We are all Picasso, Baby

On Wednesday, 10 July 2013, Jay Z performed “Picasso Baby” from his album Magna Carta Holy Grail for six straight hours at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, interacting with the invitation-only audience made up of many of the art-world’s elite, including performance artist Marina Abramovic. Many agree that Jay Z’s performance draws inspiration from Abramovic’s MoMA show “The Artist is Present,” and Jay Z himself acknowledged her influence.

The performance was filmed and edited into a docu-music-video, titled “Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film,” which was released on 2 August 2013. In that video, Jay Z explains:

Concerts are pretty much performance art with the venues changed. And just by nature of the venues the performance changes, right? You’re in a smaller venue it’s a bit more intimate, so you get to feel the energy of the people. In a concert, especially a large concert, all that energy comes to you. Like, what do you do with that energy? You know so today, it’s kind of an exchange. We have some way to drop it back off, you know. When art started becoming part of the galleries, what became a separation between culture, and even in hip hop people were like, almost like, art is too bourgeois. We’re artists, we’re alike, we’re cousins. That’s what’s really exciting for me, bringing the worlds back together.

We were immediately drawn to the performance’s “stigmata effect.” That is, the artist doesn’t just perform for the audience; the audience (made up of critics, fans, other artists, children) becomes an equal and necessary part of the performance. “Picasso Baby” takes place not just in or through the body of Jay Z, but also through the bodies of the people at that event. Everyone becomes “Picasso Baby.” As the “Manifesto of Little Monsters” positions Gaga as the “devoted jester” to her kingly and queenly fans, renders Gaga the mirror that reflects – and therefore embodies – her fans, so Jay Z’s performance changes depending upon who comes before him: sometimes he watches the audience sing or dance, sometimes they mess him up, and they always impact his movements, his engagement, his spectacle. We’re tempted to ask: who’s interpreting whom? Who’s viewing whom? Who’s influencing whom? Who’s the artist and who’s the audience? But these are questions that no longer make sense during the “stigmata effect.” As Gaga would say, “There is no chicken or egg.”

We guess we could ask: are we part of the performance? Do we experience the “stigmata effect”? Or is that performance bounded by a specific place (Pace Gallery, Chelsea) and time (6 hours; 10 July 2013), and we’re merely spectators, not participants in the spectacle?

We think interpretation wounds the performance once again, lets its blood to let us in, allows us to become “Picasso Baby.”  

In this spirit, we invited some of our favorite writers to contribute to a roundtable discussion of the performance, to build a conversation that is a stigmata of “Picasso Baby” at Pace Gallery.

+ + Kate Durbin & Meghan Vicks + +

Born This Way Ball - An Inventory

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

“Americano” and Meat Dress

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

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

– Samantha Cohen

“Bloody Mary”

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

– Meghan Vicks

The Castle

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

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

Part of Yüyi’s World

By Alexander Cavaluzzo

The following is the fourth piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

Yüyi the Mermaid was introduced to the public imagination when choreographer Laurieann Gibson leaked a faint notion of the concept for Lady Gaga’s music video “The Edge of Glory”: “I just know that we’ll be feeling very fishy.” The ichthyologic teaser was enough to spark speculation that Gaga would be appearing as a mermaid in her next video. Of course, even after a performance on the French talk show Le Grand Journal where she first unveiled her aquatic alter ego, Gaga remained bipedal throughout “The Edge of Glory” video. The hype surrounding Gaga’s mermaid guise laid out on an operating table and hacked by couture doctors was never brought to fruition. Nevertheless, the specter of Yüyi still lurked and continued to develop via tweets, live performances, and, finally, an appearance in the “Yoü and I” music video.

She perfectly summates Lady Gaga’s project thus far, combining the spectacle of The Fame, the demonic metaphor of The Fame Monster, and the dichotomy of living halfway between reality and fantasy of Born This Way. She’s not a sultry siren floating through the crystal clear waters of a blue lagoon; she’s a grotesque aberration, a welding of woman and fish, inelegantly lying on a slab, carting herself around stage in a wheelchair, or writhing in a filthy bathtub. Her tail is a squamous stub, a black latex taper with an overgrown, misshapen flipper, or a braid of scales concluding in a filiform fin. A squamous bra fuses her breasts together and erases her nipples. In exploring the creation, both literally and figuratively, of Yüyi, she bears more relation to P.T. Barnum’s strange Feejee mermaid than Disney’s beautiful Ariel (The Little Mermaid [1989]) or Daryl Hannah’s sexy Madison (Splash [1987]).

