Gaga over Gaga: Lost in the Funhouse of the (Reified) Real

By Virginia Konchan

“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” ―Guy Debord 

 “I'm telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true.” ― Lady Gaga 

The paroxysm of “authenticity,” since its modernist deconstruction, can’t cure postmodern anomie, at a time when politics, religion, self-esteem, personal expression are entirely bound up with the logics of branding and the blinding halogen lights of commodity culture, manufacturing not just celebrities but the desire to be them (mimesis, or facial reconstructive surgery), as well as dissatisfaction with our own imperfect bodies, financial and existential woes, and (occasionally) humdrum lives. When representation engulfs the real, the compensatory mechanism (inflated valuation of subjectivity, in identity politics) kicks in: can, then, the desire to worship or admire the other (as subject, not purchasable fetish) be the only “authentic” meme, driving the totalized spectacle, left? If surrendering the need for gods is last step on the journey to disillusionment (“You revolutionaries want another master, and you will get one” as Lacan warned in 1968), Gaga lights a path beyond institutionalized dogma, and the image regime, by demonstrating the performance of the real as nothing more than a metastasized staging of the desire for recognition, and (ew) love.

For Gaga, to be seen is to exist. The danger inheres in the absence or deconstruction of the spectacle, or, in psycho-sexual development, the failure of the mirror stage: without the media feed and cameras, how do iconic celebrities, and the rest of us, reify our existence, or ego? The body of an icon, like that of all market subjects, is experienced by spectators as an object designed to scandalize, sell products, and attract. Writers and other creative artists share in this dilemma of self-promotion and marketization: is constant self-and other reification through textual representation (enacting the schism between self and personae, site and parasite) that different, in the history of oral performance and codified text, than the rabbit hole of the entertainment industry?

From Gaga’s “Manifesto of Little Monsters”: “There is something heroic about the way my fans operate their cameras. So precisely, so intricately and so proudly. Like Kings writing the history of their people, is their prolific nature that both creates and procures what will later be perceived as the kingdom. So the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the Kings. They are the Queens . . . It is in theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image . . . the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be or rather to become . . .”

If celebrities (and the cult of celebrity) are materially invented and produced by man, as archetypes sustaining the human drama, their cracked surfaces and flaws show us that defying natural laws or performing ideality is a paid performance by professional stuntmen and women, assisted by teams of choreographers, make-up artists, clothing designers, and funded by us. “Glamour is what I sell, it's my stock in trade,” as Marlene Dietrich quipped. And glamour, as we know, makes life sexy, but, like hard living, can also kill.

The polarity between life and representations or reproductions of life was cogently articulated at the dawn of industrialism when Walter Benjamin declared, in 1936, all perception of post-auratic art to be perceptual mimesis: we are only shocked, moved, or stunned once, by the original event or form, and all that comes after is (mis)recognition, degrees of familiarity, and habituation to the supplement, dramatizing our alienation from sentience, the other, and ourselves.

In admiring celebrities, historical figures, and artists who seem to transcend biological or class determinisms (embodying the Greco-Roman will-to-form) we run the risk of conflating the spectacle of the medium (the “body wholly body,” to quote Wallace Stevens, “fluttering its empty sleeves”) with the message, or ceasing to believe (the coup of neoliberal aesthetics) in the value or existence of a “message,” obviating the politics of resistance and conscious deliberation, at all.

From the onrush of “open letters” penned by Sufjan Stevens, Sinead O’Connor, and others counseling Miley Cyrus back from the brink after her twerking episode, to celebrity ripostes and biographies exposing the collateral damage of media-fueled celebrity, when not resulting in actual death (i.e. Amy Winehouse and Brittany Murphy), never has the line between art and performance, iconicity and humanity, production model and duplicate, copyright and forgery, been so attenuated (nor our memory of the “authentic,” so atrophied) as today. Our collective amnesia of the real, spurred by celebrity culture, post-Cold War hijinks of technological progress (genetic engineering, robotics) and reality TV, has roots in surrealism, and other revolutionary movements breaking with official, and mass culture. In 1922, André Breton distanced himself from the Dadaist taste for scandal for scandal’s sake, yet Louis Aragon pressed on, writing in the preface to The Libertine, “I’ve never looked for anything but scandal.” As does Gaga: “They can’t scare me if I scare them first.”

The argument, like that of porn as liberation, that celebrities, even if manufactured, produced, and consumed, do so volitionally, retaining, agency, is nothing if not fraught, and often entails a culturally enforced process of teaching a woman to “confess” to enjoying social or actual prostitution, as dramatized in the 2013 biopic Lovelace, about porn star Linda Lovelace’s economic and sexual exploitation by her manager, pimp, and husband, Chuck Traynor, and the porn industry. The star herself can become mesmerized by the mirrors of her overexposed image, and addicted to the biofeedback of fans and paparazzi (not like the saline-drip of social media).

