Instagram and the Memed Self

Instagram meme accounts have become an institution on the platform once known for selfies and sunsets. These accounts put out memes into the algorithmic throes of the content economy, imparting singularity and authorship to a format defined by a distributed, authorless processes.1 The “meme admins,” who run these accounts create meme images that can’t be disentangled from their own online performance. I argue this dynamic is as much an affordance of Instagram’s design as it is the precarity of life and creative work today.

Engaging broadly with the theme of automated images, this piece looks at the way our image world is already automated through the endless stream of visual information as content, made meaningless and ephemeral in the constantly optimizing flow. The potential for the political use of memes is always there but can’t be isolated from the processes of modern online communication on platforms tooled for engagement and discrete, marketable identifiers. This article discusses the tension between meme artist and influencer, as a way to look at artists whose play with both roles allowed some political meaning to reach through the noise.

Focusing on two influential political memers, this piece discusses the ways their practices both rejected and acquiesced to these pressures, playing with their own images and identity in deeply political works. It also tracks the development of Instagram and the changes to the platform that made it an excellent vehicle for this new kind of meme creator. Finally, this piece analyzes two instances where meme culture entered into the shared reality of public space, creating offline juxtapositions that also generated new cycles of online content.

****

Rounding one of the many curves southbound on New York State Route 9, a driver could easily miss the double billboard placed before a field of tall grasses [Fig. 1]. Just outside the Hudson Valley village of Tivoli, the location seems as random a place as any for an obscure, text-heavy work of art like the one taking up the left side of the advertorial diptych. Any driver (there are no sidewalks and barely a shoulder) would have a hard time reading the entire text while passing by, let alone digesting the humor and critique. Moving through physical space along an artery of circulation, connection, and commerce, the driver could hardly begin to understand the online networks from which the image was born. Over a postcard-perfect photograph of the Hudson River, comically overdesigned text reads:

I DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE PURPLE

-Ancient White Proverb

****

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, a picnicking remote worker might have noticed a somber event taking place on one edge of an Atlanta public park. Sitting on the grass in the springtime air, the picnicker would have seen a small group of young people dressed in black, standing together near a bench covered in colorful drawings, paintings, and other ephemera. When the attendees began taking photos and selfies with their phones, the picnicker might have looked on perplexedly, confused as to the meaning of the ritual. On that spring day, anyone escaping lockdown in the park would see the group congregated near the bench for hours, speaking into another device mounted on a tripod. This random, curious person would have no way to understand the significance of the moment to the hundreds on the other end of the livestream, nor could they fathom the importance of the artist being memorialized to the online public who was tuning in.

****

For the disparate audiences of modern social media, Instagram memers occupy the kind of “microcelebrity” first discussed by Teresa M. Senft in her study of cam workers and their audiences: known within their particular online mileu but rarely beyond it. 2 Like so many concepts from earlier internet scholarship, microcelebrity has made its way into “the discourse,” and has become a meme of its own.3 This piece discusses two instances where the online world erupts into the physical and “niche internet micro celebrity” escapes the bounds of niche internet micro culture.4 One of these moments is (bitingly) funny, the other poignantly somber. Both are strange in the way so many things have become, as so much of our visual culture and shared conversations now happen in disparate online worlds and rarely speak to a larger public.

The billboard was installed by meme artist Jenson Leonard, best known by his Instagram handle @coryintheabyss [Fig. 2]. It was posted to accompany a web-based exhibit and a gallery show at nearby Bard College in 2021 [Fig. 2].56 The bench represents the life and work of meme artist Addy Borneman. It was decorated by friends and collaborators of the prolific memer, as a memorial following her untimely death in 2020. Borneman, known on Instagram as @gayvapeshark [Fig. 3] is considered by many to be a foundational figure in the meme community and meme art. The display was created by fellow memers, close friends IRL, after her passing in April 2020. Borneman and Leonard are foundational meme artists whose work exemplifies a loose movement of meme producers on Instagram—crude pranksters-cum-graphic designers who created elaborate memes from a hard-left standpoint and toyed with identity in jarring, messy, and surreal compositions. Their memes use humor to communicate political and social commentary without falling into the didactic, unfunny sanctimony that marked much Left discourse during the Trump era [Fig. 4].

Both events mark unexpected presentations of the two artists’ work and a rare public statement to the online publics their work addresses.7 The situations surrounding both moments are quite different, one tragic and the other triumphant, but they both created striking juxtapositions in the visual and discursive experiences of shared physical spaces. These two events also give new ways to think through Borneman and Leonard’s work, which I began to study in a very different moment for meme art, Instagram, and the two artists’ lives. Contrasting between the pandemic-era moments and observations I made just before, in 2019, this piece will discuss the importance of the Instagram platform to Borneman and Leonard’s meme production following their earlier work on Facebook. This period marked a shift in their output and an increasing use of their own images and representations in their work. Jenson Leonard and Addy Borneman negotiated their relationship to “Instafame” in their meme output, grappling with their own positions as influencers.8

Among a loosely connected circle of creators and fans, Borneman and Leonard’s work pushed the communicative and artistic potential of memes beyond the image macros and recurring characters that had preceded them. By asserting a new authorial relationship to a format defined by authorless distribution, these memers played with identity (and identity politics), indicting power structures while also humorously intensifying the contradictions in the social behavior of people at every stratum. Leonard and Borneman’s memes skewered conservatives while saving little regard for performative “allies” and doctrinaire liberals [Fig. 5]. This approach to meme creation, and the oeuvres cultivated by these meme lords allowed for viral images that were deeply expressive, complex, and sometimes quite personal. Often highly political, the structures of feeling glimpsed in these memes resonated deeply with online users in the publics that coalesced around the work, and beyond.

Borneman and Leonard were part of a community of practice, especially active from the early Instagram meme era through the pandemic explosion of meme accounts in 2020. They had both been prominent Facebook meme lords before moving most of their output to Instagram in 2017.9 Their practice began alongside other “Weird Facebook” meme pages and groups, an online culture phenomenon contemporary with the growth of the alt-right meme lords of 4chan.10 The move to Instagram, and the specificity of the platform played an important role. Instagram’s mix of photo sharing, video and other affordances for creators encouraged a different relationship to meme production and consumption, and to the creator’s presentation of self. Concurrent with the move to Instagram was a greater emphasis on an authorial relationship to meme art and an increase in memer’s use of their own image, whether in memes or in the many influencer-ready affordances of the platform.

