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A major highlight is Switzerland’s pavilion by Thomas Hirschhorn. Crystal of Resistance promised to be exciting with its sparkling, holographic invitation, and Hirschhorn’s talk at the press event confirmed our suspicions. To a bewildered audience and a sweaty, smirking group of press, Hirschhorn held up his  childish drawing of his plan for the Venice Biennale (above).

 “I want to work in necessity, in urgency and in a panic. This should be understood as: panic is the  solution! That’s the POLITICAL. Art reaches beyond solutions.”

He talked passionately and provocatively about his ideas and inspirations until the faces of the press begrudgingly realised they had laughed at someone who was much smarter than they were. He says,  “that’s how I see the mission of art: to give a form that can create the conditions for thinking something that has not yet existed. With this form I want to create a truth, a truth that resists facts, opinions and  commentaries.” I wondered how an artist so unrestrained and un-self-censored (the focus of the Danish pavilion, which we will discuss) could have made it past the extravagant bureaucracy that selects artists to represent a nation at the biennale. The exhibition was so thoroughly followed through (and, undoubtedly, expensive) that the effect was overwhelming. Resembling a “home-made crystal meth lab discotheque,” crystals and metal insulation cover and infect everything, creating something of a greenhouse in the Venetian sun (pictured below). While you  wander, disorientated, through the chaos of never-ending stuff, gallery attendants make sure you do not  accidently lean on a wall topped with broken glass bottles.

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Then head to the Dutch Pavilion’s Opera Aperta/Loose Work. On, behind and above the empty ‘stage’ of the exhibition in the form of a theatre, we encounter paintings, photographs, books, sound installations and video (below left). A complex, multi-layered exhibition is bound to its companion book in a playful way: pop-up. The publication is quite beautiful and is in three parts; the first is a re-creation of the exhibition in pop-up (below right), the second is a reader, and the third is Monologues. The maquette, in a light-hearted and graphic manner, reminds me of how I navigated the exhibition, giving the process of investigation a sort of afterlife. Out of the multitude of Biennale books, this stands out as the most collectable object.

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Before seeing the Danish Pavilion’s Speech Matters, it is worth reading the book; a neat compilation of texts about freedom, expression and censorship. While the pavilion itself comes across as cluttered with the exhibited works shooting into all directions, the accompanying publication is pointed and culminates in an overarching question of what freedoms we allow and deny ourselves in our art practice. The self-censorship (deliberate or automatic) of artists is discussed in the text by the pavilion’s curator Katerina Gregos. Quoting Hans Haacke, she elaborates:

“Self censorship occurs behind closed doors. There are practically no whistle-blowers. It would be too risky for survival in one’s chosen field. Many have internalised this mode of operation to the extant that they are not even aware that they are practicing self-censorship. Or they are in denial because it would undermine their self respect. In private, museums have told me that self-censorship is indeed the order of the day.”

While I am adamant that a text shouldn’t be required to ‘properly understand’ a work or exhibition, Gregos’ text forced me to re-evaluate my impatient judgement of the pavilion. Perhaps reading the text, and then entering the exhibition, would have allowed for a focus on particular works of interest. A feeling of doubt began to creep up on me, and I wondered if I self-censor, and to what degree. We might not censor ourselves internally, but how much is filtered out in the process of externalising and how much of this is due to perceived societal or legal pressure. Later, Gregos quotes Karl Popper; “I must teach myself to distrust the dangerous intuitive feeling or conviction that it is I who am right […] the danger I may become an intolerant fanatic.” Now that doubt is at home in my mind, how can I proceed with judging the Venice Biennale for review?

Taryn Simon’s Zahra/Farah (below), is a loud and violent photograph with an intensely political backstory. Yet, its position in Speech Matters allows only a quick reading of the work before encountering another. Simon’s current exhibition in Tate Modern (A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters) holds a more tempered pace, allowing the viewer to process the assault of violent information in tandem with the photographs.

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The Turkish Pavilion (in the Arsenale, pictured below), was humming with pipes from a water purification system. The accompanying publication, Plan B; Ayse Erkmen, is worth tracking down even just for its accordion binding of four segments into a single book.

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The Austrian pavilion showcased the work of Markus Schinwald (below), a problematic, but overall intriguing and rewarding, installation of video, painting and sculpture. In the high-ceilinged chamber, hovering white walls allowed you to see your neighbouring viewers’ feet as they worked through the maze of the exhibition. Abstract sculptures were placed, or partially hidden, in obscure places. Surreal paintings hint at a slow torture, or perverseness. The film acts as the main centrepiece in the white, sunlit exhibition. Rather than being entombed in a black box ‘video space,’ the film’s installation is as light as the floating walls and the architecture of the images calls for associations with the space we are in, and the sculptures and paintings we have just navigated through.

Slow moving and highly produced, the film is of formally dressed men and women engaging with a run-down space, not far from the territory of contemporary dance. Schinwald’s film is a more successful example of the wave of artists videos throughout the 54^th Venice Biennale that featured elaborate Hollywood camera movements. At times, the stylistic dramatization of the slow, low-on-content images is maddening and feels like we are being forced to look at the beauty a dolly-on-tracks or a crane can make- yet, this diversion into the mechanics of film making seems unintentional. It is unclear if the artists have been seduced by Hollywood images, or are trying to seduce us, or perhaps both. The accompanying publication presents an interesting overview of this major body of work. The artists’ use of paintings, video and sculpture without retreating to artschool ‘multi-media’ sloppiness is particularly interesting, as is his command of all three media and their specific languages.

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Taiwan’s The Heard and the Unheard Soundscape received mixed responses, from those of ennui to ones of unrestrained enthusiasm. The sound library/bar appears overwhelming at first, but to start with Fujui Wang’s Live at tranSonic 2009 will encourage a search for more treasures.

After spending a morning listening to the sound archives in the library room, I watched the video recordings of performances in the smaller room; Yu-Hsien Su’s Sounds of Nothing. Cds and dvds are available to buy of the works, offering a more fluid approach to the idea of a biennale publication. The artist founded a record label, indi indi, and formed bands, collaborating with scavengers, foreign fishermen and homeless people. The soundscapes are often made from junk, building up to form a rhythm and sometimes a song. Avoiding an insensitive and patronising attitude, the work arrives at a poignant, emotional point, informed by the political background of Taiwanese society.

We particularly like drummer no.10, a DVD of San-lian Wu, 50 years old. He currently lives in a small self-built house under National Highway no. 10. His job is to recycle the carton boxes which he collects, and guards an abandoned garbage truck. He used to be a drummer in clubs and discos 20 years ago.

And, Group Java’s disc; a Dekil band, a fishermen’s group formed in less that two weeks of time- for its formation til its performance. They sing their own songs.

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Other highlights include:

  GELITIN @ Arsenale

  Christian Marclay @ Arsenale

  India @ Arsenale

  Germany @ Giardini (pictured above)

  Hungary @ Giardini

  Korea @ Giardini

  USA @ Giardini

Not to dwell on negativity, but to avoid wasting time we recommend skipping:

Australia, Japan, Scotland, France, Italy, Russia, Greece, Spain, Belgium, Israel, Venice Pavilion and China.

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- Kevin Gaffney, ARTISIT? Venice 2011

Neon text signs. Photographs of neon text signs. Sculptures of compiled and broken neon text signs. The typical, “I love you,” “I miss you” Hallmark neon signs. A large “Negro Sunshine” by Glenn Ligon broke the neon monotony slightly.