Eddie McCaffray, on Gaga's "Do What U Want (With My Body)": “Gaga’s body is either something valueless, such as garbage or raw meat, or something flagellated, such as that of an abuse victim, that of someone with an eating disorder, that of an addict [ . . . ] If it is valueless muck, it can be refashioned however fame or art (pop) demands. If it is merely a conduit for trauma, it allows that trauma to create a space from which Gaga can emerge as coping-mechanism-cum-messiah.” McCaffray’s presents a view of Gaga as a disembodied other, stripped of subjectivity, and her social function as either stigmatic repository for our shame, sexuality, and violence, or, in her performance of illness and hysteria, a stigmatic fetish, easing our anxiety over lack, and the void (the modernist nausea of non-being; and today, in zombie capitalism, bodies emptied of personalities and selves), to avoid its projection onto men.

We live in an era dominated by the anasemic drive (e.g. Chris Kraus’ Aliens and Anorexia), mourning the inability of the necromantic body to signify, and substituting contingency and flux for meaning, and market transactions, relationships. Our troubled relationship to the stigmatized body is echoed in the enforced discipline and punishment of female reproductive body (fitness industries, post-industrial meat production, fertility politics, abortion debates), and its dangerous affects and outlaw desires. An aesthetics of waste (what writer Joyelle McSweeney calls magpie aesthetics), ecocritical, formalist, historicist, trans, queer, Marxist or feminist, can also been seen as a political refusal of the body-cum-artwork’s capitalist (Stalinist, fascist) utility and form: within the culture and entertainment industries, taboos only need to be broken once for the “norm” to be shattered.

Openly confessing to having struggled with anorexia and bulimia since age fifteen, Gaga’s Body Revolution campaign, launched in 2012, is accompanied by pictures of her in a slim but not anorexic or pre-pubescent state. As Katie J.M. Baker says, “We also know she's still struggling because of how she's trying to cope: by asking for support and validation from her millions of ardent fans. Gaga wants to empower others, clearly, but she's also letting us watch the narrative of her eating disorder play out. Gaga’s Body Revolution campaign . . . is inarguably inspiring — it's heartwarming to see dozens of posts from women and men who are insecure about features ranging from love handles to missing limbs proudly post photos of their half-naked bodies . . . Gaga proves she really is just like her fans by "showing the world that it's not okay to critique her body" instead of suing the publications that called her fat or claiming she's ‘dehydrated’.”

Gaga—not so much as sex symbol but androgene—has come to represent, then, the limits not only of commodified performativity, but its breaking point, within the body: rhetorics not of transcendence or ideality but the politics of self-harm: the occupational hazard, in the entertainment industry, of illness and addiction, at war with the off-stage desire for health and intimacy.

Gaga, Madonna’s closest heir, troubles not just iconic but historic stereotypes of women in power (witch-hunts, libidinal repressions of Victoriania), and yet the revolutionary message is largely that of defiance. Testing the boundaries of mainstream and avant-garde theaters (of the absurd, oppressed and cruel), and the sturm und drang of contemporary performance as “high art” (pageantry, spectacle), Gaga spits at vertiginous imaginaries dependent upon monetized and ideological investments for survival (“Trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it's broken, but you can still see the crack in that mother fucker's reflection”), reclaiming the right to bleed publically, for cash, not as shock art, but an embodied prolegomena, with witnesses, of her “truth” (what else is real)?

Bio: Virginia Konchan is a writer and critic living in Chicago. Her work has appeared widely in such places as in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, and The Believer. Co-founder of Matter, a journal of poetry and political commentary, and regular contributor to The Conversant and Jacket2, she lives in Chicago.

GS Announcement

After nearly four years of intensive critical-creative output and interaction with popular culture, Gaga Stigmata, in its current journal incarnation, will be coming to an end at the strike of midnight on January 1, 2014.

In these final months, we are requesting submissions in the following three veins:

(1) Any new essays on Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP era 

(2) New essays on any pop cultural phenomenon that manifests what we call a “stigmata effect” – that is, the blurring of lines between superstar and fan, between high and low art, between art and interpretation, between the “original” and the “copy.” In particular, we are interested in essays about about Miley Cyrus, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Ke$ha, Lana Del Rey, and Katy Perry, but you are not in any way limited by this list.

Additionally, we are also seeking essays that explore new pop cultural phenomena such as the aesthetics of new media forms (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, YouTubers, .gifs, Vines, Instagrams, etc.) 

We are also interested in essays that explore manifestations of the stigmata-esque intersection of the “art world” and the “pop world” in contemporary culture. 

(3) Any essays about Lady Gaga that have previously been published elsewhere. (We would like to create a one-stop on-live archive of the best Lady Gaga scholarship and creative criticism ever published; we will of course give credit to the original source of publication).