Barnum’s sideshow creation, touted as an authentic mermaid, was nothing more than a hoax (as sideshows often are), the creature in question being the taxidermied upper-body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish, dipped in papier-mâché for good measure. Meant to lure ignorant consumers and spectators into the show for their patronage, Barnum exploited mythology and disfigurement in the name of commerce. Scholar Stephen T. Asma, in his book On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, relates Barnum’s hoax to our contemporary cultural condition of ostracizing those who do not fit in with archetypical social structures, be they gender, sexuality, aesthetic representation, or biological functions. He says,

In Barnum-style hucksterism, we have completely fabricated monsters, such as the Feejee Mermaid, but also real disabled or abnormal individuals who were cloaked in fabricated exotic narratives. Often those fabricated narratives had implicit (and explicit) moral and political significance (Asma, 140).

In applying this theory to Yüyi and extending it to Lady Gaga overall, her transgressive nature and embracement of “the freak” typify the moral and political significance of abnormal individuals, and, in a way, reject the strictures and labels placed upon them (Corona, 2). The utilization of the wheelchair, while initially purely functional, bonds the creature specifically with handicapped individuals and even sufferers of Sirenomelia. Naturally this is nothing new, as many performers have exploited transgressive performance tactics to comment on mainstream society. However, none of these performers have over 12 Million followers on Twitter, music videos with over 1 Billion views, and constant attention in a 24/7 news cycle. Why has someone who so vigorously performs the monstrous, who impersonates men and mermaids, become so popular?

As Asma suggests, “Monsters were intrinsically exciting but also extrinsically useful in giving audiences a sense of relief and possibly even gratitude about their own station in life” (Asma, 140). This may account for Gaga’s initial rise to fame, when she did not yet tout life-affirming messages of acceptance, but rather bled on stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards while singing about celebrity voyeurs. She made the celebrity an exciting spectacle, a freak at which all normal people could gawk. She still does that, although the shiny sequined shell of The Fame has cracked and given way to a new pop organism that headlines a new race instead of a new trend.

In this exploration of Yüyi as a biological extension of Gaga’s persona, it’s clear that it comes to a pinnacle through bestial intercourse. While the iconography of the mermaid is explicitly sexualized, even in Gaga’s incarnation, there is a logical dissonance with the creature as an object of desire. They may be alluring, seductive, and provocative, but mermaids in effect neutralize sexual activity, as it is impossible for coitus to occur between man and fish. This doesn’t stop Yüyi’s human lover from having sex with her, of course, adding to the confusion and blatant disregard for boundaries Lady Gaga engenders.

Gaga’s lover, portrayed by Taylor Kinney, dominates her to the point where he becomes her master. He administers oxygen to her via a mask and pours water over her in life-sustaining acts. He keeps her immobile, trapped in an aluminum tub in the middle of a barn in the landlocked state of Nebraska. Is this her savior? As Gaga tweeted, Yüyi is “a reincarnation of my birth+artistic spirit. In incubation, awaiting a human lover to save her…” Where was Yüyi incubating? Within Gaga’s creative unconscious? Within a barn in Nebraska? And how does her lover save her? There is no doubt Gaga is feeding into the cultural mythology of the mermaid figure, mirroring Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the little maiden of the sea who barters her voice in order to attain companionship and humanity. For Anderson’s character, of course, the story ends in heartbreak: she does not marry her prince and consequently dissolves into sea foam. Yüyi is a bit more Disneyfied, ultimately forming a union with her lover, her creator, her Dr. Frankenstein, both in their final embrace in the bathtub and the wedding scene, where Gaga sports teal blush, tying her to Yüyi.  

Just like Jo Calderone and the Lady herself, Yüyi draws upon precedents established in mythology, literature, music, and film. Originating in Assyrian legend circa 1000 BC, the mermaid has existed as a staple of crypto-zoological lore. The image has been continually re-appropriated by popular culture, and in her own way Yüyi pays homage to many of the depictions of mermaids that preceded her.

