We are all Picasso, Baby

On Wednesday, 10 July 2013, Jay Z performed “Picasso Baby” from his album Magna Carta Holy Grail for six straight hours at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, interacting with the invitation-only audience made up of many of the art-world’s elite, including performance artist Marina Abramovic. Many agree that Jay Z’s performance draws inspiration from Abramovic’s MoMA show “The Artist is Present,” and Jay Z himself acknowledged her influence.

The performance was filmed and edited into a docu-music-video, titled “Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film,” which was released on 2 August 2013. In that video, Jay Z explains:

Concerts are pretty much performance art with the venues changed. And just by nature of the venues the performance changes, right? You’re in a smaller venue it’s a bit more intimate, so you get to feel the energy of the people. In a concert, especially a large concert, all that energy comes to you. Like, what do you do with that energy? You know so today, it’s kind of an exchange. We have some way to drop it back off, you know. When art started becoming part of the galleries, what became a separation between culture, and even in hip hop people were like, almost like, art is too bourgeois. We’re artists, we’re alike, we’re cousins. That’s what’s really exciting for me, bringing the worlds back together.

We were immediately drawn to the performance’s “stigmata effect.” That is, the artist doesn’t just perform for the audience; the audience (made up of critics, fans, other artists, children) becomes an equal and necessary part of the performance. “Picasso Baby” takes place not just in or through the body of Jay Z, but also through the bodies of the people at that event. Everyone becomes “Picasso Baby.” As the “Manifesto of Little Monsters” positions Gaga as the “devoted jester” to her kingly and queenly fans, renders Gaga the mirror that reflects – and therefore embodies – her fans, so Jay Z’s performance changes depending upon who comes before him: sometimes he watches the audience sing or dance, sometimes they mess him up, and they always impact his movements, his engagement, his spectacle. We’re tempted to ask: who’s interpreting whom? Who’s viewing whom? Who’s influencing whom? Who’s the artist and who’s the audience? But these are questions that no longer make sense during the “stigmata effect.” As Gaga would say, “There is no chicken or egg.”

We guess we could ask: are we part of the performance? Do we experience the “stigmata effect”? Or is that performance bounded by a specific place (Pace Gallery, Chelsea) and time (6 hours; 10 July 2013), and we’re merely spectators, not participants in the spectacle?

We think interpretation wounds the performance once again, lets its blood to let us in, allows us to become “Picasso Baby.”  

In this spirit, we invited some of our favorite writers to contribute to a roundtable discussion of the performance, to build a conversation that is a stigmata of “Picasso Baby” at Pace Gallery.

+ + Kate Durbin & Meghan Vicks + +

Pop Time

By Becca Klaver

This is the second piece in our series on the video for “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for the first piece.

Something happened to cheesy in 2011

and this has a lot to do with the saxophone

The Varsity online reports:

“Last year in an interview with Exclaim,

Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, right after

the band’s critically lauded Halcyon Digest was released,

predicted that in 2011 everyone would have

a saxophone on their record because,

‘Saxophones are just cool.’”

You can hear it on Destroyer’s Kaputt

You can see it on Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory”

And while everyone wants to say

Kenny G

it’s actually Lou Reed or the Stones

it’s actually Clarence Clemons, ailing

it’s the heart of rock and roll

The first time I watched “The Edge of Glory” video

I didn’t “like” or “dislike” [click here]

But I thought it was incredibly cheesy

cheesy in a way that made me want to look away

embarrassed for The Haus of Gaga

for firing the original director, Joseph Kahn

for losing the mermaid theme, the Brooklyn Bridge,

the “Couture Doctors” in scrubs and black gloves (“think Dr. 90210”)

the “Puerto Rican or Dominican type badass”

“willing to kiss Lady Gaga” (“think Enrique Iglesias”)

the military men holding M16 rifles

“The Edge of Glory”

is cheesy the way saxophones are cheesy

the way Rent and West Side Story are cheesy

the way 80s MTV looks cheesy

the way early Lady Gaga videos were cheesy

(“Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)”

was released

only two years earlier to the day

remember we are on

Pop Time

and we race and race but never catch up)

Cheesiness is meant to make you look away

so were alien prosthetics meant to

as were giant shoulderpads

and meat dresses

Gaga-Gaze makes you look away

stunned or embarrassed

and then look back again

only to find

she’s raced on to the next thing

On the same day

“The Edge of Glory” video premiered

Gaga’s meat dress—

after visiting a taxidermist

who put it in a meat locker

and treated it with chemicals—

traveled to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

where it is in a glass case

with canisters that soak up the humidity

and soak up the glutens

There are gels to “control the environment”