You are welcome to write traditional essays, and/or to use a creative-critical format for your work. Youtube videos, photoshopped images, memes, and .gifs can all feature in your work.

You are also welcome to submit more than one piece during this final incarnation of the journal, after which the journal aspect of the project will move into an archival stage. 

Miley’s War: Love and Rebellion in the Millennial Trenches

By Devin O’Neill

The following will be a review of the new Miley Cyrus album Bangerz, and the promotional and branding strategies surrounding the album’s release.

First we’ll discuss the music, since that’s definitely the neglected part of the equation.

Miley’s come up with a new pop sound, and it works. I love it. I’m going to have to rethink my approach to a lot of what’s on the radio, to Top 40, because of what’s been done here. It makes a lot of current pop sound dated. Recent Top 40’s been influenced heavily by 120-BPM dance music. Big-tent electronica. Think Ke$ha, LMFAO, even the new Britney. Miley’s drawn a line and departed from all that.

She and her team have accomplished this by, basically, incorporating cutting-edge trends in hip-hop – trap, drill, what-have-you – into her sound, alongside country and pop. The textures are round and thick, not excessively massive or blown-out like a lot of the pop on the radio. It’s got a great bottom end and tons of clarity, and reminds me of soundscapes I’ve heard from Die Antwoord, Drake, even Dr. Dre.

She’s mixing and matching musical styles, but her personality ties it all together into a vital brand. She can pose herself as country, and pull off a hip-hop-hoedown with Nelly on “4x4”, the only modern club banger I’ve ever heard with a straight-up cowgirl-line-dance rhythm.

The whole album is like this. She uses her raunchy southern-girl attitude to smooth the edges between raw hip-hop and the other forms she’s playing with, while rocking her new look. The result is very pop, very confrontational, and very her. One massive debutante fuck-you. “Do My Thang” is an archetypal example of the sound, and probably my favorite track on the album.

Her lyrics are raw, confrontational, and naive, which, in the context of this sort of ratchet/cowgirl persona, works perfectly. Think 2 Chainz yelling “SHE GOT A BIG BOOTY SO I CALL HER BIG BOOTY”. Hard-skulled punk-hop. In fact the weakest moments, lyrically, are those where Miley tries to over-rationalize or move outside her pure attitude. Attitude is the fuel this album runs on. Attitude and romance.

Yeah, Miley’s 20, so a lot of these songs are about love, sex, even marriage. They’re wide-eyed and openhearted, and, combined with her determination to decide what her own moral boundaries are, make for a compelling window into the fire of youth. It’s almost like she has unlimited energy, and she sings with an enormous amount of confidence and conviction.

The album art is straight out of Tumblr. A collaged, retro explosion of ridiculousness, neon, palm trees, and lo-fi digital. Anyone who hasn’t spent time in some pretty weird corners of the Internet might be confused. Others will recognize the aesthetic immediately, especially if they’re into performers like Geneva Jacuzzi. It’s all archival scuzz.

This singularity of identity, though, isn’t restricted to the album. So now, we get to the rest of the equation. Now we get to the secret plan.

“The Witch’s Dorothy”: On Gaga’s conflation of hero, villain, and witch

By Sarah Cook

In which I get one step closer to articulating Gaga’s intriguing use of failure, if we can equate failure with evil (i.e. witchery). If failure can be the same thing as a bad witch. If a bad witch can be good for certain things.

These notes are in response to Gaga’s performance of “Applause” (Applau-Oz) on Good Morning America, 9 September 2013.

1. That Gaga hovers somewhere between witch, villain and monster. That this hovering is the crucial source of her difference, i.e. her creativity, her power.

Audre Lorde: “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”*

1.2. Gaga embraces various differences – between her repeated incorporation of disability, multiple sexualities, the burqa, & her invitation to those who are “broke or evergreen…black, white, beige, [of] chola descent,” or Othered in any variety of ways – is this her endorsement of the creative power of difference? Does Gaga herself descend “into the chaos of knowledge,” the chaos of identity?

And can a rich white female ever invoke the power of Others in a way that is not problematic?

2. Gaga’s monstrosity has perhaps been established since The Fame Monster, sometimes occurring with a cyborg twist à la “Born This Way,” sometimes as manifesto (think of those haunting images that accompany the “Manifesto of Little Monsters” video done with Nick Knight). But with the inauguration of the ARTPOP era, I think we are seeing a new extension of Gaga’s monstrosity, one that harnesses magic and transformation – the bubbling cauldron and colored smoke in the “Applause” video – along with the multiplicity of stage presences that have occurred during each of her recent live performances. A magical, playful monstrosity. And now, with the incarnation of Oz, we see the previously clear distinction of the hero/villain binary made messy – or perhaps made articulate, specific – through the conflation of wizard/witch/Dorothy.

