The Perceptual Marriage: Notes on “Yoü and I” and Future Work

By Roland Betancourt

In June of last year, the Internet was abuzz with the news of a mysterious new model posing for Vogue Hommes Japan. His name: Jo Calderone. Soon after, following much careful formal analysis and an interesting back-and-forth of Tweets by Perez Hilton, it was clear that this hot new model was Lady Gaga. It was in this exchange that Gaga first used the phrase “Born This Way,” and Jo Calderone inaugurated the Born This Way project as its indirect poster child. Since that moment, I have been waiting for Jo Calderone to reemerge, I have written a chapter on him for the upcoming Stigmata book, and I believe him to be crucial in Gaga’s articulation of technology and her body as a shared medium for visual (re)production.

While in London recently, I tried to view the film of the shoot at SHOWstudio right before the show ended. Mysteriously, I was turned away because the basement had allegedly flooded a few weeks previously. Jo Calderone’s Twitter account, which had been dormant for almost a year, tweeted again on 2 June. It seemed that the Jo Calderone project was back in full swing, possible for “The Edge of Glory” video. However, as we now know, the original video for that – which was to contain an Enrique Iglesias-type, mermaids, and plastic surgery – never happened. Now, the parallels between the Edge video that never was and the newly released “Yoü and I” are quite evident from what little we know. Was that basement really flooded? Did anyone see the Jo video in London? (I encourage responses from readers regarding this.) What is clear is that the Jo Calderone project suddenly withdrew from the private exhibition space (the video would only be shown in house), and reemerged onto the world stage. This signals an important shift in Gaga’s trajectory, particularly after various videos that, while visually interesting, were mainly driven by Laurieann Gibson’s choreography.

I would argue that the project is complete. Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I” completes the Born This Way cycle. It all ends here. However, the fate of Jo Calderone is still left in question. Nicola Formichetti cited him as “Jo Calderone” in the wardrobe credits, along with Gaga and Taylor Kinney. Thus, the identity is still in place. When he reemerged on 2 June, Jo Calderone tweeted, “Society’s projection, should not be your reflection. If you’ve ever felt rejection, feel safe by my protection.” The rhyme scheme here suggests that this is most certainly a fragment from a new song. After all, Gaga did a similar thing with Judas lyrics months before the song came out. Thus, Jo Calderone who began the Born This Way album campaign, reemerged to complete it – and, perhaps, inaugurate the next phase in Gaga’s project.

The video also suggests an important shift in Gaga’s work, one that has always been there in statement, but lacking in visuals: the union of body and technology. The opening figure of Gaga is her new trajectory. Her feet are torn from her fashion, her body is inserted with implants, and her large hat echoes a geodesic solar panel. The image has some immediate parallels with the cyborg-like jewelry that Beyoncé donned as her alter-ego Sasha Fierce. Additionally, this potent image of the Gaga cyborg was foreshadowed the video for “Paparazzi,” when Gaga emerges from her wheelchair in Mugler body armor. Hence, we see in this proud heroic image that dominates the landscape an empowered technological Gaga, who has always tried to unify technology and fashion, and has noted the importance of social technologies in her craft.

The very idea of the cyborg, post-human body, is the unification of the organic sensorium with the distributed agency afforded by technological networks. Therefore, I would argue that Gaga is heading toward a deeper articulation of technology and social media – developing, of course, upon her BTW work that is centered on the body as a medium for infinite births. This is also a line of thought that has been of crucial interest to Nicola Formichetti, and that defined the structure of his Gothic-inspired, social media saturated Mugler show. Perhaps this will develop in fruitful ways that question the usual networks of circulation – like Björk’s exemplary new iPad-app album Biophilia.

The lyrics offered by the Jo Calderone tweet and his deployment in the video demonstrate an interesting train of thought: Jo Calderone as a personal projection. The projection has been an important, yet under-analyzed concept in Gaga’s work. Not only does the medium feature prominently in her concerts (particularly in the interludes and the “Dance in the Dark” opening of the Monster Ball), but it also appears in the Manifesto of Little Monsters. The Manifesto reads:

It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our projection. We are nothing without our image. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become, in the future.

Gaga has paralleled one’s image to one’s own projection, a present and proleptic projection. The image, the projection, the reflection are triangulated in the ideological space of perception, that is “the theory of perception.”

This “theory” seems to be a coherent – or, rather, consistent – contemplation on filmic viewing that resonates strongly with Christian Metz’s theory of film perception. Metz writes,

There are two cones in the auditorium: one ending on the screen and starting both in the projection box and in the spectator’s vision insofar as it is projective, and one starting from the screen and “deposited” in the spectator’s perception insofar as it is introjective (on the retina, a second screen). When I say that “I see” the film, I mean thereby a unique mixture of two contrary currents: the film is what I receive, and it is also what I release, since it does not preexist my entering the auditorium and I only need close my eyes to suppress it. Releasing it, I am the projector, receiving it, I am the screen; in both these figures together, I am the camera, which points and yet which records.

