“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 discussionof 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.

I couldn’t make out any details except that it looked like she was dressed in all black. But when the performance ended, I clicked over to the offstage camera only to see that she was dressed as Venus, complete with the long flowing wig and clam shell bikini from her video. Then, amidst my still-frantic online searches, I came across an image advertising the performance, only this one showed her wearing the Telephone-era blonde wig. I began to think that she must have performed multiple times, or that perhaps there were many versions of Gaga running around onstage simultaneously. Maybe there were decoy Gagas trying to keep the audience in suspense as to which one was real.

When I finally watched the full performance, I was able to make sense of my “decoy Gaga” theory and realized that she had merely done something very similar to the music video itself: that is, she (re)created multiple personas for our rapid consumption. As Meghan and Eddie pointed out, a key difference is that Gaga wasn’t referencing historical, cultural images and tropes but was “dragging herself.” 

However, there is another crucial difference between this performance and the video, one that perhaps, as a part of the audience, we often forget: that is, that there was an audience.

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During her recent appearance on Good Morning America, Gaga spoke about the pain of not performing in front of thousands of people: how much she missed this component during her time of hip-injury and healing, how she cried during the video shoot for “Applause” when she thought about how much she missed her fans, how much she depends on them. If Gaga truly lives for her fans, then the presence of this live audience must allow her to bring her performances more fully to life: as she sings about living for the applause, she faces the real-life potential for such in the cheering hands before her.

This relationship between the dependent performer and her audience – like the jester whose purpose relies on there being people to witness her – inherently aids in Gaga’s creativity onstage, which included the creation of multiple personas. These various performances of herself quickly condensed and interrogated any kind of linear understanding of time: within a matter of moments, we had Born This Way Gaga, Fame-era Gaga, Telephone-era Gaga, and Venus/Aphrodite Gaga, as Meghan and Eddie clearly distinguished. In the music video, we see image after image, with individual screens separated by distinct cuts, shuffling through the different appearances and references; no matter how quickly the shuffling becomes, the images remain separate, the implication being that they aren’t simultaneously possible (we know Gaga had to dress up and then dress down and change multiple times into each outfit). Despite technology, there’s something clear about each version: there’s this Gaga, and this one, and that one over there, etc.

And yet somehow it’s not until she’s live on the stage where they became conflated for me, where she moved through them so quickly that I began to confuse one for the other, began to think that I’d pinned her down – there she is! – up until the moment where she’d transform once again. “Transformation as magic,” she said on GMA, that it’s her “obsession.” And so the real-life Gaga, the in-flesh performance, became multiple and recursive as opposed to strictly linear. She moved through different versions of herself and yet remained there, in her black leotard, (almost) the entire time. The conflation of outfit and flesh, of identity and performance – coupled with MTVs awkward online presentation – emphasized Gaga’s monstrous multiplicity for me: it’s not that a bunch of decoy Gagas were running around, tricking me into not seeing the real one, but that the real Gaga can only be seen through such constant, repetitive (aggressive?) (monstrous!) multiplicity.

Or, as Roland Betencourt beautifully put it, “the medium is perceptible only in witnessing the manifestations and transitions of forms through its space, but not as an ontological category, which can be reduced to flatness, whiteness, or two-dimensionality.”

Indeed, the camera started out by accommodating her presentation as a canvas, filling up the screen until I physically wanted to back away myself. That feeling of not being able to see the picture clearly, not seeing everything at once – I felt anxious, out of control. It is only by the end of the performance, once we’ve witnessed the magic of transformation over and over again, that we’ve seen the full picture of Gaga. But during that moment of extreme close-up, it almost felt possible for the camera to suddenly back away far enough to reveal all forms of Gaga at once.

I mean, isn’t this basically what happened?

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This jumbling and circling of time is exactly Kristeva’s distinction between female versus male time.¹ Gaga embodies an understanding of female time, which is “all-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space.” This is in contrast to male time, which is linear and monumental, with “the stumbling block of…death” always waiting at the end – something Gaga completely opposes in her notions of infinite birth. The nuances that Kristeva might help us to tease out from Gaga’s performance strike me as rich and productive: the recursivity of time; the necessity of multiple perspectives in order to achieve a fuller insight; and the fundamental links between multiplicity, gender, and performance.

Such obvious performances (we could actually see the wigs resting on Gaga’s head), and the quick addition and easy subtraction of props and clothes, highlight the necessary use of such accessories and “dress-up” in order for these presentations of Gaga to exist in the first place, underlining the performative aspects of gender and identity. To quote Eddie, the “only firm barrier left by postmodernism – that between performativity and essentialism,” is highlighted to the point of explosion in this performance.