This was a time period of general turmoil and rupture, stretching from the campaign and election of Donald Trump through the Covid-19 pandemic. These American memers’ output served as a counter to the contemporary explosion of memes in rightwing politics documented in countless news articles, documentary films, research articles, and book-length studies such as the work of Angela Nagle and Whitney Phillips.11 Originating from the swirling anonymous depths of the image boards, overt hate speech and appeals to violence entered mainstream political discourse on the right, creating a shared vernacular political reality opposed to those rendered “other.”12 No meme would come to symbolize this phenomenon in the late 2010s like “Pepe the Frog,” whose likeness was used in countless rightwing permutations, ranging from silly to truly despicable. Despite the cartoon frog’s fairly innocuous origin in Matt Furie’s 2005 comic Boy’s Club, and the many ways Pepe was used outside of rightwing politics, it’s impossible to disentangle the meme from its far right connotations.13 In its prolific rightwing career the Pepe meme clearly served as visual signifier of the shared anger and frustration of many in the increasingly unmasked far right.

Memes like Leonard and Borneman’s also spoke to a shared experience of many younger Americans who came of age with a dense knowledge and command of online culture but little to bring them hope and joy outside of it. Instagram meme admins present themselves as anti-influencers. They often lampoon the online currency of image and clout, but nevertheless use the same tools and platforms to support their work. It’s this play with image and identity that marks the departure from the era of “Weird Facebook” to the production on Instagram discussed here. What might most differentiate the meme artists of “weird” Instagram14 from other platforms is their inclusion of their own images in their meme production. This takes the form of memes using their own selfies, portraits, and avatars. The creators’ play with their own images is a rejection of the influencer’s mandate to constantly self-market while, inevitably, also rolled up within it. The Gay Vape Shark and Cory in the Abyss personae enable Addy Borneman and Jenson Leonard’s memetic play with representations of themselves. Their absurdist, ironic online identities were also tied to their IRL subject positions. This was not navel gazing identity play, but a way to make art from a grounded political standpoint.

The two examples that begin this chapter underline the strange ways the online world and the “real” brush up against each other. Jenson Leonard/coryintheabyss’s billboard is an image plucked from the memetic discourses of the “terminally-online” and forced into public space through Leonard’s own notoriety and his rising esteem as an artist. It’s also a biting critique of white supremacy. The memorial service for Addy Borneman/gayvapeshark/Lettuce Dog, also shows a strange interface between an online micro-public and the outside world. That service was held as much in an Atlanta park as it was on the platform through which her work had reached so many. Borneman’s tragic loss and Leonard’s increasing artworld legitimacy form a stark contrast. However, both events underline the importance of their work in the meme community, and its impact beyond it. The friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators remain outsized figures in their particular corner of the modern internet, and their influence remains visible in the Instagram meme scene today.

Meming the Self

The communicative power and political potential of internet memes has been the focus of growing interest in recent years, compelling study from journalists, academic researchers, and internet users alike. Journalistic inquiries have delved into specific meme communities with an effort to track memes’ impact on politics both on and offline. Academic research, too, has come to recognize memes as an important part of internet culture. A small, but growing literature has emerged around the study of memes in recent years.15 The still-coalescing subfield of “meme theory” has largely focused on memes in the terms of their viral spread and their political or social efficacy.

The emphasis of much of the foundational work on memetics has been on the collective nature of the phenomenon which exploded during the web 2.0 era and the early social web. Scholars like Limor Shifman emphasize the distributed nature of memetics. Shifman’s original discussion from 2014 wonderfully captures the distributed doing of memes in its focus on process and the units of a greater political and cultural [things] that individual memes could represent. Memes, Shifman wrote, are like “(post)modern folklore in which shared norms or values are created through cultural artifacts” that “reflect deep social and cultural structures.16 Ryan Milner built on Shifman’s analysis while focusing on memes’ potential to create or strengthen the outlines of online publics and subcultures. Memes represent a “vibrant” media, for Milner, who uses the metaphor of a tapestry to connote the complex, interwoven nature of memetic discourse. Milner defines memetic media by their “multimodal” nature across platforms and formats, and the practical dynamics of their creation and spread.17 Crucially, Milner’s study began to consider issues of power, belief, and subcultural formation in this work, arguing “Memetic media have significant ramifications for civic participation: for representations of diverse identities, for political debate, and for the culture industries central to the contemporary media ecology.”18

This research, however, has done little to attend to memes in their singularity as individual images (works), or to meme makers themselves as artists or craftspeople.19 It’s only recently that meme researchers have begun to ask these questions, as exemplified in Idil Galip’s dissertation research into the labor of meme creation and the working lives of meme artists.20 Galip argues, “The digital labour of meme creation, dissemination and monetisation is built on digital skills, the maintenance of affective connections and being ”perpetually online”.21 Through interviews with several meme creators, Galip’s work underlines their roles as precarious creative laborers and emphasizes the communities they create online.

Memers are thought of as political agitators, idle shitposters, or simply nodes in a digitally mediated multitude—never artists. But meme making practices like Borneman’s, Leonard’s and the community to which they belong complicates those frames, and many of the assumptions around memes and the channels in which they travel. The virtual community of memers on Instagram create memes to be shared—and the hope for each image is that it will go viral—but they are shared to represent their author’s oeuvre instead of a wholly distributed cultural text. Many of these memers spend a great deal of time on their images, which they watermark and title to assert soft intellectual property control. Like many other content creators, meme artists might sell shirts or other merchandise and often use memes to promote other ventures. But the nature of Instagram, the home of the “influencer” also seems to demand a further personal connection and presentation of self. No longer anonymous memers, these artists had to reconcile their own relationship to the selfie.

Weird Facebook

In the mid-2010s, Facebook was becoming less fun. Its original millennial user-base was starting to age out of posting 2 a.m. bar selfies, and into posting ultrasounds, inspirational quotes, and multi-level marketing scams. Even worse: their parents were using the platform! The feed was now full of ads, sponsored content, and optimized web content tailored to game the recommendation engine. “Weird Facebook” offered an answer for a certain subset of users who missed the fun, creativity, irreverence, and sense of possibility of the early web 2.0 era. The phrase was first used in a 2014 article in the online culture tabloid, The Daily Dot to describe “a loose conglomeration of pages that post bizarre image macros. “Fodder for the guy you bought weed from in high school.”22 More pages emerged from the “Dank Meme Stashes,” of the 2016 United States election, and shared irreverent, highly stylized memes that maintained a political edge. Addy Borneman and Jenson Leonard were at the forefront.

