Jun story meme. Toy Zhdun, why did I wait for you? Anti-under-review of a worthless purchase

The evolution of virtual communication through the network has given rise to a new type of social communication - meme. Translated from Greek, mimema means original imitation, phenomenal, inimitable. Through funny photos, videos or verbal phrases, one can publicly ridicule a person's behavior. This one-sided state of affairs was before the appearance of the new meme "Zhdun". Who is this, and what new philosophical burden does the favorite of social networks carry, you can read below.

What is a meme, how did it appear?

In 1976, Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins completes his book The Selfish Gene. In his writings, the scientist characterizes the meme as a unit of transmission of any cultural value that evolves over time.

Main theses:

• Any idea, like a gene, can be repeated and developed.
• A unit of cultural information is transmitted from one person to another, and is confirmed by mutation and adaptation to modern realities.

Departing from the theory of genes, Dawkins cited other processes as examples: fashion, music, and the visual arts. The new generation for the meme has found its own application: original photos and pictures, equipped with peculiar statements, are used to communicate on the Internet:

At the end of the exhibition, Martin's work received the "People's Choice Award" from the organizers, and the composition itself was moved and installed near the children's department of the Dutch medical center LUMS.

In this video, the artist herself tells how she created this creature, how it came to her mind:

Where did the meme about Zhdun come from

Residents of the provincial Dutch city of Leiden were the first to see Zhdun. Traditionally, every spring for 3 months, young artists and sculptors present their works in the Leiden Bio Science Park.

Everyone liked the sculpture, but there was no excitement around Homunculus Loxodontus, and that was the name of the funny creature, among the visitors.

August 7, 2016, the exhibition ended. Homunculus Loxodontus successfully changed its location and began to decorate the entrance to the LUMS Children's Medical Center. The idea is not new - in the lobby of Western hospitals they often arrange small pools with fish and small turtles. This is how hospital management tries to reduce the nervous tension of their patients.

Six months have passed, and on the entertainment community, the Russians saw the future meme for the first time, and Zhdun became the main discovery of 2017.

Zhdun: a meme for any occasion

Meme Zhdun can simultaneously express a smile, and at the same time generate feelings of pity for him. Consider the most popular options:

• Conductor. Attributes - a bag around the neck, tickets. The phrase - “we pass for travel, otherwise I’ll get up ...”;
• A patient. Doctor's appointment, and timid - "... doctor, what's wrong with me?";
• mother-in-law. Zhdun acts as a mother-in-law: “Zyatek, I’ll stay with you for a while ...”;
• What where When. Member of a team of connoisseurs;
• User. As an inexperienced user with the inscription: "I clicked something and everything disappeared ...";
• Glutton. “I opened the refrigerator ... then everything is in a fog ...”.

Zhdun and fine arts:

• "Zhdukonda". The meme successfully fit into Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece "Mona Lisa" (La Gioconda);
• Lenin. In the film "Walkers at Lenin", Zhdun acts as the main revolutionary of those times;
• Knight at the Crossroads. On the famous canvas, the meme replaces the stone.

Satirical-tragic themes:

• A Ukrainian with an EU flag sits at the airport and waits for a visa-free regime - a reaction to political promises;
• Waiting in a turban, at the same airport - Trump's ban on refugees from entering America;
• A pensioner in front of the TV - waiting for a pension increase.

Do you know that:

• The prototype of Zhdun's muzzle was sea ​​Elephant. The author took the nose of a mammal as a basis, and the shape of the body - a pear-shaped figure characterizes humility with the current situation;
• Marguerite Van Breevoort graduated from the Art School in Utrecht in 2013. In addition to Homunculus Loxodontus, there are many interesting works in her arsenal, of which the composition of a man with a lizard's head stands out;
• For the manufacture of Zhdun, the artist spent 75 kg of plaster. To give the sculpture strength and moisture resistance, the composition was covered with a layer of bleached wax mixed with toluene. For realism, Zhdun is covered with a special paint solution;
• On August 10, 2016, Margaret Van Breevoort registered the copyright for Homunculus Loxodontus, and already in January 2017 she received the first order for making an exact copy of Zhdun. A fan of the new meme was a businessman from Belgium.

So you met the Zhdun meme. Who it is can be explained simply: a sculpture of a fictitious animal or creature, made by a young artist from Holland, Marguerite Van Breevoort. The author, who frequents the LUMS Medical Center, thus captured a sad patient waiting for his turn to see a doctor.

Photos and memes about Zhdun

In the photo (from right to left): Valentina Matvienko, Dmitry Medvdev, Zhdun

On the picture:

Internet meme "Waiting" - where, how and when did it appear

If sociologists around the world had been told 10-15 years ago that they would have to study some pictures that people send to a friend via the Internet, they would certainly have been very surprised. "Internet? And what do we have to do with it?" Today, the memes that appear every day on the expanses of social networks represent an unplowed field for these specialists. What is one Zhdun worth - either a person, or an animal, or an insect, which in 2017 won the hearts of Runet users in a matter of days. Let's try to figure out where the Zhdun meme came from and what it is.