They’ve painted it redder

to make it look more meaty

less jerky

There are methods of preservation

and resurrection

known only to animal stuffers

and Hollywood hustlers

and The Haus of Gaga

If the 90s are back

(let’s not say “back,”

let’s say “reclaimed”

or “polished off”)

if the 90s are polished off

then irony should be, too

but irony came down with the white dust

10 years ago

and doesn’t dare

be so cavalier, so arrogant again

(Conan crashes to basic cable,

Chandler’s pilots flop and flop)

If the 90s have been reclaimed

then at the very least cheesy

should be

out of the question,

which is why

63% of voters have clicked “dislike”

for “Edge of Glory”

They look away look away look away

as they are meant to—

You can tell that’s studio-lot New York, not real New York.

Backbends? Spinning around a lamppost? Thrusting against the rail?

How can she dance like that?

Why is her lip-synching so off?

Seriously, an old black guy with a saxophone on a stoop?

Turns out everybody’s always lip-synching

and those spin moves are quotations

That guy, my dear, is a legend

and half of New Yorks are filmed

and manufactured in Los Angeles

This isn’t the 80s in the 90s

This is the 80s in 2011

We are the tweens of a new century

and our bodies are changing

and we are urgent

Is that smoke or steam?

Reference and

reputation and

reality

lose their power

when expectations are

raised

to mythological proportions

If “Born This Way” was goddess myth

and “Judas” Christian myth

and the mer-myth of “Edge of Glory” was scrapped

what are we left with?

“The Edge of Glory” sounds like

an intense love song

but there is no lover

only a man on a stoop playing a saxophone

There is a moment (4:47)

when Gaga lies on her back on the sidewalk

at the bottom of the stoop

and points to Clarence as she sings “you”

But there is nothing sexy about her point

She could be pointing at the saxophone

And maybe she is

Music as lover, très Gaga—

Because of Music

Fame becomes Monster and maybe eventually

becomes Glory

But what is Glory?

The Glory Monster must be

The Fame Monster’s benevolent twin

Glory is what swirls around Fame

what shapes it

arriving before or after or out-of-time

Music without all the trappings

Something simpler, closer to home

All the adulation without all the flashbulbs

of “Paparazzi”

“The Edge of Glory” is all this, too

And it is cheesy to bask in one’s own Glory

It is nearly absurd

when one already makes the most money

and garners the most Google hits

It is certainly absurd

to bask in one’s own Glory

while one’s apartment may be on fire

and it’s the middle of the night

and no one else is around

and that’s a saxophone, not an M16

Where is the danger in “Edge of Glory”?

She doesn’t need saving

She just wants to dance

Lady Gaga is 25

The most famous girl in her 20s

Now that Britney and Christina and Paris

are all turning 30 this year

like me

And if “Edge of Glory”

is Gaga’s quarterlife crisis

then let it be

Let it be the cheesy bad dream of a fire

and an escape and a saxophone and a stoop

Let it be the knowledge that an edge

is a verge

and a cliff

Let her gaze wander back to the videos

that played on TV in  1986

when Stefani was born

that way, Gagaesque

Let it wander straight into

the mytho-futuristic

And let our gaze turn away, turn away

from something so simple and cheesy

and glorious

we can barely watch

Coda

            for saxophone

I wrote this poem, printed it out,

went to a beer garden in another borough

& didn’t look at it once all night,

not even in the bathroom.

There was a stage on a cement platform

in the middle of the huge yard,

empty save for smokers & shortcutters.

When I came home & learned

Clarence Clemons had died

the fame and glory and danger

seemed all his.

Lady Gaga, clairvoyant or not,

got it right

with only two days’ retrospect

(we are on Pop Time, come hither,

go hence, but quickly).

Cheesy becomes poignant just like that.

You go out, you come home.

This song started with a prediction

and ends with a prophecy.

Now kids in their 20s

far from Asbury Park

will know Clarence Clemons

and what he was doing on that stoop.

Ghosting into the future.

