"[Gaga Stigmata has] very modern, edgy photography to free flowing, urban narratives without censure to analytical essays, et cetera—like Gaga, imagination without ... limits. And the beauty is that anyone can submit work to the site, so artists and writers from all over the [world] have joined this experiment." -The Declaration.org
"Since March 2010, [Gaga Stigmata] has churned out the most intense ongoing critical conversation on [Lady Gaga]." -Yale's The American Scholar
The following piece is the second analysis in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Yoü and I”. For the first piece, click here; for the second, here.
We’ll begin colloquially, since the video takes place in the country.
Having little bits of metal implanted in your face and arm fucking hurts. In fact, the entire video hurts. Even the shot of her high heels looks painful, though nothing’s involved but dirt, grass and shoes. Maybe that’s saying something about high heels. Maybe that’s saying something about a lot of things.
Women are cyborgs. People in relationships are cyborgs.
Donna Haraway basically seemed to think that anything that could be parsed as two interlocking systems could be deemed cybernetic, because the distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial” didn’t mean much to her. But we see the violation of the body’s boundaries in this video and in general, in terms of cybernetics, as painful. Robocop did not look comfortable, and neither does Gaga. What does that mean about falling in love?
These implants aren’t the only painful situations in the video. There are allusions to restraint and suffocation – a mermaid outside of the water might have trouble breathing. Those prominent gills have nothing to draw in. She’s being taken care of, but a huge proportion of the scenes in the video look very uncomfortable.
There are two notable exceptions: her wedding scene and her scene with Jo Calderone.
These are worth looking at, firstly to discover if they actually are exceptions.
I can’t think about Jo without thinking about Carl Jung. The Anima and Animus, psychic shadow-personalities created from the repressed femininity in males and the repressed masculinity in females, that act at gateways, guides to the deep areas of the subconscious. The essentialist ideas implicit here cause problems, and I wouldn’t be so on board with them except for the problematic nature of Jo himself.
He’s male, and this makes him somehow different from all of Gaga’s other creations. He received an enormous amount of attention for this. Why?
Let me put this another way: Jo throws into stark relief the fact that all of Gaga’s other images and personas, while infinitely mutable, have all been decidedly female. She isn’t as amorphous as we thought. There’s something about men.
But here, at last, she gives us a man. And she has a very special relationship with this man.
Both Jung and Aliester Crowley would argue that an individual’s marriage to herself is one of the most self-actualized accomplishments in human psychic life. And that’s what Gaga’s giving us here. The force inside you that makes you fall in love, that makes the whole world seem aglow and full of butterflies? That comes from you, and gets projected onto the love-object. You can have access to that feeling whenever you want.
Is Gaga in love with Jo Calderone?
One would sculpt a male identity based on a male ideal. A possible answer is “yes”.
So we have her and Jo loving and doving in the cornfield. But we also have a very literal wedding taking place, with a gorgeous model, this acknowledgement of the other.
This other, though, is performing surgeries and violations of pornographic proportions on the pain-nerved body of our ingénue. The aggressive imagery stands in stark contrast to the upbeat rock and roll of the track. Why all the violence?
We have, here, the narrative of human love as process. Because Gaga understands something important about love, something blindingly obvious but something that often gets left out of the media’s portrayals and our own perceptions.
Love is pain.
Her example-narrative points us not to a single moment of love, the happy moment, the moment of butterflies, but to the entirety of romantic engagement as a process viewed in four-dimensional space. Five dimensional, even, because of all the layering of metaphor. Consummation is thrust in our face at the same moment as agony, and it’s all soundtracked by a rousing stomper of an uplifting track that closes Gaga’s religious statement of an album. She says, watch me get surgery performed, watch me experience pain and suffocation, and watch me do it triumphantly. Watch me get married, too. Watch me do it all at the same time.
