Head in freezers

1In April 2009, American artist David Horvitz began posting instructional pieces on his Tumblr blog. Inspired by the tradition of contemporary conceptual art—especially by Yoko Ono’s books—he came up with dozens of performance ideas, writing them down using a notepad application and publishing them as a series of screenshots. Unexpectedly, one of his “recipes” went rapidly viral, prompting thousands of people around the world to perform this bizarre task:

Take a photograph of your head inside a freezer. Upload this photo to the Internet (like Flickr). Tag the file with: 241543903. The idea is that if you search for this cryptic tag, all the photos of heads in freezers will appear. I just did one.

2To this day, twelve years later, a Google Image search with the number 241543903 triggers a cascade of photographs that portray people with their heads stuck in freezers, testifying the vitality and the longevity of the meme.

3Every participant followed the same, simple instruction, but this did not lead to the production of identical images; on the contrary, every iteration looks different. Some people decided to take their photo from the side, others from the back; some inverted the perspective, positioning the camera inside the freezer. Some are standing, some are seated, and others have deliberately chosen unusual and uncomfortable positions. The setting is also unstable: the most recurring location is of course the kitchen, but we also find bedrooms, basements, garages and even public places like shops, restaurants and supermarkets. As the conceptual infection spreads, the action is modified, reenacted and reinterpreted, in a process of endless mutation. Each version is in fact a different performance, a new version that quotes its predecessors but transforms them more or less radically. This dialectic between repetition and variation is a very specific trait of memetic systems, as many scholars have suggested in the past. Limor Shifman, in particular, high-lighted the relevance of this dynamic in the context of the photo-fad genre (in which Horvitz’s project can be included):

While the process of networking through shared images may be relevant to many web-based communities, its structure becomes apparent (or hypersignificant) through the explicit repetition with variation that characterises memes. This hypersignification is particularly noticeable in the photo-fad genre, as it is utterly nonsensical. Devoid of any clear meaning beyond posing itself, photo fads expose the skeleton of meme-based network creation. So, perhaps, while this genre’s hypersignificant qualities may initially seem related to the pose, they actually reveal a larger story about memes as social connectors. (Shifman, 2014)

4Even though most of the participants were not aware of the artistic origin of the “freezer project,” they spontaneously embraced the idea, put a consistent amount of effort into enacting it, and most importantly, seemed to genuinely enjoy the act of engaging in a frivolous, useless action just for the sake of it, using their bodies to stage a pure performative act. As it happens for most online participatory culture products, a consistent part of the motivation is generated by a profound need for belonging. These kinds of small, fragmented pieces of content, in fact, acquire meaning only when framed in the context of larger, shared cultural languages and traditions that have the power to strengthen one’s sense of community. Lastly, they can also be interpreted as attempts to escape from the monotony of everyday life by inserting an element of absurdity: an aimless, liberating gesture. According to writer and researcher David Banks, “by participating in performative memes we show others that we are a part of the same international community. By engaging in performative memes, participants constitute a social imaginary that gives meaning and context to the actions of subsequent and existing participants. When someone goes owling in an art museum, I might owl in a natural history museum and post my picture as a response. We are communicating a shared idea, and we derive pleasure from the shared experience. More than just a shot at internet fame or recognition (although that is a motivating factor), perfomative memes are a way to nonverbally communicate a shared cultural practice” (Banks, 2011).

Viral performances

5David Horvitz’s project is somehow paradigmatic of a certain typology of memetic performance (the one based on the repetition of a simple actions documented through photographs and videos), and it is a very useful point of departure for the scope of this essay because it deliberately connects the tradition of contemporary visual art with the world of internet culture. This relationship is not established with the aid of theory, nor is it a simple act of appropriation; rather, it is based on a practical experiment that demonstrates the existence of a number of strong similarities between two apparently distant milieux: the central role of instructions, the use of one’s body as a medium of expression and the choice of simple and often humorous kind of actions. In the same period and in the following years though, we have witnessed the spread of dozens of similar, totally spontaneous, “viral performances,” like planking (lying face down in unusual locations), owling (squatting like an owl), stocking (imitating scenes from stock photographs), teapotting (posing as a teacup), cone-ing (ordering an ice cream cone and grabbing it by the cream end) and horsemaning (a false decapitation that revives a photo fad very popular in the 1920s).

6Planking in particular—the most famous and long-lived performative meme (also known as “the lying down game”)—is easy to connect to the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman (Failing to Levitate in My Studio, 1966), Charles Ray (Plank Piece, 1973) and Robert Kinmont (8 Natural Headstands, 1969-2005). In the photographs that document their performances, the centrality of the body is immediately evident. Most of the time it’s treated like an object or a sculpture: it can simulate the rigidity of a table, lying down or leaning against the wall, or perform dizzying verticals within natural or domestic settings. “If you can manipulate clay and end up with art,” Bruce Nauman said in a famous interview, “you can manipulate yourself in it as well. It has to do with using the body as a tool, an object to manipulate” (Van Bruggen, 1988).

7Another interesting comparison, in this respect, can be drawn with Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures series, a project that includes written and illustrated instructions for the viewers to follow. Through these materials, the artist invites the public of museums and art galleries to pose in unusual positions for at least one minute with the aid of everyday life objects, such as pieces of furniture, brooms and plastic buckets.