Addy Borneman’s first Facebook page, Lettuce Dog, was among this early cohort who anonymously posted messy, surreal memes and other content [Fig. 6]. After founding Lettuce Dog, Borneman would invite Leonard to become an admin before forming her new page Sharks, dragon ball, vaping, and being gay (the precursor to Instagram’s @gayvapeshark). Pages like these put out content from a hard-left standpoint that also managed to be widely relevant and utterly bizarre. On Facebook, these meme makers remained mostly anonymous. Borneman, for example, represented herself with an anthropomorphized, gender-fluid, vaping shark character, not revealing her own image until much later [Fig. 7]. Upon moving to Instagram, Borneman, Leonard, and many in their loose community of meme artists, began to include their own images and aspects of their lives in their memes and other content.23

The New Normie: Instagram and the Rise of the Influencer

Instagram began in 2010 as a simple image-based social networking app for Apple’s iPhone. That original version didn’t have many of the features and affordances that we know today, but its core functionality would prove to be tremendously popular to millennial users, who were suddenly carrying devices that could take high quality images, connected to high-speed data networks that allowed them to easily be uploaded.24 Instagram originally provided 11 preset filters, simple cropping functionality, location sharing, and instantaneous sharing to Facebook and other popular social media platforms. The filters applied filmic styles or basic color corrections that made users’ photos stand out. For years Instagram held users to a fixed image size, 640 x 640 pixels in the familiar square aspect ratio, that allowed for ease of framing, posting, and viewing using the iPhone 4’s screen. One of the app’s “founders,” Kevin Systrom described it as a streamlined social network for sharing with friends. “Our goal,” he said, “is to not just be a photo-sharing app, but to be the way you share your life when you’re on the go.”25

Systrom’s words rang hollow even in Instagram’s early days. Instead of the reciprocal production and consumption of images among peers, one-sided production from well-followed users has always accounted for much of Instagram’s traffic and growth.26 The iPhone 4’s addition of a front-facing camera, the ease of the app, and its simplified approach to social media gave a new currency to the phenomenon of taking “selfies.” Its addition of a “popular” tab created a goal for aspirational users.27 These features, continued improvements in smartphone imaging, and parallel moves in broadcast media set the stage for a new kind of celebrity, the “influencer,” known mostly for being seen. Early updates brought hashtags and gave users the ability to tag others.28 These affordances also allowed for easy connections to brands or to other influencers. The influencer’s careful curation of their own images, or those that show a perfected, aestheticized lifestyle became the currency of what was becoming a highly monetizable platform.

Discussing microcelebrity, Senft reads Warhol’s prescient “15 minutes of fame” through an equally prescient 1991 update by musician and blogger, Momus. “In the future,” Momus wrote, “everyone will be famous for 15 people.”29 Senft notes that online celebrity differs both in the relative scale—a user can be a star in one online community and completely unknown in another—but also in the mode of address. Microcelebrity “changes the game of of celebrity,” she argues, blending audiences and communities and their traditionally-opposed forms of address.30 “Audiences desire someone to speak at them; communities desire someone to speak with them.”31 Microcelebrities like Instagram influencers must navigate this dialectic of accessibility and remove carefully if their brand is to be successful. Both aspirational and relatable at once, influencers must make themselves noticeable but never push too much against the prevailing trends of the platform.

Unique to the internet age, influencers recall the thought leaders, daytime TV personalities, and teen idols of print and broadcast media. Entrepreneurs of self-branding were making names and deals for themselves online well before Instagram became a techno-cultural juggernaut. Facebook, Twitter, and especially YouTube were already full of “content creators” whose main product was themselves. But the new, inherently visual app became a perfect vehicle for an explosion of the influencer economy. Always intended for smartphone screens, Instagram favored dramatic and expressive shots over the high-quality photography of rival Flickr or the photo-dumps of Facebook (both created for the use of standalone digital cameras). Instagram instead encouraged feeds full of decisive moments and impeccably arranged tableau. Whether for the perfect pout or plate, greatly improved iPhone camera hardware and software coupled with the suite of filters and cropping tools built into Instagram’s accessible UI, gave users the means to project an idealized self and lifestyle through curated squares.

Lev Manovich has done a great deal of work to theorize the cultural and aesthetic impacts of Instagram while developing research programs for analyzing online visual culture at incredible scale. The affordances of the platform (hashtags, geolocation, and uniform aspect ratio and resolution) enabled the creation of the massive visual datasets that powered the “Selfiecity” project he developed with Alise Tifentale.32 That project would lead Manovich and his lab to publish a broader study of Instagram as a platform for “aesthetic visual communication.”33 Manovich forwards “Instagrammism” as a way to describe the global spread of similar kind of curated image and feed featuring “designed images” using the then-popular VSCO editing suite and echoing the look of Kinfolk magazine.34

The impact of Instagram on visual culture and marketing (and the inevitable relationship between the two) is hard to overstate. The era of the selfie ushered in a whole new discipline of self-presentation, complete with guides and techniques, trends in posing and makeup, and eventually “face-tuning” filter software. This new self-portraiture practice ignited much cultural debate in the 2010s, as well as a rich area of research.35 As Instagram matured, however, the commercial value of the self-image began to crowd out the many other ways the practice might be used. The platform’s own efforts to encourage advertising revenue meant users increasingly saw marketable images in their feeds. To quote selfie researcher Katrin Tildenberg, “Commercial appropriation of selfie culture strips selfies and selfie practices of the multitude of their meanings.”36 All these factors—algorithmic, market, and cultural forces—pushed users toward normative standards and performances of beauty. Facial beauty filters have advanced significantly but ultimately perform the same function: using computer vision to recognize facial features, bringing different parameters into alignment with a pattern—quantified beauty using an algorithmic process to bring the anomalous within normative standards.