3. The Wizard isn’t the real villain of the story, we know that. His innocent folly and simple-minded desire for the mask of power – layered upon his own desire simply to go home – is ultimately dismissed: the true villain, the Wicked Witch, is rightfully killed and the Wizard actually provides Dorothy and her friends with what they need. With Gaga’s manifestation of all three of these figures on the stage – good, somewhat evil, more evil – she is therefore complicating our distinctions between the good figure and the bad one. How do we distinguish maniac from evil sorceress from small-town girl when they’re all showing up within and hovering so closely to the same body?

What is the Location of Pop Culture, Part V: The Logic of the Cover

By Roland Betancourt

The cover video is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous YouTube videos out there. They can be immensely complex music-video renditions, or simple a cappella vlog-style iPhone videos. Its prolific character makes it difficult to categorize or to produce any all-encompassing argument about the format. Here, however, I am more interested in sketching out a conceptual system for the logic of the cover as a prevailing structural mode of thought and production, rather than an all-encompassing survey of the trend. My interests lie precisely in the cover as a structure of thinking creatively and originally about an inherently derivative product.

The discursive sphere of contemporary pop operates within a strange double bind. On the one hand, it glorifies stereotypical postmodern culture of manic citation and reference, identifying the layering of source material as an indicator and generator of complexity and erudition. On the other hand, these layers of citation are simultaneously criticized as unoriginal, derivative, and as rip-offs.  

The former is the logic of BuzzFeed, for example, whose litanies of gifs, short analyses, and iterative comparisons construct compendia of intertextual, intervisual analyses, which find their gravitas in their iterative power. Like the florilegia of medieval authors who appended their texts with lists of excerpts from canonical sources that supported the claims of their arguments, the BuzzFeed lists allow for the construction of relational knowledge through short, rapid-fire, sequential captioned images that, while seemingly unrelated, generate logics through their encounter upon this tabula.

For example, a few weeks ago Aylin Zafar expertly composed a cohesive litany of Gaga’s cultural citations in “Applause” entitled, “Every Cultural Reference You Probably Didn’t Catch in Lady Gaga’s New Video.” Aylin Zafar’s florilegium of sources was a fascinating moment for contributors of a blog like Gaga Stigmata: it demonstrated a form of scholarly, academic production that was self-reflexive on both the medium of its circulation (pop), and the content it addressed (pop). That is, it was a rigorous discussion of pop in the medium of pop.

Consequently, this manifested the possibility of academic writing and presentation that is often difficult for us – those who are often steeped in the academy – to willingly explore. To a certain extent, it requires that we relinquish our agency as authors who construct robust and well-argued theses, and instead present audiences with rigorous fragments through which we enable readers to conduct their own analyses in the comments. However, this is not a full relinquishing of agency, since it is the manner in which those fragments are arranged and what fragments are included that enable arguments to arise.

Reading through Zafar’s compendium and noticing how Gaga Stigmata was cited presented a model where the tl;dr (too long, didn’t read) assumed logic of a project like BuzzFeed collided head-on with a project like Stigmata, which allows for concerted, longer analyses that for me – and my overly verbose approach to things – has always been a draw and an exciting aspect of GS. Let’s face it: in the digital blogosphere there is a lot of discussion, but even the lengthy posts are often quite limited comparatively. On Gaga Stigmata we often encounter what are essentially 20-minute conference paper length works – hence being true to the form of a common scholarly method of exchange, and not sacrificing the space to allow thoughts to develop and explore various options.

In contrast, Zafar’s incisive observations in a bullet-point format readily enabled users to produce a critical analysis of “Applause” by providing a robust and deep vocabulary that not only featured external sources, but also presented Gaga’s own precedents for much of the imagery of her “Applause” video – a crucial element that is often overlooked by such blog-driven posts, particularly when their intentions are to prove a dearth of originality. Hence, projects like Gaga Stigmata and BuzzFeed find a generative collision precisely in the friction generated from their contact.

How then does this play in at all with the logic of the cover?

I do not see BuzzFeed as a derivative or condensation of Gaga Stigmata’s work simply because it took some of its information or arguments from it. Instead, I see the two as covers of one another, understanding that knowledge is not just produced by some and disseminated by others: the two constantly feed upon one another and develop audiences not as mutually exclusive spheres, but in the interstitial sites that occur between the two. One does not merely read Stigmata for the whole/longer argument, but rather for a different form of argumentation.      

The same system is in play with the cover video, which cannot be said to copy or riff on an original, but rather generates audiences through the iterative permutations it enables.

A key illustration of this function of the cover emerges when we encounter covers that engender their own covers, and therefore muddle the chains of contribution and alteration. This was evident when Glee blatantly used Jonathan Coulton’s cover of Sir Mixalot’s “Baby Got Back” without giving any authority or recognition to Coulton for his slowed-down cover, despite the fact that the Glee cover even featured a lyric alteration from Coulton’s song (where they sing “Johnny C’s in trouble,” a change that Coulton made to adapt the original’s “Sir Mixalot’s in trouble”). This then led Jonathan Coulton to release another version of his own cover “in the style of Glee,” making the chain of covers nearly unrecognizable – a veritable snake biting its own tail.