Love and mating are engagements in which both systems involved must open to the interaction. Parts mesh, gears grind, and things get snapped off. Love is violence and collision; I’m sure Ballard would agree. Love is the creation of the cyborg, the amalgamation; it’s the ultimate surgery on our subjectivity. This is the surgery that’s being performed in the video, and whether the interaction is between Gaga and the other or Gaga and herself is ultimately immaterial – when say that we must come to love ourselves, the violence of a bifurcation has already taken place.
The oxygen mask offered to the mermaid. The splitting of the self. The longing, and the eternal gap, and the tiny, glorious moments of consummation we get. These processes are the reward for living and loving. The processes themselves. The entire picture, and the slow disassembly, throughout our lives, of the chrysalis of ourselves, the imprisoning neurosis of our own individuality. Learn to love, and learn to die. Be ready.
Grant Morrison has declared, in lectures and in writing, the end of the individual in favor of a kind of willful schizophrenia, the development of multiple personalities to avoid the ego’s calcification and lack of options toward being. What a charming idea: two of those multiple personalities could get married.
You can marry yourself.
But you can also marry somebody else. The meshing is never easy, and you do it at peril of the disruption of your current system of self. But this pain, this surgery, is celebrated by Gaga. This song is triumphant and liberating and the video should be viewed the same way; we should marvel at this gorgeous violation of becoming, we should glory in the dirty obscenities of love as thoroughly as we celebrate its beauty. The video forces us to confront both sides of the coin at once. It’s a tesseract diagram of how to love, and we should not just examine it. We should go beyond that, and examine our own lives, loves, and pains in the same way. In five-dimensional hyperspace, the way they actually exist. They’re beautiful that way.
Photographs and video from Devin and Mrs. O'Neill's honeymoon album.
Author Bios:
Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, PR practitioner, and compulsive liar. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Some of his projects can be found at http://www.popocalypse.com/ and at http://devinoneill.blogspot.com/.
The following piece is the second analysis in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Yoü and I”. For the first piece, click here.
Lady Gaga’s newest video, “Yoü and I”, released two days ahead of schedule on August 16th, includes the usual heavy dollop of striking images and dichotomies. There’s the bloody-heeled, black-clad, cyborg Gaga lurching gracefully down a sun-baked Nebraska highway; there is the mad-scientist lover and the Frankenstein Gaga-mermaid he creates; there is the virginal dream-state Gaga performing “Yoü and I” in a cornfield for the Jo Calderone Gaga.
Clearly, present here are sets of oppositions: Cyborg Gaga is both glamorous and very literally artificial, fake, robotic, made in the big city of show business and high technology – what is she doing in rural farm country, in the heartland? There’s also Jo Calderone, the hard-bitten greaser, and Nightie Gaga, the picture of an innocent farm-girl. Not only do these two oppose one another as simple man and woman, or rebellious hellion and doe-eyed virgin, but they also, as a couple, stand in sharp contrast to the freakish and raunchy pairing of Mermaid Gaga and her mad-scientist creator (who is, in his turn, marked as the opposite to his fishy pop creation by the wings tattooed on his back).
What does it all mean? Of course, oppositional pairings are nothing new to Gaga’s work. In my essay about the “Judas” song and video, I discussed several such pairings: Judas and Jesus themselves, as well as Gaga’s equation of betrayal and forgiveness in an interview. That piece suggested that these opposites might in fact be one and the same: Gaga’s vices are her strengths, her fears are her aspirations. In my essay “Grammar Trouble and Lady Gaga’s Lyrical ‘I’”, I considered the way in which Gaga’s character songs blur the distinctions between various individuals, with major ramifications for power, agency, and identity.