Filter software evinces a literal automation of notions of beauty, but the cultural logics of the platform create an automation of self that’s not as visually immediate. The circuit between culture, capital, and platform shapes normative standards and the imperative to participate, to present oneself, and to post. Even if we aren’t pursuing anything like “Instafame,” social media users are ultimately performing and posing in response to this distributed machine. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes said as much of being photographed: “once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.”37

This dynamic has only become intensified as Instagram, the platform where the influencer was born, has been eclipsed by TikTok and its infinite scroll of frantically performing users making their plays for a tiny slice of the attention economy. As Instagram (and Facebook, Meta’s lumbering giant) is increasingly reformulated in TikTok’s image, it’s become a clearinghouse for video content that originated on the newer platform. Instagram’s content delivery is relentlessly tweaked to squeeze every drop of ad revenue from the maelstrom of video generated by the constantly optimizing humans who create it.38

Whatever Systrom originally envisioned for Instagram, the platform would become synonymous with the influencer economy. Instagram leaned into this business model as it was slowly becoming a more robust, complex application and content hub. Facebook (now Meta), seeking tangible profitability as it geared up for its initial public offering, acquired Instagram in 2012.39 As was the case with its flagship platform, Facebook (the company) sought to constantly retool Instagram to maximize user engagement. This came in the form of advertisements in 2013,40 major changes to the recommendation engine, algorithmic moderation, and increasing incentives for influencers.41 Instagram added features to the platform in direct competition with other applications. The addition of its “Stories” function was one such example: created to take market share from rival Snapchat, the feature would also prove important to the nascent movement of memers on the platform.

“Weird” Instagram

Instagram added the ephemeral “Stories” feature in late 2016, and it would fundamentally change the way a content creator could share on the app.42 It was a perfect feature for the influencers Facebook relied on to drive its engagement numbers, and Stories allowed for lucrative video ads to be interspersed among them.43 A user might post their perfected compositions to their feed but save the Stories for snapchat-like updates, snippets of content on other sites, and promotions. Ironically, it was also this feature that made Instagram a perfect vehicle for the meme creator scene growing on Facebook. A memer could post new works to the feed (“grid posts”), while sharing quick shitposts and other media in their Stories. Stories were also a place for cross-promotions between memers, sharing each other’s latest with the attribution built in, or by tagging each other. Instagram Stories’ “create mode” is also a fairly versatile image creation tool, and some memers used it for original posts that were then screenshot into static memes on the main grid. It was the addition of these features that slowly transitioned Instagram into a streamlined platform for the controlled distribution of content writ large. In 2017 and 2018, the memers of Weird Facebook mostly moved to Instagram.

With a deeply ironic brew of politics and absurdism, Instagram memers’ work is analogous to the far-right meme production on 4Chan in some ways.44 Both present their humor against a backdrop of a ruined social world full of exploitation and misery. However, our memers offer winking structural critique of the predations of capitalism, racism, sexism, and queerphobia where far-right memers place the decline at the feet of those most vulnerable to those structural forces. The memes are crude, ironic, and layered with heavily-compressed referentiality. Many of these well-followed accounts developed a signature brand of humor and aesthetics while cultivating loyal fans. It was on Instagram that creators experimented with an authorial relationship to their images, and some began to gain minor celebrities within specific circles.45 Alongside the move toward what Alice Marwick calls “Instafame,” a more irreverent push toward authorship and self-promotion has come out of the weird world of meme culture. But these artists are still compelled by the platform to engage in the “attention economy” Marwick described in her early study.46

Memers are minor influencers who might cobble together rent with the mix of creativity and entrepreneurialism unique to this moment. While not likely to feature corporate products or sponsorship, these “alt” influencers get a tiny cut of Instagram ad revenue if their following is large enough, and they monetize that audience through subscriptions, merch, other ventures. Memes are just one facet of a content creator’s output, used more to advertise their party promotions, art prints, vintage clothing, music, standup, podcasts, video content on other platforms (be it YouTube, TikTok, OnlyFans, or some combination thereof), etc. Early creators like Jenson Leonard still make memes from time to time, but many are focusing on other creative projects.

Jenson Leonard (@coryintheabyss). Observations from 2019.

I survive by asserting my particular black voice against the chorus of mayo. My content doesn’t get shared by the bigger pages often. Why? Because the design of white supremacist neoliberal capitalism is rampant in the ephemeral. The white boys with the big pages tend to share the content of other white boys with big pages and that directly ties into a content monetization business model. But in the tradition of Maya Angelou, Still I Shitpost. (Leonard in interview with Manuel Arturo Abreu, 2017).

“Cory in the Abyss” is an online handle that could not better represent meme culture.

Meme artist Jenson Leonard’s alter-ego is a play on a long running Twitter meme riffing on the title of 2007 Disney Channel spin-off Cory in the House.47 Similarly, Leonard’s work often refers to a long and tangled knot of referentiality: online in-jokes, bizarrely appropriated pop culture, and crude humor. Unlike the haphazard collage aesthetic of

many memers, however, Leonard’s memes are polished works of graphic design that exhibit a meticulous hand with Photoshop and hours of labor. His work is situated in politics, gender, and race—especially the Black American experience. Leonard’s memes as @coryintheabyss, often draw from a history of Black cultural productions that has little presence in the image-based meme world. These references can be subtle (as in figure 5 above). More often, however, Leonard’s work is and decidedly unsubtle [Figs. 8, 9], contributing to the sense that he’s carefully cultivating a series of political statements amidst the crude and absurd. This sense is compounded when looking through his memes as a collected body of work.48

Leonard uses his own image very sparingly, when compared to his fellow memers. His alter ego’s face appears in the tiny thumbnail profile image of his Instagram account, photoshopped onto the sentient water entity from the 1989 film Abyss. Leonard plays with images of other Black men, perhaps in an ironic reference to the common racist failure of white people to see Black people as unique individuals. This includes the titular character from Cory in the House, a chubby-faced preteen with a precocious grin. Leonard is round faced and full-cheeked; at a glance, “Cory” could be an image from his youth [Fig. 10]. This cultivated uncertainty begs the viewer’s complicity in confusing two Black men’s identities, an interpellation of visual white supremacy made darkly playful.