This is a process that occurs daily as YouTubers constantly cover and re-cover songs not only from their favorite artists, but also from their fellow YouTubers and other permutations – such as a performance on Glee. What is noteworthy here is that just as you learned from playing telephone in elementary school, with each transmission information is radically reconfigured and repurposed, thereby leading to the creation of new and unique performances – not only when a quasi-heroic figure takes on the task to reimagine a classic or contemporary tune. For example, one group that came to fame with its creative takes on songs is the real-life couple Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan of Karmin. Karmin went viral following their 12 April 2011 cover of Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now” (ft. Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes), which was even featured on Ellen. The song not only involved an impressive rap session by Heidemann, but also included the use of internal covers and citations – such as fragments of the Lord of the Rings main theme woven into the song itself.

After the hits from their first album Hello – “Crash My Party” and particularly “Brokenhearted” – this summer Karmin released a new single, “Acapella,” off their upcoming album Pulses. While “Acapella” has not received the attention it deserves (drowned out by all the other mega-songs of the summer), the song manifests precisely the generative logic of the group’s roots. True to their original medium, the song has its origins in Anna Kendrick’s “Cups (When I’m Gone)” from Pitch Perfect. As Heidemann describes it, “Acapella” reflects on the use of household, unorthodox objects to produce unusual beats. This fits in as part of a Do It Yourself (D.I.Y.) trend, rooted in the proliferation of YouTube videos and covers. Given their origins on YouTube, they produced this song with the perspective that if you can do it yourself, you can also do it a cappella. Hence the song relies mainly on beats created through the use of their own voices.

As such, Karmin’s song falls within an long line of covers. Not only does it riff on “Cups” – a song that itself has inspired a slew of covers on YouTube, and is in itself a complex cover (see below) – but “Cups” itself manifested the logic of household production that both speaks to a drive to make do with what one has immediately around, but also to create innovative products that emerge from such a D.I.Y.-aesthetic, which has now become in itself a specific medium or trope that constantly tries to outdo itself with new and unique types of covers or music videos.

This medium of cover productions is best exemplified by the formerly Yale-based duo, Sam Tsui and Kurt Hugo Schneider, YouTube stars whose claim to fame is a series of early covers where Tsui sings on stage alongside many iterations of himself, and their web-series College Musical, primarily with the hit “I Wanna Bone My TA.” Tsui and Schneider’s early cover videos fit well into a category of covers that play directly with the notion of singing a cappella and pushing it to its limits, by recording different elements of the song and syncing them together in a video.

Mike Topkins is one YouTuber who has uniquely utilized this method by producing simple videos that show him at the center of the screen and surrounded by close-ups of his mouth, each labeled with the instrument or element of the song’s mix that it is playing. It is perhaps quite fortuitous that Tompkins is currently performing along with Karmin as part of the Jonas Brothers tour. Tompkins’ videos manifest the technical complexity of a cappella musical production that mimics the full-bodied sound of the original song through the human voice alone.

Similarly, Sam Tsui’s early videos use the singular person as a way of producing the sound of a college a cappella group, like the well-known Yale Whiffenpoofs. As with his “Michael Jackson Medley” (which has over 30 million views), Tsui’s early videos usually began the same way: he walks onto the stage and is soon joined by other reduplications of himself who play various parts of the harmony. The non-existent audience cheers as he walks onto the Yale stage, emulating the experience of an a cappella group performance or competition. As such, his videos seek to make manifest – and internalize – the very logic of viral reproduction that his videos partake in. The performer is reduplicated across the stage in a microcosmic manifestation of the logic of the cover, and of the video’s own unfolding across the Internet.

“Pop Culture Was in Art, Now Art’s in Pop Culture in Me”: Thoughts on Lady Gaga’s Inclusion and Embodiment of Art in “Swine” at the 2013 iTunes Festival

By Courtney Constable

Lady Gaga has expressed a strong desire to exist as both an artist and a musician since the beginning of her career. This desire has manifested itself in many ways throughout the years, but was perhaps first exemplified in the Fame era by her earliest persona Candy Warhol, whom Gaga presented to fans as pop music’s female answer to infamous artist Andy Warhol. Using fashion and music as her chosen artistic mediums, Gaga often highlights the influence that pop culture has on the ever-changing world of art. Now, with the beginning of the ARTPOP era, Gaga’s preoccupation with the relationship between art and pop culture has been put center stage. This emphasis was more easily identifiable than ever before in her performance at the 2013 iTunes Festival, particularly during “Swine.”