Fun comes from Holland

In the spring of 2016, a creative exhibition of sculptures opened in Leiden, the Netherlands. The gifted youth exhibited their work at the Leiden Bio Science Park for three months. Among the exhibitors was 26-year-old Magritte van Breevoort, who presented the world with a sculpture of Homunculus loxodontus, whose name roughly translates from Latin as "humanoid elephant." According to Magritte herself, the sculpture symbolizes the patients of the clinic, waiting for their turn to get an appointment with a doctor. Can we say that we answered the question of how and where Zhdun appeared? Definitely not, because the story of the meme called "Waiting" is much more interesting.

Despite the fact that the sculpture quickly gained popularity in the Netherlands and quickly became one of the most frequently photographed sights of the country, it was not known about it for a long time in Russia. Exactly as long as one of the users of the Pikabu site did not tell about it at the beginning of 2017. The phenomenon of the “finest hour” of the Zhdun meme in the CIS, which has not ended to this day, is rather difficult to explain. Mikhail Nikolayevich Zadornov, I would say that our legs grow out of our ability to laugh at ourselves: always waiting for something, not always quick, but definitely good-natured.

Procession to the masses

From Pikabu, where Zhdun came from, he quickly spread throughout the Runet. In addition to the original black and white photo of a sea lion sculpture with the body of a larva and human hands, social media users began to send each other homemade memes for all occasions. Waiting girls appeared “waiting for March 8”, Waiting mother-in-law (“Son-in-law, I’ll stay with you for a while until we get bored”), Waiting girls from the accounting department (“I pressed something and everything disappeared) and many other variations of the meme for all occasions.

The management of Vkontakte decided not to be Zhdun and use the "hype" from the new meme to the maximum - in the spring of 2017, the social network released a series of free stickers with this meme for its users. Communities of needlewomen began to crochet Zhdun figurines, and smart entrepreneurs began to produce Zhdun soft toys for children and adults.

Interesting Facts

Zhdun's sculptor, Magrit van Breevoort, is distinguished not only by his creative talent, but also by his excellent sense of humor. The LUMS Medical Center, at the entrance to which the sculpture is installed, specializes, among other things, in genetic research. This led Magritte to the idea of ​​creating a kind of genetic hybrid that radiates goodness and expects good news.

Immediately after the end of the exhibition, where Homunculus loxodontus won the audience award, Magritte filed a patent for the sculpture, and already in early 2017 she received the first order to make a copy of it for a Belgian businessman.

The sculpture took 75 kilograms of gypsum, which was covered with a mixture of wax and toluene, and only then with paint.

Homunculus loxodontus, although the most famous architecture of the medical center in Leiden, is definitely not the first. It is a kind of tradition to place funny sculptures in the lobby of the center that cheer up adults and children and relieve tension before going to the doctor.

Surely, many of you have seen on the Internet a photo or picture of a gray creature with the head of a sea lion and arms folded on its belly with a funny inscription. At the heart of this phenomenon is the sculpture Homunculus loxodontus ("Humanoid Elephant" from Latin), created by the Dutch artist Margriet van Breefort in 2016. On the Russian Internet, he was nicknamed Zhdun.

Why did Margrit create such a strange creature, what prompted her to such an idea? Here is what the artist herself says:

"I wanted to connect it with patients. Find a way to show that they just have to wait and hope for the best ... There is a lot of genetic research going on in this center. And my character is a kind of failed experiment, he is waiting and hoping that to get better. He's like a big, cute lump of flesh that you want to hug."

Margrit wanted to create an attractive and cute sculpture, so that it could evoke a smile and a feeling of comfort and warmth.

Margrit created the sculpture as part of a competition held by the Leiden University Hospital. From plastic and epoxy resin, she wanted to embody something not directly related to diseases, medicine. In the end, she decided to portray a patient waiting for a diagnosis in line with a doctor.

Initially, the sculpture was installed in front of the children's hospital. Later, the sculpture was moved inside the medical center. Currently, Zhdun is at the entrance to the Leiden University Medical Center.

Initially, as you already understood, Zhdun was not Zhdun - he got such a name when he got into the Russian-language Internet. In 2017, a Russian tourist posted a photo of the sculpture on the Pikabu website. The character very quickly gained popularity and became a well-known meme on the Internet under the name Zhdun.

In Russian-speaking countries, they learned about the sculpture thanks to a photo of a Russian tourist who published it on the Pikabu website. After that, Margrit had an influx of Instagram followers from Russia. Here is what she says about it:

“Suddenly, dozens and dozens of readers from Russia began to appear on my Instagram. I didn’t understand why, but at first I didn’t attach much importance to it.

