I was nervous walking into Southern Methodist University’s Pollock Gallery to see “ME^2,” an exhibition of memes curated by SMU senior Elizabeth Han featuring work by the art collective and Adult Swim television show Bottom Text. It wasn’t just because it was Friday the 13th, already a spooky enough omen, but because, to my knowledge, this was the last art opening in Dallas, as the rapidly spreading pandemic was closing galleries, museums and events by the hour.
In many ways, this exciting and often hilarious show was the perfect way to contemplate COVID-19 and our response as an artistic community to the crisis.
The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a “unit of cultural transmission or imitation.” More popularly, memes are pictures — often with text on them — that get copied, distributed, edited and redistributed across the internet and social media.
“Meme is giving the voice back to the people, and it has no hierarchy because it is accessible to everyone,” Han says.
One of the memes in the show features a white man in a black hat and a white T-shirt laughing with a cigar in his hand next to a car with a bumper sticker of the Mexican flag. Underneath that is a black-haired Vegeta, a cartoon character from Dragon Ball Z, and then the white man again, this time frowning. Next to him is a golden-haired super Saiyan Vegeta. The text is a conversation about the Mexican bumper sticker that alludes to the differences between cultural heritage and racism.
Other memes take on Instagram validation, performance art, criminal justice, feminism, sexual harassment, identity, racism and religion. The images consist of George W. Bush, Aaliyah, anime characters and Sonic the Hedgehog, among others. The work includes video, an interactive installation involving heart stickers, posters and floor and wall installations. All of the memes serve as both an instruction and dissection of an underappreciated cultural language, and all were selected by Han as a response to her time as a student at SMU.
“For a meme to be successful, it is a choice as a group," Han says. "Without the force of the group, it can’t be successful. It invites viewers and users to alter it to address their needs, which makes it successful in the meme environment.”
That’s not unlike the choices we are making together on social distancing and the collective responses we are facing with this pandemic. As we process the implications together, check out the Bottom Text Instagram account, have a laugh and maybe be inspired to create your own meme.
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The “ME^2” exhibition, which closed early because of the pandemic, is a show that continues to be timely and live on (as memes often do) online. Follow Bottom Text on Instagram @thebottomtext, or watch the show at adultswim.com/videos/bottom-text.