This process of projection is crucial to the medium of film, which is distributed across the space of the auditorium, residing neither in the projector or the screen, but in the locus of experience: the viewer as receiver. Gaga develops this thesis as a structure for the articulation of identity. (Neil Leach has applied Metz for similar purposes in his article “Belonging: Toward a Theory of Identification with Place,” in the Mining Autonomy [2002] volume of the architecture journal Perspecta.)

Gaga’s work here takes on an interesting project by slowly inscribing identity onto the act of viewership, thus empowering her users as viewers. Through the act of viewing, the viewer “poaches” the text (to use Michel de Certeau’s term), making the narrative their own in their interpretation. However, there is also a bodily confusion between the screen, the camera, the projector, and the body. Thus, the cyborg image of Gaga is theoretically paralleled to the image of Jo Calderone, who is a reflection/projection of Gaga.

The video has a simple reading, one that helps this argument: “You will never find what you are looking for in love, if you don’t love yourself,” as Gaga tweeted with a preview still of the video. Quite simply, the video is “about” having to love oneself before one can love another. Hence, Jo Calderone standing in for her lover, Nebraska, is Gaga’s depiction of loving herself. After all, Jo Calderone has important resonances with Gaga’s (infamous?) boyfriend Lüc Carl in his stripped-down drinking, rocker look. However, what are we to say about that pale, white Gaga who smiles at the camera in a daze most of the times, noticeably not even singing the lyrics? Her body seems to echo a white canvas, the space of the representation of the image – this is a thesis that I have found crucial to the rule of Jo Calderone. Here Gaga and Jo Calderone are caught in a complex relationship of projection and screen (the perpetually absent body, of course, is that of Stefani Germanotta), but the act of performing and viewing Gaga is defined by their unified relationship. Her cyborg-self presents us with the same image, but in this viewing she is a compound of the technologies and social networks of (re)production through which we, as an audience in a global public sphere, view her.

This hybridity is again doubled by the image of the mermaid YÜYI, whose name I would argue is a unification of “Yoü and I” – the “and” replaced by a “y,” as in Spanish or merely phonetically, Yoü-y-I. As a hybrid creature, she serves precisely as a union of these tied opposites: fantasy and reality, projector and screen, body and technology, Gaga and Jo Calderone. She is a creation of the lover, but the lover creates various images or permutations of Gaga. As Gaga tweeted, the more you try to alter her the more powerful she becomes.

YÜYI is the marker of a resilient viral image who embodies the full virality of the spectator and the performer, whose image is subject to the manipulation of user-masses. In a telling moment, the lover strokes the glass of her framed fish-tank-like container. She is “still” human – although like “Bad Romance,” the video works against any clear narrative development and thus it would be unwise to carelessly assume a linear chronology to these images. The scene seems to echo myths of Narcissus and Echo, or even the Portrait of Dorian Grey. She stands as a framed image with a spectator that is also a lover and image-maker.

There is a sexualized image-poesis implied, as if the creation of images is a sexual act – the impending virality a desirable venereal disease. The barn house is the artist/lover’s workshop, replete with a model of his creation in the left background. The production is violent, torturous. The figure that emerges in YÜYI is haunting; her fused breasts almost look as if they’ve been seared together. Image production is a sexualized violence. However, one must remember that this is not image production in the traditional sense of a medium (e.g. sculpture or painting), but rather image production is the node of perception, of viewer-filmic interaction in the body of the viewer. We are all YÜYI.

* * *

Lady Gaga is meant to make an important announcement on Thursday with the official release of the video. There are many things that she may well announce. Perhaps, a new song that involves Jo Calderone, probably the Born This Way Ball. However, given the strong themes of union and hybridity, I am left to wonder if there is not a big autobiographical secret encoded into this video: the video concludes with the wedding scene. A virginal Gaga is betrothed to her torturer, her image-maker, her lover. Most of the costumes featured in the video were, as usual, from major fashion houses, usual collaborators, and a few in-Haus designs by Perry Meek. One notable custom item is the veil, made to match the wedding dress. This wedding dress is credited by Formichetti on his blog as “WEDDING DRESS BY VINTAGE NORMA KAMALI (SPECIAL THANKS MRS GERMANOTTA).” The use of her mother’s wedding dress is a charged statement. Given the various articulations and structuring of union in the video, the blatant declaration of love for Nebraska, I cannot help but ask: Is Lady Gaga getting married? Or, perhaps, which “Mrs.” Germanotta is he referring to?

