HOUNDSTOOTH FAME IS TOO GREASY FOR GLITTER : GAGA AS THE GUTTERDRUG : FAME & THE ANAGIRLS LIMITED $$$ ENGAGEMENT! : A RETROSPECTIVE OF PRODUCTION-VALUE FASHION; OR, AN ANALOGY INVOLVING GLITTER, VOMIT, AND PAIN.

By Carina Finn

the details scream over-privileged teen aristocracy, the jamaican-flag knits & houndstooth nails. everyone needs some low-culture kitsch in their closet; if you’re under 25 & “legit” you have to have it. 

“POP MUSIC WILL NEVER BE LOWBROW”

pop music makes its own language & the language is made of refrains. the repetition of the hook which is a mask all monsters wear is a loop of constant passwords. if the passwords do not unlock value that is to say style or worth then the password is of little consequence and is repeated endlessly (see: rebecca black’s FRIDAY or The Black Eyed Peas’ I GOTTA FEELING).

In the original video version of FRIDAY, the illusion of style is chemically reproduced; the image is screenprinted in toxic ink, the inhabitants of the video are uncannily animated mannequins produced by the same kinds of machines that produce pop with a high production-value. because the economy of pop music is dictated by either cost or exclusivity, rebecca black’s video has a low production-value because its language is not exclusive and its materials are not costly.

In this hipster cover of FRIDAY, the password does not acquire its referent-value by means of repetition, but by its imitation of an exclusivity that acquires its value via a semantic disjunction. the components of the image projected in this video have randomly assigned values, and the viewer must work harder to establish objective correlative indicated by the combination of coke-bottle glasses, tie-dye, harmonica descants, college sweatshirts, tween-girl pop lyrics, etc.

Contrast these with THE FAME PART ONE, in which the password, or refrain, is not repeatedly endlessly – it is not even complete. A constant loop of pop creates a language that is minor and exclusive and therefore raises its value. The language can exist because it steals from itself, makes a hinge of its own parts.

EITHER A MINOR LANGUAGE CONNECTS TO MINOR ISSUES, THEREBY PRODUCING PARTICULAR RESULTS, OR IT REMAINS ISOLATED, VEGETATES, TURNS BACK ON ITSELF AND PRODUCES NOTHING

“I do not think that is an elitist attitude” [i]

THE POWER-VALUE OF GAGA is imitation, intimidation. the fashion is a repetition of the antithesis of such, such that the imitators become the gods themselves, the paradigm like a virus rather than a symptom. in this way, gaga’s power, which is desire (defined by the fact that her acolytes wear her style like masks), infects her public with military tactics. she demands that they comply they acquiesce it’s their desire to be loved by their object, so they make of their bodies, idols.

IDOLATRY IS AN ESCAPE FROM FORMAL REDUNDANCY

the repetition of a system : ESCAPES FROM POWER FORMATIONS. DESIRE IS NOT INFORMED, INFORMING; IT IS NOT INFORMATION OR CONTENT. in which case is the system by which the same is conveyed – form rather than information, the matrix which defines a quality of GAGA-NESS, into which a given agent might input the components allowed by their own economy and press it through the mesh. the result is a disposable fabric which can be mass-produced, becomes weaker with every wear, shifts the status of desirability of the wearer from a concentrated fabric with a high production-value to one which has been stretched to a level of transparency due to a scarcity of luxurious resources; or, DESIRE IS NOT SOMETHING THAT DEFORMS BUT THAT DISCONNECTS, CHANGES, MODIFIES, ORGANIZES OTHER FORMS, AND THEN ABANDONS THEM[ii] –

or, fashion is a collective constant present: In The Fashion System, Barthes says that Fashion Time is “festival time,” that “festivity is tyrannical, it conquers time” (Barthes, 250). Fashion Time is time and its afterlife, the moment of the outfit & its temporal death, an undeath that endlessly cycles through the collective consciousness as Fashion continues to infect itself with a constant rebirth. Fashion Time is of and outside of time but never in Time.[iii]

time in THE FAME is a fantasy of form. the action of being fashionable is urgent; there is an object of some value that must be acquired immediately. there is a sale – this implies rarity, as this particular value is only available for a limited amount of time. to turn value into an object is to commodify the insubstantial substance à STYLE.

the value of the individual song is cut so the value becomes the conglomerate, the collective. the soundtrack changes songs like outfits. every hook is on sale there is a small tear of entrance. the tear is a needle-hole, or a lesion, which allows the contamination of the body by the drug machine.

teenagers ripping apart sales GIVE ME MY DISCOSTICK just dance wearing sunglasses breaking glass with glittery scepters and taking taking taking and wearing black and finding the one thing they want which has value only because they want it; or,

TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY is I WANT THAT machine.