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One of the Frieze projects (the programme of artists’ commissions) by Pierre Huyghe, Recollection, was an aquarium with a giant hermit crab walking around with a copy of Branusci’s Sleeping Muse on his back. The crab is fascinating in itself, and the conversation around the room revolves around animal cruelty. “This is horrific! Another gallery has birds in cages!”… “This surely is illegal!”… “perhaps the crab doesn’t mind… It must be done carefully… *voice falters*”  The crab takes the discarded shell of another crustacean as its home while in the sea… so is it really a concern if it uses a sculpture or an actual shell? Maybe humans have never put sea creatures in tanks or birds in cages before. Hearing English people talk about animal cruelty after their colonial history is deeply boring and short-sighted. Shall we free the creature into the seas we’ve polluted? Or the rivers full of our shit and shampoo? Do we really go to art fairs to see examples of morality and environmentally friendly practices?

Galerie Perrotin’s booth showed the work of artists/curators Elmgreen and Dragset. It was a recreation of a morgue, with a dummy of a woman sticking out. It felt like being on a set of a tv show without lighting, drama or content, and yet far from a real-life scenario of cold and blue bodies. Seeing the morgue as neither real, a successful illusion or a sensory experience rendered it as an unconvincing gothic shop display. Should we steal the dead dummy’s shoes? Perhaps the Frieze fair was not the right context. At the Venice Biennale 2009,  their work (The Dead Collector Mr.B at the Nordic Pavilion) explored similar territory and was a highlight, tying into the overarching narrative of the Collectors exhibition.

Another Frieze project, Christian Jankowski’s The Finest Art on Water, was simply a lucury yacht deposited in the fair. You can buy the yacht as a boat, or as an artwork (at an inflated price to take “into account the artist’s and gallery’s proportion of the profit”). A tired and predictable question, we are asked “what does the re-contextualisation of the boat into artwork- and vice versa- mean for the market which, in the case of Frieze Art Fair, immediately surrounds it?” Aiming at a critique of the fair, while being commissioned by the fair itself, the work ends up simply reaffirming the nature of the art market. Nothing in particular is challenged or destabilised, it leaves us knowing what we already knew; the market is inflated, an assertion creates an artwork and luxury is a desireable purchase whether it is functional or conceptual. To read the boat as a symbol of complicity with, and even glorifying, the market seems more appropriate.

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- Kevin Gaffney, 2011

day 4 craic.

day 3. gelitin at the arsenale, corban walker for ireland opening, future generations, ukraine, whistling for water taxis, finnish ruckus, prosecco by the neck, speedboat kidnappings by techno loving venetians, running into a solo mundi at 4am, hotel bauer and a sunrise in st.marks.

day 2: prosecco breakfast, the giardini, openings – germany, japan, canada, britain .. korea bullets and vogue burquas. the utter shite canadian party, like cotton eye joe in a medival courtyard… what the fuck?! the irony (of which we don’t think there actually was) was lost. but then to the white cube blow out for some decent tunes and a dance with amaretto and gabriel lobell.

day 1: arrivo. expresso. gelato. prosecco.

Then San Giorgio for Anish Kapoor’s Ascension’ and ’Real Venice’ a show featuring : Lynne Cohen, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Antonio Girbés, Nan Goldin, Pierre Gonnord, Dionisio Gonzalez, Candida Höfer, Tiina Itkonen, Mimmo Jodice, Tim Parchikov, Matthias Schaller, Jules Spinatsch, Robert Walker and Hiroshi Watanabe.

Snapped by Vogue Italia (thank you SANS) on arrival and kept it fabulous from then on in. We also swang by the opening of  Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence,  a collateral event of the Biennale featuring the work of Marina Abramovic and exhibited in the beautiful Palazzo Bembo. Lovin being back in Venezia!

Introduction

Pop music will never be low brow, my name is Lady Gaga, so, you think you can dance?

Lady Gaga first appeared on national USA television on 31st July 2008 wearing TV-“Gaga-vision” glasses that spelt out her mission: “Pop Music Will Never Be Low Brow.” 18 months later she had infiltrated and saturated mainstream culture. Every appearance on the street or at an awards ceremony, every performance, every infamous interview, every music video/ single release/ photograph/ etc., and every article about her supposed penis adds to the snowballing myth of Lady Gaga. All of this is part of her ‘project’: Project Gaga. I see Project Gaga as an over-arching artwork, with all of these disparate pieces making up the whole- rather like Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. Like Barney she is a super-creator working with a hybridization of art forms. It is not necessarily a linear project, and its rhetoric is cloaked in myth and endless cultural references. In Chapter 1 we will trace parallels of Lady Gaga’s practice with contemporary art discourse surrounding complicity and capitalism.

Perhaps my biggest obstacle to proving Lady Gaga’s worth (that her contemporary project is particularly of the moment and that her work has an efficacy that is missing from the majority of contemporary art) is Lady Gaga herself; sometimes she seems remote to the point of vacuous in interviews and sometimes she is as disposably trashy as any other faceless playboy blonde. However, for the majority of the time, she speaks eloquently about her art, her ambition and its message. Accordingly, we will examine her songs and music videos in Chapters 4 and 6.

Her personality changes for the audience: for what version of “Lady Gaga” she perceives them to want (we will discuss this in Chapters 2, where the name of her brand is dissected, and in Chapter 8 in relation to her shifting identity/ fashion-self). When talking to a broadsheet she discusses the avant-garde, and when talking to the tabloids she talks about big dicks and her vagina. She talks in riddles, changing her image and ideas (sometimes even her voice and accent) between interviews and often challenges the prejudiced slant of the questions asked of her (all the while making sure her every move is news worthy and every quote is a soundbite). All of this adds to her myth and stardom, all of which (i.e. her inconsistency), is too constant to be a mistake, her playful calculation and manipulation of all the popular medias (from tv & radio to print & the internet) leaves the 24year old in a position of huge power and ability to disseminate her work. Chapter 5 and 7 discuss Lady Gaga’s myth-making relationship to her audience, both a camp and cult interaction.

Douglas Crimp, while speaking of Madonna (who, in Chapter 3, we will study in relation to Lady Gaga and the postmodern), answers a question I’ve been asked many times (“Why Lady Gaga?”) since beginning this dissertation;

My hesitancy to participate in the Madonna Studies phenomenon is that I generally think and write about things that really do matter to me, and Madonna doesn’t matter to me that much. But it’s a problem to even say that, because it sounds like denial or snobbishness or elitism. At some point you have to ask, How can anything that’s captured so many people’s imaginations, that’s generated so many millions of dollars, how can it fail to interest you?

My practice is concerned with knowledge creation through myth and legend, and the present vessel of myth and legend is pop culture. Is Lady Gaga important? Is pop mportant? The same question was asked of Madonna Studies writer Georges-Claude Guilbert, to which he wrote:

In our image civilisation, the Holocaust is dealt with in prime time soaps, and frequently interrupted by commercials. When there is no more information hierarchy, Madonna acquires as much (or as little) importance as the Gulf War or African ethnic massacres.

Chapter 1: The Zeitgeist in Complicity with Capitalism

My ultimate goal? I want a Lady Gaga exhibit at the Louvre.

In Sweet Dreams, Johanna Drucker examines the current position of the art worlds’ artists and theorists and identifies a strong movement away from oppositional criticality towards complicity with consumer culture. Drucker appraises art that is in dialogue with contemporary consumerism:

Works that admits its unabashed use of a wide range of sources doesn’t have to be made only in relation to mass media, but it does function as a testimony to experience within contemporary life as lived, a contribution to historical memory that takes into account our relation to mass culture.

As more artists are mirroring and commenting upon our present condition as consumers (of products as well as culture) trapped in advanced capitalism (e.g., Takashi Murakami Vanessa Beecroft) and more are employing Hollywood aesthetics to convey their ideas (e.g. Gregory Crewsdon, Matthew Barney, Mariko Mori) the quality-control divide between high art and mass culture is somewhat blurred, but the divide remains because of the context within which they are received.

