About

Yacht Metaphor: The Collected Works of @CoryInTheAbyss is a browser-based exhibition that explores the work of artist, poet, and meme creator Jenson Leonard (b. 1990). This online showcase presents a selection of internet memes created between 2015 and 2021 under the artist’s alias, @CoryInTheAbyss. Through a custom-made website designed by the artist, the exhibition invites visitors to engage with these memes both as contemporary net art and as an unexpected educational entryway into complex social and political theory.

Embracing the appearance of an absurdly high production value, @CoryInTheAbyss memes mine the visual language of mainstream news media, advertising, and mass entertainment. Skillfully combining text and images, Leonard’s works pit American visual culture against itself through pastiche and satire.While most well-known meme makers create work that feeds off viral online trends, ranging from the latest meme-able moment from the twenty-four-hour news cycle (see: Mike Pence’s fly moment during the 2020 presidential debates, or Bernie Sanders at the 2021 presidential inauguration), or they use the remix meme template of the day to create their own riffs (see: Expanding Brain or Arthur tightly clenched fist). Leonard instead focuses on creating what he calls “evergreen” images—content that remains consistently relevant over a long period of time. 

Inside the @CoryInTheAbyss universe, Leonard uses the levity of pop culture imagery to address heavy social issues such as class consciousness, police brutality, commodification of race, and predatory data collection. In Kool Mutual Aid (2017), the Kool-Aid Man, beloved mascot for the flavored drink mix, becomes a symbol for Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. The contents of the anthropomorphic pitcher’s cherry-flavored drink is transformed into the blood of the bourgeoisie, and its enthusiasm for sugar water is grafted onto the liberation of the proletariat. The work Slave Patrol (2019) appropriates Chase, the CGI-animated German Shepherd from Nickelodeon’s hit kids TV series Paw Patrol, as a symbol for racist police violence. What was once an overwrought piece of elementary police propaganda, or “copaganda,” becomes the face of Leonard’s critiques of mainstream media’s pro–law enforcement messaging. In Burnt Cork 2.0 (2017), the DC Comics superhero Cyborg is co-opted by Leonard to orchestrate a direct confrontation with his audience regarding their use of online performative Black affect: the half-man, half-robot is positioned to respond and ready to take on anyone who dares to use “digital Blackface.” The work Tinder Cinematic Universe (2018) features Thanos, the villain from Marvel’s Avengers film series, to animate a critique about mediated neoliberal desire and the questionable fine print of our data-driven “terms of service” contracts. His oversized muscular blue body works as a signifier of abominable conquest and destruction—and to advertise for Tinder Plus.

Co-hosted by External Pages,Yacht Metaphor exhibits a selection of Leonard’s most iconic meme works, accompanied by the artist’s annotations and an extended text by artist and poet manuel arturo abreu. An artwork in itself, the website presentsan interactive underwater seascape that asks visitors to pause the infinite scroll and explore the abyss. 

Bringing to life the links between online space and the physical world, Leonard’s work can be found offline, or AFK (away from keyboard), on a billboard located in the Hudson Valley (~1309 U.S. Route 9, Tivoli, N.Y.) from April 19 to May 10, 2021. 

Additionally, Yacht Metaphorcan be accessed through a physical installation inspired by Y2K-era internet cafes, on view at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, from April 3 to May 30, 2021 as a part of the 2021 Graduate Student Exhibitions and Projects. 

Artwork and web design by Jenson Leonard

Curated by Georgie Payne

Catalogue text by manuel arturo abreu

Web development by Clay Colonna, with support from Ana Meisel

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Yacht Metaphor is curated by Georgie Payne as part of the requirements for the master of arts degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. 

In addition to exhibition support provided by CCS Bard, Yacht Metaphor was made possible by the generous support of Joseph Ozal at NoMüNoMü and Ana Meisel at External Pages. Special thanks to all the friends, family, and CCS staff and faculty who have so generously lent their time and feedback to make this project possible.

Yacht Metaphor Catalogue Essay (PDF)

manuel arturo abreu

“Meme culture feels like prison at this point.” —Michel Foucault (jk, it was Jenson Leonard)

This essay builds on ideas developed between Jenson Leonard and myself in a 2017 interview published by AQNB. Memes are to culture as genes are to biology. However, we’ve moved from a static nature versus nurture dichotomy to a more interactionist model—that is, nature and nurture interact. For example, genetic predisposition to a disease doesn’t predict you’ll definitely get the disease: environmental factors, comorbidities, and so on interact to determine whether the illness expresses itself in specific cases.