“We must begin by enlarging the definition of drugs” (Felix Guattari, MACHINIC JUNKIES).

we must acknowledge FASHION-AS-DRUG. we must look to the origin of the term HEROIN-CHIC, in which the body that seeks to imitate purity of form for the sake of fashion must suffer by entering into the physical language of fashion, which requires a salve, a rupture of “reality,” an injection :

everything that contributes to provide a sensation of belonging to something, of being somewhere, along with the sensation of forgetting oneself, are ‘drugs’[iv]

what is the value of the sick life, or the life of the sickness, the natural development of disease?

the fashion junkie, the heroin-chic, the organless body, the anoretic, the reverent. these things have value they are LIMITEDTIMEONLY! this is because they are going to die, soon. their extremity, their excessive withholding of “nutrition” in favor of “luxury”, is fatal. the fact that it is fatal is part of its appeal. a drug can kill you; that’s why it’s fun. we want to be saved, we want absolution, we want to die.

“this ‘medicine,’ this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence”[v]

the teenagers take to the streets they are starving. they take bites of things with value they spit it out they taste like poison. the ultimate fame is adoring degradation.

the rush of glitter-vomit is a drug. it feels good to be watched, adored, sacrificed. the point is to adore oneself to the point of destruction. the point is an absolute quality of vanity. to love the imitation so much so it’s ”true”. to lose oneself in the materials of oneself, to be constantly breaking, combusting, on purpose. to keep making ruptures, to keep reinventing, to keep up with the economy one must constantly be emptying. becoming-nothing is style; fashion is waste. the wasteless are the totally wasted, they break.

THE RESIDUAL CRYSTALS THAT CONSTITUTE MACHINIC DOPE CAN PENETRATE THE ENTIRE PLANET, REANIMATE AND RELAUNCH IT[vi]

in order to be reborn one must die. there has to be an ultimate excess; the body must first be emptied, then filled, then emptied and filled again, must be pressed & pressed many times through the mesh of reality to become unreal, to transcend the organic, to achieve fame – to not need. to exist in a constant revolution-state of teen which has value because it is always-rare; or, the becoming-body is always limited-edition.

inside of the temporality of fame time is malleable, shifts, condensed and stretches, is defined by a quantity of light; or, glitter. the light burns holes in the fabric, makes lesions, or sites of affliction, harbors for drugs. the need of the constant-present is continuous destruction, never-ending consumption of the materials of construction. there has to be a loop. there has to be a digesting, a regression. one gets a bit obsessed with the process of crafting the body such that value is a goal rather than an assignation, an alienated, all-encompassing sign with no signification other than fame.

in this case, fame forms an absolute-zero, attainable only when the subject has transcended substance, become a specter of reflection, smashed glitter, vain annihilation.

---

[i] Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions: I AM AN IDEA THIEF p. 21

[ii] Some of the above CAPITALISED text is from Guattari, Soft Subversions: The Adolescent Revolution, p. 156

[iii] The italicized text is from my talk, THE COLLECTIVE FASHION CONSCIOUSNESS, presented at the IU Collections and Collaborations Conference in Spring 2010 . The full text is linked here: http://ladyblogblah.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-collective-consciousness-look-at-my-outfit-we%E2%80%99re-at-war/

[iv] Guattari, Machinic Junkies, p. 158

[v] Derrida, “Dissemination,” p.1845

[vi] Guattari, Soft Subversions: Machinic Junkies p. 161

Author Bio:

Carina Finn is an MFA student at the University of Notre Dame. Her chapbook, I HEART MARLON BRANDO, was recently released by Wheelchair Party, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SUPERMACHINE, TYPO, boo!, Alice Blue, CutBank, Seven Corners, and elsewhere. She has won two Academy of American Poets prizes and been nominated for a Pushcart. Her plays have been performed at Notre Dame and The Bowery Poetry Club.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Puke On Gaga – Honoring Vomit

By Rachel Clark

In this short film, used both as an opening to the second act of the Monster Ball tour and previously exhibited within the SHOWstudio exhibition “Inside/Out,” Gaga is first seen elegantly dressed in a Marko Mitanovski gown. Standing atop a small marble podium in a plain studio setting, her all white costume and stony expression are reminiscent of the classical sculpture of Greece and Rome. The sharp constructs of Gaga’s dress, whilst shifting gracefully in the breeze of a wind machine, reflect the textual carving of fabric in Renaissance masterpieces such as Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.” In an unflinching, powerful stance, Gaga embodies these two celebrated canons as a perfectly constructed object, stationed in homage to fine art and high fashion for the twenty-first century.