Her second performance of Yüyi in Sydney sparked mild controversy when Bette Midler reacted by tweeting, “Dear @ladygaga Ive [sic] been doing singing mermaid in a wheelchair since 1980-You can keep the meat dress and the firecracker tits-mermaid’s mine.” Midler was referring to her own alter ego Delores Delago (which, interestingly, means “Pain of the Lake”), a mermaid in a wheelchair act that she has performed since 1979 in several of her shows. The “fight” fizzled out as quickly as any trivial news story, and it would come as no surprise that Gaga would stage a re-performance of a cult figure. Surprisingly, though, Lady Gaga responded to the controversy a few days after the Divine Miss M’s tirade, pleading ignorance to Access Hollywood:

I didn’t know that she’d done [it], but I do now and I think it’s great…Obviously I feel connected to women in theater and women from the past … Maybe we’re just cut from the same cloth. I couldn’t hop around in that tail so I just stuck myself in a wheelchair.

That seems like a reasonable enough explanation, although considering the uniqueness of the staging, it might provoke further inquiry into whether she was truly ignorant of the character. Ultimately the research would be fruitless since authorial intent does not have supremacy over readings, and since Yüyi in practice confounds logic to begin with. She has little thematic development, she has inexplicable sex with humans, she has no clear demeanor attached to her monstrous flesh.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of Yüyi: she exists primarily as a visual representation of the female monster. Lady Gaga’s creation of the mermaid figure inextricably binds woman and monster, a relationship that has permeated the arts and philosophy for centuries. One of the most infamous demons featured in the Christian Canon is Lilith, a monstrous female associated with storms, illness, and death (Isaiah 34:14). While only mentioned tangentially in the Scriptures, Lilith is a figure prominently displayed among many cultural mythologies, dating back to ancient Sumerian tradition. While historically Eve is credited as the first woman created by God, there is evidence that suggests there was another before her (Genesis 1:27). The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text, states that God created Lilith from the earth, as He did with Adam, before the creation of Eve. When Lilith refused to become subservient to Adam, as she believed them to be equals cut from the same cloth, God sent three angels to retrieve her and then created Eve from Adam’s rib. While both stories have receded into mere folklore, the exploration of the two females in Christianity prompts an interesting dialogue regarding the association between demons and the female sex.

Marie-Hélene Huet draws from Aristotelian theory to suggest, “The monster and the woman…find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity” (Huet, 85). Just as, she writes, demons are engendered due to the power of a mother’s imagination during pregnancy, usurping the place of the father as progenitor, Eve is deformed when she is birthed from Adam’s body (Huet, 85). She is dissimilar from man. Eve is not, however, dubbed a “demon” as Lilith was, in spite of the fact that Lilith was not the distorted offspring of a human. This concept of the monstrous birth repeatedly factors into Lady Gaga’s self-creation, alter egos, and her femininity and feminism. Especially in “The Edge of Glory” video, while sans Yüyi, Gaga displays her embracement of perhaps mythology’s most famous female monster, Medusa, in her bearing of Versace’s emblem.

Huet continues in her discussion of the monstrous imagination by examining the etymology of the word “monster,” deciding that it stems from the Latin monstrare, meaning “to show, to display.” She claims, “This tradition confirmed the idea that monsters were signs sent by God, messages showing his will or his wrath…” (Huet, 87). Demonic imagery acts as a reminder to faithful Christians of the dangers of sin and defying God’s word. This idea stems from the story of Original Sin, in which Eve plights humanity for her disobedience to God’s strictures, cementing the connection of the woman and the demon. The theory that the word “monster,” now inextricably bound with Gaga’s narrative, comes from a verb expressing the action of presentation and exposure illustrates how she uses spectacle as a tool in uncovering the monstrous aspects of the human psyche, exposing them to literally millions of people in hopes to reveal the lie and make it true.

Yüyi exists as a metaphor, manifesting all facets of her personality, in an attempt to make “this complex + incomprehensible force to be true” through acceptance of all personas, elements and processes of being, the incomprehensible force being the cultural phenomenon of Lady Gaga, a continuing effort designed to marry reality and fantasy and exist simultaneously in both.

Works Cited

Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Corona, Victor P. Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga. Journal of Popular Culture 44(2): 1-19.

Huet, Marie-Hélene. Monstrous Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993).

The New Jerusalem Bible. Ed. Susan Jones. New York: Doubleday, 1985.

“The Story of Lilith,” JewishChristianLit.com, http://jewishchristianlit.com//Topics/Lilith/alphabet.html

Author Bio:

Alexander Cavaluzzo (@AleksandrJohn) is a Fashion-Sexual and unpaid laborer at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine and the art blogazine Hyperallergic.com. He graduated with a BS in Art History from the Fashion Institute of Technology and is an MA candidate in the Arts Politics program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. On the occasional nights when he is drunk on Jameson, he blogs at alexandercavaluzzo.tumblr.com. His lifelong dream is to become the intelligent version of Camille Paglia.

