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

By Roland Betancourt

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

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

Iconography in Motion: In Preparation for the Chromatomachy

By Roland Betancourt

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

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

By Roland Betancourt

A Pop Music Emergency: From Pallor to Applause

By Laurence Ross and Meghan Vicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CODA: Lady Gaga is Over

By Roland Betancourt

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

ARTPOP

STOP THE DRAMA.
START THE MUSIC.

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

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

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

GAGA PIERROT: Something of a Devoted Jester

By Roland Betancourt

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

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

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

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

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

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 + +

Gaga in Space

By Ben Fama

On Saturday, 3 August 2013, The Atlas Review, in cooperation with the Marina Abramovic Institute, hosted a long durational performance in the screening room of Brooklyn’s upscale Wythe Hotel. Under Marina’s instruction, more than 55 performers read Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris in its entirety. “Special guests” included Marina Abramovic, Neil Gaiman, and Lady Gaga. 

Marina introduced the event by skyping in on a screen and relating an allegory about a shepherd walking beneath the stars. The shepherd taught Marina to close her eyes in order to listen better when talking to other people. Event staff then passed out white blindfolds and encouraged the audience to wear them for as much of the performance as they chose.

The first reader was Lady Gaga. Gaga provided a short video, which began with a flash of an image of herself, short hair falling in her eyes. The video went to black screen as she read the first page of the novel. The clip ended with a quick flash of the same image, a look I overheard someone else describe as a Mara-Rooney-Girl-with-the-Dragon-Tattoo-esque. Other standouts included Lynne Tillman, Jennifer Tamayo (who performed with a megaphone), and Monica McClure who collaborated with dancer Cori Kresge. 

Considering that Gaga appeared alongside Marina at the 20^th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit just last Saturday, 27 July 2013, her participation here isn’t surprising. 

Visit the Marina Abramovic Institute’s kickstarter page for additional information.

Author bio:

Ben Fama is the author of New Waves, Aquarius Rising, and the artist book Mall Witch. He is the co-editor of Wonder. His work has been featured and discussed in The Brooklyn Rail, Bomb Magazine, Action Yes, Jubilat, and on the Best American Poetry Blog. He lives in New York City.

Born This Way Ball - An Inventory

Gaga Stigmata recently wrote a guest piece on the Born This Way Ball for Gagaism.org. Here's a preview of the piece, with a link to the full post below. We are grateful to Scott Finley for inviting us to contribute to Gagaism.org's larger project on the BTW Ball.

“Americano” and Meat Dress

Women as meat: the oldest metaphor. As Carol J. Adams wrote in The Pornography of Meat, it is usually invisible, this practice of “viewing another as consumable – as something,” of presenting the Other packaged and ready for a lustfaced gaze-and-devour. (Or it is visible but ridiculous, laugh track-able: Jessie Spano reminding Slater yet again that she’s not a piece of meat.)

But here Gaga makes it visible, literally, disgustingly (because if she’s making visible a disgusting system, a disgusting [set of] practice[s], shouldn’t she provoke disgust?): Gaga was strung up with the other stripped-and-shined pink meats. But she broke free. She broke free even though she was almost dead. She found other self-freed meatgirls and grabbed guns – giant phallic guns: signifiers of American subjecthood and tools to blow apart the system that slayed and displayed them. These meatgirls didn’t wait to clean themselves. They didn’t put on ugly pantsuits from Express and get stuck on the middle rung of the corporate ladder. They’re about to smash patriarchy still in their meatsuits – still as the meatcreature-monsters the patriarchy has created. They manifest a more literal and pop-spectacular translation of Schneemann’s “Meat Joy.” Joyful-angry Othered meatgirls ready for consumption but redirecting the violence outward toward their perpetrators – viva la revolución!

– Samantha Cohen

“Bloody Mary”

Lady Gaga tells NME Magazine that “Bloody Mary” is “a song about Mary being divine and human at the same time.” When she performs “Bloody Mary” at the BTW Ball, it becomes a song about being fully human and fully A.I. A haunting, moaning, part-human-part-machine screeching sound fills the stage, reminiscent of the music that accompanies Kubrick’s monolith – that black pillar/3-D-screen that challenges viewers and ushers forth evolution’s newest stage. When Gaga glides upon the stage and the first chords of “Bloody Mary” sound out, there are really two stages present: the one she glides upon, and the new evolutionary one she embodies. Her white Perry Meek dress and helmet channel Kubrick’s spaceship, positioning her as human-become-spaceship (and spaceship is the body of Kubrick’s computer come into consciousness). As she floats forward, defying gravity, her dress also defies gravity, refusing to trail behind her and instead surging before her – as though both flesh and fashion disregard all known laws of nature, problematizing what forward movement looks like. Gaga is the second coming of Mary as 100% human and 100% HAL 9000. Surrounded by the audience’s little screens – those miniature monoliths – that both capture and create her, the next stage of humanity, Homo A.I.

– Meghan Vicks

The Castle

The castle in/before which the Born This Way Ball takes place is certainly a surprising choice .....

Click here to read the full piece on Gagaism.org, which includes entries by Samantha Cohen, Peter Kline, Devin O'Neill, Eddie McCaffray, Alexander Cavaluzzo, Laurence Ross, and Meghan Vicks.