Yet, within seconds, the image is disrupted. We hear Gaga scream “Make it Stop!” on the overlaying soundtrack as her legs are reversed, thereby challenging the previous illusion of the ideal, and forcing its reassessment in the wake of this now divided human body. She is at once a beautiful object and a physically fractured human subject as the statement “I’m A Free Bitch” begins to permeate the disco beat soundtrack. These two declarations provide a subtle commentary to the visual discord. “Make It Stop!” is screamed like a battle cry, functioning as a catalyst for the corruption of the harmonious opening scene. The classical quest for visual perfection is abandoned in favor of the twisted image Gaga becomes. In this disruption, Gaga is freed from art’s confining rules regarding the beautiful and logical, and becomes capable of embodying the monstrous and fantastic in its place.

The title “Puke On Gaga” is taken from the film’s following segment, wherein the New York performance artist Millie Brown is seen straddling a now seated Gaga, vomiting a stream of sparkling, luminous paint upon her. Significantly, Brown is dressed in all black, wearing an outfit that fans of Gaga will associate with her pre-Gaga Stefani Germanotta Band stage attire. Gaga has also previously referenced Stefani Germanotta in the video for “Telephone,” where she cast her younger sister as her younger self.  The effect in this case is that we bear witness to Stefani Germanotta vomiting on Lady Gaga.

Some have suggested that the vomit should be interpreted as an act of disgust, an expression of a repressed disappointment felt by Germanotta that her past identity had to be erased in order to achieve worldwide success as Lady Gaga. It could be that this is an act of rebellion against the superficiality of the Lady Gaga construction, but then, how does this sit with Gaga’s frequent refusal to separate these two personas? As she herself often attests, Stefani Germanotta was always Lady Gaga: “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.”

Modern artists have frequently explored their relationship to their own bodily fluids. Marcel Duchamp upturned his urinal, Piero Manzoni canned his “Artist’s Shit,” and today, Millie Brown performs by vomiting rainbows of colored milk onto blank canvases in order to “use [her] body to create art in a way that challenges people’s perception of beauty.

In a literal act of artistic regurgitation, Brown/Germanotta turns her insides out, and splatters the superficially ideal image of Gaga with the glittering colors of her interior self. There is no medium of creation other than the physical body in this moment. Against the traditions of formal art training and beauty, which the unwavering Gaga-as-sculpture represents, there are no words, no consumable images, only a visceral demonstration of the potential of turning what is inside us into an artistic act.

In Gagavision 43, Gaga states, “the creative process is fifteen minutes of vomiting … it all happens in fifteen minutes this giant regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings, then I spend days, months, years fine tuning. But the idea is you have to honor your vomit, you have to honor those fifteen minutes.” What does it mean to honor one’s vomit? Why does Gaga feel affinity with what would be an abject act? The answer, I believe, lies in the physicality of the act itself. Our bodily expulsions are the most primal of life experience, and we are often powerless to control them. When our bodies reject these fluids, they are forced outside ourselves as we are forced outside of ourselves when we observe them. As Julia Kristeva has argued, they are made by and of us, yet they embody an entire otherness in their gross exterior existence. To observe the abject is to briefly rupture consciousness, as the many paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity come to dwell upon a terrible truth of physical existence. To honor one’s vomit is to honor the power of this realization: that we can never escape bodies, that before culture we are animals, and that understanding is not akin to reality. This sensation, a compelling leap into deep thinking and primal repression, has been described by Giles Deleuze as a “discordant accord,” and its potential to create a collision of the senses can be understood as central to the world’s most affective works of art. Via a stream of shimmering blue Gaga invites us to find this artistic potential inside of ourselves, and regurgitate our own thoughts and feelings without shame or regret.

