E.6 Contagion Aesthetics: On Infectious Visual Cultures
Fri Oct 28 / 9:00 – 10:30 / Burwash Room, rm 2005, Hart House
chairs /
- Émilie von Garan, University of Toronto
Is there such a thing as contagion aesthetics? Understanding global cultures as visual cultures, this panel invites critical reflections on the aesthetic sensibilities of our current moment. The tangible and visible expressions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which it has radically altered every aspect of life over the past several years, are considered alongside more subtle ramifications such as how we might re/conceive of the ‘viral’ and the ‘infectious’ as applied to social relations, entertainment, or political events, among other aspects of everyday life that find themselves mediated through the circulation and reception of images today. From the early days of toilet-paper shortages, to washing and disinfecting groceries, to eerie footage of empty streets, to endless Zoom meetings and social media trends, this panel engages with both individual and collective creative expressions and reflections. Does our current moment have a distinct visual form?
keywords: aesthetics, contagion, infection, virality, visuality
E.6.1 Meme-ing the Pandemic
Kashfia Arif, OCAD University
Ever since Pepe the Frog was created to espouse commentary on the state of politics in the UK, memes have been at the forefront of social commentary of global and cultural affairs. The global lockdown enforced by the COVID-19 Pandemic has only augmented the virality of memes as cultural commentators, maximising the meme's potential as an easily transmissible unit of communication. The shift into the digital mainstream meant that there was now a meme for every scenario whether it was on political situations, healthcare breakdowns, lockdown trauma, Zoom fatigue or existential crisis. This proliferation of memes during the C-19 Pandemic is comparative to the outpouring of absurdism in the aftermath of other global crises, such as the Spanish Flu and World War II, where steeped in collective grief and trauma, the global population sought refuge in humour and the absurd. While the artistic and aesthetic expressions of the two eras are quite different on the surface, there are thematic similarities in how modern-day visual creators have also used humour in their response to the existential crisis brought by the pandemic. Using this parallel, it can be argued that memes are the historians of the current pandemic era. Through the examination of pre-pandemic and post-pandemic memes, this essay explores the portrayal of the new normal through memes and reflects on their identity as the storytellers of the C-19 Pandemic.
keywords: virality, memes, aesthetics, visual culture, absurdism
Kashfia Arif is a cultural scholar, writer, editor and curator. She completed her MA in Critical Media and Cultural Studies from SOAS in 2014 before working in arts and publishing, and teaching media studies at the undergraduate level. Arif is currently pursuing her MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. Alongside her studies, she works remotely with Brihatta Art Foundation as their Editor for all art publications and exhibition content. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Arif has presented on Korean fanculture, Japanese visual culture and South Asian art initiatives in international conferences. Arif’s curatorial research interests include narration and storytelling, memory and trauma, catharsis and healing, humour, graffiti, and memes.
E.6.2 Zoom and the Modernist Grid
Paula Burleigh, Allegheny College
During lockdowns mandated by the Covid-19 pandemic, life for many migrated to Zoom. Meetings, classes, and happy hours transpired against the rote uniformity of Zoom’s virtual grid. The grid—once lauded as modernist art’s utopian final frontier—became among the most iconic facets of Covid visual culture. The image of individuals floating in their respective modular units served as an acute visual metaphor for physical isolation, and perhaps more aptly, for the desire to maintain bodily autonomy in the face of an invisible viral adversary. And yet historically and now, the autonomy that the grid proffers is illusory. This paper situates the contemporary digital grid within a longer history of Modernist discourse. The modernist grid expunged everything extraneous: narrative, illusionistic space, figure, ground. Artists and theorists proclaimed it a universally legible form. Yet Modernism’s supposedly neutral, universal subject was almost unremittingly white and male: the grid also excised difference. The contemporary pandemic witnessed another failure of the grid: students increasingly shut off their cameras in Zoom classes, as even the visible fragments of their backgrounds attest to the vast inequities among their socioeconomic stations. Zoom fatigue set in, perhaps owing to the merge of work and recreation into the same flattened space. It is no wonder that major exhibitions of 2022—the Venice Biennale, for example—register a reaction against autonomy, with a proliferation of artworks foregrounding interconnectedness: inter-species relations among humans, animals, and environment. This paper concludes with a glance at pervasive motifs in art on view in 2022, which are anathema to logic of the grid: they are messy, fleshy, and oozing. Ultimately, the grid its antitheses reflect deeply rooted anxieties and realities of the pandemic, namely, the fear of contagion coupled with the impossibility of autonomy.
keywords: contagion, grid, modernism, post-humanism
Paula Burleigh is an art historian specializing in postwar to contemporary art. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and affiliated faculty in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College where she also serves as director of the Allegheny Art Galleries. Burleigh earned her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (New York, NY). She was previously a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a frequent lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Stedelijk Studies, and in various edited volumes. Burleigh’s current research focuses on the intersections of feminist speculative fiction and contemporary visual art.
E.6.3 Memetic Aesthetics: Virality and Visual Culture in the Post-Digital Era
Alican Koc, McGill University
This paper examines the relationship between virality and visual culture by focusing on what it terms “memetic aesthetics,” referring to the vast proliferation of niche aesthetic categories, styles, and social types (e.g., vaporwave, sea punk, normcore, VSCO girl, e-boy, etc.) which have been emerging on social media since the heyday of Tumblr in the late 2000s. The central argument of the paper is that memetic aesthetics represent a digitally mediated shift away from questions pertaining to taste, judgment, authenticity, and originality which have informed past modes of thought in aesthetic theory, and toward an aesthetics devoted to the ceaseless ontological production of new categories achieved via viral circulation. The paper highlights the role of internet memes in the production of memetic aesthetic categories, focusing predominantly on the starter pack meme, a format which creates satirical representations of various individuals, entities, and cultural types by curating collections of images of stereotypical objects, quotes and attributes associated with them. Treating the starter pack as an allegory for memetic aesthetics, the paper discusses a logic of affective worldbuilding achieved by curating particular sets of objects as a given category or type and securing their ontological status as a “thing” by disseminating them across digital media. The paper concludes by situating memetic aesthetics within a broader genealogy of postmodern aesthetic thought, and reflecting on their possible implications for the future of digital aesthetics.
keywords: aesthetics, virality, memes, visual cultures, digital media
Alican Koc is a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. His doctoral research investigates the burgeoning relationships between new media, memetic circulation and subculture in online communities. Alican holds a BA and MA in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto.