The same applies to memes—both circulated symbols in general and digital memes in particular, such as the work of Jenson Leonard a.k.a. @CoryInTheAbyss. The interactionist model is the best way to understand why so many cultural laborers are exhausted or feel that a sea change is necessary. For example, Jenson is contemplating retiring from the meme game, perhaps to become a fine artist (here, value is created through artificial scarcity or exclusivity rather than by circulation or universal relatability). He’s made physical objects in the past—for example a CD jewel case with a printout of one of his memes as the insert—and comes from a poetry background.

The general sociopolitical/online context has been exhausting for a while, so the urge to retire is relatable. Black online culture laborers face anti-Blackness constantly, either as much as or even more than in meatspace. Black diaspora theorist Christina Sharpe indeed argues that anti-Blackness is the weather. Anti-Black societies are weather engineers. Corporate social media platforms limit Black creators’ reach through shadow banning and ignore reports of harassment and bigotry. Non-Black people consume Black content constantly (and prefer it from light-skinned and white-passing Black people) and simultaneously never really listen to Black people. Non-Black people get accolades and income for the same things Black people get punished for (Black language, style, etc.). This latter seems to become a structural property of digitality, as far back as the obscure Jive filter of 1986, and more recently in the mainstream with facial modification filters like Snapchat’s Bob Marley filter gaffe in 2016. Artist Keith Townsend Obadike said back in 2001, “The net space just makes the same old burnt cork blackface routine easier. . . . To many white artists, blackness represents some kind of borderless excess, some kind of unchecked expression.” 

Non-Black digital users express such affects of excess through (1) GIFs of Black people, (2) emojis with skin tones darker than their own, (3) what I have termed online imagined Black English, or digital linguistic minstrelsy, and (4) Blackfishing, which combines (1) to (3) but also involves claiming to be Black and altering one’s appearance to advance this claim, and other phenomena. Singer and entertainer Khadija Mbowe goes a step further and argues that “the screen is the new burnt cork” (emphasis added). This connects with ideas advanced by the artist known as American Artist, who in the essay “Black Gooey Universe” argues that the “hacker” paradigm of Silicon Valley and its iconic black screen (with white or green code text) evinces a kind of fantasy of control and dominance, which evokes Obadike’s point at the level of developer rather than user. Conversely, at least before the advent of the “night mode” option on mobile devices, the white background of the corporate digital landscape may be cause to reflect on racialized assumptions around a normatively white or white-assimilated user. We can even say that the idea of a general idealized user is unrealistic and ignores the complexity of human capacities. A generic user may be a necessity for an agile development life cycle, but it’s an untenable paradox that leads to a lot of bad design and absolute broken trust between those the term “user” represents and those corporate bodies who continue to operate as though it’s not obvious to “users” that we are really “products.”

What kind of meme aesthetic can express this? With this brief sketch in place, we can turn to Jenson’s memes, a selection of which are being showcased as part of the browser-based retrospective exhibition Yacht Metaphor, curated by Georgie Payne. Jenson is an artisan, laboring over most of his works to create a digital baroque aesthetic (which he terms “boughetto”), drawing on cultural references that express some of the paradoxes of the digital moment: feeling dead inside but also feeling too much constantly; dealing with information overload while also freely canceling everyone and everything that yucks our yum; hermeneutic of suspicion toward the other without realizing this partly causes our deep isolation; and on and on. There’s components of a neo-Y2K aesthetic (replete with glitz and glamor, though perhaps more from a millennial perspective, where the idea of nostalgia for the 2000s really stands in for our own childhood relationship with technology, which might have seemed or felt more playful), as well as clear influence from the “Weird Facebook” and “Leftbook” aesthetics. RIP to Terrell Davis, a major innovator of neo-Y2K, as well as Gay Vape Shark, a major innovator of Weird FB. Leonard’s style of humor strongly connects the Black satirical tradition, dating back to the blues, with its heavy reliance on Black language and affect in the digital meme sphere. The question of satirical literacy invokes the struggle for meaning, which I’ll return to later.