Writer’s Bio

Roland Betancourt is a PhD student at Yale University in the History of Art department focusing on Byzantine art and image theory, with an outside concentration in contemporary art and popular culture. Roland.Betancourt@Yale.edu 

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If God is a DJ: He’ll Play the Revelations Sound-bite

By Yi-Jun Ian 

Inspired by biblical imagery and centered on religion, Yi-Jun Ian created this 20-piece wearable art collection for a Fash Mob event at The Butter Factory in Singapore. The collection heavily incorporates imagery from Gaga’s Born This Way album. With pieces including a red-veiled crown of insect-legged thorns and eyewear with blood-stained nails embedded in bleeding corks, Ian sought to establish the context of spiritual war that occurs amidst our everyday lives, whether out in the open or hiding in plain sight; to champion the idea of fighting for personal faith over blindly accepting religious dogma.

The Ark & the Covenant, rings

Cardinal Whore, headpiece

Cork+Screw, rings

Punktius Pirate, hat

Rouge Roulette, gloves

Sodom, eyewear

Gomorrah, eyewear

Vintage Bleach, vest

War Is Peace?, necklaces

Artist Bio:

Yi-Jun Ian is a 20-year-old obsessed with the concept of wearable art since the entrance of one Lady Gaga. He developed a strong interest in pop culture while studying visual art at a junior college in Singapore. For more of Ian’s work, visit http://cerebralchastity.carbonmade.com/ or follow him on Twitter, @morallygrayswan.

Playing with Pearls: The Adornment of the Selves

by Laurence Ross

There was a table set out … and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it. – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In 88 Pearls, Lady Gaga and Terence Koh sit at a table, laughing, playing, dressed up in costume. Indeed, dressed up in pearls. There is an empty wine glass and an empty tumbler, but these glasses are ignored. Gaga and Koh care only for the teacup. “Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked. “There isn’t any,” said the March Hare. It seems, from the viewer’s perspective, that we, just as Alice has done before us, are crashing the party – a party we have not necessarily been invited to, and one in which we are left to interpret what we see and hear, to attempt to make some sense of the whole mad affair (if we wish to make sense of the whole mad affair). We are spectators of (not participants of) the spectacle.

Illustration by Sir John Tenniel

Games/Performances of Madness

I’m afraid Alice is a bit of a killjoy. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life” She doesn’t know how, exactly, to respond to Wonderland. (Perhaps this is because she “grows” so much when she gets there? She drinks the wrong potion? There is nothing left in her of the Peter Pan?) She certainly doesn’t know how to respond to the mad Hatter and the mad March Hare at their mad tea party. Alice never actually becomes a part of the party. Yes, from a technical standpoint, there is dialogue between Alice and the party, but there is a persistent separateness, a failure of language, that prevents the occurrence of genuine communication. This same separateness exists for the viewer of the spectacle, the spectacle here being Gaga and Koh counting pearls. As Guy Debord comments in his The Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule” (17). Even the absence of rule – zero rule – is itself a rule, and we are not privy to the rules of the game Gaga and Koh play. Not only do we, as spectator, lack agency in regard to the spectacle, we cannot even inquire, in the absence of understanding, explanations from the spectacle. This information, the logical answer, is cut off from the audience.

Mad Tea Party (1969), illustration for Alice in Wonderland by Salvador Dali

This is, perhaps, a trouble with madness, in dealing with one who is mad: there is often an assumption on behalf of the other (the viewer) that there is an absence of logic with the mad person and that this absence is a totality. That the one who is insane, the fool, is incapable of uttering a truth. (Let alone the chaotic horror, the apocalypse that might develop if we were to entertain the notion that perhaps the madness is the truth). “Why not?” said the March Hare. Alice was silent. I remember, as a theology student, one of my professors saying, “You have two options: you can either believe that Jesus is the Son of God or that he is insane – there is no in-between.” This bi-versification is one that never sat well with me. Wasn’t Galileo’s sanity questioned when he posited that the sun was the center of the universe? Wasn’t Shakespeare constantly placing his truest lines in the mouth of the fool? The scientist who studies (for example) Water Crystal Theory is ostracized from the scientific community and defends her scientific beliefs from the outside, much in the way Wordsworth defends his poetic beliefs in Preface to Lyric Ballads. There is ridicule, disapproval, banishment. This or that person is (literally) out of line, an outlier, out of his mind, mad. From the perspective of many, the mere idea of Gaga’s “Holy Fool” is one that is not possible. It is not possible to blend madness and divinity, madness and truth. It is a blending, a bleeding, a conflation of two incompatible and unrelated attributes.

As I have stated before, if Gaga is consistently anything at all, she is a paradox. In 88 Pearls, she is both a girl at play and a woman (an artist) at work (performing). She is a figure rendered in both black and white. She is playing/performing a game with Koh that both makes sense (the simple task of counting to 88) and does not make sense (numbers and pearls are skipped, and why are Gaga and Koh counting them in the first place?).

