Seated Sanders Memes
An update
In my forthcoming book (Attardo, 2023), I analyze a few examples of the Seated Bernie meme cycle. The discussion draws on my presentation for the Humor Research Conference in 2021. I collected a sample of what I called “Bernie memes.” I now realize I should have labeled them “Seated Sanders” (or “Seated Bernie”) memes, since there are plenty of other memes about Bernie Sanders. “Mittens Bernie” is also used to refer to this meme cycle, but that ignores the sitting aspect of the meme, which was crucial. Knowyourmeme’s label is “Bernie Sanders Wearing Mittens Sitting in a Chair,” which is exhaustive but also pretty awkward. In what follows I present updates to both discussions.
First, also in 2021, R. Eric Thomas, a humor writer, created a crude, by his own reckoning, photoshop of the Seated Sanders in which Sanders is seated across from Marina Abramović
For the uninitiated, Marina Abramović’s performance The Artist is Present consisted of “a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her” (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87)
Figure 2, below is another instance of the Marina Abramović The Artist is Present performance, sans Sanders.
In this set of Seated Sanders memes, we see the same high-brow vs. low-brow opposition (performance art vs. memes) we saw in the “When Chuck Norris is waiting, Godot comes” meme (Attardo, 2023). However, as becomes clear in the context of other variants of the Seated Sanders meme, all locating Sanders in artworks, such as Hopper’s Nighhawks, or Renoir’s Le Déjeuner des canotiers, the opposition here is not used to create a deliberate outgroup in which the “straight” readers of the Chuck Norris memes are implicitly mocked, but merely to create an incongruity (political figure vs. art environment). These variants are collected and commented on by Greenberger (2021).
The second update is more topical. During his presentation to HRC 2023, Anthony Dion Mitzel discussed a meme variant of Seated Sanders in which Sanders is positioned so that his head exactly covers the penis of Michelangelo’s David. [figure 3] Again to the uninitiated this may appear baffling, but in the context of US politics (which is as low brow as humanly possible) the meme makes sense: a principal was “resigned” by the school board of a Florida high school after one parent complained that “pornography” (i.e., Michelangelo’s David) was shown to the students and two other parents complained that they had not been informed that such materials would be shown (Associated Press, 2023). Needless to say the school (Tallahassee Classical School), on its website, denies anything ever happened, and has lawyered up.
Aside from consideration of the pathetic state of culture and (private) education in the US, where this sort of nonsense is allowed to happen, what can we learn about memes? The obvious point is that the affordances of memes are truly determined by context and as such hardly predictable. While in my discussion of the Seated Sanders memes I considered various affordances (sitting, the chair, etc.) I did not consider the affordance of “opacity.” Any opaque physical object, because it acts as a barrier to light, prevents us from seeing what is behind it. Thus, by placing the Seated Sanders image just so, we can “cover” the naughty bits of the David. What the meme does is turn the image of Seated Sanders into a fig leaf.
As I discussed in Attardo (2020) and in more detail in Attardo (2023), in the process of memetic drift, i.e., the production of derivative memes inspired from an original anchor meme, as the process continues the original features and meaning of the meme “fade away” (technically, semantic bleaching occurs) and the signifier (the image, per se, detached form its meaning) is left to “drift.” Practically speaking what this means is that the meme functions regardless of whether one is aware of all the semantic features carried by the anchor meme. For example, in the very prolific “Drake meme” which shows the hip-hop artist wearing a bright orange puffy coat, semantic bleaching has completely erased the original reference to the video of the song “Hotline bling” from which the stills are taken. In fact, even Drake’s identity has been bleached away: when I first encountered the memes I was unaware of who the person depicted was, but I was nonetheless able to figure out the disapproval/approval dynamic. Likewise, in the Sanders vs. David case, it does not matter who the seated person is, when all that matters is that the image covers the petrified pudenda of Michelangelo’s statue.
Finally, the rhetorical force of the meme (its message if you will) come from its kairos (the rhetorical characteristic to “fit the times,” to be produced at the appropriate moment). The Seated Sanders as Fig Leaf meme mocks the narrow-mindedness and ignorance of the conservative parents and school boards who consider one of the masterpieces of classical art to be pornography because it shows a (marble) penis. It does so very effectively because the entire message is left implicit for the viewer to decode. On the surface of it, it’s just another Seated Sanders meme (recall that a plethora of examples showed Sanders seated more or less anywhere, so why not in front of the David?). In other words, the logos, the rational message, is minimal. However, for those who are attuned to the kairos and can thus read the implicit message, the ridiculousness of using an object to cover up the stony junk of a statue is reinforced by the incongruity of doing so with a completely unrelated meme.
In conclusion, I would like to announce that I have started a fundraiser to organize an event in which Sen. Sanders will sit in front of Marina Abramović, outside the Tallahassee Classical School. Let them try and figure it out…
References
Associated Press (2023). ‘David' Statue Controversy Creates Permanent Rift Between Michigan College, Florida Charter School. A Tallahassee Classical School Principal Hope Carrasquilla resigned last week after an image of Michelangelo’s David was shown to a sixth-grade art class https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/national-international/david-statue-controversy-creates-permanent-rift-between-michigan-college-florida-charter-school/3005519/
Attardo, S. (2021) The emergence of the Bernie memes. Paper presented at the Humor Research Conference. 2021.
Attardo, S. (2020). Memes, memeiosis, and memetic drift: Cheryl’s Chichier She Shed. Медиалингвистика [Medialinguistics], 7(2), 146-168.
Attardo, S. (2023). Humor 2.0: How the Internet Changed Humor. Anthem.
Greenberger, A. (2021). Bernie Sanders Stars in Art History’s Greatest Artworks in New Viral Meme. Art News. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/bernie-sanders-art-history-memes-1234581892/
Mitzel, A.D. (2023) Paper presented at the Humor Research Conference. 2023.
Sources:
Figure 1:
Figure 2: By Shelby Lessig - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12134088
Figure 3: Courtesy of Antony Dion Mitzel.
This meme (and concurrent mimetic drift) is pretty hilarious/interesting on a bunch of levels. Insightful post!