“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.