In a July 2019 post that places video elements within the image/text meme format, Leonard again presents himself ambiguously [Fig 11]. It appears that it is Leonard himself in the image, but he’s made himself uncanny through post-production lighting, smoothing effects, and his own performance. He’s blankly staring away from the camera, blinking once before the loop repeats. Leonard wears a durag and the caption reads in part, “It seems like every art n---- at some point makes work about durags. So here’s my obligatory durag joint.” Leonard’s empty expression doesn’t allow any interiority, and the caption pokes fun at a type while also implicating himself within that type. Even when using his own image, Leonard keeps up his ironic play with identity. There were few images of Leonard online in 2019, though he had a large following and had given many interviews. His ever-present parodic tone aside, it would seem that Leonard doesn’t much enjoy being photographed. Under one of the few selfies on his Instagram account, Leonard commented, “U can tell I don’t like the camera but understand the value of brand recognizability.”49

Ancient White Proverb. 2021

Jenson Leonard’s ambivalent, ironic play with his own image has continued as he’s gained respect as an artist. It’s that growing esteem that has allowed him the resources for stunts like the billboard on route 9. A weird irruption of niche internet discourse into the shared, physical time and space of a road, the billboard was also a piece of political art that multiply references histories and power dynamics of racism and white supremacy in the United States. Leonard, who is African American, often uses his work to addresses race in ways both subtle and glaring. Our hapless driver might glimpse the billboard while speeding past, but Leonard’s work invites an engagement on many registers. Recalling Walter Benjamin, the billboard is meant to be “received in a state of distraction.”50 Art for the masses, per Benjamin, is not made to be silently contemplated on a gallery wall, instead “the distracted masses absorb the work of art.”51 Fleeting in its sensorial effect like a lone frame of motion picture film or a meme scrolled past in an infinite feed, art like Jenson Leonard’s holds out Benjamin’s hope that its shock effect can bring about changes in consciousness.52 “As fascism renders politics aesthetic, communism responds by politicizing art.”53

Leonard’s billboard exemplifies a style of meme art he had been developing since he began making memes in 2015.54 Though designed specifically for the billboard format and location, the meme image is a play on one he’d posted in 2016 [Fig. 12]. The earlier meme used the same caption but placed it over an image of the purple monster, Grimace from McDonald’s stable of characters. Oafishly grinning, Grimace steps down from “white heaven”55 on a golden staircase (possibly a reference to Trump’s golden escalator?). Whether to intensify the nostalgic identification with the Happy Meal character, or to reference Grimace’s CRT-TV era heyday, Leonard uses a scanline filter over the entire image. Like so many Cory in the Abyss memes, it’s meticulously designed while also garish and absurd. Leonard summons Grimace from the vacuum of culture—the abyss—in a visual joke that makes the entire piece uneasily hilarious when paired with the caption. “I don’t care if you’re purple.”

The caption similarly bubbled up from the cultural soup in which we swim, filtered through online discourses around anti-Black racism and many versions of its joking critique.56 Like the best memes, the humor and political barbs are layered: “I don’t care if you’re purple” refers to a common assertion of post-racialism often deployed by white people to rebut any claims of racial inequality and to pull any discussion of such back into the individualized, ahistorical realm of debate in which they (we, I’m white) are more comfortable. In a discussion of structural, historical housing inequality, for example, the phrase might be used thusly: “I’m not racist. I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, or purple! But you can’t expect me to pay for your bad choices.” Purple evokes a rhetorical otherness, beyond even black or brown. The white person in this fabulation is then exhibiting an incredible (rhetorical) tolerance. The truncation of the phrase underlines its violent absurdity. When detached from its preamble and the rhetorical turns in which it would be deployed, the statement becomes nonsensical yet remains instantly recognizable.

The attribution, “Ancient White Proverb,” also builds and changes the inherent critique and humor. A play on a trope in 20^th century American humor, the “Ancient Chinese Proverb” has served to fetishize and exoticize Chinese culture while also creating a convenient setup for a joke. Often used interchangeably with “Confucius say…”, the punchline is generally just a pun or observation that has little to do with anything particularly “Chinese,” and even less to do with teachings of Confucius or any other Chinese thinker. Often, though not always, the punchline is spoken or written without articles and pronouns, in a racist caricature of a Chinese speaker who is learning English. This memified version, for example, deploys a long running variety of the joke, “Man who fart in church sit in own pew,” over an image of Confucius [Fig. 13].57

Returning to the billboard and our imagined driver: that person might have noticed the house across the street and the supreme irony of its owner’s chosen décor as it faces Leonard’s billboard. The homeowner has installed a large flagpole in the center of the yard flying both American and “thin blue line” flags, the latter signaling support of the police. Often referred to as the “Blue Lives Matter” flag, the stylized American flag with its single blue line may evoke the line between order and chaos, good and evil, or danger and security (etc.) for some. For many, however, and especially for Black Americans, the flag is a blatant rejection of the protest movements against the carceral system and the frequent police murder of Black people. It’s also a rejection of the slogan that has animated these movements, the demand that “Black Lives Matter.” The act of hoisting such a flag—let alone digging a post hole, pouring concrete, and erecting a flagpole to do so—can be viewed as bold statement of white supremacy and an aggressive stance toward Black Americans seeking justice, reform, and safety.

It’s no fluke that the billboard was posted across the street from the Blue Lives Matter house. In Leonard’s work, few details are unintentional. In an interview Leonard bemusedly discussed placing the billboard across from the flag. “In the transpositioning of the meme from screen to billboard, there’s an illustration of that white liberal “colorblind” sentiment’s ubiquity,” Leonard says. “Of course the billboard was positioned across the street from a row of homes that had Blue Lives Matter flags hanging out front.”58

The Hudson Valley setting similarly plays a role, whether intentionally or not. It’s a region full of beautiful environments, art, culture, farm to table living, staggering inequality, and racial and economic segregation. The picturesque villages and hamlets of the Hudson Valley have served as destinations for well-heeled white people fleeing New York City for more than a century. But the region is also the home of many small cities with large Black and Latino populations that were decimated by 1960s urban renewal and waves of industrial decay.59 The idyllic Hudson River view on the billboard is enjoyed by many, including the homeowners nearby. Across the river, on its more industrial west bank, there are many pockets of concentrated poverty, urban decay, and the toxic remnants of past extractive enterprises in cities like Newburgh. Of course, the Hudson Valley was also home to some of the earliest European conquest in North America. The Dutch and then the British decimated the native Lenape population in their quest for land and profit. As beautiful as it may be from the right vantage point, the Hudson Valley is home to painful histories and a new wave of conquest brought on by the Covid era migration of white, millennial settlers from Brooklyn.60

All these threads are present in this billboard, this meme. Layers upon layers of meaning, ironic humor inextricably linked to political critique, a joke that’s as simple as it is endlessly complex, as timely as it is centuries in the making, made to be received in a state of distraction. While existing in physical space and time (the billboard was posted for about a month between April and May of 2021),61 it emerges from the ever-compounding archive of online discourse and visual culture. It represents a kind of “happening” between digital life and the physical world, as much as it is a political intervention. While it’s the singular work of an artist with a highly developed style, Leonard’s billboard also represents a moment when an online public injected itself into one of the places where shared culture and experience still remain: the road.

