Dadaist Memes: Nonsense for the Modern Age
If the internet excels at anything, it’s channelling chaos with startling efficiency. Yet long before timelines became flooded with absurdist humour and surreal juxtapositions, there was Dada — the early twentieth-century art movement that delighted in dismantling logic, poking holes in polite society, and elevating nonsense to an art form.
Dada emerged during the First World War, when the world itself felt grotesquely irrational. Artists responded by producing works that intentionally made *no sense* — collages of improbable objects, poetry assembled by chance, manifestos that spiralled into playful rebellion. It was an anti-movement movement, gleefully taking a hammer to conventional aesthetics.
Fast-forward a century, and the Dada spirit has found a natural home: the meme. Not the neatly structured, caption-above-picture meme of a decade ago, but the wild, layered, glitchy, unhinged species of meme that thrives today. Memes where logic collapses, where text is an afterthought, where images are distorted beyond recognition in pursuit of a punchline that feels more like a fever dream than a joke. Dada would be proud.
These modern Dadaist memes don’t ask to be understood so much as experienced. They operate on instinct, absurdity, and the peculiar joy found in meaninglessness. They are the perfect antidote to a world drowning in earnestness.
Perfunctory Blancmange: A Corner of Artful Absurdity
Which brings us to Perfunctory Blancmange.
The name alone hints at the spirit of playful irreverence that runs through the project — sweet, strange, perhaps unnecessary, but absolutely delightful. As an artist, I’ve always been drawn to the liminal spaces where humour meets visual experimentation, and *Perfunctory Blancmange* has become a home for precisely that.
The blog is a kind of ongoing collage: snippets of ideas, images that skirt the boundary between sense and nonsense, reflections that may or may not lead anywhere in particular. It’s a space where the surreal is not only welcomed but encouraged to ramble. If traditional artistic discourse asks for structure, argument, and clarity, Perfunctory Blancmange happily wanders off in pursuit of something more elusive — the spark that appears when the mind encounters the unexpected.
In many ways, the blog continues the lineage of Dadaist playfulness. Not as a revival or a rigid homage, but as a natural evolution of the impulse to upend the ordinary. Whether through visual pieces, conceptual sketches, or brief musings, Perfunctory Blancmange exists in that same deliciously illogical territory where art refuses to behave.
After all, in a world that often feels overly serious, there is something liberating in embracing the absurd — in allowing art to be not a statement, but a moment of amused bewilderment.
If Dadaist memes are today’s digital absurdities, then Perfunctory Blancmange is a small analogue echo: a place where nonsense is nurtured, and where the blancmange, however perfunctory, is always served with a wink.
G.P. Thomson
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