The filter of fine art creates noticeable effects. The difference between these works and their sources within domains of mass, material culture is clearly marked by the ways they are made and the sites in which we receive them. But these works also speak an uninhibited enthusiasm for the modes and icons of mass culture. (Drucker, Joanne)

Yet, Lady Gaga’s practice is not within an art context. While her work is made for consumption through mass media outlets and internet viral activity its concepts and production runs parallel to the high-art artists mentioned above. Her hijacking of popular culture for self-serving as well as provocative reasons has resonance with Murakami’s practice; her use of the female body as a site of political commentary resonates with Beecroft; her high-production values and series of complexly coded video works and photographs parallels with Barney and Crewsdon. Like Dali or Andy Warhol (who she cites as influences), her every move, especially the most preposterous and controversial, are absorbed into her myth (as we will reveal later in Chapter 7).

If we accept that Johanna Drucker has identified art that feeds on mass culture as a strong undercurrent in the present, and a potential future direction of art, then where does this situate Lady Gaga? Lady Gaga speaks and performs the “uninhibited enthusiasm for the modes and icons of mass culture” that Drucker describes while also being a “mode” (i.e. a system/fashion) and “icon of mass culture.” There are a number of other timely waves that Lady Gaga is also on the cusp of (which I will later discuss in further detail); liberation from the outmoded postmodern feminism (the ultimate icon of which is arguably Lady Gaga’s predecessor Madonna), the increased velocity of fashion/capitalism/consumer culture and the underlying melancholy/malaise of these, and the gay community’s need for a strong public figure to teach liberation rather than toleration. To be so on point with all of these pressing moments/movements in popular and subcultures does not just mark Lady Gaga as being ‘on trend’ as she embodies and performs these ideas (and through doing so she is propelled to an even more prolific platform to air these ideas from), if anything she personifies the trend, the movement, the zeitgeist.

To be, or to mirror, the zeitgeist is surely every artist’s aspiration? If the answer is ‘no,’ and we do not see ourselves as the present in transition to the future, we find ourselves in another category: the past. But, to answer ‘no’ is perhaps out of dislike for the future that Lady Gaga is hurtling us towards- what exactly is she bringing us to, and what is she mirroring besides an increased velocity towards nothing and an endless recycling of culture? She has dispersed with the modern (Blondie), and learned from the freshly dead, but still lingering, postmodern (Madonna), so where are we now? Is her art the ultimate hybridized art package that Drucker describes? Lady Gaga is like a cultural dictator, everything she uses is absorbed into “The Fame Factory” machine and re-appropriated to serve “Gaga-vision.” Alexander McQueen’s haute couture is merely an outfit in a Lady Gaga music video; endless sculptures and installations are merely Lady Gagas’ props and stage dressings; video art and photography are a concert backdrop. The result is “a labyrinth of signs.”

This reduction of culture to signs for sensory entertainment has resonance with Baudrillard’s Simulations. When discussing the image of God, he speaks of the iconoclast’s despair of “the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination.” If Lady Gaga is forever to overhaul her image and the presentation of her identity with an appropriation of simulacra, which themselves were simulacra to begin with, “then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum- not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.” (Baudrillard, Jean)

Lady Gaga never takes off her mask. She is never not “Lady Gaga,” her construct to us. Her construct is her identity, she tells us, and she is a performance artist. She is the summation of her signs. There is something more monstrous about her deciding and following through on her idea to become a living art piece (to always be her construct) than the alternative, more sympathetic, idea that she might be the victim of post-Spice Girls fame consumerism and is simply chasing her teenage dream. At the heart of this is the question of the masculine (active) and the feminine (passive). This will be further developed in chapters 7 and 8.

Perhaps her ‘low-brow’ post-postmodern pop music is just another symptom of advanced capitalism, perhaps her power as the ‘other’ is diminished when her work becomes appropriated by the majority, and perhaps her image is everything that is wrong with our current societal values (“fame, doing it for the fame, fame, because I want to live the lives of the rich and famous”). However, I will argue that this is a very simplistic and reductionist view of the power of pop culture- a power which Lady Gaga has used (along with the power of capitalism) to allow herself a huge freedom to test her ideas on the world, rather than in a white cube gallery to a select audience.

Chapter 2: “Lady Gaga,” The Name of the Brand

We all know one of the biggest talking points of the year was that I have a dick, so why not give them what they want? […] When a woman [is] open about her sexuality or she’s free, or liberated, it’s, “Oh, she must have a dick.” That’s a threat. I also carry myself onstage in a masculine way and sing in a low register. This is not out of nowhere, right?

The name “Lady Gaga” implies a number of contradicting ideas: 1) “Lady” as a woman of a superior social position, of nobility; 2) The absurd word “gaga” meaning crazy but also affectionate slang for a grandmother; 3) “Lady” as a drag queen title, or as in “ladyboy.” So, immediately, on being introduced to “Lady Gaga” she risks the scorn of embracing a ‘low brow’ dragqueen name (which is not far from her origins as a burlesque performer). There is also an otherness implied, as being a “lady” is a construction- you are born a girl/woman, and become a “lady” through social training and learning- which is why “lady” is often used in drag to comment on the construction of your “ladylike” gender:

By overcoding her creation, by investing it with all the cliché signifiers of “femininity,” a drag queen embodies the Ideal Woman, she who by definition does not exist. As she constructs an identity from scratch, the drag queen deconstructs the dictatorship of gender. By definition, the drag queen is rebellious; she frightens and destabilizes people when she points out the artificiality of the very concept of femininity in our society. (Guilbert, Georges-Claude)

Through signifying herself as a drag queen Lady Gaga locates herself amongst these discourses on gender normality and sexuality. Lady Gaga is questioning not just what it is to be a constructed “lady,” but also a “woman” and a “man.” The name “Lady Gaga” is essentially “crazy lady,” a person deviant to ladylike ways. The essence of this is one of Camp (which we will explore further in Chapter 3). “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.”

It is, then, unsurprising that Lady Gaga has been rumoured to be a man or a hermaphrodite. She threatens mainstream ideology (both the audience and her contemporaries) with her polymorphous gender (which she exaggerates and mutates) and her aggressive sexuality. After all, if a boy is aroused by Lady Gaga’s latex and finger licking, and she might have a dick, what does this mean for his sexuality? If a girl wants to emulate Lady Gaga, and realises she might have a dick, does she still find her an enviable role model? Whether Lady Gaga’s styling of her gender is regarded as that of the “other” entirely depends upon her audience.

Style is never fully self-styled, for living styles have a history, and that history conditions and limits possibilities. Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an ‘act” which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” itself carries the double-meaning of “dramatic” and “non-referential.” (Butler, Judith)

At a photoshoot for Q Magazine, she appears blonde and topless with a foot long strap-on dildo in her tight pants. In the Telephone video16 (please see Appendix 1) she is stripped of her clothes by two transgender prison guards and jumps onto the prison bars to reveal her fully-naked (besides a pair of fishnets) body. Her genitals are blurred out. A fellow prisoner in the all-female ward says, “I told you she didn’t have a dick,” and another replies “too bad.” Yet, by blocking out her genitals Lady Gaga is neither confirming nor denying the hermaphrodite rumours. The audience is still aware that her gender is a site of contestation.

With all of these transgressions in mind, when we do see Lady Gaga looking attractive and sexually alluring (i.e. subscribing to macho culture’s idea of beauty- see below), the whole nature of her beauty, and beauty as a whole, is undermined and questioned. It is revealed as constructed and “natural” gender lines are deconstructed. She is “the world’s only female pop icon who deliberately presents herself as significantly less attractive than she really is,” and, as she says, “I’m not trying to make your dick hard the way other girls are. I’m trying to teach your dick to get hard when it looks at other things.” To put it crudely, her transgressive gender performance could even be read as simply a fetishized idea of the “chicks with dicks” porn subculture.