The idea of an exit (i.e., due to exhaustion) might seem like a paradox juxtaposed with the notion of what Leonard calls “auteur” or high-effort memes. Critics might ask why Jenson would spend so much time on the memes in the first place. Ignoring formal questions of “whether memes are art” and “whether meme makers are artists,” we can say that an artist will generally get the most attention for their most inane output: that’s the nature of the lowest common denominator (and not necessarily a bad thing). Is a John Henry–type gesture of busting your ass on an overwrought output perhaps tracing a line of flight regarding, let’s say, the uncirculated meme? His potential exit is, I think, less a statement on Jenson’s part about the value of the medium. Rather, it’s about what it is that’s actually value-laden (whether exciting or disappointing), about latent potential. In the same way that the best film is perhaps the one no one ever saw, the meme that refuses to circulate (because it never got made, or it’s too complex, or it was meant for only one person and that person passed on) is a meme that says a critical position is possible. Under all the layers of lulz, this missing meme is actually a significant thing, in a world where such a critical position truly seems impossible.

Memes are ranked by their circulation. The most viewed is the best one, but maybe not your favorite, the story goes. The corporate social media platforms in this story are akin to the “theatre” of evolution: the individuals with mutations that happen to be useful for their specific environments are the ones that survive. It’s a cold world for all the unexpressed mutations, or the ones that might have served well in a different context, or even the ones that might be inexpressible (if that even means anything). In the attention casino, everything starts to feel like either labor, a transaction, or both. We lack terms for what’s really going on, and digital network dynamics speed up concept creep (when context- or discipline-specific jargon leaves its specific use zone), so we misuse terms with specific meanings to try and describe what’s going on: “emotional labor” (if this doesn’t refer to a service industry worker, it may be getting misused); “intersectionality” (critical race theorist and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw’s legal framework for articulating Black women as a protected class—i.e., rather than having to choose one or the other legally-protected category, as had been the case up till then, which now means something like “overlapping layers of oppression”), and so on.

Laboring over memes you know won’t get as many shares as some random inane shitpost is a kind of tragic action. But with enough satirical literacy, we can, for example, trace a potential through-line from W. E. B. Du Bois’s speculative fiction, to the paintings of Robert Colescott, to Cornel West’s philosophy of utopian energy coupled with tragic action, to the @CoryInTheAbyss aesthetic. If we are reading pedagogical potential into the work, this tragic action implies not only that the best meme is the one no one ever saw (the rarest Pepe) but also that a certain domain of critical discourse exists in the potentially cringey layers of reference. Some sort of emergent property exists in grokking this referential network. Is this a matter of critical mass (i.e., stacking references to a certain level) or of specific resonances of certain juxtapositions? This is a formal question that I’ll leave to the critics. 

The kinds of critical proposals available in the work have to do with finding ourselves in horrible, cyclical modes of coping every day. That is, they are in accord with an interactionist model. User experience (UX) design is a kind of gamification in the modern context (an affective casino, like I said), and the meme format in a sense leans into this gamification to explore whether there are alternatives. The space of the poetic, as a space of potential, perhaps arises as such an alternative, and perhaps even remains a horizon within Leonard’s endeavors of making: it’s unclear if we can get there, but if it’s true that the dematerialization of the art object means the refetishization of discourse, then we can see some mining of the discursive in the context of this @CoryInTheAbyss showcase interface—for example, through Yacht Metaphor’s annotation functionality. 

The poetic has to do with transcribing or tracking immaterial, nugatory cognitive phenomena in ways that resonate with the writer. But the value proposition doesn’t necessarily relate to circulation—this is why poetry can feel like a “private language.” While philosophers since V. N. Vološinov and Ludwig Wittgenstein have argued language is inherently social (and thus the “private language” feeling is a kind of mirage), Leonard may be asking us to imagine the possibility of the private language in the context of another inherently social medium: the meme. Pop cultural frameworks make the message simultaneously “clear enough for a child,” so to speak (for example, Slave Patrol (2019), a Paw Patrol–based meme that says “Pigs Are (And Always Will Be) Slave Patrols”), while also indicting these formats as deep-seated in white supremacist assumptions and structures, such as the need to humanize the state monopoly of force through TV shows, including Paw Patrol for children and Brooklyn 99 for adults. Indeed, in his argument that language is inherently social (and not private), Vološinov goes further, saying that the struggle for meaning is inherently tied to class struggle.

The Yacht Metaphor showcase itself takes on a game format. Rather than the gamification of affect present on corporate social media UX, it references the participatory model of video games: you enter the browser, and it takes you to a kind of video game title screen. You press any key and are brought to a solitary server rack at the bottom of the ocean, which one can imagine might be prey to sharks—might be nestled alongside the bones of those enslaved Africans thrown overboard or who jumped overboard during the voyage across the Atlantic. Then we come to a “fighter select” screen: each meme is a fighter, so to speak, and choosing your fighter brings up the annotation space for the meme. In theory, gaming as a format has a sociality that might potentially challenge, or at least not fit as usefully into, the alienated sociality of the social media “affect casino” gamification.