Gaga first set the stage for “Swine” with her August 2013 VMA “Applause” performance, during which she embodied the role of the canvas, first by wearing a large, square white headpiece (a blank canvas) and then by actually having her face painted during the number (this has been more fully discussed on Gaga Stigmata – here and here). In the week following her VMA performance and leading up to the iTunes Festival, Gaga turned the tables, this time inviting her fans to become the canvas by providing her Twitter followers with a list of “acceptable attire for #Swinefest...” The list included what she described as “ARTCLOTHES,” which she said would be necessary for the “paint zone” that would be present during her show. She later clarified on 28 August that “#ARTCLOTHES are clothes you don’t mind getting covered in live art!” This short dialogue set the tone for Gaga’s unveiling of several tracks from the upcoming ARTPOP album, but gave particular insight into the artistic spectacle that was her performance of the highly anticipated song “Swine”.

Sex and its Role in ARTPOP

By Edmund McCaffray

So, ARTPOP is pretty obviously about the encounter, intersection, and even merger of art and pop. In part this is the continuing development of one of Lady Gaga’s perennial themes, her reliance on and relationship with her fans – after all, pop fandom is so distinct from (high) art “fandom” that it doesn’t even seem right to use the same word for both phenomena. Yet Gaga clearly brings the two together by pursuing her art in a pop medium. But her performance at the iTunes Festival on 1 September 2013 seemed to highlight a new key theme of this current phase in her overall project: love, or more specifically, sex.

Of course, as in pop songs generally, there’s been plenty of sex and love in previous Gaga songs. But the concentration that appeared in the lyrics, performances, and interludes of her set at the festival sets it apart in this regard. Perhaps most overtly, Gaga performed three songs (“Artpop,” “Jewels and Drugs,” and “Sex Dreams”) in her new Aphrodite persona – signified by the Aphrodite hair wig, which she wore only for these three songs. Aphrodite is, obviously, a goddess not only of fertility (an easy metaphor for artistic creativity), but also of sex. Gaga has already shown the new persona in the video for ARTPOP’s lead single, “Applause,” and in a performance of “Applause” for the recent VMAs, as well as in many public appearances.

But the subjects and lyrics of the eight songs Gaga performed also center on sex. “Aura” asks if the narrator’s audience wants to see her naked, peek under the covers, and touch her. It also includes a kind of trance-chant of “dance, sex, art, pop,” highlighting the theme of sex by placing it in a sequence including the obviously cardinal component terms of “art” and “pop.” Next comes “MANiCURE,” in which Gaga begs to be healed and saved because she’s addicted to love. “Artpop” clearly is pitched as a love song, from its dreamy melody to its “we could belong together” chorus. “Jewels and Drugs” gives the theme a relative backseat (just demanding love over money), but only before the most overtly sexual song of the set, “Sex Dreams,” which is obviously about having sexy sex in sexy sex dreams. “Swine” continues this focus: the title is a common derogatory term for lecherous men, and Gaga makes this explicit with the lyrics “I know, I know, I know, I know you want me, but you’re just a pig inside a human body.” “I Wanna Be With You” is another love song, and “Applause,” as I discussed in an earlier piece, includes some double entendre so blunt – “give me that thing that I love, I’ll turn the lights off . . . make ‘em touch” – as to threaten reduction to single entendre.

And it isn’t only the lyrics of these songs (I suspect that once we have official lyrics for these new songs that they’ll reveal plenty of sex and sex metaphor in the verses; here I’ve mainly limited myself to choruses). In a number of the songs, sex is closely associated with the central ARTPOP themes of open-ness, hybridity, creation, and so on. “Aura” is about penetrating (no pun intended) the performative fame shell that Lady Gaga has quite explicitly built for much of her career as one of her main artistic projects. So peeking under the covers, touching, and being addressed as “lover” are not just manifestations of omnipresent pop sexuality and titillation, but also invite the listener into a more-intimate-because-less-guarded version of the axial fan-Gaga dialectic. It’s no coincidence that “Aura” opens the whole performance (inviting the audience “behind the curtain”), or that it includes such icons of distance and inaccessibility as the iron cage (perhaps echoing the one present in the “Applause” video) and the burqa.

Swine at the Rave: Erotics and Humiliation in Lady Gaga’s Schandmaske

By Roland Betancourt

In Lady Gaga’s “Swine” performance at the iTunes Festival, we may have seen a sketch for the rumored “Art Rave” that Lady Gaga has allegedly been planning with Jeff Koons. The flashing lights, the raging punk-esque tones, and the muzzles-cum-spray-paint donned by her dancers (who produced impromptu art projects on lowered canvases, some of which were later tossed into the audience) – these all suggest a model of an ideal art rave in Lady Gaga’s vision.