Dali, The Pearl (1981)

Lady Gaga and Terence Koh are clearly not fans of following rules. Rules, in fact, are facts or constraints that artists have become expected to break. “Is that the way you manage?” asked Alice. Alexander McQueen stated: “You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.” Koh playfully skips ahead while counting to the number 69, expecting that we will accept the fact that he has cheated a rule of mathematics and altered it to his own whim. Yes, Gaga and Koh count 88 pearls into the teacup in the reality of the film, but in our reality (our numeric reality) there are not 88 pearls in the teacup. There both are and are not 88 pearls here, a pearled paradox we can choose (or choose not to) swallow.

Pop artists, however, are not expected to break the rules. Pop artists are considered the hacks of the music world. There are many pop artists who are, perhaps, only called artists by default. They cannot be called musicians because, in many cases, there is no instrument in their hands. In fact, for many a pop artist, the pop artist is the instrument, at times even a corporate instrument, and certainly not the creator. And if the pop artist is a corporate instrument, then the corporation is running the show. Corporations that run on business models. Corporations that are accustomed to formula and replicating that formula over and over again until something isn’t working properly and then the formula (the pop artist) is scrapped. ‘N Sync is, perhaps, the most obvious example of this – the boy band that felt so tightly controlled by the corporation’s formula that they needed to cede, to cut all ties, and to produce No Strings Attached. But what happened once those strings were cut? The group soon dissolved. Even the group’s pro-pop anthem, “Pop,” frames pop music not as art, but as something contagious and fun, something that will endure the inevitable and never-ending criticism of the genre as garbage.

(Infinitely) Shucking the Pop Bivalve

The oyster, the bivalve, begets the pearl. Not every species of oyster is capable of producing a pearl. Not all bivalves are created equal. But there is a species of oyster, just as there is a species of pop star (of monster?), capable of producing a luminous object: the pearl. There is a species of pop star that can produce an object of (artistic) value.

Society establishes splits, artificial divisions, rules that exist only as we allow and invent them. Society has classified music into genres (species), divided music into the valuable and the worthless, the intellectual and the vapid, the good and the bad. In the face of this division, Lady Gaga must tell us – and tell us directly – “Pop music will never be lowbrow.” That pop music is not disposable trash. That pop music (as a genre, as a species) is something to pay attention to, something that could produce (and actually does, at times, produce) art. Lady Gaga takes a knife to the throat of pop music, shucks it in two, and shows us the effervesce of the nacre inside.

 And when a bivalve is split, a mirror image is created. A bivalve is, in a way, a living paradox of form: two inverse shapes positioned on top of one another, joined into one being. Francis Ponge, in his meditation on the oyster, tells us, “Inside one finds a whole world, to eat and drink; under a firmament (properly speaking) of nacre, the skies above collapse on the skies below” (37). When the bivalve is closed, its figure resembles that of a zero (0). When a bivalve is opened by its hinge, a new figure is formed, is birthed: a figure eight (8), which, viewed askance, is also the figure of infinity (∞). When closed, the world of the oyster is shut off from us completely, its luminous quality out of view, nullified. The open oyster, however, is an open world, a world, as Ponge tells us, that is two parts wide-open sky, two parts heavenly vault, two views of eternity. Whereas the closed(-minded) view of the oyster (of pop music) yields a zero, the open(-minded) view of the oyster (of pop music) yields an infinity.

And so Gaga and Koh count to 88. The pair counts – or, more accurately, creates – 88 pearls in a teacup. The pair creates not one infinity (∞), but two (88). A double-infinity, a concept that is itself a paradox, as infinity is already infinite in both directions and there is no need (and no mathematical reason) to double it. When Koh playfully skips ahead to the number 69, he skips ahead to a number that (if its two inverted figures were fused into one) very much resembles the figure eight, the figure of the bivalve, the figure of infinity.

This creation is play; this creation is work. This creation is game; this creation is performance. This creation is a world of dress-up/adornment/births/infinite births. The world, the play, the rule of play, is born this way, over and over again. The pearl from the oyster, the head from the vagina, the spectacle from the performer. “For the spectacle, as the perfect image of the ruling economic order, ends are nothing and development is all – although the only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself” (Debord 15-16).

In 88 Pearls, Gaga, adorned in the very pearls she plays with, conjures once again her trope of continual birth. the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells. But she also, by her very adornment, conjures the infinite death that must accompany that birth. “Once in a rare while a globule pearls in [the oyster’s] nacre throat, with which one instantly seeks to adorn oneself” (Ponge 37). And to shuck an oyster and retrieve the pearl (for adornment or the creation of a self) is to kill the oyster. When Lady Gaga wears these pearls, these pearls are not in the form of pretty necklaces, but affixed to her skin, to her jaw, to her cheeks. It appears as if the bone is being exposed, that we are viewing a glimpse of a skull. (Shaun Leane produced a similar effect for Alexander McQueen with his “Jaw Bone” Mouthpiece.) Gaga is both a woman in her pearls and a monster with a skeletal-pearled countenance. Gaga is (and has been) a series (a string) of selves through adornment, the new birthed through the death of the old, life and death piled on top of each other. “When a newly independent art paints its world … then a moment of life has grown old … The greatness of art makes its appearance only as dusk begins to fall over life” (Debord 133). Lady Gaga is continually paradox at work/play.