This is the myth of Lady Gaga as sibyl,

in which she of all people

gets out of the spotlight and,

writes Heraclitus,

with frenzied mouth

uttering things 

not to be laughed at,

unadorned and unperfumed,

yet reaches to a thousand years

with her voice

The saxophone, the bagpipes

spirit blowing through the reeds

5,109,428 views

hangin’ on a moment with you

Author Bio:

Becca Klaver is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where she studied screenwriting, English, Gender Studies, and Spanish, and of Columbia College Chicago, where she received an MFA in Poetry. She is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature at Rutgers University. With Arielle Greenberg, she is editing a collection of contemporary poems for teenage girls, a project inspired by an article they co-wrote entitled “Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets – a Professor and Graduate Student – Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence” (College Literature 36.4; to be reprinted in Critical Insights: Sylvia Plath [Salem Press, 2011]). She is also the author of a collection of poems, LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), and a chapbook, Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost, 2009). Klaver is co-founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, and has taught literature, writing, and editing in a variety of traditional and nontraditional settings.

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The Femme Outré & Other Real Fakers: Going Gaga for Artifice and Femininity in the 21st Century

by Becca Klaver

Gaga, what can I say but that I recognized you the moment I saw you. You were a star, a sign of everything I knew about women and artifice, taken to the most illogical, asymmetrical extreme. Over and over they call your outfits outré, from the French to push beyond bounds, and everywhere you go you push beyond, casting mirror-ball light onto the limits we thought we were too post-post-post- to still believe in. You put the shock back in pop, and this has everything to do with gender.

I went to Catholic school, too – replete with uniforms and uniform worldviews. When I was in eighth grade, a runaway to public school, my new best friend took me on as a makeover project. Raiding her closet and thrift stores down by the university, we tried out Raver, Hippie, Glam, and Grunge. It was fun, but nothing stuck. What I really wanted from my newfound fashion freedom, it turned out, was to be able to mix and match all of these prepackaged looks, and to apply touches that belonged to none of them. I spent high school combining and recombining, indulging a thirst for texture, color, armor. At the end of senior year, the feathers, velour, faux fur, animal prints, long gloves, and rhinestones helped me secure “Most Original Style” alongside “Most Likely To Win on Jeopardy.” In college, I acquired a vocabulary for what I was doing – performing, and specifically performing the straight-girl-as-femme – through a gender studies minor, a particularly fantastic writing class called “Scandal, Femme Fatales, and the Information Age,” and my residence in Los Angeles, whose artifice I thought a very suspect thing.

So you see, I recognize you, Gaga. People like us – artists, poets, singers, dancers, fashionistas – need, or once needed, to perform, bedeck, exhibit our identities as others, little monsters, queers, aliens, artists. It happens in every town. And in every town, now, people know who you are. And so they know who we are: you made us all famous. Do all your fans say, I feel like I know her? Some celebrities cultivate an aura of remoteness. But in spite of your gleaming armature, in spite of your exacting poise while performing, you seem like one of us. Vulnerable in interviews, contradicting yourself from one to the next, staging your identity every day even as you struggle to articulate it. And you do try, seeming gosh darn earnest at every turn, patting your heart as your eyes fill up with tears, straining your brow, shyly avoiding eye contact, even slumping your shoulders, hands clasping instead of clawing, uninterested in posturing during conversation. I’m real, you want to say, not artificial, and then you move over to the stage and become unreal, or realer, or the thing called Gaga.

They all say you had to say goodbye to Stefani, or that you do daily. I’m not sure I believe it. Before I do, I would like to know what that moment looks like. Is it when you put on the first mask, or the last? The heels or the eyelashes? Is it the moment you start singing? Or does Stefani vanish from the second-story window at the sight of the first cameraman of the day, lunging from the shrubs? I don’t want anyone to separate who I am with my makeup on from who I am without it. I’m the same person.

You went so far down the gender spectrum, you circled back around on the other side. As Anne Sexton writes, A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind. A woman who is too much woman, too unsettlingly woman, must be something else – must be in drag or a freak but not just woman. When they asked Google if you were a hermaphrodite, when the kids playing foursquare whispered loudly that you had a penis and then squealed and shoved each other, that was a schoolyard way of saying that you had taken woman so far beyond bounds that they didn’t recognize it anymore. Besides, who would wear so many outlandish outfits unless she were hiding something? Isn’t hyperbolic style just a big cover-up? Well, yes: gender is often the very thing we hide or exaggerate when we hide or exaggerate ourselves. Your pixellated crotch on the “Telephone” video proves you’re in on the joke.

The guy from the New York Times asked, “How important is artifice to you?”, and you replied, “Artifice? As in artificial?” He clarified: “No, as in a construct, a stratagem.” Then you said, “I don’t know, that word implies artificial to me. I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically. I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.”

I’ll admit that I was surprised by – and amused by the irony of – the fact that you weren’t familiar with the word artifice, but the artist isn’t, and shouldn’t have to be, the critic. I do have a problem with all of these definitions, though, each of which define artifice as a negative concept. Artificial. A construct. A stratagem. Like the related word artful, which can mean crafty as well as skillful, artifice as a concept rides the line between trickery and creativity, between casting a spell and making a work of art. When the artwork is the body (“I am a walking piece of art”) – and not only the body, but its décor, and its gestures, and its mise-en-scène (that is, and the entire image-matrix in which a persona is bound up) – the audience becomes especially convinced that there is a difference between Artifice (Bad) and Art (Good).

I am not so convinced. When artifice is seen as the opposite of authenticity, naturalness, reality, and openness we forget (or maybe, never knew) the fact that artifice and femininity have had an uneasy relationship for most of modernity. Giggles, skirts . . . blanched deference, hesitation . . . the trappings of femininity have been “optional” in theory for a long time, but not until the late twentieth century in some privileged countries on this planet did girls and women start to have a real choice about how girly, womanly, or feminine they wanted to appear. Indeed, in some cultures in 2010, the costumes of femininity are enforced by armed guards. And beyond that, modern western culture has long policed the idea that it is “natural” for women to behave in modest, flirty, or coy ways – that it is “natural” for women to be artful – as in, conniving and strategic. What you do, Gaga, that is so magnificent, is to realign these costumes and mannerisms of femininity with artifice instead of naturalness, thereby calling into focus – and celebrating and redeeming – the unnaturalness of it all.

Cultural theorists have been saying for at least two decades that gender is a performance, but not until you, Gaga, did they have their glittering, sequined exemplar. And you underscore the fact that femininity is not “natural,” but not “artificial” in a bad way, either – on the contrary, femininity can be performed quite artfully. It may take a Haus of designers to create you, but you are nothing if not dazzlingly crafted. You can “be yourself” and “be authentic” especially if you are an artist of selfhood: the performance is transparent; more than that, the performance is all there is. The adolescent fear of being perceived as “fake” and the “deep self” of psychoanalysis are traded in for the sheen of surface.

Those who find you inscrutable probably haven’t been paying very close attention to what’s happened to femininity as it moved into the twenty-first century. They might not know what a big problem and question it is for The Thinking Girl Now. We apply eye shadow, or we don’t. We wear pants, or we don’t. (“No pants.”) We giggle ecstatically, or we don’t. We smile and nod while someone speaks to us, or we don’t. We call ourselves girls well into our 20s and 30s, or we don’t. There are so many ways to perform girl and/or woman now; granted, most of the performers don’t recognize their behaviors as performances. But for those of us who do, who must, we now have something – someone – to point to in order to explain what has happened: the change that’s come upon us all, the detachable femininity that we recognize because we enact it on a smaller, more private scale. It is easy to point to you, because you are everywhere. And whether a widespread comprehension of gender as a performance has seeped into popular consciousness or not, we know, through you, that gender performance has hit the mainstream (with all the complications of commodification that this implies).

You shout it out from every page and screen: Once feminine costumes and behaviors became regularly detached from women (in theory, through gender, queer, and feminist studies; in practice, through drag and burlesque, through the hallway and the sidewalk), femininity may have looked the same, but its function changed. The fact that biological women can perform femininity, and the audience can sense that this is a performance, is the fundamental difference. And perhaps this crucial change also provides an explanation for all of the “Lady Gaga hermaphrodite” online searches. It’s simply hard to believe that a “real woman” would find a need to perform femininity – so, instead of making the conceptual leap toward accepting detachable (unzippable, unbuttonable, unvelcroable) femininity, people question your gender instead. As Ella Bedard points out, “[Gaga] cites iconic, often gendered identities without indicating the existence of a ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ self that these performances can be said to mask.” So, people go looking for the empirical evidence of a “‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ self” – that is, for evidence of the young woman known as Stefani Germanotta – in the place they usually go for fact-checks, the Google search box.

When an artist like you comes along to declare, to the tune of incredibly catchy pop, that we’re all freaks, made of fake parts in authentic assemblages, the whole world sits up and listens. Or gets up and dances. And when a woman artist like you dresses every day like she’s on a runway or in a museum installation, “no pants” and all (or nothing), we are reminded not only of those cultural places in which femininity is on display, but of the basic fact that femininity, by virtue of being, historically, the gendered quality linked to display, is both an act and an art. Those of us who perform it consciously are real fakers. And we’ve got tickets to the ball.

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Author Bio:

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost, 2009). A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is also editing, with Arielle Greenberg, an anthology of poems for teenage girls. Becca holds degrees from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago, and is currently a PhD student in English at Rutgers University. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY, and blogs at the pomo expo.

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