In the “Yoü and I” video, as in these previous works, Gaga is interested in a very special kind of opposition, or duality: namely, she is interested in binaries which only appear to oppose one another; but when we peer at them more closely, or understand them in a new, more profound light, we come to see that they are in fact indistinguishable from one another – they are unities. Cyborg Gaga is, after all, returning to her home – “it’s been a long time since I came around/been a long time but I’m back in town.” She may have changed in drastic, even horrifying ways, but can it be denied that she is still a creature of the place in which she was born? Of course, Jo Calderone is easy to explain in this light: he is Lady Gaga in the most literal sense. And as an artistic creation, acted out by her, he fits in perfectly well as the dream of Nightie Gaga – who, after all, must be dreaming of some hunk, or why is she scampering around in her underwear at night in the middle of a giant field of fertility metaphor?
Giant field of fertility metaphor
In a similar sense, the winged-scientist lover and Mermaid Gaga also belong together, require one another. The monstrous passion of the scientist requires its project, as his monstrous lover’s passion requires the object of its lust. He clearly craves his opposite, a fish woman to his birdman, and their coupling is obviously both joyful and desperate on the part of both parties. Though perhaps Mermaid Gaga didn’t know that she needed the transformation her tormentor-turned-creator-turned lover has inflicted upon her, she seems to realize it by the end of the video. And the pain and violence of her creation is not incidental – it parallels the bloody, raw heels of Cyborg Gaga as she marches home down the highway. Journeys of self-discovery, as well as of homecoming, are difficult and even painful. (Odysseus, the original home-comer, is given his name by his grandfather who takes it from the word odium; he is later only recognized by the scars on his body – physical manifestations of the odium heaped upon his being. His pain, therefore, is synonymous with his identity.)
Thus the “Yoü and I” video is perhaps Gaga’s most overt statement on identity thus far. The crux of this video is that, despite the oppositions between Nightie Gaga and Calderone Gaga, between Mermaid Gaga and Nightie Gaga, between Cyborg Gaga and Nebraska Homestead, and between the two different romantic pairs, all these different Gagas belong together: even more, they are one.
This is how the identity which Gaga posits, and which she explores not only in individual songs and performances, but also in her day-to-day performance art project, is able to be at once performative and essential. The title of her second album, Born this Way, certainly caused a hubbub among many observers who considered themselves informed. How could Gaga champion empowered self-creation, to say nothing of LGBT rights, and yet choose a name that positively screamed the essentialist understanding of identity: from birth and by birth we are determined? Such observers could take a lesson from Gaga in the (re)unification of supposed-binaries: does having a destiny truly preclude self-creation, or transformation? Isn’t it conceivable that one’s destiny might be to make a certain choice, and if so, hasn’t the opposition between fate and freedom become obsolete or arbitrary?
Hegel, in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, writes,
Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself – not an original or immediate unity as such – is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presuppose its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out it its end, is it actual. (10)
I argue that what Hegel means in this passage and what Gaga is attempting to say about identity have much in common. Hegel’s argument is that the really real, the “actual”, the human subject, must include both itselfand the perception of itself. There is always a distance inherent in identity, a sense in which a person knows who and where they are, and also that they could be something else someplace else. Thus, in a way, identity is an empty space, a gulf across which the self is perceived by something at once itself and alien. Compare this idea to one of Gaga’s tweets in the days before the video was released: “We bare an Unbearable Human Inability: to just ‘be.’” She grasps what Hegel means when he writes that “this substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity” – humans are nothing more than the perception of something missing, of a void wherein that perception will always struggle and transform in an attempt to be fulfilled. Hence the arduous distance Cyborg Gaga must traverse, which leaves her ankles caked with blood, before she can return to a home as alien as it must be familiar. Hence the painful, rapine, monstrous transformation Mermaid Gaga undergoes before the throes of pleasure, before the coming-home of orgasmic ecstasy; hence the desire of Nightie Gaga for her dream object, which is after all only an inversion of herself. That tweet also includes “love is a result” – the result of this striving, a homecoming across the gulf of the self, which is perhaps not so different from the gulf between two selves.
Author Bio:
Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University.
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
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.
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 toLyric 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.