Then there were more readers from Russia than from Holland. It was very funny. I tried to understand what was going on, I searched through Google. I saw messages in Russian about sculpture, tried to translate them.

In Ukraine and Belarus, Zhdun also became popular, receiving the names "Pochekun", "Pachakun".

Some believe that Zhdun's special popularity in Russia is rooted in the difficulty or impossibility of solving social problems due to the dominance of the bureaucracy, as a result of which expectation is an integral part of Russian reality.

In July 2017, the Russian company CD Land bought the rights to use the Zhdun brand. CD Land planned to resell the brand to other companies, however, so far it has only managed to “become famous” for filing lawsuits against companies for using the image and was able to recover 8.6 million rubles from MegaFon.

And, finally, a selection of funny pictures with Zhdun:

One of the most famous statues in the city is the Zhdun monument (Homunculus Loxondontus), created by local artist Margaret van Breefort. The sculpture has an original shape resembling a mysterious creature with large eyes and an unusual nose. His unusual image quickly spread on the Internet and became the subject of numerous comics.

This is a legless creature with the body of a huge larva, human hands and the head of a sea elephant. It is gray in color and sits on a chair. This image was not chosen by chance. Although the face does not look like a human, nevertheless, it quite accurately expresses the doom and defenselessness of people in line. The folded-arms figure replicates a pose that is typical of patients waiting to be seen.

By the way, the monument to Zhdun is surrounded by 10 other sculptures and does not arouse much interest among local residents. But foreign tourists specially come to look at Zhdun and take funny pictures, especially travelers from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine tend to get here. In 2016, the statue became the most photographed in the city.

How did the monument to Zhdun end up at the university?

In an interview, Marguerite van Bryfortre said that this sculpture is a failed experiment that gives hope for the best and wants to be hugged. The monument was made of epoxy resin and plastic, the mixture of which forms a substance similar to clay. It is quite rough and firm to the touch.

Margaret won a grant on the topic "Biological Sciences", and her creation was placed at the university. The monument to Zhdun is the second sold work of the girl, but she brought her great fame. Van Breefortre was very surprised by such popularity and plans to create a series of similar creatures in the future: Zhdun's wife, children, etc.

Where did Zhdun become famous?

Surely, many of you have seen on the Internet a photo or picture of a gray creature with the head of a sea lion and arms folded on its belly with a funny inscription. At the heart of this phenomenon is the sculpture Homunculus loxodontus ("Humanoid Elephant" from Latin), created by the Dutch artist Margriet van Breefort in 2016. On the Russian Internet, he was nicknamed Zhdun.

Why did Margrit create such a strange creature, what prompted her to such an idea? Here is what the artist herself says:

"I wanted to connect it with patients. Find a way to show that they just have to wait and hope for the best ... There is a lot of genetic research going on in this center. And my character is a kind of failed experiment, he is waiting and hoping that to get better. He's like a big, cute lump of flesh that you want to hug."

Margrit wanted to create an attractive and cute sculpture, so that it could evoke a smile and a feeling of comfort and warmth.

Margrit created the sculpture as part of a competition held by the Leiden University Hospital. From plastic and epoxy resin, she wanted to embody something not directly related to diseases, medicine. In the end, she decided to portray a patient waiting for a diagnosis in line with a doctor.

Initially, the sculpture was installed in front of the children's hospital. Later, the sculpture was moved inside the medical center. Currently, Zhdun is at the entrance to the Leiden University Medical Center.

Initially, as you already understood, Zhdun was not Zhdun - he got such a name when he got into the Russian-language Internet. In 2017, a Russian tourist posted a photo of the sculpture on the Pikabu website. The character very quickly gained popularity and became a well-known meme on the Internet under the name Zhdun.

In Russian-speaking countries, they learned about the sculpture thanks to a photo of a Russian tourist who published it on the Pikabu website. After that, Margrit had an influx of Instagram followers from Russia. Here is what she says about it:

“Suddenly, dozens and dozens of readers from Russia began to appear on my Instagram. I didn’t understand why, but at first I didn’t attach much importance to it.

Then there were more readers from Russia than from Holland. It was very funny. I tried to understand what was going on, I searched through Google. I saw messages in Russian about sculpture, tried to translate them.

In Ukraine and Belarus, Zhdun also became popular, receiving the names "Pochekun", "Pachakun".

Some believe that Zhdun's special popularity in Russia is rooted in the difficulty or impossibility of solving social problems due to the dominance of the bureaucracy, as a result of which expectation is an integral part of Russian reality.

In July 2017, the Russian company CD Land bought the rights to use the Zhdun brand. CD Land planned to resell the brand to other companies, however, so far it has only managed to “become famous” for filing lawsuits against companies for using the image and was able to recover 8.6 million rubles from MegaFon.

And, finally, a selection of funny pictures with Zhdun: