“The Witch’s Dorothy”: On Gaga’s conflation of hero, villain, and witch

By Sarah Cook

In which I get one step closer to articulating Gaga’s intriguing use of failure, if we can equate failure with evil (i.e. witchery). If failure can be the same thing as a bad witch. If a bad witch can be good for certain things.

These notes are in response to Gaga’s performance of “Applause” (Applau-Oz) on Good Morning America, 9 September 2013.

1. That Gaga hovers somewhere between witch, villain and monster. That this hovering is the crucial source of her difference, i.e. her creativity, her power.

Audre Lorde: “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”*

1.2. Gaga embraces various differences – between her repeated incorporation of disability, multiple sexualities, the burqa, & her invitation to those who are “broke or evergreen…black, white, beige, [of] chola descent,” or Othered in any variety of ways – is this her endorsement of the creative power of difference? Does Gaga herself descend “into the chaos of knowledge,” the chaos of identity?

And can a rich white female ever invoke the power of Others in a way that is not problematic?

2. Gaga’s monstrosity has perhaps been established since The Fame Monster, sometimes occurring with a cyborg twist à la “Born This Way,” sometimes as manifesto (think of those haunting images that accompany the “Manifesto of Little Monsters” video done with Nick Knight). But with the inauguration of the ARTPOP era, I think we are seeing a new extension of Gaga’s monstrosity, one that harnesses magic and transformation – the bubbling cauldron and colored smoke in the “Applause” video – along with the multiplicity of stage presences that have occurred during each of her recent live performances. A magical, playful monstrosity. And now, with the incarnation of Oz, we see the previously clear distinction of the hero/villain binary made messy – or perhaps made articulate, specific – through the conflation of wizard/witch/Dorothy.

3. The Wizard isn’t the real villain of the story, we know that. His innocent folly and simple-minded desire for the mask of power – layered upon his own desire simply to go home – is ultimately dismissed: the true villain, the Wicked Witch, is rightfully killed and the Wizard actually provides Dorothy and her friends with what they need. With Gaga’s manifestation of all three of these figures on the stage – good, somewhat evil, more evil – she is therefore complicating our distinctions between the good figure and the bad one. How do we distinguish maniac from evil sorceress from small-town girl when they’re all showing up within and hovering so closely to the same body?

“Pop Culture Was in Art, Now Art’s in Pop Culture in Me”: Thoughts on Lady Gaga’s Inclusion and Embodiment of Art in “Swine” at the 2013 iTunes Festival

By Courtney Constable

Lady Gaga has expressed a strong desire to exist as both an artist and a musician since the beginning of her career. This desire has manifested itself in many ways throughout the years, but was perhaps first exemplified in the Fame era by her earliest persona Candy Warhol, whom Gaga presented to fans as pop music’s female answer to infamous artist Andy Warhol. Using fashion and music as her chosen artistic mediums, Gaga often highlights the influence that pop culture has on the ever-changing world of art. Now, with the beginning of the ARTPOP era, Gaga’s preoccupation with the relationship between art and pop culture has been put center stage. This emphasis was more easily identifiable than ever before in her performance at the 2013 iTunes Festival, particularly during “Swine.”

Gaga first set the stage for “Swine” with her August 2013 VMA “Applause” performance, during which she embodied the role of the canvas, first by wearing a large, square white headpiece (a blank canvas) and then by actually having her face painted during the number (this has been more fully discussed on Gaga Stigmata – here and here). In the week following her VMA performance and leading up to the iTunes Festival, Gaga turned the tables, this time inviting her fans to become the canvas by providing her Twitter followers with a list of “acceptable attire for #Swinefest...” The list included what she described as “ARTCLOTHES,” which she said would be necessary for the “paint zone” that would be present during her show. She later clarified on 28 August that “#ARTCLOTHES are clothes you don’t mind getting covered in live art!” This short dialogue set the tone for Gaga’s unveiling of several tracks from the upcoming ARTPOP album, but gave particular insight into the artistic spectacle that was her performance of the highly anticipated song “Swine”.

The Spectacle of “Offstage” & the Mythos of the “Pop Star’s Comeback”: Preliminary Thoughts on Lady Gaga’s iTunes Festival Performance

By Meghan Vicks

I want to begin by thinking about this movement to put “onstage” what is normally confined to the “offstage.” We first witnessed this during Gaga’s recent VMA “Applause” performance: her hairstylist Frederic Aspiras and makeup artist Tara Savelo were both onstage as integral parts of the performance, and, as Roland Betancourt first commented, their presence onstage actually draws our attention to these operations of a performance that are normally kept hidden from the spectators (e.g. putting on makeup and wigs, etc.). By putting Aspiras and Savelo onstage, we not only begin to contemplate how the spectacle comes into being, but Gaga is positioned as the medium upon which her various spectacles emerge. Gaga is not only the spectacle (Fame-era Gaga, “Telephone”-Gaga, etc.), but also the artistic medium (the canvas, the screen, the marble, the clay, etc.).

What is the Location of Pop? Part III: When Marina Abramović Twerks

By Roland Betancourt

Dance, Dance, Dance, With My Hands, Hands, Hands: Gaga-Pierrot, Repetition, and the Total Artwork in “Applause”

By Ayah Rifai

Mother Monster is miffed. Following a succession of tweets calling for an end to fan wars, excessive gossip, and blogger criticisms after leaks of her new single, “Applause,” surfaced on the Internet, Gaga implores us to change our ways and enter into a post-critical age of pop music so that artists may do what they’re best at: entertaining us.

In my previous contribution to Gaga Stigmata, I argue that what distinguishes Gaga from other pop artists in the music scene today is her contemporary realization of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total artwork” that synthesizes music, drama, poetry, the material arts, choreography, and technology into a unified project. Now that the era of ARTPOP is upon us, Gaga does not disappoint: she remains true to her aesthetic with the release of “Applause.”

“Transforming as Magic”: on Gaga’s GMA appearance and official video release for “Applause” (a partially ekphrastic set of working notes)

By Sarah Cook

1. “I live for making you happy.”

Interview and official video premier on Good Morning America, August 19th, 2013.

The dynamics of fame, of fandom and obsession – an “obsession with transforming” – the expectations of hundreds of thousands of thousands of fans:

“obsessed, obsessed, obsessed about the music.”

When, and where, does failure come in? There will always be failure when so many people are counting on you; that’s fame. But there seems to be another type of failure at play in Gaga’s work: failure as a method; failure as queer – failure as allowing the unsayable to be said. To quote John Pluecker, “I’ve been thinking about how best to fail in this piece. And in failing come to say this thing that I haven’t been able to say.”

Gaga Apotheosis

By Edmund McCaffray

One of the first things that stood out to me from the “Applause” video was the “freak-out” that comes at the song’s climax. The camera shakes, as though either it or perhaps the world can’t contain Lady Gaga in those moments. And for good reason: Lady Gaga herself explodes through a stuttering rush of fast-cuts, appearing in several forms, triumphant and ecstatic.

THE SINGER AND THE SPECTACLE: Applause for Lady Gaga

By Devin O’Neill

Lady Gaga clearly just wants attention.

How does this still manage to be a controversial statement? But it is, it is. It looks so benign, but it hides a number of terrifying realities inside its apparently innocent body, just like she does.