My work exists within the framework of meme and poor digital image, but it distinguishes itself from the herd through its thick pop cultural plaster. When one encounters a Cory In The Abyss meme, my hope is that they see something that looks like it was produced by more than one person (in a way it is). I want my work to look and feel like a microdose of big-budget Hollywood detritus. I want people to ask themselves why my memes are so extra, to question their production value, and the absurdism behind that (because the locomotive subsumption of creativity into capitalism is absurd). The aesthetic maximalism of my memes is my way of finessing on white meme bros, but it’s also a means of grabbing the audience’s attention through a visual language capitalism has already inundated them to pay attention to. Once I have pulled them in, finally, through that subterfuge, giving them my message. After that they’re free to keep scrolling.62

A few drivers likely scratched their heads, chuckled, or cursed at Leonard’s billboard. But the image would be most impactful online, where it moved in the familiar channels of circulation on Instagram. Leonard’s posts featuring the billboard were shared and commented on like his memes, despite being a digital photograph of an image posted in physical space. Memers and fans made pilgrimages to the site, capturing their own images of the billboard, sometimes taking selfies in front of it and tagging Leonard’s Instagram handle, @coryintheabyss. Visitors joked about the absurdity of their visit, and the billboard’s juxtaposition with the visual politics of the neighboring flags.

Leonard’s billboard, in all its 21^st century culture-jamming glory, strangely echoed Addy Borneman’s memorial a year prior. Both events marked the moment an online public—the community around the memes of Borneman, Leonard, and others—was pulled (or pushed?) into the greater world.

Addy Borneman (@gayvapeshark ). Observations from 2019.

I was raised by parents and society to think socialism was the worst possible thing. I always had this sense that everything was wrong, and we lived in a sick world, but I didn’t have any answers. Eventually I started reading communist literature and began to purge myself of anti-communist rhetoric. I was definitely that kid who turned the stock photos in their text book into little comics. That's not much different than what I'm doing today. Instagram honestly is not a good place for activism which is why it's the most fun place to post politically charged shit. (Addy Borneman interviewed by Sofia Barrett-Ibaria, 2018).

Addy Borneman is the godmother of weird Facebook, and her page Lettuce Dog was well known for its absurdist, irreverent meme production before she moved on to her @gayvapeshark persona. Borneman’s memes are text-heavy and conversational; they usually feature either one character in monologue or two in dialogue. Mostly using stock photos, Borneman’s characters can be seen as types to whom she attributes characteristics that are often unflattering. The humor in Borneman’s memes is often found in the contradictions in her character’s behaviors, motivations, and self-perceptions. Borneman mercilessly indicts these caricatures, making social commentary along the way [Fig. 14].

There is one recurring character with greater complexity however: Borneman herself. At some point in her Facebook tenure, Borneman created the anthropomorphic shark character that she used to ventriloquize many of her rant-y opinions like “Austin isn’t weird. Portland isn’t weird. Cities full of fake smart comfortable white liberals with owl tattoos aren’t weird. They’re boring. You know what’s a weird city? Cincinnati, Ohio. What a fuckin shithole, man” [Fig. 15]. But upon moving to Instagram, that shark became more confessional, sometimes sharing quotidian details and thoughts from Borneman’s life. In September 2018, Borneman began to include her own images as well, often connected to experiences from her life as a trans woman [Fig. 16]. These posts appear intermittently in Borneman’s output, using her own image but often also the shark, and she seems committed to this play with identity.

In a 2-part meme posted October 1^st, 2019, Borneman not only uses her image but her father’s as well. In the meme, she shares a personal conversation between the two, creating a three-part narrative that’s at-once serious and absurd, political and deeply personal, and expresses the complexity of family love under heterosexism [Fig. 17]. Those contradictions all exist in the images, while also referencing previous memes and the changing generational attitudes about a public figure. The first panel follows Borneman’s familiar stock photo copy/paste format, showing a statement and response dialog between the artist and her father over a wood-paneled background. His cut-out head is pasted on a stock image of a heavyset, seated man clutching a remote control and alternatingly using a laptop (where he’s posting as a “3/10, cuck, KYS”), and eating pizza. Borneman has emblazoned his shirt with “#2 Dad.” Her own cut-out image is placed on what looks like a catalog model’s torso, a slim woman wearing a snug sweater. Borneman’s oversized face alternates between snarky and serious when responding to her father’s critiques, but the tone remains mocking throughout the piece. The drop-shadowed orange and yellow script is as follows:

Father: honey, you realize most of your “followers” are fuckin idiots, right?

Borneman: so are most of Christ’s.

Father: goddamnit, Sport. Ya cant just go comparing yourself to jesus. Its blasphemous. look what happened to John Lennon.

Borneman: good point, he and I are really nothing alike anyway. Dude only had like 12 orbiters, 1 e-girl and 70 other followers before he got cancelled.63

In the second image, Borneman departs from her usual style. Since the frame is mostly filled with a black and white photo, she’s done the whole piece in grayscale. That photo, a 1971 paparazzi shot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono from the streets of Cannes, is notable in that Lennon is performing a strange squatting walk, and his exaggerated step looks as if it might burst through the frame. Borneman has placed her own face over Lennon’s and made Ono an anime cat girl. Emerging from clouds above them is Borneman’s father asking, “What happened to my intelligent muscular boy[?]” while the image of a blonde-haired 1980s bodybuilder hovers in the distance.

In one sequence, Addy Borneman has communicated something heartbreakingly personal, yet all too common to many queer experiences: the melancholy of inhabiting a gender that was not the one assumed by your parents; the complicated feelings involved with a parent who may love the person you are, yet still mourns the person they wish you were. In the comments section, she confirms it’s her father, “I love my dad. He’s just 74 and we have nothing in common. When he passes I’ll probably cry in bed for a month straight and yet when I go to call him the phone weighs ten tons.” That this emotional touchpoint is buried in an absurdly parodic text speaks to the potential of memes to transmit information and affects differently than other communicative forms. The viewer takes part in unraveling this complex text for humor or pleasure, connecting with the biblical joke perhaps, the reference to an earlier John Lennon meme featuring the same image,64 or to the polysemy of the term “cancelled”—which could refer to John Lennon’s recent reframing as a wife-beating racist when being revisited by modern writers.65 It also, of course, speaks to Lennon’s (and Jesus’s) murder.

Borneman’s meme can transmit so much in nearly an instant, as the viewer grapples with interpreting its “open contradiction.” This is a perfect example of what internet researchers Geert Lovink and Mark Tuters describe as memes’ potential to elicit a pre-thought response in their viewer, “the political theological ‘event’ bringing about meaningful change as the acceleration of our associated species being into that elusive half-second between action and thought.”66 Borneman’s work, like the best pieces Instagram memes, speaks to the potential for memes to reach people on an affective register and maybe, hopefully, change their understanding of the world a tiny bit. In retrospect, the hopefulness found in Borneman’s work is bittersweet.

The Death of a Meme Queen. 2020.

In late April 2020, our Atlanta park-goer might have prepared a picnic to enjoy with their household or Covid pod. Anything to take their mind off of the global pandemic that was raging through the population, and the stumbling response of the Trump administration (just a day earlier Donald Trump had suggested, in a press conference, that injecting disinfectant could be a potential treatment for Covid).67 While getting some much-needed outdoor recreation, the picnicker could be forgiven for wondering about the significance of the ongoing ritual at the colorful bench across the park.

Addy Borneman was a trans woman, she was a prolific memer and shitposter, and she’s considered by many to be the mother of the meme world discussed here. Her memorial was held April 24, 2020, in an undisclosed park in Atlanta, Georgia. The event was broadcast live on the Instagram account for Bottom Text, the web-based meme variety show that she had hosted with a few other creators. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was attended in person by Borneman’s castmates (and housemates) Cindy Xin (@males_are_cancelled), Fatima Khan (@djinn_kazama), and Hubert Obasanya (@meme_for_speed), as well as a handful of local memers. Many more attended online, and the live stream went on for hours [Fig. 18]. Meme creators, artists, and many others who’d appreciated her work gave their remembrances in the chat. Some also joined the live stream from their phones, dropping in to offer their own eulogies via their front facing cameras [Fig. 19]. Jenson Leonard joined the semi-virtual memorial to offer his own remembrances of Borneman, who he had worked with through multiple projects and who had been a major influence on his own work. Leonard had written on his Instagram page that, “Cory In The Abyss and countless other meme pages wouldn’t exist without the seeds Addy germinated deep below the soil of Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.”68 [Fig. 20].

Borneman had been creating bizarre online content for most of her adult life. This memorial event was a remembrance by and for the meme world to which Addy Borneman had been such an important contributor. It was also another on/offline happening that saw a particular online community represent itself in a shared public space. The many users who came together to remember Addy Borneman were spread across the country, but that day they were all focused on that tiny corner of the park, the bench, and her memory.

The makeshift altar, tucked away at the edge of the park, was painted with a floral leaf pattern over a rainbow gradient. It was festooned with chrysanthemums, daffodils, and roses, arrayed around an oil painting of Borneman’s alter ego, the vaping shark [Fig. 21].69 Two stuffed sharks sat on the bench, as well as several instant photo prints of Borneman. In one, she is dressed as the character Bulma from her beloved anime series, Dragon Ball Z. The photo is cradled by an action figure of that character’s husband, Vegeta. A cartoon image of Borneman’s shark character cuddling with DBZ hero Goku is also placed nearby. A vape device rests near the center, its mouthpiece running to a stuffed hammerhead. The themes of Borneman’s Facebook page title all there: Sharks, vape, being gay and dragon ball.70

Borneman’s personae are represented here, as is her history of gleeful absurdism online. The collection of objects on the altar/bench may not seem to fit the somber moment, but they memorialize a person whose life and work were always noisy, bright, and unrestrained by propriety. Her memes left few above critique including herself, who she playfully lampooned with her shark character and later with diaristic pieces that included her own image [Fig. 22]. She had once described herself as “chaotic good” when asked whether leftist memes could have the radical bite of those on the right. “I actually consider myself more of a ‘social hacker’ than a memer. Every hacker is either addicted to chaos or addicted to order. I myself am addicted to chaos, but I’m chaotic good.” She added, “Trump and the alt-right are chaotic too, chaotic evil.”71

Gayvapeshark’s Last Meme:

Addy Borneman’s final meme [Fig. 23] was characteristically crude: a stock image of a white man in an office wearing business attire with the caption, “god damn this fuckin COVID-19[,] it’s now bronchially impossible to get a full hit of a Crack[.]” Borneman added a further caption when she shared the meme, this one outside of the image and in the text of the Instagram post: “First we have no Charmin to scrub our butt now we got no choreboy to fill with crack. Butt crack[.]”72 The meme and caption refer to Covid-19 and the early shortages of the pandemic with Borneman’s usual raunchy irreverence. Looking to the comments, however, the tone is somber.

Not long after that meme was posted, Addy Borneman died. The details of her death were not made public by her family, but they shared the news of Borneman’s passing on Facebook on April 13, 2020.73 Over the next week, the news made its way around the meme scene to which she had played such a foundational role.

In the comments section of Borneman’s final meme, friends and fans continue to express their dismay at her passing. Many also discuss the importance of her memes, to themselves and to the meme world. One user wrote, “RIP Addy. You were an excellent creator and member of the meme community.” Many mentioned the importance of her work, like the user who commented, “rest in power and peace. thank u for ur voice. we are heartbroken and you will be missed and remembered. u changed minds and opened hearts using one of the most accessible forms possible. important work was done. thank u.💜💜.” Another said, “Really shocked to hear. You are a MF legend and I hope your memes are in history books one day.” Another said, “Her last words were butt crack. Epic.” Posting a year later, one commentor recognized how much the vibrancy of the meme scene had faded since Borneman’s passing. “Instagram memes died with you,” they say, “miss your wit.”74 Another said, “The TL [timeline] gets dryer every day without you. Rest in paradise.”