But within this art-production hedonism there lies the menacing grotesque narrative of Gaga’s untold story of pain and abuse – which she chose not to share with the audience, but which certainly alluded to many figures from her rise to fame who used and abused her. Figures like Perez Hilton come to mind; or perhaps even closer associates and loves, like Bob Leone and Luc Carl, whose separations from the pop star have led to rumor, slander, and myth causing one to wonder what precisely happened behind the mask. The punk or screamer rock aesthetic of the song might even suggest a direct tie to those Rivington Street days at St. Jerome’s where the burgeoning pop-star was surrounded by her then boyfriend, Luc Carl’s, rocker friends, while being slowly drawn into other spheres by the fairy-godmothers of pop, Lady Starlight and Darian Darling, for example. 

This art rave, however, was also haunted by the ever-present grotesque images of Swine – by the very figures the song commemorates and embraces, and simultaneously distances itself from in an attempt to work past. This produces an interesting disjuncture that is worth exploring: the song, which is a sort of confession that functions to move through the pain, brings to the forefront the swine as a trope. But, the swine do not merely populate some othered, dystopic landscape of pain; instead, they occupy the art rave itself, which one would imagine is the utopia of the ARTPOP project.

Her dancers emerge onto the stage clad in all white, with large swine-like gasmasks covering their heads. Their bodies are equipped with fog-machines and spray-paint packs, and these apparatuses give them an almost insect-like form – as if some sort of cross between the filthy swine and the flies upon their wretched, putrid flesh. Those large, condiment-shaker-lid eyes soldered into that bestial head, muzzled with that long, gasmask-canister snout. Oh, what a sight of post-apocalyptic horror, where human-animal hybrids make art and seem to have been bred not just across species, but across humans, animals, and the very debris and detritus of war and industry – the gruesome flesh of man merged with swine and speckled with the accoutrements of the war-industry complex. Those jet-packs of noxious, gassy fog and hissing paint, sprayed onto those canvases are like poison spat-out from some dilophosaurus, like in that famous Jurassic Park scene, some creature from the terrifying dawn of creation. It is truly a horrifying scene.

Relocation, Revelation, & Death: preliminary notes on Lady Gaga’s opening performance at the iTunes Festival, live from the Roundhouse in London, September 1st 2013

By Sarah Cook

                                                            ライブがまもなく始まります。

                                                            (live)        (shortly)   (will begin)

                                                            (life?)

I’ve been to so many concerts, I know what it’s like: the ebb and flow of screams while you’re waiting for the main performer to come out. But something about the cheering – Gaga, Gaga –like babies chanting violently. The waves of screaming.

Name-calling.

Audience-culture: pre-applause (vs. post-applause…which kind does Gaga live for?). The rhythmic hands that accompany the yelling, all of which signals an anxious audience, waiting.

clap-clap, Ga-ga!        clap-clap, Ga-ga!        clap-clap, Ga-ga!        repeat

In couplets – such a different kind of applause – an expectant kind – versus the approval that comes after witnessing, after enjoying –

The sound of hands waiting versus the sound of hands consuming. The way these two sounds might sound like each other.

+ + +

On Gaga’s eight individual performances

Aura:

Lady Gaga has gone mad.

“Hollywood” written on a knife – both a sign of a murderous weapon as well as an implied threat, toward Hollywood culture, perhaps. Is Hollywood in charge here, given agency and control by being imprinted on Gaga’s weapon? Or should Hollywood be running for its life…

The Spectacle of “Offstage” & the Mythos of the “Pop Star’s Comeback”: Preliminary Thoughts on Lady Gaga’s iTunes Festival Performance

By Meghan Vicks

I want to begin by thinking about this movement to put “onstage” what is normally confined to the “offstage.” We first witnessed this during Gaga’s recent VMA “Applause” performance: her hairstylist Frederic Aspiras and makeup artist Tara Savelo were both onstage as integral parts of the performance, and, as Roland Betancourt first commented, their presence onstage actually draws our attention to these operations of a performance that are normally kept hidden from the spectators (e.g. putting on makeup and wigs, etc.). By putting Aspiras and Savelo onstage, we not only begin to contemplate how the spectacle comes into being, but Gaga is positioned as the medium upon which her various spectacles emerge. Gaga is not only the spectacle (Fame-era Gaga, “Telephone”-Gaga, etc.), but also the artistic medium (the canvas, the screen, the marble, the clay, etc.).

“Vast Emptiness”: a personal account of anxiety, Lady Gaga, and what happens when you don’t own cable.