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The Devil Wears Gaga: A Critical Exploration of Lady Gaga as an Editrix

By Alexander Cavaluzzo

“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

–Pablo Picasso

“Art gives birth to new art. There is no chicken or egg. It’s molecular.”

–Lady Gaga

It can be said that Lady Gaga wears many hats, but for all the different disciplines she embodies – pop singer, pianist, performance artist, runway model, creative director – it can be argued that she wears many different heads. In her recent cover shoot for V Magazine, this idea is literally expressed with a tri-headed Gaga. The growth of her two new heads possibly represents her two new roles that were instituted this spring: that of cultural critic and editrix. With a 90-minute stint as Metro’s worldwide editor-in-chief and her new monthly column for V, she’s extended her reach to additional outlets of pop culture critique and creativity. But the truth is, prior to this official designation, Lady Gaga has always been an “editrix,” directing every aspect of her performance, appropriating past pop culture imagery, and analyzing the fame culture of the twenty-first century.

“Editrix” is a term used since 1950 to describe a female editor, utilizing the feminine suffix “-trix” commonly applied to loan words from Latin. Currently, the term has been associated with the stereotype of a very strong, decisive female editor particularly in the field fashion journalism, perhaps partially because of the sonic association with the word “dominatrix.” An editrix connotes a strong sense of control and power that defies gender stereotypes and imbues power to those who embody the term, which makes it an excellent signifier for Lady Gaga.

Not only has Gaga fulfilled this role as the editrix of her art project, she has also been its canvas: she is herself the outlet for her creative identity, treating her physical body as a malleable performance space that transforms her into a living, breathing storehouse of popular culture. Typically the role an editor plays is concealed and secluded from the public; aside from anomalies like Anna Wintour, editors do not usually have a recognizable or distinct guise, remaining behind the curtain of the magazines they spearhead. With the performative aspects of her work, Lady Gaga has exposed the editorial figure to the world, giving the position more bearing and, thus, more approaches to critique. Furthermore, as she has employed critical and editorial functions in her artwork, she presents another dichotomy of roles. In general, the role of editor (and critic) is typically diametrically opposed to that of an artist; in our society, they are positions embodied by separate entities that rely on one another for existence – an editor or critic cannot exist without content, and an artist (particularly in contemporary Western society) cannot create without an audience that provides press and feedback. This melding of two distinct positions in society provides the launching point for an analysis of Gaga’s unique role in media, art, and culture.

Before we proceed, it is important to point out that magazines, much like Lady Gaga, are often criticized as arms of consumer capitalism that blatantly exploit and manipulate the public while offering no “artistic sustenance.” However, magazines were originally conceived as, and in most ways continue to function as, storehouses of art and culture. In the English language, the word “magazine” stems from the Arabic مخزن (makhazin), translated as “storehouse,” in many ways drawing correlations to the museum, another type of cultural storehouse. In fact, it was common practice for early magazine titles to include the word “museum,” such as Louisa May Alcott’s late nineteenth-century publication Merry’s Museum.[i]

Of course, the crossover between magazines and museums does not stop there: art and publications have long had an incestuous relationship. For example, Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview was subsequently included in exhibitions devoted to his work, and Salvador Dali once illustrated the cover of Vogue. The comparison of the magazine to the museum imbues it with more legitimacy than it is usually afforded. For all the negativity magazines are criticized for (and usually guilty of) – promoting negative body issues, uncannily photoshopped Frankensteinian models, glossy advertisements that make us spend money we do not have – they still exist as a receptacle for cultural ideas, opinions, and images that later serve as historical record for the time in which we live.

Lady Gaga makes use of the same model, spreading artistic imagery and ideas by touring, tweeting, and maintaining an acutely cultivated public image. Even Gaga’s influence from, and manipulation of, the images and standards many magazines project has been utilized to great effect in her performance art. To pierce the public consciousness she molded herself into a cookie-cutter image of what a pop singer in the pages of a typical editorial spread would look like: blonde, half-naked, and constantly shielding her eyes with sunglasses. Gaga’s reliance on these cultural cues helped her to establish herself as an artist whose work and image is dependent on the fact that she is fully engendered from a public understanding of what an idol should be, an understanding promulgated in part by the magazine industry. Now, the combination of the two cultural storehouses is already making an intensely interesting, symbiotic relationship of pop culture promoters.

