“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.).