But if memes are to culture what genes are to biology, and memes are, at least in part, inherently social, then we find ourselves again emphasizing an interactionist position about both genes and memes. That is to say, it’s possible that there are cultural or social causes for genetic changes: an example includes lactose tolerance, which can be found in cultures with ancestral attachments to cattle ranching and dairy consumption. Once cattle ranching emerged, those with mutations for lactose tolerance had evolutionary success (i.e., spread their genes), and, as a result, some people in the world have lactose tolerance. And from the other side, we can see how things like language are not really inscribed in the genes (contra Noam Chomsky): if language were genetic, we would expect to find children who aren’t able to learn certain languages, due to certain genetic mutations having occurred since the origin of language. But it seems that most children are able to learn any given language to which they are exposed in their environment. Indeed, another linguist, Daniel Everett, argues, contra Chomsky, that there is no “language instinct.” Rather, he says, there is a “social instinct.” This instinct is why all humans seem to have some form of linguistic communication, and not because of some genetic inheritance. 

The next step in this line of thinking is to understand that, in many ways, culture is a ritual escape from culture. The meme maker—especially the meme maker who is interested in the potential for critical perspectives within the form and distribution of the medium—couples utopian energy with tragic action, because they know culture doesn’t really have an “outside.” They sense that something deep is happening with the affect casino, deeper than the serious issues depicted in documentaries like The Social Dilemma (2020). A preoccupation with private language, yoked to a medium whose ontology is circulation (proven by the exception of the rarest Pepe), reveals the primary yearning: the yearning for the social. That is to say, the question seems to be whether the social is possible in this contemporary context. For example, Leonard attempts to make anti-Blackness visible without recirculating Black death media (the high-tech version of lynching mementos and abolitionist trauma porn), hearkening back to African American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman’s argument against such circulation at the beginning of her book on terror and slavery, Scenes of Subjection. 

In our 2021 personal correspondence, Leonard acknowledged this somewhat pedagogical bent: “I’m not just shitposting necessarily. . . . I’m sitting with something. This is happening in collusion with theory that people are writing, and me reflecting on ideas. . . . It’s like, how can I distill theory, or attempt to respond to it in my memes, or lead people to those works?” He goes on: “@CoryInTheAbyss doesn’t happen without other people. It’s irreducibly social. I’m not just in the abyss—a lot of people are in there. A lot of people feel lost, and dizzy.” The artist’s annotations for Yacht Metaphor serve as a massification of this intent, or a yearning toward the social. Novelist and poet Wilson Harris says the artist is but a debt to (1) adversarial formative contexts and (2) the community. This is not simply a fiscal or moral debt to the community; rather, it’s an unpayable debt, a force of formation that inherently binds us to the other, to all the living today and all the dead who came before and made us possible. We can’t pay this debt; we can only showcase it—or gamify it, to follow the line of metaphor. For Harris, for example, aesthetic form is itself a formalization of such unpayable debt. For Leonard, the game of the abyss—which, in this iteration, is a fighting game—is the best paradox to speak to the yearning for the social.

1.  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 189–90
2.  See the work of naturalist Daniel Lehrman and psychologist Susan Oyama, for example.
3.  “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” Dawkins 1976: 192.
4.  In a 2017 Juxtapoz interview, Leonard says, “My background is poetry. That’s what I went to school for, but I wanted to make something that was more widely accessible. Instantly publishing content online through social media has always been more gratifying than waiting on a publisher to accept or reject a poem that will likely be read by a very select audience.” Jenson Leonard, “An Interview with Jenson Leonard on the Intersection of Poetry and Memes,” interview by Eben Benson, Juxtapoz, June 30, 2017. https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/collage/an-interview-with-jenson-leonard-of-coryintheabyss.
5.  In 2017, Leonard said: “I use Adobe software to add a level of production to memes that might be as absurd as the humor in them. But if you look at the statistics of people’s engagement with my content, it’s no contest; I get a fractional level of attention for my work compared to less produced, rushed, even sloppy content.” Leonard, “An Interview with Jenson Leonard on the Intersection of Poetry and Memes.”
6.  See Jane Coaston, The Intersectionality Wars,” Vox, May 28, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/, where Crenshaw is quoted as follows: “Sometimes I’ve read things that say, ‘Intersectionality, blah, blah, blah,’ and then I’d wonder, ‘Oh, I wonder whose intersectionality that is,’ and then I’d see me cited, and I was like, ‘I’ve never written that. I’ve never said that. That is just not how I think about intersectionality.’”
7.  See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Comet,” in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (San Diego: Harcourt Brace), pp253-274.
8.  Robert Pirro, “Remedying Defective or Deficient Political Agency: Cornel West’s Uses of the Tragic,” New Political Science 26, no. 2 (2006): 147–70.
9.  Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991).
10.  See V. N.Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973 [1929]) and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1953) p88-95
11.  Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 23.
12.  See Daniel Everett, Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
13.  Wilson Harris, The Tree of the Sun (London: Faber, 1978), 64.