By Sarah Cook

“In that opening shot Gaga seems to literally become the screen – and, as the camera pulls back, what was once the screen is revealed to be the performer on the stage. This blurring between the screen itself and the performer on the stage suggests a kind of transgression of the screen.” ~Meghan Vicks, from her and Eddie McCaffray’s initial discussion of Gaga’s VMA performance

I want to start by agreeing with Meghan’s observation – in fact, the longer the camera stayed right up against Gaga’s face, the more uncomfortable I felt. Was it just me? I became incredibly anxious for the camera to back away, and to see her body, the stage, the surroundings…

It didn’t help that MTV online was a bit tenuous throughout the VMA airtime, taking forever to post each performance (which was supposed to happen immediately after it occurred), and only offering a live-stream of alternative cameras: a couple backstage views, a view of the audience, a few different rooms, etc. For me, this became the most interesting part of the whole experience: I found myself anxiously searching various online sites for a chance to live-stream Gaga’s performance, and I clicked repeatedly through all the different live cameras that MTV offered, trying to see which one was the most promising at any given moment. It became a race to see Gaga live, or to at least figure out which source would allow me to see her performance the soonest.

But here’s where it got especially weird: once Gaga started performing and I had yet to find a live stream, I realized I could hear her faintly in the background from these random MTV cameras. Each camera had a slightly different volume of sound, but none of them were loud: so while the visual cues were completely absent, the echo of “Applause” in the background told me she was onstage at that moment. I clicked ever more rapidly to try and see what I was only slightly able to hear. I clicked over to something called the “Talent Lounge.” There, I saw a bar with the phrase “Good Vibrations” written along the front. There were three small TV screens hung up in various corners of the room – they looked about a half-inch big on my computer screen – setting a kind of sports bar vibe. I was about to click onto a different camera when I realized those three small TVs were all broadcasting Gaga’s performance: multiple Gagas, and yet they were all so tiny! And so, my first taste of Gaga as Gaga as Gaga was through computer through video through TV, all these layers of technology that gave me what I desired only by lining up just so.

Gaga looks into Gazing Balls for inspiration

By Jon-Michael Poff

Jeff Koons’ Gazing Balls – a series of plaster casts paired with metallic blue globes – figures largely into Lady Gaga’s 2013 VMA performance. A little over halfway into her performance, Gaga holds a blue gazing ball above her head as she sings, “One second I’m a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me.” (In a wide shot, one can see her backup dancers hoisting gazing balls above their heads as well.) Though visible for only ten seconds of the performance, the Koonsean gazing balls give insight into Gaga’s professional ambitions, her personal struggles, and her relationship with her fans.

The Evolution of Gaga: The Medium Condition of Lady Gaga

By Roland Betancourt

Lady Gaga sings, “I can feel my heart beating in your hands, my aura and yours meeting in this dance, pull the trigger I’m ready, it’s show time” – probably an excerpt from a rumored forthcoming song, “Aura.” The camera focuses closely on her face, which is set into a white two-dimensional square that seems to evoke the white modernist canvas, and, in particular, the square as a manifestation of this medium – recalling an iconic modernist work, such as Malevich’s Black Square (1915), whose intellectual heritage is directly traced to the Russo-Byzantine icon. Here, we see Gaga as an icon set in a flat two-dimensional space. Particularly, it speaks to the miraculous image of Christ impressed on cloth, known as the image of Edessa in the Eastern Christian church, attested in an image such as the Holy Face of Genoa.

In this moment, Lady Gaga’s body operates as the medium for the Video Music Awards, since the show begins from this space – she is an emblematic, bodily manifestation of the flat white canvas. Upon her body, Lady Gaga has wrapped into herself the modernist white cube of the museum and its blank canvas. As the camera zooms out, her body is revealed to be clad in an elaborate dress with large shoulders and gown.

Gaga “Drags” Herself Through the VMAs

By Eddie McCaffray and Meghan Vicks

Opening: Gaga as the screen, or the white canvas

Eddie: Gaga begins as a blank canvas. Not just white, but flat and huge, filling the TV screen.

Meghan: Exactly! I had the same thought! The opening shot of Gaga’s face in what appears to be the center of a white canvas, combined with the fact that the shot is filmed in such as way that Gaga’s face/canvas takes up the entire screen, does two really interesting things. On the one hand, it associates Gaga with the white canvas (an idea Roland Betancourt has been writing about here on Gaga Stigmata for years), a canvas upon which various manifestations of Gaga come into being (and indeed, we see these various Gagas manifest throughout the performance).

On the other hand, in that opening shot Gaga seems to literally become the screen – and, as the camera pulls back, what was once the screen is revealed to be the performer on the stage. This blurring between the screen itself and the performer on the stage suggests a kind of transgression of the screen. I’m thinking, for example, of Cronenberg’s film Videodrome, where the images on the screen actually become flesh (and the TV becomes flesh too!), or of Ringu/The Ring, where images invade reality. Both Videodrome and The Ring articulate an anxiety or terror concerning the viral image’s power to invade real (fleshy) life. Gaga seems to be doing something similar (or maybe I’ve just been thinking about these movies too much) when she positions her face as the screen itself, and then shows how her face moves from the screen to become a body on the stage. The crucial difference between films like Videodrome and what Gaga’s doing, however, lies in the fact that she views the transgression of the screen as something positive: art into life, art into popular culture, art pop.