The Chromatomachy: Demeter’s Salvation of Persephone, and other Chromatic Myths

By Roland Betancourt

The other day, I defined chromatomachy – from the Greek chromata (colors) and machia (battle) – as a battle of color on the proportions of the mythic Ancient Greek war of the giants, the gigantomachy, or the war of the Amazons, the Amazonomachy. Lady Gaga’s music video for “Applause” did not fail to manifest precisely this notion of a chromatomachy articulated specifically through the language of Greek myth. The video unfolds like a grotesque burlesque show at the bottom of a minimalist hellscape. The carnivalesque scene is replete with human-animal hybrids, dancers, our familiar Pierrot, a giant magician’s hat, and a colored-smoke emitting cauldron. While the video does not narratively stage a battle between color and black-and-white (as Gaga’s earlier statements might suggest), it certainly constructs a cyclical push-and-pull between the two – like the passing and return of seasons.

The video blatantly stages a modern day riff on the Disney classic Fantasia (1940), a fantasy of music, color, magic, and myth with a playful, at times absurd, humor. Gaga appears in a variety of guises that allude to mythic figures: for example, she emerges out of a giant hat like a magician’s rabbit, yet the figure she embodies is reminiscent more of a Satyr, with her disco-ball pants and perky fiber-optic tail, than a rabbit.

Iconography in Motion: In Preparation for the Chromatomachy

By Roland Betancourt

On 18 August 2011, Lady Gaga uploaded on YouTube a “Pop Video Countdown” of her favorite music videos that changed the landscape of pop culture. Among these she listed David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” which she hails for its simplicity and effectiveness, going on to say, “and that makeup, you can never forget it.”

What is the Location of Pop? A Pop Phenomenology, Part I

By Roland Betancourt

A Pop Music Emergency: From Pallor to Applause

By Laurence Ross and Meghan Vicks

The voice is one akin to the automated airline intercom telling you to secure the mask to your face and breathe normally in order to begin the flow of oxygen. “Thank you for your cooperation during this pop music emergency,” she posts.

This voice is admittedly calmer than the one a mere seven hours before: “A POP MUSIC EMERGENCY IS UNDERWAY 911,” and “911 SUMMON THE MONSTER TROUPES.” Or her post on Saturday: “Wanna grab some shovels and fuck up some hackers?”

Applause: (from the Latin applaudere, to strike upon, clap), primarily the expression of approval by clapping of hands; generally any expression of approval.

What exactly is a state of emergency, let alone a “pop music emergency”?

A state of emergency is a period when the exception to the rule takes over – the state of exception. Normal order is suspended, and what is usually outlawed takes control precisely in order to save the system that is under attack or corrupted, that is under unbearable tension or friction. It turns out (as it often does) that the system is dependent upon that which it normally excludes, outlaws, taboos.

Lady Gaga announces a state of emergency on 12 August 2013, and there emerges “Applause,” accompanied by the jester Gaga-Pierrot. “Applause” and Gaga-Pierrot are thus positioned as the exception to the rule that has come to rule, as the exclusion-from-the-system that is necessary to restore the system, as the outlaw that has come to save us from a corrupted rule.

The questions arise: what is this system that we need saving from? What has caused this state of emergency?

CODA: Lady Gaga is Over

By Roland Betancourt

– If you don’t like pop music, you should turn this off.
– Lady Gaga is no longer relevant.
– Ever since Born This Way, she’s a flop.
– DO NOT buy her new single ‘Applause’ on iTunes.
– Give her no A-P-P-L-A-U-S-E.
– DON’T dance to the song at all.
– DO NOT buy ARTPOP on November 11.
– She’s over.

ARTPOP

STOP THE DRAMA.
START THE MUSIC.

As I wrote and published my initial response to Gaga’s cover-art for “Applause,” Lady Gaga was making an appearance at Showgirls, a weekly drag show on Monday nights at Micky’s in West Hollywood. Gaga appeared alongside drag-queens Courtney Act and RuPaul’s Drag Race alumna Shangela, who achieved Drag Race fame with her sketch of Laquifa, the P.M.P. (the Post Modern Pimp-ho). The two queens were dressed in Pierrot costumes, and wore the “Applause” cover-art makeup. As they lip-synced “Applause,” Gaga followed them around on stage with a video camera and a mounted LED light recording them (and at times the audience). Gaga also seems to have recorded several of the other drag queens’ performances as attested by a pic tweeted by Shannel:

Here, as a coda to my earlier essay, I wish to focus on Gaga’s filming of “Applause,” which has been described by blogs as being for the “Applause” lyric video, though whether this will only be for the lyric video is yet to be confirmed.