ORIGIN STORY (PDF)

Georgie Payne

Jenson Leonard (b. 1990) began making memes under the alias @CoryInTheAbyss in 2015 at the age of twenty-five. Drawn to the immediacy of the meme format, Leonard was captivated by the ability to create and post content to various social media platforms and message boards almost instantaneously to reach audiences both far and wide. A 2017 Seattle Weekly article recounts how he turned to memes after receiving his MFA in Creative Writing (with a focus on poetry) from Pratt Institute, New York. In the article, he states: “I felt frustrated with its [poetry’s] ivory-tower elitism. With a poem, you might get published in a journal, and then a few people in academia might read it. When I make a meme, I post it, and almost right away it reaches thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. It’s immediate, and honestly, probably the most pragmatic way to reach people now.”

The University of Oxford–trained biologist Richard Dawkins, in his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, coined the term “meme” to define a unit of cultural transmission or imitation. An expansion of Charles Darwin’s concept of genetic evolution, Dawkins’s theory holds that humans evolved both through biological genes and through cultural memetics. Wide ranging in its definition, Dawkins’s idea of a meme includes anything from ideas to behaviors that are passed from person to person. 

By the mid to late 1990s, with the commercialization and introduction of the World Wide Web in homes across the world, a new concept of the meme was introduced into the public consciousness—the internet meme. The proliferation of the internet meme resulted in an evolution of the mainstream definition of the term “meme” itself, ultimately overshadowing Dawkins original concept. Today, “meme” refers to content spreading online from user to user, most prominently on social networking sites, direct messaging platforms, and public web forums. Today’s memes can take many different formats—a still image, an animated GIF, or even a video—but they are most recognizable as low-res images or screenshots paired with comedic text. Often created in response to specific events—whether stories from the global news cycle or bespoke inside jokes—internet memes are remixed and transposed to demonstrate a wide variety of takes on the original source material, information, or event.

As Leonard recounts in a 2017 interview with writer manuel arturo abreu for AQNB, entitled“Still I Shitpost: Cory in the Abyss on a Communism of the Visual + Anti-Blackness in the Meme-o-sphere,” he originally began making work in the standard “Twitter format” (the modern-day version of a caption contest, featuring an image or screenshot in a white box with black text above or below), but his format quickly shifted within the first year, evolving into a more ornate and heavily parodic style of the original content (OC) he is known for today. He states: 

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.

The aesthetics of Leonard’s work employs the visual language of American capitalism, already familiar to his audiences, to draw the viewer into far more complex theories. His imagery illustrates the paradoxes and complexities of the inner workings of meme culture, specifically in relation to the co-option and commercialization of Black culture and online vernacular which has been brilliantly and thoroughly theorized by scholars and writers including, but not limited to, manuel arturo abreu, Aria Dean, Legacy Russell, Lauren Michele Jackson, and Doreen St. Félix. Furthermore, he illustrates what arturo has termed “online imagined Black English,” which describes “the phenomenon of non-Black English speakers with no fluency using real or imaginary linguistic features of Black English”—exemplifying how disembodied and essentialized versions of Blackness have been commodified and reappropriated by white and other non-Black bodies, both online and off. 

In the 2017 work Burnt Cork 2.0, Leonard employs DC Comics superhero Cyborg to orchestrate a direct confrontation with his audience, specifically his white and non-Black fellow meme creators, regarding their commodification of performative online Black affects for a certain kind of “cool factor.” Paired with an image of Cyborg’s half-man, half-robot body positioned at the ready to take on anyone who dares cross him, the work’s text states, “You wouldn’t last a week without digital Blackface.” Leonard again addressed this subject in 2020 with Gwan Online, an even more literal translation of the minstrel performance of a new era.