At the close of the film, as Gaga and Koh place the final pearl in the teacup, Gaga says, “Let’s do the last one together.” Gaga and Koh, together, each take hold of the pearl, each one’s thumb and finger carefully joining to pinch a side, their pair of hands forming two rings, two circles, which, when joined (jointed) at the point (joint) of the pearl, form the figure eight, form yet another figure of infinity.

Gaga as Gyre

Yeats had his own notions on infinity and birthing, notions that he forged in his poems and writings on gyres. In his poem, The Second Coming, he writes, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” (line 1), the gyre a type of geometric cone, a cyclone really, one that spirals wider and wider in time until the apocalypse arrives. The moment when the gyre is at its widest, the moment when the end of the world has arrived, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (2-3). This moment is chaos at its height, the world at its most advanced and complicated state, and Time at its lowest ebb. But this moment for Yeats is not entirely catastrophic, despite the fact that “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (4). There is anarchy, yes, but “mere” anarchy, anarchy that can be treated just a bit flippantly because, though the end of the world (death) is at hand, there is a new beginning (life) that will happen at the exact moment the end occurs. “But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.

Diagram of opposing gyres, from W.B. Yeats’ A Vision

Here, there is a hinge, a joint, so that at the moment when the cyclone/world/game is at its wildest, widest end, that very same moment a new pinpoint begins. A new spiral is birthed. There is a second coming, a second birthing. The end of the world is not the end of the world. Or, rather, if it is the end of one world, then it is the beginning of a new one. “Surely some revelation is at hand” (9). And though Yeats’s vision in The Second Coming is not a cheerful one, it is one of birth nonetheless. “That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (19-22). So yes, there is a Second Coming after the birth and death of Christ. There is the cradle. There is the birth of the beast, a birth the majority of us might not expect to follow the last birth. Gaga does not give us what we expect either (just look at “The Edge of Glory” video and our spectator’s response to it). But Gaga is not only okay with the idea of the monstrous, of the beast – she has, as Mother Monster, embraced the notion, embraced the title of birthing what might typically cause fear, repulsion, distain.

These gyres, the overlapping, inverted cones of Time’s diminishment and history’s expansion, create the shape of an hourglass, the shape of the figure eight, the figure of infinity. The inverted gyres represent the interdependence of two forces that we do not expect to be linked. Yeats writes, in A Vision, “As man’s intellect, say, expands, the emotional nature contracts in equal degree and vice versa ... one always narrowing, one always expanding, and yet bound for ever to one another.” And, according to Yeats, these gyres continue on, linked in a never-ending chain, an infinite process of rebirthing, a never-ending string (of pearls). And she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal.

Digestion

So what is Lady Gaga doing with Terence Koh, playing with pearls and a teacup? She is making a short film. She is making a short film that we can either view as a piece of art or a piece of madness or both. She is, perhaps, making a short film that is part art and part madness, showing us, as many artists have done before her, that the two are not always separate entities. That one can stylize madness, that one can glue pearls to one’s body to create sequined fashion.

Debord discusses the spectacle in terms of style and fashion when he writes, “In contrast to the passing fashions that clash and fuse on the frivolous surface of a contemplated pseudo-cyclical time, the grand style of our era can ever be recognized in whatever is governed by the obvious yet carefully concealed necessity for revolution” (116). Debord discusses the spectacle in much the same way Yeats conceives of his gyres and Gaga conceives of her project: an evolution of revolution that is not cyclical in its infiniteness, but linear. Though there will be another Gaga video, another Gaga song, another Gaga performance, there will not be another Gaga video, another Gaga song, and another Gaga performance. There will not be another, not more of the same, but an other, an addition that differs from the previous edition. Lady Gaga and her work has (and presumably will) evolve not revolve, cycle not recycle. This infinite birthing of selves is why she has become the spectacle she has become. This infinite birthing of selves is why we find ourselves continually watching.

Note: The italicized lines of the text are taken from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Bibliography

88 Pearls. “Terence Koh Show”. Dir Terence Koh. Perf. Lady Gaga and Terence Koh. 2010. Film.

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 21 July 2011.

Born This Way. Dir. Nick Knight and Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: W W Norton & Company, 1971. Print.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Print.

Lady Gaga. “Born This Way.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Judas.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

‘N Sync. “Pop.” Celebrity. Jive Records, 2001. CD.

Poker Face. Dir. Ray Kay. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2008. Film.

Ponge, Francis. The Voice of Things. Trans. Beth Archer Brombert. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972. Print.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. F. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. Print.

Yeats, William Butler. “A Vision.” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume XIII. Ed. Catherine E. Paul. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.

Author Bio

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism, among other things.

Bled Threads: Dustin Anderson

GS: How long have you been making your own clothes?

DA: I started designing my own stuff in high school.