Beginning with the Summer 2011 issue (Volume 71) of V Magazine, Lady Gaga became the “punk piss-off Carrie Bradshaw” when she was hired as a monthly contributor to the glossy, high fashion and culture magazine to share her thoughts on art, music and, most importantly, herself. With her debut “memorandum” she cites another kind of storehouse (in this case, the library) as a metaphor for researchers and obsessors of popular culture. Addressing her first column to the likes of Stephen Gan, Andy Warhol, Little Monsters, Fashion-Sexuals, and, of course, The World, she situates herself in the position of an expert (head librarian, perhaps?) of “glam” culture, fashion history in particular, asserting that she has the ability to trace the entire history of something as minor as a hemline. While she bestows this title onto herself a bit pompously, it is difficult to discount Gaga’s pronouncement given the nature of her artistic output.

Her work, like the work of magazines, museums, and, to a certain extent, libraries, is based upon appropriation: the collecting and curating of several different cultural artifacts, works, ideas, and concepts to create something new. In the more structured environments of magazines and museums, these often take the forms of editorials or exhibitions, which typically project more transparency in their appropriations than Lady Gaga does. The cultural storehouse is as much of a work of art as it is a repository for art. Exhibitions of an artist’s work and editorials featuring designer’s clothes are almost always viewed as a means to display another’s intellectual property. However, they both construct meaning and situate work within an historical narrative, thus becoming works of art themselves despite never typically being viewed as such.

Gaga, on the other hand, appropriates content and, under the intense scrutiny of the media, is commonly accused of “ripping off” other artist’s work. From the David Bowie lightning bolt to the Grace Jones-esque hoods to the religious iconography associated before with Madonna, she is commonly dismissed as an ersatz of previous legends instead of a cultural storehouse. The creation of something new from something old, to realize that “art gives birth to new art,” is a style and practice that exemplifies Lady Gaga’s simultaneous roles as artist and editrix.

Coupled with the library metaphor, Gaga frames the V column partially around Yves St. Laurent’s appropriation of Piet Mondrian’s “Compositions” into the modern shift dress. She considers Laurent’s action and asks whether he “plagiarized or revolutionized” when he introduced not only the work of another artist into his own creations, but transformed it into a style previously unseen in women’s fashions. This pondering of whether an act of appropriation is plagiarism or revolution is a clear defense of similar criticisms she has faced in her career, particularly the accusations that her new record “Born This Way” is a rip off of Madonna’s 1989 single “Express Yourself.” She defends herself through communicating a similar incident in the history of art, situating herself in the vast narrative through more than just her expression (the music), but how she expresses herself (partially through appropriation). She encompasses the outward projection of reworking cultural precedents into her artwork in the same fashion as Yves St. Laurent. Naturally to protect herself from unwarranted criticisms of plagiarism she denies that she would blatantly copy another song, though she did acknowledge in an interview with NME that “Born This Way” reflects similar chord progressions of Madonna’s song, (chord progressions that, she adds, have been utilized since the Disco era), which not only illustrates how she uses established themes to create her own work, but also illustrates that she’s not the first to do it.[ii] In all aspects, good or bad, Gaga continues to formulate herself and the work she produces into a cultural storehouse.[iii]

In a more powerful, albeit shorter-lived, position as Metro’s Editor-in-Chief, Lady Gaga was given full editorial control of the May 26th issue of the daily, worldwide newspaper. In her editor’s letter, she says that she constructed the issue with the help of her fans situated throughout the world, “…includ[ing] graphs, charts, commentary, global surveys and articles inspired and generated by Little Monsters.” The primary focus was on anti-bullying, coupled with articles about the earthquake in Japan and her personal heroes. Reflecting on the experience, she said, “If you have revolutionary potential you have a moral obligation to make the world a better place.” Certainly it’s dubious how much influence she could have had by editing one issue of a free newspaper, but the real impact arises when we’re faced with the concept of Gaga as an editor-in-chief in a position that imbues her with a power typically not wielded by an artist.