The body as a sculpture

8If we dive a little bit inside the planking meme history, the idea of transforming the human body into a sculptural object, together with the pleasure of engaging in an unpredictable, nonsensical activity, keep emerging as key factors. Scott Amy and Joel Marshall, who claim to have invented this performative format in 1984 when they were still in high school in Edmonds, Washington, (at the time they called it “face dancing”), stress this concept in a video-interview produced in 2015 by Bahram Sadeghi and Dikla Zeidler for the exhibition Planet Hype at MOTI, Museum of the Image, in the Netherlands:

[A]t the time we had been doing things that, we said, made no sense. There is absolutely no reason to face-dance. There are maybe some therapeutic things you can get out of it, say like meditation, but generally it’s done “because” it makes no sense, “because” there is no purpose. (Zeidler, 2015)

Similar comments were made by Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon, two British friends who also claim to have started the planking game in 1997, performing the action in public places. As Clarkson puts it: “it was just a really stupid, random thing to do.” (Meltzer, 2011)

9In the following years, when the web entered the age of social media, photographic and video documentation gained more and more relevance, transforming planking into a worldwide craze and triggering the production of increasingly extreme versions of the action, in a competition for the production of the weirdest possible iteration.

10Following art critic Mat Gleason’s comment on another very popular performative meme, the ASL Ice Bucket Challenge, it is also important to underline the “transformative power” that viral performances seem to hold. According to Gleason, these actions mimic

the relationship between individual and radical acts. Just as Burden had himself shot to see what it would be like, many participants in the Challenge seek to transform themselves as an act of public inquiry. The absurd nature of being doused in ice water mimics many performance art strategies of juxtaposing a transformative act on an ordinary human being. (Gleason, 2014)

The performance of idiocy

11YouTube has also hosted the spread of numerous performative memes, some of which have taken the form of bizarre and extreme resistance tests, for the body and mind alike. Between 2011 and 2013, for example, a group of young men challenged each other to watch a ten hour video in a single sitting. It all started on December 6^th 2011, when a user named GamePro uploaded a “reaction” to the famous viral video Nyan Cat 10 Hours. During the performance, we see him at his desk in front of the computer screen with a big clock on his side, staring at the repetitive flying cat sequence for an unsustainable amount of time. A few months later another user, Alexander Rhodes, filmed himself while he watched the GamePro video for ten hours. And the vertiginous performance did not stop there: in April 2013, Andrew Hall up- loaded a video in which he watched Alexander Rhodes watching GamePro watching Nyan Cat 10 Hours.

12The world of Internet Challenges represents an incredible source of spontaneous performance art: these kind of actions, which manifest themselves in the forms of “trends,” testify to a strong need to take part in collective rituals. Many of these challenges are based on stupid and sometimes dangerous tasks—like the Cinnamon Challenge, which involves the rapid ingestion of a large amount of cinnamon powder in front of the camera—but more theatrical examples can be easily found. One such example is the Mannequin Challenge, which became popular at the end of 2016—a trend that has produced a series of brilliant video content in which the protagonists remain motionless in different positions, as if time had stopped, while a camera spins around them.

13In an essay published in 2014, Russian scholar Olga Goriunova proposed an interesting concept related to these kinds of participatory performances: “new media idiocy.” Goriunova outlines the concept of idiocy by distinguishing it from that of stupidity and associating it with a certain type of internet content, a genre characterised by formal simplicity, humor and DIY aesthetics:

new media idiocy may, for instance, help us understand YouTube successes or the movement of cultural objects through social networks in terms of crafted, participatory performance as a mode of living with technical networks. (Goriunova, 2013)

14Leaning on philosophers such as Kant, Žižek and above all Deleuze, Goriunova defines this “new idiocy” as a type of ability, an expressive modality born out of the necessity to find new strategies of subjectivation in a globally interconnected world. Goriunova also put emphasis on the performative aspect:

new media idiocy is produced through craftful participation, a participation that is not summed up by one or two clicks, but is compositional, conceptual, and performative itself. Such a participation is itself the practicing, the performance of idiocy, of everyone joining in together. (Goriunova, 2013)

Grounded aesthetics

15In the past five years, TikTok took over as the biggest stage for performative memes. Born in China (where it is known as Douyin) and then merged with the already popular Musical.ly, TikTok is a social app for mobile devices that allows users to create short videos using different soundtracks and taking advantage of a great number of editing tools built into the interface. Unlike most social platforms, this app is designed to encourage the creation of original content and collaboration between users, who can easily rework ideas and content, build memetic chains and interact with each other through the option of the “duet.” Used mostly—albeit not solely—by young people, TikTok testifies to the existence of a growing trend: the adoption of performance as a strategy of self and collective expression by millions of people around the world. In fact, the proliferation of memetic content on the app happens through the physical reenactment of gestures, dances and acting performances. As a consequence of the daily use of video-cameras—which are now built-in on every computer, smartphone and tablet—self-image management has reached very high levels. Within this scenario, the human body, which has been at times considered less important in the context of online communication, has gained a central role, albeit in its mediated form. Self-representation takes the form of an action in front of the electronic eye, a daily practice that, as we have seen, shows many points of contact with the tradition of performance and conceptual art. Performative memes function as tools of identity exploration and as test-beds for the abilities (and the limits) of the body. Also, they offer a context in which breaking social rules often seems easier.

16Taking up a well-known definition coined by the British sociologist Paul Willis—who in his essay Common Culture rejected the choice of relegating art to a separate universe and claimed the existence of an aesthetic rooted in everyday life (grounded aesthetic)—we can describe these actions as spontaneous expressions of “symbolic creativity” (Willis, 1990). Willis wrote: “we insist that imagination is not extra to daily life, something to be supplied from disembodied ‘art.’ It is a part of the necessariness of everyday symbolic and communicative work.” This kind of expressive impulse, which is intertwined with the practices of consumption and reception of mass culture products, has received an enormous boost from the spread of digital devices. The result is a growing ocean of wild performance art, completely absorbed within the flow of human existence and programmatically shared with the world through social networks.