All of this is to say that Lady Gaga is critiquing attitudes and prejudices held about gender and sexuality, yet, in Chapter 1, I discussed her complicity with capitalism. For some it is hard to imagine critiquing anything from inside capitalism. Yet, as we all operate within capitalism is there a way to critique from outside of it? Perhaps it is part of the hangover from modern ideas of criticality, but I would like to point out that it is possible to criticize issues of humanity (such as sexism, racism, homophobia, heterosexism, etc.) while still being capitalist. “The intertwining of the mythic values of a fine art and supposed criticism with the culture of late capitalism is a reality to which we need to wake up.” (Drucker, Joanne) So, while Lady Gaga is complicit she is also critical. The two are not always in binary opposition.

Chapter 3: The Madonna Question, and Ugly Beauty

Pop said I needed a new face, so I got one.

Any contemporary female pop star cannot avoid comparisons to Madonna, with the majority meriting unfavourable comparisons next to her legacy. Lady Gaga was quick to be hailed as both “the new Madonna” and a “copycat,” and certainly there are obvious proclivities towards Madonna in her work; her quick sucession of re-inventions could make her the Madonna of the internet generation.

“Some see in the postmodern intolerable manifestations of selfishness, egocentrism and individualism” (Guilbert); one could easily replace “postmodern” with “capitalism” and both variations ring true for Madonna and Lady Gaga. It is important to note that while Lady Gaga’s contemporaries continue to imitate Madonna, Lady Gaga isgoing beyond Madonna (it is clearly not a regression to the modern or a reiteration of Madonna’s territory) into a further complicated set of coding and interactions; perhaps this is the post-postmodern, or an add-on development of postmodernism (as postmodernism is itself about cyclical re-interpretation)? If postmodernism was/is an “increase in communication, the growth of knowledge, the rise of leisure (and of Disneyland simulacra), […] and global economy,” (Jencks, Charles) and if one of its main goals was to challenge elitism between high and low cultures- then, is Lady Gaga not, perhaps, the new embodiment of postmodernism? A more complex, coded and hyper-textual version of Madonna (who was hailed as ultimately postmodern)? If the postmodern was the “complexification, hybridisation and sublation of the modern- not its antithesis” then is Lady Gaga not postmoderning the postmodern? Is it a further postmodern collapse in on itself?

In Madonna as Postmodern Myth, Guilbert discusses Madonna Studies and the institutional recognition of Madonna’s cultural worth and importance as an artist. As such, Madonna provides a framework to contextualise Lady Gaga’s work. Madonna’s beauty is constructed; she attracts and intrigues us through various superficial guises of costume, hair and make-up. In her 20 year long career we have seen her as a geisha (Nothing Really Matters), S&M mistress (Erotic) and, of course, a virgin (Like a Virgin). At the time of these reincarnations Madonna wanted us convinced of their authenticity, that each new re-invention was a revelation of Madonna’s new true self. Like a drag queen, she wanted us to believe in the theatre of her construct.

Lady Gaga’s beauty is also heavily constructed. Like Madonna, she has a normal face and a mediocre background, but through the elaborate construct of beauty she transgresses these limitations and becomes another being: a naked half-reptile glittering n Love Game, an Italian glamourpuss in Eh Eh, and a high-fashion serial killer in Telephone.

Madonna’s power came from this constructed beauty and shocking female sexuality, her power to allure and to own the cliché of female fame: girls (and gay boys) wanted to emulate her, and straight boys (and lesbians) wanted to fuck her. Yet, she was still linked to modern ideas of female icons; that, beneath all the controversy and theatrics, she should be lusted after by both men and women (as she displayed in the Sex book). Being coveted was her power to own the audience’s attention and use this as a platform for her postmodern ideas. This position is upset rather dramatically with Lady Gaga. When Lady Gaga simulates killing herself on stage and rubs blood from her stomach across her face, we don’t see a sexually alluring female star anymore (no matter how fashionable and erotic she looked at the start of the performance). In her debut video, Just Dance, she gyrates with a blow-up whale and we are not sure if it’s sexy or weird, or both. She has, perhaps, freed herself from postmodern feminism.

This is in stark contrast to her contemporaries (Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera) who still subscribe to Madonna’s postmodern sexuality and the modern female star formula/cliché of being self-referential and ironic in choosing your looks while remaining sexually attractive and alluring. This is a rather unempowered position for a woman to put herself in; if she doesn’t look pretty no-one will buy her records? But, of course, perhaps Britney et al might just simply want to be sexually exhibitionist, and why shouldn’t they? They do not have to critique gender inequality in order to legitimatize their power as sexual beings. Either does Lady Gaga. In fact, it could be argued that to see Lady Gaga’s expressions as transgressions at all signifies how deeply entrenched one’s own gender prejudices are.

Self-aware and self-reflexive, Lady Gaga performed these issues and insecurities and contradictions to her audience as part of her first world tour, The Fame Ball, which I attended at l’Olympia, Paris, 9th July 2009. At an interlude, her dancers rolled three screens together (she was unable to bring her pyrotechnics from America because of “the dollar and the euro”) and a short video piece played. Lady Gaga is “Candy Warhol,” and her face is distorted with, what is perhaps, a pair of tights and make up smudged across her eyes and mouth. A man asks her, “Candy, what happened?” and she answers, “Pop said I needed a new face. So I got one.” She knew you were going to call her ugly before you had a chance. The tour began in March 2009, and 18 months later, avowed ‘feminist’ Camille Paglia denounced Lady Gaga because she “isn’t sexy at all- she’s like a gangly marionette” with a “goofy, rabbity grim.” What’s the point of chauvinism when you have feminists like that. Perhaps Lady Gaga shouldn’t perform anymore for fear of being too ugly, perhaps she should get plastic surgery to be more attractive, can she perform then or will she have sold-out and shamed ‘feminism’? What of the millions of young people who aspire to be like Lady Gaga that Paglia is so worried about, how much plastic surgery do they need? How much do I need? How much does Paglia need!

Madonna, a freak of nature, a transgression of the female sex is getting old now, perhaps she will stop her campaigning. However, not only is Madonna not stopping but Lady Gaga has made the foundations of institutionalized sexism further shaky by exhibiting that Madonna was not a freak of nature (or, if she was, she has bred and multiplied her race) because now there is a successor to her throne and this means there will always be ‘new Madonnas.’ New campaigners, and new sexual and moral deviants.

To clarify that this is not an over-analysis of Lady Gaga I would like to draw attention to this transcript of an interview with Norwegian journalist Gjermund Jappee in 2009, to verify that Lady Gaga is as self-aware as I claim her to be:

GJ: Your video, Pokerface directed by Ray Kay, has a strong sexual undertone-

how important in your artistry is that sexuality?

Lady Gaga: It’s as important to me as it is to you- isn’t sex important to everyone?

GJ: Probably is. [Lady Gaga smirks] Are you scared, though, that having sexual

references can undermine the music, because the sexual references and people

focus on that and not-

LG: I’m not scared, are you scared?

GJ: No, ha.

LG: ‘Cause I’m not scared.

GJ: You’re not worried that they’ll check out the sexual references and not care

about the music?

LG: No. Not at all. I’ve got 3 number one records and I’ve sold almost 4 million

albums worldwide.28

GJ: So, what’s the biggest thrill of your career so far?

LG: The gay community.

GJ: Oh, wow, why?

LG: ‘Cause I love them so much. ‘Cause they don’t ask me questions like that.

‘Cause they love sexual, strong women who speak their mind. You see, if I was a

guy and I was sitting here with a cigarette in my hand, grabbing my crotch and

talking about how I make music ‘cause I love fast cars and fucking girls: you’d call

me a rock star. But, when I do it in my music and my videos, because I’m a female,

because I make pop music, you’re judgemental, and you say it is distracting. I’m

just a rock star.

Chapter 4: The Fame, The Fame Monster: Hit Formulas, Sex and Death

I need more to feed my pop heart. Give me more. I want the future, Gaga, fashion, technology, dance, New York, music, pop culture. I want The Fame. I can hear you, can you hear me? The pollution is coming, and I want, what we want- you deserve: the future. My name is Lady Gaga, and this is my Haus.

