Of chickens and chaos: How Gen Z connects to Modernism

Who cares why the chicken crossed the road; we should be asking why innovative people are constantly being blamed for the “devolution” of culture, when they are just responding to the political climate other people have created for them.

“Modernism is … essentially, post World War I, mid-1900s… and it’s a response to these huge changes in the world and these massive wars where people were basically asked to go fight with new technological advancements,” OH AP Literature teacher Stephanie Stegich said.

“It was more about the collective versus the individual, and so when people came back, there [was] this question of ‘Where do I belong and where do I fit? And also, do we really need to abide by these rules?… Is it really about the individual anymore?’” she added. “There [were] questions about morality and religion and just the element of existentialism, [of] nihilism, of what’s the point of life…and so you had writers… who are bending the rules.”

The World War era was an especially fraught one for American youths, going from WWI to the moral panic of the 1920s to the Great Depression, then back into war with WWII, followed closely by the Red Scare and fears of divergent political or religious beliefs. However, that chaos served as a breeding ground for Modernism and the movements that grew from it.

“The movements themselves [were] pretty closely intertwined with… communism and socialism and anarchism [and were often] contrarian. … In the modern day, of course, there’s lots of remnants of the Red Scare in ways that people don’t even really think about,” OH senior National Art Honor Society member Mya Olson said.

Recent American history has been plagued with turmoil — from the Vietnam War in the 70s, to the AIDS crisis in the 80s, to 9/11 and the subsequent “forever war” — but the responses from those issues didn’t seem to garner the extent of absurdity that Gen Z celebrates now.

“We had an event that really turned the world upside down, right? You had the pandemic, which … affected everyone,” Stegich said. “That, coupled with the advancement of social media and new types of social media and algorithms has really… alienated people from each other, because there’s no longer this collective.”

Not only has Gen Z faced parallels with the Modernists’ world of conflicts and isolation, but with the scientific — especially the psychological — advancements and religious changes at the forefront of the public consciousness.

“The surrealist art movement emerges out of… the 1920s and 30s when Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung start[ed] really tapping into the subconscious and the social sciences. … It was a movement that … wanted to ground itself in the realism of the last 400 years of Western Art, [and tap into] this idea of [the] subconscious,” Fine Arts Department Chair Michael Skura said.

This exploration of psychology is something social media and Gen Z explore a lot as well. “Therapy-tok,” or the slew of both accredited and self-proclaimed mental health supports rampant on social media, are commonly criticized for the appropriation of mental health supports and terminology. The Modernist and Surrealist movements also explored a lot of religious themes, or the lack thereof.

 “There was a movement of… anti-religious [feeling where] they felt like religion wasn’t doing [what it was] supposed to, and so science hits this opportunity,” Skura said.

This loss of religion and older cultural ideals is also evident in social media— even “trad wives” staying at home and following traditional expectations of family dynamics or parents advocating for things like “90’s summer” supposedly returning to earlier values show that those values have been departed from. Modernism, as well as the many movements which emerged within it, directly played with this discomfort and overturning of norms.

“I think, like every new movement, there’s an element of resistance critique, [and an] attitude that the old is far more superior than the new,” Stegich added. “There is also, I think you can even see this today, this concern that there is a decline in morality. There is this decline in… faith, … there is a decline in having a collective sense of community that was known and accepted by all, and I think, to some, this was a welcome change.” 

Gen Z and Gen Alpha humor is often criticized for its absurdity — all of the memes playing off of other memes, dragging things further and further from their original contexts, and a lot of satire are absurd, but not unprecedentedly so.

“[In Modernism,] there’s definitely a lot of abstraction. It’s like [a] compounding meta, if you will, like onion layers of irony, [which is also] how a lot of humor is formed nowadays,” Olson said.

While meme and social media culture may not be the most elegant or enlightened versions of art, not everything has to be enlightened on the surface: it isn’t fair to brush off Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s cultural creations for their absurdity when one of the largest recent art movements was founded on it, and founded in response to similar problems.

“[There has] always been hostility towards art and … creatives,” Olson said. “In the end, people have always just been trying to cope.”