GS: How many outfits have you made for yourself/others?

DA: Have made thousands of outfits. Mostly for myself. I find others don’t understand my clothing, but when I wear it they all love it.

GS: What is it you hope they’ll understand?

DA: I just hope they will understand to enjoy the art.

GS: What percentage of the time do you wear the outfits you design?

DA: Almost 90% of the time I’m wearing something that most people would consider abnormal. Even now while just relaxing at home, I am wearing pants I made and dyed and a Semi Precious Weapons t-shirt. I also cut and dye my hair so I guess in a way I’m always in my designs.

GS: Who or what are your biggest inspirations/influences?

DA: Living in the fashion district is a HUGE influence on me. I can just walk around the block and get everything you can imagine. Also other designers are always great influences. McQueen, Haus of Gaga, Grace Jones, Olima, Robyn, just to name a few. I’m inspired just looking at fashion around me at events, and in the streets. I also think traveling has opened my mind to different fashions. LOVE Japan street styles!

 GS: Could you describe any positive or negative public reactions to your appearance that stand out?

DA: The one that stands out the most is when a young kid, around 5 or 6 years old, was standing next to me and turned to his mom and asked, “Why is he so pretty? Can I be pretty like him?” I could see on her face that until that moment she had never considered, “What if my son were gay?” I think in some way I changed a small part of both of them. And recently, I went to Ralph’s and ended up having a crowd of people taking pictures and posing with me. I think most people need the artistic release from their boring daily routines. There are negative reactions, too, but I brush them off as coming from stupidity, ignorance, and fear of the unknown.

GS: How do you feel about Lady Gaga?

DA: I personally, professionally, and artistically admire her. I love that she has brought a lil ray of light to all “monsters”. I look forward to more from her and her team! Although recently it does bother me no matter what I wear, the mainstream automatically links it to Lady Gaga, as if no other person has created anything. Nonetheless, it is still a compliment.

GS: Finally, how does it feel to be objectified?

DA: HMMMM. Well I have always stood out my whole life. So I guess I am used to it. I am made for it.

BIO: Dustin Anderson is a crazy artist, photographer, cook, fashion designer, and make-up stylist. His Montana redneck/Native American upbringing taught him traditional woodsman and tribal talents and an appreciation for what he has. As soon as he arrived in LA, he was instantly drawn to the fashion district’s never-ending supply of creative materials and knew it was his home. For more of Dustin’s work, please see http://www.multiplecompounds.com.

STIGMATAVISION 2: On Interpretations & Expectations

By Kate Durbin

This is a companion piece to Meghan Vicks' "Questions at the Edge: On Interpretation & Expectations, Lady Gaga & Gaga Stigmata"

*filmed in Bellyflop swimming pool gallery, Los Angeles

Introducing: Our New Creative Editor!

Gaga Stigmata is delighted to announce our new Creative Editor, Samatha Cohen! Below, a message from Sam to our readers.

XO
Kate & Meghan

Hi Everyone!

I am beyond thrilled to be joining Gaga Stigmata as Creative Editor!  I’ll be curating the site’s creative works, including fiction, poetry, visual, video, mixed media, & performance art, as well as Bled Threads.

I had amazing talks with Kate and Meghan and we’d like to see Gaga Stigmata’s creative section expand to include not only art that considers Gaga-ness directly, but also art that is conceptually or aesthetically linked to Gaga’s project in any way.  My pet Gaga-related interests include identity performance, post-humanism and cyborgs, sex, queerness, myth, genesis, trickster, monstrosity, artifice, subjectivity, social justice work, fashion, and flux.  Please send me work that deals with any of these, or any other obsession you & Gaga share.

Look out for new calls for submissions coming soon, and changes to the creative portion of the site.  I can’t wait to see your work!

Love,

Sam

Traductor, Traditore: (Un)translating Born This Way’s Duplicitous Message

By Samantha Cohen

It’s taken a long time for me to respond to “Born This Way.” It took a long time for me to watch the video, even. The first time I heard the song, I had to close its window before it ended. Oh Gaga, I thought. No.

Maybe it is silly, embarrassing even, to have such a prolonged emotional response to a pop song. To be actually saddened. But in the bio-deterministic world of mainstream media, Gaga had been an anti-essentialist beacon, beaming into the living rooms of, like, all U.S. families. In a world where female pop stars are packaged to be palatable, commoditized and literally defined by the gaze, Gaga’s art and fashion said fuck the gaze and fuck gazing into mirrors, even. Invent an identity. Invent another one. Become who you want to be and then become who you want to be and then become who you want to be again.

My love for Gaga had been based on her performative assertion of performance as identity and it broke suddenly and crushingly with three words: Born this way. I don’t get to love a lot of things in this world and so I hold on fiercely to the things I do. Lady Gaga was the only contemporary mainstream pop artist I was able to love and now what.