As we hear Gaga scream “Make It Stop” once again, the film cuts to a close up of Gaga eating a raw bovine heart. The story goes that Nick Knight challenged her to do this as means of externalizing the traumatic fears she faced concerning her father’s heart surgery. The effect is a conceptual reversal of the previous image of externalized artistic creativity, as we watch Gaga devour the symbolically laden internal organ.

One must not only produce to create art, but also consume: such is the cyclical nature of creativity. In her first V Magazine column, Gaga asserts the necessity of consumption to inspiration: she considers the act of re-appropriation as both transformative and radical. In Gaga’s interpretation, the creation of art is marked with violence and suffering, as illustrated in the grotesque images of self-induced vomiting and eating raw flesh. As tears of blood are seen to run down her cheeks as she bites, her voice is heard listing the names of tragic beauty queens in what is both a tribute to the damages of fame and a testament to its immortality.

The final scene shows Gaga in the studio being decorated, powdered, gagged, and bound by Matty Dada (the creative director of Haus of Gaga at the time of filming). Gaga retains her silent, objective composure, becoming the passive puppet of fame that the world’s superstars are commonly imagined to be whilst her image is physically developed by a rough-handed assistant. Her alteration by the hands of Dada becomes gradually more aggressive, the connotations of bondage increasing as Gaga is bandaged, blind-folded, braced, and strapped to pieces of wood that imitate the hoisting of a figure onto an easel, or even crucifix. Again a theme of immortality emerges, and the famous vessel becomes an icon of worship. Gaga has adopted religious iconography across her oeuvre, and here, once again, we find fame fashioned as a new religion and Gaga suffering for the love of her fans.

This construction via an act of extreme styling represents the modern-day public persona. Manipulated to the point of abstraction, Gaga objectifies herself as a celebrity, whilst casting a shade of violence over the ritual of getting done one’s “hair and make-up.” Beauty and pain go hand-in-hand for women the world over, but Gaga pushes the boundaries of these expectations, forever forcing confrontation with unspoken truths through her elaborate performances of celebrity such as this.

In all, the film’s sequence works to remind us of what we often forget – that our sense of reality is a fragile construction. She challenges first the classical notion of beauty, severing it with a simple twist of her legs, before “honoring her vomit” across the ideal object and staining it with her creative juices. In the final scene, we see the literal process of beauty being constructed, but it is rendered exploitative and disabling. This seemingly innate sense of what makes another person attractive is one of the many false truths our lives are constructed upon, and Gaga pushes us to examine what thought really is. By tapping into the Deleuzian “discordant accord,” she liberates her Little Monsters by making these strict social expectations ridiculous, and by offering art as a means of salvation. The real art here is not the beautiful mannequin the viewer is first introduced to, or her final subtly Christ-like transformation, but the artistic regurgitation upon them. By honoring our vomit, we confront our subjective existence within the raw meat of our bodies and recognize that it is only through imagination and creative expression that we can be free.

Author Bio:

Rachel Clark is a 22-year-old Cultural Studies postgraduate student, BA Hons in Art History and Museum Studies, with a keen interest in contemporary art, memory studies, and postmodern theory. She is currently based in Leeds in the North of England. As an avid fan of techno and electro, Gaga isn’t her usual cup of tea, but she was ‘enlightened’ by her dear Mum, who took her to see the Monster Ball live – She’s been a little monster and proud ever since!

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

G.O.A.T. Meat

By Caspian Carter

The following piece is the fourth in our series on Lady Gaga's video for "Born This Way." Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, (1944)

Gaga has noted that Francis Bacon was a major inspiration for her new video “Born This Way.” Using Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon’s paintings – particularly the attention given to the head – we may understand the video as proof that when Gaga “becomes monster” she is in fact becoming-animal, and inviting us to do the same.

The video’s first shot is of a unicorn – its head silhouetted by a night-lit cityscape. This scene takes place within an upside down glowing neon pink triangular frame. The unicorn enters and stops, centered within the equilateral sides. It breathes out smoke in the cold. From above, still within the graphic pink lines, another triangle slides downward. Peering from the bottom angle, the point of this new triangle, we see a face. As it continues to slide, to align with the other, to substitute in for it, we see a pair of legs spread pointing upwards in a V.

