There’s something very profoundly surreal about watching our generation respond to an imminent WWIII in memes and satire, and though some might find it culturally insensitive and “very gen-z”, a look back in the pre-WWII era shows us that perhaps it is neither.
Back in 1916, in the aftermath of the first world war, poet Hugo Bell founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland, a club which set the stage for artistic expression in the form of sound poetry, cut-up writing and even sculpture. The overwhelming tone of the art here was anti-war and anti-establishment, and a very open rejection of the gatekeepers of art in the modern world, embracing irrationality, and illogicality.
The art movement which would soon be referred to as Dadaism, spread quickly across Europe, in Paris, Cologne, Netherlands, etc. It was characterized by art which can be called “silly” or “nonsensical” and quickly descended into absurdist humor. Marcel Duchamp’s famous work on a postcard with Da Vinci’s Monalisa, involved drawing a mustache on her face.
The nonsensical art movement spread all across the world and became the birth place of what we know as Surrealism, and would see artistic contributions from non other than Salvador Dali, from his timeless still frames to his 1929 surrealist short film Andaluský pes (An Andalusian Dog), created by both Dali and Buñuel which contains surreal scenes of a man cutting an eye with a razor, a woman holding a severed human hand, a man’s hand infested with ant, all seemingly disconnected from each other. The movie rejected the traditional understanding of a plot, with disjoint chronology and a dream-like narrative.
Francis Picabia, another great artist propagating the movement, created the Tableau Rastadada in 1920, where he created a collage of himself with cutouts from various magazines, to depict himself as a casanova.
The reason for the rise of this movement is highly debated, although a crucial motivating factor might have been the helplessness of artists and the youth in the face of a war-torn Europe. The movement began on the graveyard of hopes after WWI, as a defiance of the institutions of art, and as a rejection of every rationality, embracing the absurd-ism of reality.
The creation of absurdist art using pre-made material, nonsensical messaging, surrounding an imminent war, draws a natural parallel to today’s dark humor among the youth, in the face of life-changing crises in the form of war, climate change, pandemic, and political unrest all around the world. The constant accessibility of negative news from all corners, the live streaming of air-strike sirens from the capital of a country being invaded, the pleas of help from citizens not alike to us, have only increased the feeling of deep inconsequentiality.
Perhaps what comes off as ‘insensitive’ to certain viewers, is a desperate attempt from the young to hold on to hope, maybe embracing absurdism in the face of a cruel, unforgiving reality, is the only way to survive through it. Perhaps the realisation of this inconsequentiality of our actions, our protests, and our petitions can only be dealt with that, humor.