I still have complicated feelings, but I’m ready, I think, to work through them, here. It was Meghan Vicks’ article on Gaga as trickster that sparked a bit of hope toward the reignition of my Gaga love. What proceeds will be an argument that “Born This Way” marks Gaga’s self-outing as a trickster figure and that in “Born This Way,” she uses her trickster status to further the cause of gay rights. It will be, too, a personal attempt to redeem Gaga, an elaborate excuse-making for an artist I want badly to love.

***

So, trickster: Coyote, Raven, Prometheus, Loki, Eshu, Hermes, Mercurius. Et fucking al. All mythologies, all cultures, have a trickster figure, and at the site of any change in the social fabric, there s-he is. Trickster is shape-shifter, gender-transcender, a two-spirited seducer. Trickster embodies both sides of any binary opposition. Trickster is culture hero and amoral jokester. S-he is sacred and hilarious, ridiculous and godly, good and evil. Do I need to go on to convince you that Trickster is Gaga?

Okay but what I do need to convince you of, maybe, still, is that Gaga identifies herself as Trickster in the “Born This Way” video. So here: The video opens on a pink-triangle-contained Gaga with legs up where antlers might be, an animal (but still human) Gaga, a between-genders Gaga high-heeled and bearded.

This Gaga is revealed to have two heads and two faces, symbolizing Trickster’s dual nature. Gaga’s second face tells us a creation myth. A creation myth that breeds both good and evil. Wherever there’s a creation story, there Trickster is.

Plus, Trickster is able always to descend to the realm of the dead – to play around and shift things down there. At various points in the video, Gaga enters a sort of underground meat locker where a dead guy dwells. Gaga herself’s in death drag. We know it’s death drag because while the actual dead guy’s catatonic, Gaga’s dancing vigorously, chest-beating, even. She’s physically manipulating the dead guy, presumably for her own ends. Gaga’s down in the death realm for a shifting.

***

But so here’s the thing about Trickster: Trickster’s ends are always the ends of creation, of social change. Trickster is thief, outlaw, destroyer, and ultimately, creator. Trickster uses the Lorde-ian “master’s tools” to dismantle his superstructure, all while entertaining and enchanting, distracting and seducing the fuck out of him. Or H-I-M. Coyote, Loki, Anansi, and Prometheus, for example, all charmed their ways into stealing fire from the gods in order to bring the sun, moon, and stars to the people of their respective cultures.

Trickster uses the language of the dominant culture to get the job done.

“Born This Way” is essentialist, for sure – but Gaga knows that essentialism’s what gay-basher bullies are able to hear, what those in power to change the gay rights situation know how to respond to: There is no other way. You were born this way.

In his book Trickster Makes The World, Lewis Hyde argues that Tricksters are “joint-disturbers” (256) – that Trickster pinpoints the joints of any being, culture, or idea it plans to attack and, in a sense, lubes up these joints in order to move around the more solid pieces they connect, to slide them smoothly, smilingly, and reconnect them elsewhere. Trickster must fit easily into either side of the joint, must seduce both sides in order to slide them so smoothly. Gaga recognizes where the joint of the gay rights debate is, and she works that joint.

Gaga’s aware that U.S. gay rights hinge on proof (or at least belief) that homosexuality is biological. The rhetoric surrounding the U.S. gay rights debate has been, on the right side of the joint, that homosexuality is a sinful choice (God says), and, on the left side, that homosexuality is genetic, and therefore cannot be sinful, since it’s not a choice at all (Science says). “Born This Way” sides with the science of the left, functioning as an anthem self-assured enough to fill in any gaps the scientific studies might leave. Simultaneously, it challenges the right by bringing their God into its message and subtly questioning their faith in H-I-M: Gaga’s God makes no mistakes. Gaga’s God didn’t mess up in creating the gays.

***

Hyde claims that Trickster always serves as translator between two realms. The realms between which Gaga translates in “Born This Way” are actually not the realms of the right and the left; they are the realms of born-this-way gay rights activists and anti-essentialist self-performers. While pro-gay equality and anti-gay equality sides of the argument are essentially speaking the same language (no choice vs. choice), we (queers, academics) are literally speaking a different language than those who seek proof of genetic gayness. We require a translator. And Hyde reminds us of the Italian saying, “traductor, traditore,” or, translator = traitor (264).

Signifying Monkey defeats his Lion oppressor using verbal tricks and witty discourse the Lion is unable to understand. Though Monkey is speaking Lion language, Monkey twists this language. Monkey uses symbolism and the Lion can only understand what is literal. Br’er Rabbit, too, despite being rabbit-sized, uses wit, trickery, and the invention of a new symbolism in order to dismantle the enslaving social rhetoric.

It’s important that, just as Signifying Monkey speaks in Lion language, Gaga doesn’t use academic jargon or the language of queer subcultures. Her litany of identities doesn’t include butch, boi, bear, or even queer. She is speaking the language that the dominant culture understands to be theirs.

One thing Gaga’s use of the language of the dominant culture enables her to do is insert the word “transgender” into the mainstream lexicon. Transgendered life, is what she says. LGBT has sort of just become code for “gay,” while its other initials get lost. The word transgendered is still underlined in red by MS Word’s spell check where I’m typing this.

***

   

Gaga’s creation myth is pretty clearly for us, the anti-essentialist self-performing ones, the academics, the artists, the queers. Who else cares about origin stories or the “multiverse” or mucus-y glittery cell division but the same freaks who care about performance as identity? And one way to read Gaga’s creation myth is as a form of extended justification, an apology for the essentialism to come. The final line of Gaga’s creation myth: “It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate easily and unwaveringly towards good. But…how can I protect something so perfect, without evil?” As she says this, Gaga holds a machine gun, rendering actual the metaphorical master’s tool.

And when Gaga descends from her heavenly Mother Monster throne and enters the world of the song, she’s wearing (comparatively) subtle makeup and a bikini with dainty chains. Her attire is decidedly normal, pop-video appropriate. At first glance, it’s something Britney might wear. But Gaga’s prosthetic cheekbones and strange magazine glossiness exaggerate her normalcy in a way that lets us know that Gaga hasn’t walked away from her monsters, but is adopting the uniform of the mainstream in order to work inside the system, for us.

***

But so by showing us that she identifies as Gay Rights Trickster, Gaga invites us to look beyond the platitudinous words of her almost-parodically reductive anthem, or to look deeper into them. But then what is she saying beyond the seeming-essentialism?

First, the vaginas through which Gaga’s new race are birthed are made not only of shiny pink membrane, but also of black patent and glitter and silver chains, dissolving the boundary between nature and artifice. And, then! Post creation-myth, in the first shot of the dance floor, the dancers are hunched and shadowed to be shaped like uteri and ovaries.

We might miss this had the video not primed us (at least) twice already with ovary/uterus shapes during the creation story, but since we’re primed, we totally see it. And what it suggests is that we can form ourselves into our own uterus-and-ovaries, into our own self-birthing centers. That we can curl in on ourselves and gestate, any time we need to, and be reborn.

The factory rows of Gaga heads, inchoate and waxy, suggest that there are multiple possible selves for all of us, that we simply have to call on one of our own partly-formed baby heads, to shake it awake and wash it off, in order to be new. I love this.

***

I’ve convinced myself now that Gaga has not had an essentialist conversion. But I still have tangled feelings about whether it is okay to put such a strong essentialist message out into so much of the world. I’m pretty sure most people who hear “Born This Way,” or even watch the video, will not see past the apparent biodeterminism. Isn’t it destructive to tell gay kids, or “orient-made” (I won’t go into this term’s issues here) kids that the have no choice in who they become, that they are victims of the circumstances of their births?

But then, shortly after Gaga’s Prime Rib of America speech, DADT was repealed. Months after the release of “Born This Way,” gay marriage was legalized in New York. On June 24 just after New York legalized gay marriage, Gaga tweeted “I can’t stop crying. We did it, kids.” Maybe this is not self-puffery but just…somewhat accurate. We could ask whether these huge systematic changes are worth the propagating of an essentialist message, but I think a better question is, is there another way to create change? Or do we need this trickstery use of (which is also a propagation of) the dominant language, even if that language is harmful?

I don’t find “Born This Way” inspiring or beautiful. What I wish the whole world would watch instead is the scene in Paris is Burning where two joyful-looking transwomen frolic on the beach singing, “I am what I am / I am my own creation!” But what does this accomplish, social change-wise? 65 million people have watched the “Born This Way” video on YouTube alone. Paris is Burning, I think, is relegated mostly to the academy, or to queer living rooms only.

Angela Carter wrote that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” Gaga extends this monster-ness to all of the disenfranchised, the bullied, and the pushed-out who are dancing in 5-inch heels and hair dye (or in bowties and suspenders, or in A-shirts and Dickies). And maybe part of the monster quality is that we monsters can’t speak in our own language if we want to be taken seriously by the dominant culture, if we want to create big systemic change. Monsters have to skew, to craft, to seduce. Gaga, as self-appointed Monster Representative to the dominant culture, must be Trickster. We can go on speaking our language in our queer living rooms. We can create spaces for monster discourse and monster love. But if we want equal rights, we need a Trickster representative.

Before “Born This Way” begins Gaga tells us to “Put (our) paws up.” Not our hands. Our hands are for holding our lovers, for cutting friends’ hair and watering plants. Our hands are too pure for this kind of work. No, for Trickster work, we need our paws – our Monkey paws, our monster paws.

Author Bio:

Samantha Cohen is a writer living behind the Scientology building in Los Angeles.  Her fiction can be found in PANK, Black Clock, Storyglossia, The New Orleans Review, and Mary Magazine.  She's teaching a class called Semiotics of Fashion in the Critical Studies program at CalArts this fall.

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