The face that we see is not a face at all but rather a head – the back of a head wearing a face as a mask. And so immediately we are thrust (pointed) towards a tension between the face and the head. As we fall through the pulsing outlines of the pink triangle (see above image) – not unlike the opening shot in Marcel Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema” (see below) – we recognize that Gaga is introducing a space, in Deleuzean terms a “zone of indiscernibility,” where she meets/meats herself and invites her fans to do the same. She is convulsing delightfully. She is becoming-animal.

The Opening Shot of Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema” (1926)

Gaga, like Bacon, “pursues a very particular project: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face” (20-21).

Francis Bacon, Head VI (1948)

As Deleuze understands it, the face masks the head; the face denies bodily meat; the human becomes animal/meat when the face is removed. The face (falsely) discerns race. It (falsely) discerns sex. It (falsely) discerns species. The face is prejudice: the head, boundless in beef. And over the seven plus minutes of the “Born This Way” video we see Gaga attempts to demolish the face. She does so in order to build an ethics, to push ahead – or rather two heads, or rather an entire race of meaty heads. As Gaga speaks (mouths) the “Manifesto of Mother Monster,” her mirrored vagina is fisted (pawed?) and births an endless chain of monster heads. The camera zooms out and we see a sea of these heads lined up, produced. Manufactured G.O.A.T meat. Grade V.

Her monster ethics calls for social equality and justice in the face of pervasive cultural homophobia and inequality. Mother Meat calls for “the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.”

Throughout the video we experience several incarnations of Gaga as meat: Gaga as meat in her spread legs, the stirrups scoring her body, Gaga as a butterflied steak; Gaga as meat with her bone implants, her bulging cheeks, shoulders and forehead; Gaga as meat with her skeleton marked face. (And we certainly have not forgotten the famous meat dress.)

Gaga as meat becomes the goal, embedded with an ethics of endless substitution, part of meat for hole. As Deleuze might say, Gaga “retains all the suffering and assumes all the colors of living flesh. [She] manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics”(23). This tense relationship between pain/vulnerability and pleasure is endless mitosis itself. And it is expressed (as per usual) in her spastic yet always controlled and often physically distorting dance moves. We watch her in her underwear as she tenderizes herself repeatedly breaking down her face for consumption. She convulses. She collapses to the floor. She rolls around on the floor. She dances perfectly to the beat. And in a perfect illustration of her meatiness we witness a dance move-cum-jerk-off-gesture-cum-fuck-you-finger.

And she asks us to just put our paws up, to hold our heads up. And then she holds her head up. She puts her paws up in the shape of a V, becoming the V. Becoming vagina. But the V also stands for violence as we see in another scene when she digs a machine gun out from her own vagina. Put your two fingers up and give a piece sign. Finger the air with your V. And be sure to do it on video because we were virtually born this way. Vertigo. The third eye on her chin forms a V which mimics her jaw line, which mimics her cheek and forehead implants. The group dances in a V formation. Giving us the bird, her hand, with the V, we tenderize ourselves. We tuck our stiff cocks between our legs and ben dover loves mike hunt. We scream. After all this is G.O.A.T. and we are all tired of waiting. We too are becoming animal.

The video ends brilliantly with an image of Gaga-cum-Madonna staring into the camera. Her mouth open, her V gapped-teeth hanging off her meaty head. For Deleuze it is the rendering of mouths in Bacon’s portraits that ultimately “turns all meat into a head without a face. It is no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes, and from which the flesh descends” (26).

Francis Bacon, Head, (1948)

Francis Bacon, Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)

We stare at Gaga while she breathes heavily. A single tear falls from her right eye. She swallows—clenches her back teeth, raising her lower lip towards the gap. It is almost as if she is mouthing the letter V. The tear screams down her faceless head.

The video ends with the same pink triangle from the opening shots. Only now it is right side up. Gaga rides the unicorn into the night under a rainbow, their bodies meet/meat each other, following and blocking the light. From below another triangle rises. Still within the graphic pink lines this triangle slides upward, to align with the other, to substitute in for it. We see emerging beneath her face a head shot blowing a bubble with pink bubble gum – bazooka perhaps. The bubble never pops. Her breath instead sucks back in an attempt to retain the hole.

Francis Bacon, Self Portrait, (1971).

Author Bio:

Jon Rutzmoser (b. 1982) is an artist, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. He recently received an MFA in Writing and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. His work engages with notions of ethical subjectivity within a world of collapsed metaphor, linguistic slippage, and self-exploitation. His blog is http://hystericallyreal.com.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.