Lady Gaga’s Project is an overarching greedy monster that consumes and regurgitates the past (and past artworks/performances/fashions) into a repackaged comment on her role and our relation to her. She is living and performing her self-made prophecy; it was a brave move for an unknown artist to release a debut album called The Fame.

Now that she is famous she is telling us about The Fame Monster, the underbelly and her second album (which was actually released, confusingly, as a package with her first album which, cleverly, meant the album sales of the first kept increasing). I will now examine songs and imagery from both The Fame (released 19th August 2008) and The Fame Monster (18th November 2009).

Lady Gaga’s debut single, Just Dance (released 8 April 2008), introduced her reoccurring musical motifs. One of the most persistent is her use of assonance, alliteration and repetition in her melodies. Almost every song has a cult-like, quasi- nonsense chant section, whether it is “just dance, da da doo doo, just dance, spin that record babe, da da doo doo, just dance, dance, dance, just just just dance” or “ga ga ooh la la ra ma ra ma ma, want your bad romance.”

The Lady Gaga Hit Formula? In my analysis of Pokerface (her second single, released in September 2008, which confirmed she was not a one-hit-wonder), I found it to be not just lyrically and melodically repetitive, but also mathematically cyclical. The introduction of the song is 24 seconds, verse 1 is 16 seconds, bridge 1 is 16 seconds, chorus 1 is 24 seconds, verse 2 is 16 seconds, bridge 2 is 16 seconds, chorus 2 is 24 seconds, the rap is 24 seconds, and the final chorus is 76 seconds. It has a moderate tempo of 120 beats per minute. All of thes are multiples of 4, which makes a rather organised pie-chart for a frenetic pop song.

Poker Face is an interesting example of how Lady Gaga transgresses the commercial restraints of pop music by luring the audience into a false sense of security through entertainment and trashy ‘low brow’ sensibilities. After listening to the repition of Poker Face, you being to expect to hear “p p p p poker face, p p poker face,” when in fact she is singing “p p p p poker face, p p fuck her face.” She mimes “poker” rather than “fuck her” in the accompanying music video and sings “poker” on televised performances, and through of all of this “fuck her face” ends up all over the radio uncensored and in children’s karaoke games and ended up as the most downloaded song on the five years of the British download charts to date. What does she achieve by this slipped-in obscenity? The line exaggerates the sado-masochistic adult lyrics of the song (which would make old-school feminists rage); “I let him hit me. Raise it. Baby, stay with me- I love it.” It also distances Lady Gaga from the “Lady” part of her name as she is demanding someone to “fuck her face,” which even Madonna at her most sexually aggressive and crass would balk at announcing.

With Bad Romance (released October 2009), the lead single from The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga developed her sound; “I spent a lot of nights in Eastern Europe, and this album is a pop experimentation with industrial/Goth beats, 90’s dance melodies, an obsession with the lyrical genius of 80’s melancholic pop, and the runway.”

In the song her pop culture references name checks Alfred Hitchcock; “I want your Psycho, your Vertigo schtick, look in my Rear Window, baby its sick, I want your love.” For the first time Lady Gaga’s loneliness and tragedy is blatant (“I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as its free”) whereas, before, her songs had a subtler underlying melancholy. For example, Just Dance was her chanting to herself that despite the fact “that she couldn’t see straight anymore […] it’s gonna be ok, just dance,” and Poker Face contained the grim assertion that “baby, when it’s love if it’s not rough- it isn’t fun.” Perhaps violent sex is a good analogy for talking about Lady Gaga’s music: on the surface is it indulgent and pleasurable, fetishized and shallow, but the subtext below all of these distractions is desperate and lonely.

In Paparazzi (released July 2009) she sings under the analogy of the paparazzi; “I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me, papa, paparazzi.” Beside the reference to Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach, she is singing three intense things simultaneously in a short, simple, breezy pop melody: 1. I will not stop until you love me, papa (her real dad), 2. I will not stop until you love me, papa (a pet name for a boyfriend/lover- either way Oedipus is looking for approval), and 3. I will chase fame (paparazzi) until it loves me back. Again, there is the the motif of repetition, this time referencing her own hit “p- p- p- poker face” in “pa-pa pa-pa-razzi.” Already the song is loaded with content and references, and this is before she makes a 7min30sec video to further elaborate the songs intentions.

Chapter 5: Camp Theatre/ Life

Work it, Jon Benet Ramsey!

An underlying melancholy hidden inside a piece of happy entertainment is, of course, the essence of camp; camp as entertaining tragedy. Lady Gaga, having studied the icons who have gone before her, memorialized their camp tragedies in Dance in the Dark (an album track on The Fame Monster), a song about being vulnerable and “falling apart.” She calls to them in the lyrics (“Marilyn, Judy, Sylvia, tell them how you feel girls! Work it, Jon Benet Ramsey, haunt like Liberachi”) from beyond the grave, at once locating herself as one of them, and as a fan of them (in the same way the gay community are fans: loving their imperfections/ vulnerabilities as well as their iconography). Thus, she locates herself as part of the gay community (the originators of camp) as well as the object of their approval and aspirations. So, Lady Gaga is knowingly enacting a cycle of worship and performance in itself.

She can now talk to Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Sylvia Plath because she is one of them, she is a tragic icon who will “die alone, surrounded by all my stage props and sketches.”

Through sharing Marilyn’s unhappiness and self-loathing (one of the main reasons why gay men identify with these famous women in the first place), and by performing it on stage, she is performing her own dissatisfactions and insecurities as part of her celebrity heritage as a means of identifying with the reasons why the audience identifies with herself. She is a knowing icon, she shares the audience’s pain. In this cycle she creates a space for herself and her fans where she is “detached from humanity, to create an escapist environment where my fans and myself are safe.” Susan Sontag says:

Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy […] Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’

Is Lady Gaga’s pop performance art not to be considered real ‘art’ because it is too camp? Too reliant on aesthetics, style and humour? Is it this use of campery that relegates her from the “high brow” to the “low brow”? And, is it this camp sensibility that has some in the photography department so confused about my dissertation topic? Perhaps camp has yet to transcend its subculture roots but it has always implied a more complex interaction with “serious” topics. Like in the mass media, in camp there is no distinction between the serious and the superfluous.

Rather than following her predecessors in camp/life as theatre (such as Quentin Crisp or Boy George, for example) Lady Gaga’s camp/life is recorded and distributed and subsequently dissected all around the world, rather than local to just Europe or just the UK. As the cliché goes, the world is Lady Gaga’s stage. Camp is essentially a histrionic refusal of reality- an escaping rather than performing of life. So, is Lady Gaga a camp tragedy in a global media spotlight, is she really as empty and soulless as her image/identity changes would suggest? Is Lady Gaga riding on the legacy of Camp and taking it to its extreme, or is she a victim of it- sold the Hollywood dreams without any of the downside? When asked by The Times, “How do you keep depressive, or panicked, thoughts at bay?” she answered “Prescription medicine. I can’t control my thoughts at all. I’m tortured. But I like that.”

It is rather foolish to think she is solely the victim of Hollywood, or a symptom of capitalism, when she burns herself alive on stage in a pot labeled “rejected” in a set of “The Fame Factory,” while the narrator of the performance announces that she “has no soul!” These self-reflexive comments on herself, and on her Fame, is in constant dialogue with her ever-evolving status and achievements/ controversies- she is one step ahead of the thoughts the audience might have about her (please bear this in mine when, in Chapter 5, we discuss the VMA performance of Paparazzi). She is not responding to critics in a work statement hung in a gallery six months after a bad review, she is performing their criticisms. Similarly, her political statements aren’t kept inside a white cube space: when she marches for gay rights it is transmitted across the globe. Thanks to globalization and the internet, it is possible to hear about and view Lady Gagas’ constant activities in country’s where there is still the death penalty for homosexuals.