Of course, there were also trolls. For example, one wrote, “another self hating lefty propagandist becomes a statistic” adding, “rest in piss.”75 This kind of “RIP trolling” is a problem on many platforms, and one of the nastiest examples of antisocial behavior online.76 In reply to one RIP comment, a user had apparently said something transphobic. Only the response to the trolling remains, as the comment has been deleted, but it underlines Borneman’s marginalization as a trans woman. Even in death, she’s continued to be misgendered and subject to anti-trans jokes.

However, several commentors described her impact as a memer and as an out queer and trans woman in a space full of nasty, heterosexist trolling. “RIP Addy,” one user commented, “it feels bizarre to cry I over someone I never knew but you were truly a queer icon. You made me laugh on some of my worst days. The world has truly lost a legend.” Many just simply posted, “RIP Queen.”

Several memers posted about Addy Borneman’s death on their own accounts, sharing favorite memes and discussing her importance to memes and to the community. Jenson Leonard, who had worked with and been friends with Borneman for years, posted his remembrance in the caption to an image of the two together. “Before i saw Addy’s memes,” Leonard posted. “i didn’t know memes could be diaristic, literary...liturgical even.” Borneman’s work had shown him how memes “could transcend our established metrics of what art is supposed to look like, what box it’s supposed to neatly fit into, and where it’s supposed to be engaged with.”77 He continues, and it bears quoting at length:

To describe her work is to describe something that refuses to be reduced to just one thing; Poetic Anti-poetry? Vape Cloud Agitprop? Post Comicstrip Digital Tragicomedy? Stock photo Bricolage? Anti-american Americana? Marxist-Leninist Dragonball Z Trans Erotica? Addy possessed a preternatural ability to manipulate the invisible and everchanging algorithms of Facebook and Instagram to her favor, amassing engagement and page growth not through the machinations of a market firm, or a corporate sponsorship, but through her transcendent force of will. To you, maybe they’re just image macros she made on her phone but they feel like so much more than that to me. Cory In The Abyss and countless other meme pages wouldn’t exist without the seeds Addy germinated deep below the soil of Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet. Institutions that claim to champion internet art and digital culture in all its permutations but fail to acknowledge the influence of artists like Addy Borneman continue, on que, to show their petty bourge’ asses. No, I don’t know how she died, and frankly I don't need to because I’m reminded every time I see her work draped across my feed how abundantly she continues to live.

****

Jenson Leonard’s billboard was an important moment for his practice and his rising career as a working artist. But the event also presented a coda for an era of furious creativity that saw memers take the format to new artistic and expressive places on Instagram. By the time Leonard had created his billboard, the meme world had become less vibrant for its creators and the format felt less dynamic and exciting. A year earlier, Addy Borneman’s untimely passing had left the community without one of its greatest creators and someone who had supported and connected many others. Her death, the upheavals of 2020, and Instagram’s continued changes to the platform’s functionality and recommendation system all contributed to a sense that this moment in meme art was coming to an end.

Meme accounts still proliferate. In fact, there are more than ever. The influence of Borneman, Leonard, and their contemporaries is visible in the work of the many memers still cranking out content. However, Leonard is much less active on the platform today. Addy Borneman’s account now serves as both a memorial and a collection of her body of work. Many of their contemporaries have also left the platform or use it infrequently. Most that remain active on Instagram have branched out into adjacent creative and entrepreneurial ventures which they promote with their meme production. There are countless political meme accounts on the platform, but they seem to be preaching to their respective choirs with little opportunity to reach outside of them, algorithmically or ideologically.

Addy Borneman and Jenson Leonard’s work represents a momentary space of possibility for political interventions like the “culture jamming” of the 90s. Like those earlier plays at upending hegemony from within, the impact is unclear (though the memes surely brought joy and perhaps resolve to many who were already politically inclined to enjoy them).78 Their accounts took off because the artists used the meme format to make political commentary that rang true for their fans, couched as it was in crude absurdism and opportunistic visual appropriation. The two memers were also producing content at a time that saw Instagram spinning up new functionality on the platform to expand its reach (and thus share of ad revenue). These can’t be untangled, a dynamic both artists often referenced in their work. Through their play with identity, Leonard and Borneman could acquiesce to the platform’s requirements while critiquing the process.

Borneman and Leonard were spitting through a crack in the window that seems to be closing ever-tighter. They both embraced and rejected an imperative to self-market on the platform, underlining the absurdity of the whole enterprise. As the prospect of fully automated content looms as a threat (for now) on the horizon, the platforms that have consumed the internet can rely on the always-multiplying supply of content to which ads may be interspersed, attached, embedded, or otherwise intermingled. Instagram and other platforms are constantly being retooled for engagement, and the resulting algorithmic slop of targeted ads and seemingly random video content doesn’t lend itself to political discourse or much exchange of meaning whatsoever. Meta has also taken steps to de-emphasize content deemed political in the user-facing feeds of the platform.79 None of these changes bode well for the kind of political art Borneman and Leonard are known for, which used the broad reach of the platform instead of unmoderated forums or other spaces reminiscent of an earlier internet. As Meta and its rivals try to milk every drop from their platforms, it’s hard to imagine meme artists breaking through in the same way.

 A contactless, decentralized, hands free accumulation. The base salary determines the superstructure of your beast of burden of proof of concept. Perfection is the enemy of egress. Pay the heap of flesh no mind, live in the nanosecond. Fake it till you’re skeuomorphic. You’re more than the sum of your outsourced manufacturing components. Know your neural net worth. Walk with your overhead held high. There’s never been more exciting growth in the excrement sector! (Jenson Leonard, from the script to his installation Workflow, 2023)80

Wade Keye is an interdisciplinary scholar, researcher, and PhD candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies. His work focuses on the political and social implications of new media and technology, emphasizing the ways publics have been made and unmade through the many disparate channels of social media. He is currently engaged in research into memes as visual and communicative phenomena that define common political understandings among online communities. Wade’s experiences span many different areas of media production and analysis, from documentary film production to digital journalism, all of which inform his perspective and scholarship.