Content aside, this particular issue of Metro exists differently within their archives simply by virtue of the reality that Lady Gaga served as its editrix. The very fact that her appointment as their editor-in-chief became a news story (not just within Metro itself, but was reported by several other news sources) opens up the dialogue of how content is controlled and dispensed by individuals. The incredibly meta-nature of the event removes the trappings of dominant-hegemonic readings that incline us to passively accept the news as it comes, and to be more skeptical about the information we receive. Lady Gaga puts her critical abilities to work in a manner no other artist does; her art project has the undercurrents of not only celebrating, but also subverting pop culture. In her role at Metro she nearly expels her own artistry in favor of completely embodying the editrix side of her, alerting us to how publications aid in the creation of knowledge and, in effect, turning the notion on its head by “Gaga-izing” the newspaper.

Of course, beyond Gaga’s creative role as a pop star, and beyond her official positions at Metro and V, her relationship with the magazine industry and her role as an editrix have been established in more overt and typical manners. Like anyone in the public spotlight, magazine covers, interviews, and editorial spreads have facilitated Gaga’s rise to fame. While the particular creative and editorial team of a magazine dictates exactly what she’ll look like and what exactly she’ll say within the pages of a particular publication (US Vogue, in particular, seemed to reign her in a bit), Lady Gaga’s carefully cultivated aesthetic is always present one way or another when she appears in those glossy spreads and interviews. This is most exemplified in her recent feature in Harper’s Bazaar, where her creative authority is immediately displayed on the cover: suffice it to say, not every model is allowed to sport facial bones in photographs. When pressured by Derek Blasberg in the accompanying interview about the authenticity of her new osteo-appendages, Lady Gaga infamously deadpanned, “They’re not prosthetics. They’re my bones.”[iv] Using this and numerous other magazines as a channel of communication, Lady Gaga effectively employs the press as an extension of her overall project, so much so that some of her most interesting and reality-twisting work has been fully formed and executed within a magazine.

The Vogue Hommes Japan cover (Vol. 5, A/W 2010-11), where she posed as her male alter ego Jo Calderone, is among one of her most ambitious projects. With the help of her partners in crime, photographer Nick Knight and stylist Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga created one of her most fascinating pieces to date in a magazine. The very concept and nature of the Jo Calderone spread does not function as press, as would all other spreads featuring Gaga. She has never publicly admitted that she was in drag, propelling the project to function in different terms, specifically how she used the magazine’s power to create epistemology and ontology in an era that is supersaturated and heavily influenced by media. So far, Jo Calderone only really exists within the context of the magazine (and in other media outlets, such as his Twitter account), and the creation of this persona illustrates the force the platform of the magazine has in constructing personalities that we as readers treat as legitimate. Jo as an image, as a projection, is indexical based on the glossy photographs in the spread; we believe he exists as much as we believe any other model exists within a magazine through a tautological precedent. A specific photograph, as Roland Barthes puts it, is never “…immediately or generally distinguished from its referent.”[v] Though an oppositional reading may prompt us to be skeptical about his authenticity (as we are with airbrushed figures), through the combination of realistic indexical imagery (photographs), primary research (interview), and secondary research (captions), Lady Gaga manipulates and exhibits the abilities of the magazine to inform and shape knowledge and being. And naturally the apple doesn’t fall far from the waking self, as Jo, just like Gaga, exists as an extension of pop culture precedents, notably James Dean. The creation of an archetype within a medium that references the past in order to establish a connection and loyalty to the reader compounds the ease of the reader treating Jo as an authentic figure.

Lady Gaga culls imagery, sounds, and personas that typify popular culture and the human condition with the same skill and panache as any well-trained editor or curator. Through these new ventures at established publications, Gaga nurtures her role as an editrix that has existed since the inception of her artistry. Through the combination and straddling of these two roles, she transforms herself into a storehouse of cultural iconography, a veritable treasure trove of artifacts from the past that will certainly go on to create the future.

---

[i] Johnson, Sammye. Patricia Prijatel. The Magazine from Cover to Cover. Oxford University Press, 2006.

[ii] http://www.nme.com/news/lady-gaga/56256#2

[iii] Lady Gaga. V Magazine, v. 71, Summer 2011.

[iv] Blasberg, Derek. “Lady Gaga: The Interview” From Harper’s Bazaar, May 2011.

[v] Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill & Wang, 1980.

Author Bio:

Alexander Cavaluzzo (@AleksandrJohn) is a Fashion-Sexual and unpaid laborer at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine and the art blogazine Hyperallergic.com. He graduated with a BS in Art History from the Fashion Institute of Technology and is an MA candidate in the Arts Politics program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. On the occasional nights when he is drunk on Jameson, he blogs at alexandercavaluzzo.tumblr.com. His lifelong dream is to become the intelligent version of Camille Paglia.  

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