Chapter 6: Violence, Simulation and the Male Gaze

MTV said, what do you wanna do? I said, I wanna bleed to death for four minutes and they’re like… [face of confusion]. So I said, The world is looking for a story about me being fallen. So maybe if I just show them what it looks like, they’ll stop looking. Here’s what I look like while I’m dying. And I bled to death surrounded by flashing lights and was hung like a martyr in all my blonde glory. Like many others before. Princess Diana. Marilyn Monroe. Anna Nicole Smith.

The last single to be released from The Fame was Paparazzi, and the first two singles to be released from The Fame Monster were Bad Romance and Telephone. Together these three videos make up something of a Violence Trilogy.

Together the promotional video clips for the Paparazzi and Telephone singles total 16 and a half minutes and form a 2-part narrative. Both are directed by Jonas Akurland (who has directed a number of controversial music videos, many of which have been banned or recalled for being too violent, including The Cardigan’s My Favourite Game in 1999, and Madonna’s American Life; namely when the violent perpetrator has been female). Loosely tying into the soundtrack songs the video for Paparazzi shows us a rich and successful Lady Gaga who is exploited by her rich boyfriend for paparazzi fame. He attempts to murder her by pushing her off a balcony, after she smashes a bottle across his face. Lady Gaga plummets to the ground, dripping in Dior, and lands in a pool of her own blood. She takes time out from recovering in a wheelchair to orchestrate a full dance sequence in crutches. Knowing she is no longer an “it girl” she poisons the boyfriend (who wears a patch to cover his glassed eye) and kills him, before being taken to jail amid a circus of paparazzi, catapulted to notoriety.

The concept for the subsequent Paparazzi performance at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) 2009 was simply “fame kills,” the name of an aborted collaborative tour with Kanye West. Lady Gaga, at the start of the performance, was an erotic part-bunny girl in white lace, by the end of the song she was hanging, dead, with blood pouring from her stomach. Her use of imagery and coding referenced the illuminati and provided her with an internet storm of conspiracy theory and was linked to the idea of her sacrificing herself to her audience, to The Fame.

Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. […] But they nevertheless needed that aura of an artificial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die- that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. (Baudrillard)

She killed herself to let the audience know that she knows they want her to fail. The staged ritual brought her even closer to the camp icons who suffered a tragic death, while also referencin a Marilyn Manson-esque horror film shock. She would provide them with the entertainment of her death spectacle but, ultimately, she has the power over them. We will examine this idea of shaman-like control over an audience later when we discuss her myth in Chapter 7.

The sequel to Paparazzi, Telephone (released January 2010) shows Gaga’s introduction to her prison, a hive of homosexual and transgender activity. While fights break out around her, she is concerned with maintaining her hairstyle through an innovative use of Diet Coke cans as rollers. Eventually, Honey Bee (played by Beyoncé, the antithesis of Lady Gaga) bails Gaga out of jail and they go on a revenge- fuelled killing frenzy. They drive the PussyWagon (famous from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films) and, despite overt Thelma & Louise references (which Akurland also referenced in My Favourite Game), the main motif of the video is the ironic B-Movie genre of road trips, campy awkward dialogue and American diners. When Gaga and Honey Bee have successfully poisoned the entire diner, they drive off into the sunset à la Thelma & Louise, holding hands. Both Paparazzi and Telephone are highly-stylizing and hyper-coded Lady Gaga worlds that overwhelm the viewer with seemingly unlimited costume changes and settings. The edit is epileptic and the overall effect is seducing and escapist, artificial and constructed.

Artifice and constructedness are the catchwords of recast notion of complicit formalism. [..] It doesn’t even index an actual event, but rather, plays with the inconceivable unreality of a staged image, daring us to believe in the fantasy it projects. Often contradictory, always indexical and complex, the formal properties of such new works are dynamically, markedly impure. (Drucker)

The final scene of Bad Romance (which was released in the period between Paparazzi and Telephone) shows Lady Gaga lying on the burnt-out bed of the man who had, earlier in the video, bought her for $1,000,000. His corpse lies beside her, and she lies back in lace panties, a bra and heels with her body rubbed in ash. Lying beside her dead man, she is the image of female submission and passive sexuality for the male gaze. As the camera zooms in, her robotic breasts fire sparks and, at once, she is ridiculing herself and her presented sexuality as well as the male gaze for believing it when, in actuality, her feminity/breasts are a weapon that possibly killed the corpse beside her. Instead of giving milk they are breathing fire. As the Paparazzi horror performance and Telephone female murderers point at, Lady Gaga embodies a powerful sexuality as the femme fatale. This posed-sexuality is perhaps more shocking and unexpected in a bubblegum-pop setting.

The femme fatale is a figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma. For her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she seems to be. She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable or manageable. (Mary Anne Doane)

The femme fatale is the antithesis of the maternal, but, despite this, Lady Gaga has become a “mother monster” to all her “little monsters” (fans). We will now attempt to explain how has the antithesis of the traditional maternal figure come to be in such a position of powerful idol worship.

Chapter 7: The Cult of Lady Gagas’ Myth and Performance

“I’ve always been famous, you just didn’t know it.”

In this section I will analyse the myth of Lady Gaga, how she creates and maintains it, and how this has become her brand. Her performance as being will also be discussed as another subtext of her myth.

Stephanie Germanotta was born into the world, achieved her character from New York club life and internalizing her favourite artists, and became her person; titling it “Lady Gaga.” She is aware that the process of self-realisation & visualization must then be performed publicly in order to become concrete in the minds of others. She calls this “The Fame”; “The Fame is not about who you are- its about how everybody wants to know who you are! It’s not just a record its a whole pop art movement Its not just about one song.” What better way to create your own myth than to write an album about your predicted fame, so that when it happens, your listeners and fans know you are the visionary you claim to be? After all, you saw the future before it happened and made an album about it. This process of self-realisation/ projection is a performance:

Performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self. (Carlson, Marvin)

By projecting and styling herself as Famous, Lady Gaga is performing a simulated reality until it becomes an actual reality in hers and the minds of others. Her posturing attempts to make the audience react to her Fame in a specific way, and she “may seek this judgement as an ultimate end in itself.” (Goffman, Ervin) This requires a belief, on the part of the audience, of the authenticity of the role she is playing.

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them […but] the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. (Goffman)

This breakdown between performance and performativity leads to a hyperreal; a breakdown in seperation from the real (projected) and the imaginary (invented). As Lady Gaga’s Fame posturing is constant to us, the audience, we are always interacting with her performance (for it is not performative as it is not a projection of an inner reality, but a projection an inner desire to be a different reality). With this imagined reality she has created for her character, if we call it a mask, we see that:

The mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves- the role we are striving to live up to- this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. Our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into this world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons. (Park, Robert Ezra)

Her mask was Famous and now she is Famous. By creating Lady Gaga from a complex citational process, Lady Gaga is performing what it is to perform an identity, while simultaneously being the identity in her mind and the minds of others. (Parker, Andrew & Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky)

We always laugh when we get to some major magazines and they’re like [high-camp voice], So, the art direction of the shoot is: we want the world to see the real you […]. That’s like saying, “We know you’re full of shit. But it’s fine, we get it. So let’s just cut out the bullshit for one shoot.” But you don’t really want to know me or photograph my soul, you want to do some version of what you already think I am and then expose something you believe is hidden. When the truth is, me and my big fucking dick are all out there for you. But, I’m not angry, I’m laughing. The joke is not on me, it’s on you.