The performance at Micky’s resonates with the issues I addressed in my essay, notably: the full-fledged and unambiguous manifestation of the Pierrot iconography as a stock character, and the crucial connection between Pierrot and the Manifesto of Little Monster’s “Jester.” In the performance, Gaga reveals Pierrot as a function of drag: his stock character is duplicated on stage with the dueling Pierrots, demonstrating the trope’s duplicability with no real or original other – other than the typological form of Pierrot, which is meant to be proliferated, embodied, and performed (never just a re-performance). The use of this proto-viral image serves these tropes well and, of course, responds directly to Gaga as videographer.

GAGA PIERROT: Something of a Devoted Jester

By Roland Betancourt

[T]he costume of Pierrot worn by the mime becomes the white field into which cast shadows are thrown, creating a secondary set of traces that double two of the elements crucial to the image. One of these is the Pierrot’s hand as it points to the camera; the other is the camera itself, the apparatus that is both the subject of the mime’s gesture and the object of recording it. On the surface of the mime’s clothing, these shadows, which combine the conventional language of gesture (pointing) and the technical mechanism of recording (camera) into a single visual substance, have the character of merely ephemeral traces. But the ultimate surface on which the multiple traces are not simply registered, but fixed, is that of the photograph itself.

As an art historian, this is a stereotypical (albeit groan-worthy) place to start: a quote by the loved/reviled modernist art historian Rosalind E. Krauss. In her 1978 article “Tracing Nadar,” published in the journal October, Krauss described a late-nineteenth century photographic representation of the stock-character Pierrot by the French photographer Nadar (aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), focusing on the question of the photographic medium itself and its capacity to capture the indexical trace of its object – that is, on the power of the photograph to capture the objects that it represents through the physical impression of light within the camera that has bounced off the body of the sitter. In the ekphrastic description (cited above), Krauss sees the photograph of Pierrot pointing to the camera as manifesting the logic of the photographic medium, with Pierrot himself operating emblematically.  

Félix Nadar (1820-1910), Adrien Tournachon (1825-1903), Pierrot the Photographer, also called The Mime Artist Deburau, 1854. Salted paper print. H. 28.6; W. 21 cm© RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Krauss’s reflections on medium specificity, medium reflexivity, and other related modernist myths dominated the fields of modern and contemporary art from the 1970s to the 1990s. Building upon and responding to the work of contemporary mentors, friends, and fellow critics, Krauss was accompanied in the crusade for medium-specificity by figures such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, who saw medium-specificity as the paradigm of modernist and late-modern artistic production. Essays such as Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoön” or Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” are taught in any survey of modern and contemporary art – and often even find their way into the most expansive surveys of global histories of art.

Hence, when I first saw the cover for Lady Gaga’s single “Applause” from ARTPOP, Krauss’s ekphrasis on Pierrot as a medium condition resounded in my mind. Surrounded by a voluptuous and crinkly white garment, Gaga’s head emerges from within the folds. She wears a tight, black skullcap, and features a white-powdered face. The image is strikingly in keeping with the iconography of the stock-character Pierrot of the Commedia dell’Arte, whose trope dates back to the seventeenth century, and is famously depicted, for example, in a 1718 painting attributed to Antoine Watteau, now in the Louvre. The character Pierrot serves as a particularly adept emblem for ARTPOP given that he was a figure of popular culture who nevertheless found its way into the most notable art of his periods, from Watteau’s canvas to Nadar’s picture – produced in the cutting-edge medium of photography. As “Applause” says: “Pop culture was in art, now art’s in pop culture, in me.”