In many ways, Leonard’s work can be traced to several distinct histories within contemporary visual art that have used popular culture and mainstream media platforms to satirize and critique social structures and patterns of behavior, particularly in relation to race, class, and gender. The foremost connection is the culture jamming movement of the 1980s—a form of tactical media protest used to disrupt or subvert mainstream media and corporate advertising to expose their questionable modes of operation. The movement, which itself can be seen as an adaptation of the 1950s technique of détournement developed by the avant-garde artist-activist group the Situationist International, turned the capitalist system and its media culture against itself, subverting the original meanings of its advertising slogans and logos toward radical ends. Artists and collectives of this genre, including the Yes Men, Adbusters Media Foundation, and the Billboard Liberation Front, appropriated iconography from megacorporations ranging from McDonald’s to Marlboro to critically engage audiences to reflect on these industries’ corrupt production practices and the evils of the capitalist system. 

Much like the work of the culture jamming movement, Leonard’s practice pits pop cultural icons and the mainstream media advertising universe against itself, subverting the original messaging to convey radical ideology. In the digital “abyss” in which Leonard operates, Y2K pop stars such as Beyoncé, Aaron Carter, and *NSYNC become comrades of political philosophers like Guy Debord, Karl Marx, and Angela Davis. Advertisements for iconic fast-casual American restaurants like Ruby Tuesday and Applebee’s become beacons for the impending race war, harbingers of radical race and class consciousness. Tyler Perry’s Madea film franchise is reimagined through the lens of the Combahee River Collective, championing “Madea’s Proletariat Uprising.” Meanwhile, the poster for slasher film American Psycho(2000) is recast in a more honest light as “White Male Power Fantasy.” Furthermore, Leonard continues in this lineage with an adaptation of one of his most iconic works, ancient white proverb, displayed on a billboard located on U.S. Route 9, in Tivoli, N.Y., from April 19 to May 10, 2021,  hacking into public advertising to insert one of the artist’s works both online and AFK (away from keyboard).

At the same time, Leonard’s work is also the latest iteration in a history of net art practices, not only because of its location and circulation as a born-digital artwork on social media platforms and in its latest iteration as this artist-made, browser-based exhibition, but also because of the ways it has used web space as a place for critique. Specifically, his work follows in the footsteps of artists who have used satire and the medium of the web to critique dominant white society and underscore social contradictions of Western society. Leonard’s practice falls into a lineage of net art from the ’00s that exercises similar elements of contemporary meme practices, subverting user-driven web platforms to stage interventions into web space. We can look at Leonard’s work as related to works such as Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale (2001), Damali Ayo’s Rent-a-Negro(2003), and Jayson Musson’s Art Thoughtz (2010–12). All these artists exercise comedic prowess and digital know-how to satirize expected forms of racial performativity in relation to the white gaze and the essentialized version of Black identity that has been created and maintained by and for white audiences. While Musson’s Hennessy Youngman persona refers to this as the “Jazz principle”—that is, white desire for “the exotic other”—sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois introduces this concept as “double consciousness,” the long-held theory that Black Americans have developed a dual sense of self: the ability to see themselves both as they are and as they are perceived by a white viewer. 

Furthermore, Leonard’s practice, much like Ayo and Musson’s works, suggest a link to a history of Black comedy that has used humor to speak critically both to and about white audiences — drawing connections to the work of stand-up legends such as Dick Gregory,Godfrey Cambridge,Richard Pryor, Wanda Sykes, and Dave Chappelle. As the late, great Gregory once said, “You can’t laugh social problems out of existence,” but you can use it as a tool—which is what these comics have done, using their comedy routines to confront and name the unmarked nature of white normative bodies, values, and social practices. This history exists in what literary and Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe calls “the wake” of the catastrophic violence of the American Atlantic chattel slavery system and its continued unresolved legacies. As media scholar Bambi Haggins outlines, Black American humor, from Civil War–era minstrelsy to stand-up comedy of the civil rights era and beyond, has always been a marker for race relations, both in “how much they have changed and how much they have stayed the same over time.”Though the medium might change, the joke stays the same— a marker of the “progress” made.