With Lady Gaga, however, it is not her personal life (relationships, family troubles, etc.) that is turned into entertainment as she proposes to have none, it is her whole persona that is constant entertainment. At once she is denying the current tabloid/paparazzi culture’s invasion into personal space, but at the same time affirming it by becoming a daily spectacle. The key difference is that it is Lady Gaga orchestrating her public spectacle, she is not merely a victim of the media catching wind of her private dramas. This is, again, particularly of the moment as:

The new relationship between entertainment and life. By conflating the two and converting everything […like] the marital misadventures of Elizabeth Taylor into entertainments that transport us from our problems, we need never leave the theatre’s comfort. We can remain constantly distracted. We have finally learned how to escape from life into life. (Gabler, Neal)

Lady Gaga is a living, ceaseless, performance artist. Her life, that she presents to us, is merchandised and readily consumable. If Lady Gaga is the mirror of art, fashion and capitalism, then without a clear distinction between  “‘life’ as something other than art, the terms collapse into one another and we are left with an all-performance-all-the- time reality.” (Phelan, Peggy)

In Madonna as Postmodern Myth, Guilbert identifies specific attributes and attitudes that are essential to an individual’s myth and stardom, to paraphrase;

The star is beautiful, yet her beauty is constructed. The star is ambivalent; the first stars were vamps, whores, as opposed to pure virgins. There is no mythic stardom without some form of ambivalence, as there is no myth without these inconsistencies.The mythic star transgresses the traditional boundaries between gender; she is fundamentally androgynous, like any number of divinities. The mythic star and the personae she interprets are amalgamated in the media and the mind of the public. Stars continue moving the public long after they have played their part. The mythic star is the object of a cult, a religion. (Guilbert)

We have already discussed Lady Gaga’s transgressions, her ambivalence and contradictions- yet, her longevity, in the traditional media exposure sense, is yet to be proved. But having recently surpassed Michael Jackson’s record on the World Music Chart58 it is safe to assume her legacy will be remembered, and if the wide world forgets about her the Lady Gaga flame will be kept alive amongst the thousands of gay clubs around the world every night, where she will join past mythic stars such as the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson.

At The Monster Ball (November 2009- May 2011) she asks us “are you having the time of your motherfucking lives?” and when the 20,000 strong crowd reply “yes”: we aren’t lying. When she stops the constant barrage of dance, song, fashion and staging to address the crowd properly, to have an ‘intimate’ chat, the whole audience spontaneously stands in respect of our Queen. Her heart and soul is displayed on stage and as she cries we cry with her. We are her cult, her “little monsters.” She jokes about our worldwide cult symbol (the Gaga monster claw from the Bad Romance video) and later brands herself to be “very fucking religious, because we are a fucking religion.” During Boys, Boys, Boys she implores her “most loyal, best dressed fans… the gay boys” to “fight for your fucking freedom.”

It is easy to be cynical of a woman supporting gay rights- don’t they all want to cash in and be gay icons for eternity? Yet, if we compare this Lady Gaga concert to a Beyoncé or Britney Spears concert: at a Lady Gaga concert the audience is much wider and varied than at Britney or Beyoncé, but it is still overwhelmingly straight (as arenas that require 20,000 people need more than gay people, a minority, to fill the seats). Beyoncé and Britney shout to all their “girls in the audience!” Lady Gaga screams to the “gay boys!” Which is more exploitative? People have argued with me that Lady Gaga is exploiting impressionable gay men who will be forced to worship her for all time. Besides the fact we are not sheep or dogs, how can it be more exploitative to target 6% of the audience at the risk of alienating the 94% of the audience that isn’t gay? Out of the 94% of the audience that has been raised as straight in a heterosexist society, we can deduce a certain amount of which are homophobic, at worst, and “tolerant” at best. Maybe some of them have a “gay best friend” but don’t believe gay people should adopt, etc. [Between 3% and 4% of the world’s male population and between 1.5% and 2% of the world’s female population, are gay, i.e. approximately 1 in 20 people. So, at most, 6% of the world’s population. Perhaps the population of a Lady Gaga concert would have a slightly higher percent of gay audience members, however this would vary enormously from city to city- Mackay, Judith]

Imagine if Beyoncé directed her concert performances to the black people in the audience even if the majority was overwhelmingly white. What if she called her black fans the “best dressed” and told them to “fight for your fucking freedom”; a freedom that their fellow white audience members deny them habitually and ritualistically. When Lady Gaga declares the “gay boys” (who are usually remain hidden behind the scenes; doing Beyoncé’s hair, make-up, costumes, and choreography to ensure the hetereosexual spectacle happens without a hitch), and the straight audience is made aware that GAY is present, that GAY is welcome and GAY is celebrated. Then, Lady Gaga announces that “tonight the freaks are outside and we’ve locked the fucking doors,” and suddenly locates the straight people with the gay people and herself. Suddenly, the Monster Ball is a participatory gay rights rally.

This campaigning for freedom is not without repercussion. The Westboro Baptist Church in America (famous for its “God Hates Fags” and “Fags Die, God Laughs” pickets at gay mens’ funerals) picketed the Monster Ball in St. Louis, Missouri, with “God Hates Lady Gaga” signs.They also made a parody of Poker Face, intending it to go viral through the internet. Its lyrics are, “Go devil spawn, you just keep pushin’ on to the hell where you will forever burn. Show your filth to everybody, you pissed off God, you’ll see what he’s got.” The song and accompanying story went viral and had thousands of listeners, giving the church massive media attention. Did this martyr and confirm Lady Gaga as a protector of gay rights or is it simply a hate group hijacking a popular singers affiliation with the gay community for opportunistic publicity of their “cause”?

When performing the melancholy So Happy I Could Die she rises above the audience on a platform in a “living dress” that resembles a sea creature morphing around her body. The effect is hypnotic and the symbolic imagery places her not just as Glenda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz but also as an Other form, a girl standing beside me notes that she looks like “an angel,” and I tried to scoff that is was more like an alien- but as hundreds of lights shined through her contorting silhouette it was hard to disagree with the sentiment.

John Izod describes Madonna as a trickster. He means trickster as a joke-playing god, magician, illusionist, shaman, not as in confidence trickster (although…), and he endeavours to study the Madonna archetypes in a Jungian way. There are parallels between the rocker and the shaman: a ‘traditional’ rock concert functions as a mass, a gathering of the tribe around the medicine man. The visionary singer takes the audience to another universe. (John Izon in Gulbert, Georges-Claude)

Lady Gaga says of The Monster Ball, that she expected this shamanic outcome as proclaimed to us “I want you to leave feeling connected, not just to me, but to each other.” On a recent trip to London’s G-A-Y bar on a Friday night at 2am, the clubs’ heaving crowd was suddenly placated. Dancing stopped and loud conversations finished, the entire club turned to face the numerous television screens playing the full 9 minute long video of Telephone. There was no rage at the DJ stopping the constant barrage of thumping music for the video that contains 5 minutes of spoken dialogue.  A spontaneous Rocky Horror-esque chant and response began to the video’s dialogue, while others concentrated on their best mimic of the “Lady Gaga-isms,” and others perfected the dance routine. It is easy to laugh or scoff at this moment as trivial and ridiculous: a club full of grown up gay men pretending to be a female popstar that is probably younger than they are. But, group (perhaps it could be called cult) moments like these are always baffling if you locate yourself outside of them. As she tells us, her cult followers: the freaks are the ones outside, not us.

Chapter 8: The Fashion Self

Fashion- put it on me. Don’t you want to see these clothes on me? I am anyone you want me to be… I live to be model thin, test me, I am your mannequin… You are who you wear, it’s true.

As we have discussed, there are no days off for “Lady Gaga” the construct. Magazines, radio, tv, blogs, etc., sell and make myths hourly to feed the increasing demand for gossip and news about her. Every outfit she wears (whether getting off a plane or stepping from hotel to taxi) will be photographed by the paparazzi and will be sent around the globe within minutes (with increasing speed due to the connection of fans through Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging). As such, every outfit must be controversial or unique. As a brand, Lady Gaga is selling us her identity and she wants (or wants us to believe that she wants) the same in return. “Some artists want your money so they can buy Range Rovers and diamond bracelets,but I don’t care about that kind of stuff. I want your soul.”

