have to be disenfranchised about? We, from a deeply Western perspective, have grown up during a time of nearly constant, questionably-justified war. Job instability, the market crash, and the rapid burning-through of retirement funding and student debt; I don’t mean to harp on the potential bleakness of our futures, but it doesn’t look too bright.
And that’s why a Twitter account like Horse eBooks is so funny. Horse eBooks is essentially a Twitter-bot created by some Russian guy to hype eBooks about horses on the internet. To avoid bot detection, he programmed it so that every once in awhile, it spewed out a hodgepodge of lines from the books. The result? An incredibly bizarre Twitter account that tweeted out messages such as “.RAVEL. .RAVEL. .RAVEL. .RAVEL. .RAVEL. .RAVEL. .RAVEL. .RAVEL. GRADING AND GRAVEL. .RADING AND GRAVEL. GRAVEL. GRADING AND GRAVEL. TOTAL.”
Weird Twitter accounts, nonsensical memes, and “shitposting” are all deconstructions of hegemonic structures through the discourse of the absurd and surrealism. By rendering sensical, “real” objects, words, or concepts unintelligible, we are breaking down the systems that uphold them.