 In Ancient White Proverb (2016), Leonard repurposes Grimace, a fuzzy purple character featured in McDonald’s advertising, to playfully take on the evasive “I don’t see color” trope. The text reads “I don’t care if you’re purple (Ancient white proverb).” Grimace, in this instance, is not in fact being used as a tool to reflexively critique the McDonald’s corporation, but instead to call out the  “I don’t care if you’re purple, green, or polka-dotted” platitude that often circulates in liberal-leaning white circles. Though the colors invoked might change, the result of uttering the phrase stays the same: it’s a deflective attempt at the ever elusive racial neutrality that downplays the realities of how race operates in society, and a conflation of the very real histories and realities of BIPOC lives with that of nonexistent purple, green, and polka-dotted people. Furthermore, the phrase implicates a flawed understanding of racism as simply the work of singular individuals and their actions—the “bad apple” mentality—rather than as a systemic function of society. 

In an August 2020 online panel discussion entitled “Race Jam: A Panel on Memes and Online, Imagined Blackness” (hosted as part of Leonard’s residency at the Buffalo, N.Y.–based arts organization Squeaky Wheel), the artist addressed the many ways in which “Blackness, Black culture, Black affect, Black vernacular” has been “extracted, surveilled, and commodified down to the nearest Nae Nae.” Speaking with fellow meme creator panelists Ashley Khirea Wahba, Nicolás Vargas, and Pastiche Lumumba, Leonard shared how his follower count rose following the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police earlier that summer. Acknowledging the harrowing set of circumstances that gained him over 2,000 followers in a week, Leonard stated:

I’m not encouraged by that. I’m deeply disturbed by the fact that the increased visibility of my meme page and my content is intimately tied to Black death. And it took a succession of Black people dying for white meme pages to be like “Hmm, well, maybe this might be a good idea,” and that really fucks with me and makes me not want to participate in this thing. Because now it’s tainted. My page growth is now associated with that fuckshit.

Here, Leonard is articulating what critic, artist, and curator Aria Dean reminds us of in her 2016 essay “Poor Meme, Rich Meme”: “These videos proliferate alongside memes, brushing up against each other on the same platforms. Further, black death and black joy are pinned to each other by the white gaze.” While his viewership went up following Floyd’s death, Leonard’s drive to produce content went down, specifically in response to not wanting to appease his new white viewership and pushing back against the infinite scroll of the internet and the tireless production of online content. 

In a work entitled BLTN (read: Better Late Than Never), a muscular white Rambo-esque man lets out a roar as he runs from a swarm of helicopters quickly approaching behind him. He holds a machine gun in each outstretched arm while a blaze of fire engulfs the bottom of the frame. The text on top reads: “In the year 2016 white liberals are just now starting to notice . . . White Nationalism. Better late than never I guess.” The artists describes the work as being “spurred by [his] amusement in the uptick of newfound political awareness amongst white liberals about the nationalist elements that have always permeated American politics, but became more legible when the president was explicitly white supremacist, as opposed to prior, more tacitly white supremacist administrations.” Following in the same vein, Yacubian Cave Trickery (2019) depicts Captain Caveman from the 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon shouting, “Me go to anti-racism workshop, me fix racism!” While made the year before, the work remained relevant in the summer of 2020 as performative allyship spreading online reached an apex. Leonard, through addressing the “marketized logic of the anti-racism industrial complex,” notes how these topics remain relevant within his work yet fade in and out of algorithmic fashion within the larger culture. While anti-racist resources, training workshops, and readings lists were the dominant topic of conversation on influential social media platforms this past summer, they slowly began to fade out of our timelines, almost entirely gone by the time the first leaf fell in autumn. 

While it’s hopeful  that for many white people this moment was a powerful “wake up” call about the existence of systemic oppression and racism, these works point to the fact that “the work” is not over after one workshop, one book, or one Instagram post. In his 2009 book Black Is the New White, Paul Mooney, legendary comedian and frequent collaborator of Richard Pryor, writes: “For white people, watching the Rodney King video is like a world premiere movie. ‘Oh, I didn’t know the nice policemen did that.’ For Black people, it’s a rerun. It’s been in syndication for a long time. We’ve seen it all before.” This apathetic white attitude perpetuates across time, and was more recently satirized by filmmaker Chester Vincent Toye’s comedic short I’m SO Sorry (2021) and personified by Saturday Night Live’s Beck Bennett in a satirical commercial advertisement for 5-Hour Empathy during an October 2020 episode. Given the opportunity to drink “five full hours of complete intimate understanding of systemic oppression and ever-present racism,” the white male main character (and later his white wife) find every possible excuse to delay accessing the knowledge they claimed to desperately want to know, exposing performative forms of activism for what they are—all talk and no action. 