A slip in her identity is a slip in the brand. Rather a lot of pressure for a 24 year old. However, in brand marketing genius, her personality is essentially that of a loose cannon,an artistic genius with an excessive, random temperament. Thus every misjudged interview and ‘mistake’ is re-consumed and fed into her myth making Fame Factory. Even outright lies about not wanting money (while concurrently endorsing headphones that cost £109) are excused because she is vocal about her need for money to make the art, through which she gives you her soul, and through which you find happiness, escape and religious affirmation. Her brand is such that she can do no wrong; because wrong is right, and right is right. The biggest threat to her brand is if she becomes too ‘normal’ or fixed. This does not seem a concern for Lady Gaga so far: before heavyweights such as Christina Aguilera and Beyonce began to dress up like Lady Gaga (because Lady Gaga is fashionable), Lady Gaga had already switched her game.

Fashion is irrational in the sense that it seeks change for the sake of change, not in order to ‘improve’ the object, for example by making it more functional. It seeks superficial changes that in reality have no other assignment than to make the object superfluous on the basis of non-essential qualities. (Svednsen, Lars)

She is the image of fashion in an advanced capitalist society; she is a de-centred personality striving for individuality through constant change and re-representation of herself. Are Lady Gaga’s constant transformations symptomatic of her seeking change for the sake of change, or to become a better embodiment of her brand/myth/identity?

Here we can see what the problem is with the ‘fashion self.’ It is a hyper- reflexive self, thus fulfilling the demands of selfness, but since it is only without trace and without being related to each other, its selfness is undermined. It is a self without a cohesive narrative. … Fashion does not have a final goal, it is not going anywhere except forwards. (Svendsen)

If you would agree with me, even for the sake of argument, that Lady Gaga embodied the essence of fashion, then where is Project Gaga heading except forward? What is the final goal, the outcome, by which we can judge or evaluate its efficacy? Forwards towards what- a new world, new music and new fashion, does she know what this world is yet or will we know when we get there? And, if we do get there, how long before the new world becomes unfashionable and disposable? Is the relentlessly accelerating Project Gaga an exercise in futility? Is it just an exercise in excess and entertainment for the sake of it- the essence of fashion? Like fashion, is it trying to be more than that, to be ‘art’? However, if Lady Gaga is the ultimate model of an artist as according to the qualities outlined by Johanna Drucker, is this also the symptom of the current artistic climate? Will Lady Gaga, like fashion, keep spiralling out into faster and faster cycles of reinvention and, most importantly, what if Lady Gaga, or fashion itself, goes out of fashion?

If we take away the capitalist power of media oversaturation and bring Lady Gaga back to her small club-show origins, does it affect her work? It certainly affects the distribution of her work, the wide dissemination of her ideas and her subsequent cultural currency- but the work is still the same. Even better, if the fame and mass adoration turns into mass contempt or, worse, indifference, she then validates her brand’s identity as the  other, the outsider and the freak. Or, perhaps Lady Gaga doesn’t exist if no one is watching? If everything about her identity and costume is a construct made for consumption, what happens if no one wants to consume it?

Having already discussed the socio-political discourses that Lady Gaga finds herself in, and in a new era of complicit capital production in the art world there can be little objection to her being considered an artist. Yet, in an art context, legitimization to art practices is granted by the establishment; institutions, museums, etc. Due to her overt engagement with fashion and pop culture, she will not benefit from ‘high brow’ artists’ retrospectives and continued respect long after going out of fashion. Even at her level of fame it is easy to be removed from popular conscience; the pop/fashion arena moves light years faster than the art world and they search and find the ‘new’ much quicker. If Lady Gaga really is the Madonna of the internet age and internet speed, how many years does that leave Gaga? However, these rules no longer apply as Madonna was postmodern and Lady Gaga is a new embodiment of the postmodern or perhaps operating in an entirely new category, the post-postmodern?

Conclusion

Lady Gaga’s entrepreneurial skills and art forms are intrinsically linked with capital; she has availed of the current stage of advanced capitalism just as she has availed of the (ending?) wave of postmodernism. Her “resonance in the minds of the public [...is] a repository for all our ideas about fame, money, sex, feminism, pop culture, even death.” (Anderson, Steve)

The current generation of the late 90’s to the present (if we call us the Internet Generation, since the previous generation of the 80’s-90’s was the MTV generation) has an even more epileptic concentration span than the previous MTV generation. As children, the Madonna-influenced Spice Girls showed us that the most normal person (such as Geri Halliwell, from a council estate in Watford, London) could be a global superstar if they worked hard enough and followed their capitalist instincts. I too could make a world record by having 25 product endorsements in one year! It follows that today children are brought up on dream-selling star-machines such as the X Factor, American Idol, etc., that feed us the same story with even more instant fame. Is Lady Gaga a beacon of this self-made enterprising star-making machine, or is she a victim of it; filling her ‘need’ to be famous and the world’s ‘need’ for a new fame figure? I believe the answer is yes to both options; that she is knowingly both a symptom and personification of theories of fashion and branding/capitalism.

I would like to re-appropriate the following statement by Camille Paglia as all positive- rather like how the “smirky teens” of today, whom Paglia despairs for, say “sick” for something that is “good”;

[Lady Gaga’s] grisly mix of sex and death is sick, symptomatic of Gaga’s alienation from her own body- another example of which is her promise to reveal the title of her next album tattooed on her body […]. A Washington Post article described Gaga at a gay-rights event last year as “looking slightly embalmed.” (Paglia, Camille)

Yes, Gaga is […] entombed in her own deadly cult of self. 70 Has Paglia not, accidently, described our contemporary position as youths? Sex and death often mingle together in a society where we have been brought up to be hyper- aware of HIV/AIDS and other deadly sexual diseases; where rape is often a prerequisite for murder in popular media stories; where (thanks to the internet’s open source of porn) we are more aware of diverse sexual practices (such as asphyxiation, bondage, torture, etc.) than our parents would have been. Are we not encouraged to be alienated from our bodies by technology, the internet and distorted body image? Are we all not seeking individuality through our choices in consuming- whether we are consuming fashion, art, education, the country we live in, etc. They are all a choice of a product that will define our life. We are doing everything we have been taught to, that capitalism and postmodernism has created for us. Lady Gaga is simply reflecting it in its most monstrous form- the fame monster.

To finish: Lady Gaga “is more than a witness of her epoch, she is an active reflection of it, she is an inconoclast, and her aesthetics do not give a damn about ‘good taste.’” (Tritoléno, Martine).

Written by Kevin Gaffney.

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ARTISIT? strives to promote and engage emerging artists, through a series of exhibitions and films with a full music and lecture programme. The exhibiting artists have been chosen from 2010 graduate shows both in Ireland and abroad. This annual event was founded in 2006 by Mary Nally and Sharon O’Grady. For further information please visit www.artisit.org or contact artisitdublin@gmail.com!

THIS IS GONNA BE EPIC ::: A BIENNIAL OF CREATIVE VIDEO PRESENTS THE TOP 20 VIDEOS
Live Stream Event at YouTube.com/Play: Thurs, Oct 21, 8-9:30 pm EDT
Join us online this Thursday as the jury’s top 20 videos from the YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video shortlist are announced via live stream from the Guggenheim. The top 20 videos were selected from more than 23,000 global submissions. After the Guggenheim curators determined a shortlist of 125 works, a distinguished jury selected the top 20 most creative videos for presentation at the Guggenheim and to the world.

Hosted by comedian Michael Showalter, the live stream event will feature performances by Grammy Award-winning rock band OK Go; musician, producer, and video artist Kutiman; and more. Outside, the public is invited to view excerpts from the top videos projected in a spectacular display on the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed facade from 6–10:30 pm on October 21 and 22.

this is an epic exhibition. it has one of the best pieces of art ever made on show – Nan Goldin‘s, The ballad of Sexual Dependency. i could watch it forever, the soundtrack is perfection.