In recent months, rather than working overtime within the tireless production cycle to create work that appeals to his newfound audience, Leonard has directed his practice to become even more intentional. The Yacht Metaphor exhibition is designed to enable viewers to engage longer and deeper, and to consider the works’ continued relevance and messaging, particularly within extended histories of artistic expression and critique. Offering an experience that is distinctly separate from algorithmic mediation, the exhibition frees the memes from the grasp of the dominant social media platforms on which they typically circulate, inviting viewers to stop the scroll and explore the significant layers of history, reference, and knowledge hidden within the abyss.

Endnotes

1. manuel arturo abreu, “Still I Shitpost: Cory in the Abyss on a Communism of the Visual + Anti-Blackness in the Meme-o-sphere,” AQNB, December 12, 2017, https://www.aqnb.com/2017/12/12/still-i-shitpost-cory-in-the-abyss-on-a-communism-of-the-visual-antiblackness-in-the-meme-o-sphere-with-manuel-arturo-abreu.
2. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 40th Anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
3. Jenson Leonard, “An Interview with Jenson Leonard on the Intersection of Poetry and Memes,”interview by Eben Benson, Juxtapoz, June 30, 2017, https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/collage/an-interview-with-jenson-leonard-of-coryintheabyss.
4. abreu, “Still I Shitpost.”
5. Leonard refers here to artist and theorist Hito Steyerl’‘s idea of the “poor image.”
6. abreu, “Still I Shitpost.”
7. manuel arturo abreu, “Online Imagined Black English,” Arachne, n.d., https://arachne.cc/issues/01/online-imagined_manuel-arturo-abreu.html.
8. Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink, eds., “Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance,”Mark Dery, “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Sign,” in Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance, ed. Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 58.
9. “(1977) The Combahee River Collective Statement,” Black Past, November 16, 2012, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977.
10.  By using AFK, I reference Legacy Russell referencing social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson, who prefers this term in lieu of the more well-known shorthand “IRL” (iIn rReal lLife), which, as Russell and Jurgenson, argue “ is a misunderstanding, an antiquated falsehood, one that implies that two selves (i.e. online versus offline) operate in isolation from one another, inferring that online activity lacks authenticity and is divorced from a user’s ‘real’ identity, offline.” Legacy Russell, “On #GLITCHFEMINISM and the Glitch Feminism Manifesto,.” Res., 2016/17, http://beingres.org/2017/10/17/legacy-russell/22  Oct. 2017. Web. 19 Mar. 2021.
11. See “INTERNET EXPLORERS” by Ceci Moss, “Internet Explorers,” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), Mass Effect (p147)— which draws out this history, specifically looking at artists (between 2005 and -2010) who have chosen to forgo the traditional exhibition space, with its excessive limitations, and instead utilize use the digital space to exhibit their work, specifically following the rise of major social media platforms (Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, YouTtube, Twitter, and Tumblr).
12. Alexander Iadarola, “What Up Internet,” Rhizome: Net Art Anthology, January 12, 2018, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jan/12/what-up-internet/.
13. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” Atlantic, August 1897, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/.
14. Musson’s Hennesy Youngman character is a reference toHenny Youngman, king of the one-liners, and has reference Def Comedy Jam as a source of inspiration ; Ayo's work is an adaptation of Godfrey Cambridge's1965 stand-up bit, The Rent-A-Negro Plan, also similar to a bit Dick Greggory did around the same time.  
15. Western Washington University, “KVOS Special: Dick Gregory,” YouTube, uploaded July 9, 2010, https://youtu.be/75ajExLNU9k.
16. Bambi Haggins, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 21.
17. Black, Indigenous, and people of color. For more information on this term, see Sandra E. Garcia, “Where Did BIPOC Come From?,” New York Times, June 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html
18. Squeaky Wheel, “Race Jam: A Panel on Memes and Online, Imagined Blackness,” with Jenson Leonard, Ashley Khirea Wahba, Nicolás Vargas, and Pastiche Lumumba, YouTube, uploaded August 20, 2020, https://youtu.be/dOtgYW5i1LQ.
19. Jenson, in “Race Jam: A Panel on Memes and Online, Imagined Blackness.”
20. Jenson, in “Race Jam: A Panel on Memes and Online, Imagined Blackness.”
21. Paul Mooney, Black Is the New White: A Memoir (New York: Gallery Books, 2010), 341.