But for me, it was all filtered through MTV’s online presence. There was the caption: “Lady Gaga coming offstage,” and the small awkward camera. I immediately picture Jo Calderone: “When she cums, it’s like she covers her face, cuz she doesn’t want me to see, like she can’t stand to have one honest moment when nobody’s watching.” The implication is that all her moments of honesty are viewed publicly as opposed to privately. Or even further: that all public moments, for Gaga, are honest.

As Gaga drags multiple versions of herself onstage, where and when and why are we locating her honest moments?

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Before I ended up on the “Talent Lounge” camera, when I could still just faintly hear that Gaga was currently onstage, I searched the faces of the various audience shots, hoping for something to be revealed. I watched people watching her, expecting to see – what was I expecting to see? People moving, dancing, wearing wild facial expressions. I expected to see that same mirror that I’ve come to see when I consider looking into Gaga’s face. The stillness of the bodies in the audience – the people backstage, the people in various rooms and in the “Talent Lounge” and all these strange locations that MTV was letting me look into – became even stiller in contrast to what I expected to see. Just various groups of bodies looking immobile, blank.

If the eye mask at the end of the “Applause” video is as significant as I assume it to be, then I’ve got to wonder if it goes both ways: if the audience’s immobility and stillness was reflecting back some kind of truth about Gaga’s performance itself.

“Her ability to perform doesn’t depend on a blankness, but on an emptiness, a loss of self. She isn’t a chameleon, but emptiness, an all-surface no-innards being – just like a Koons work…Gaga is a new being that has grown from the encounter of trauma with a vast emptiness” (Eddie McCaffray).

I go back to the mirror: the act of looking toward Gaga and seeing a multiplicity of truths reflected back. The act of looking even further – or perhaps of losing the distance that allows us to see more, just like the close-up camera in the beginning of her performance – so as to see blankness, emptiness, loss. We either look from a distance at a great multiplicity, or from a closeness where we see directly into the canvas of Gaga. This repetition of varying perspectives becomes a kind of folding inward, not just of time (in her short recreation of multiple “eras”) but now of space as well. It becomes incredibly difficult to think and write about Gaga’s various manifestations without encountering some form of anxiety about time and space, and the inevitability of emptiness.

The cosmic void of Gaga – could this be the epitome of failure?

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¹ Kristeva, Julia. “Women's Time.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia      University Press, 1986. 187-213.

Author Bio:

Sarah Cook is an MA candidate at the University of Maine, where she’s focusing on poetics, creative writing and gender studies. Recent work can be found in gesture, Phoebe, and Horse Nihilist, and is forthcoming in Vector Press and SWINE. Her newest chapbook, a meadowed king, is out from dancing girl press.

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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.

I. On art and pop culture

Koons’ Gazing Balls exhibit, which ran through early summer at David Zwirner’s gallery in Chelsea, is arguably the ultimate combination of art and pop culture, high and low. As a New York Times review put it, “The show resembles the plaster-cast collections that were once de rigueur at museums,” noting, “That each has affixed to it a mirrored blue ball that you might find in a suburban birdbath almost reduces the sculptures to yard ornaments, but it also gives them a visual, contemporary spark.” Koons makes it new by pairing casts of Greco-Roman statues, (i.e. the essence of high art), with once popular lawn adornments. What some might call “ideas…yoked by violence together” Koons – and Gaga – find deeply inspiring.

It is no wonder, then, why Lady Gaga adopts the gazing ball for her VMA performance. Indeed, she sings, “Pop culture was in art, now art’s in pop culture in me,” as she holds the ball above her head. And she does bring high and low culture together in her performance, as Roland Betancourt has expertly noted hereon Gaga Stigmata. At the beginning of the performance, he points out, Gaga’s white headpiece and gown recall not only her own “Bloody Mary” costume from the Born This Way Ball but also Malevich’s Black Square – and even the Image of Edessa. Toward the end of the performance, Betancourt notes, Gaga’s seashell bikini channels both Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and The Little Mermaid. Each source has something to offer, and Gaga pulls equally from both, integrating so as a equalize them.

II. On self-acceptance

In an interview with New York Magazine published in May, Koons remarks on the difficultly of accepting oneself as an artist. For years, Koons found himself rejected by the art community. Eventually, he found success by, as the magazine put it, “insert[ing] himself into art history in the most literal way imaginable – by making new work that collages with several-thousand-year-old work.” Koons goes on to say, “That’s the reason I like to work with these external things. I really think that the journey that art takes you on as an artist is that you first learn self-acceptance.”

Koons’ journey, then, is not unlike Gaga’s. As the “Marry the Night” music video recalls, Gaga found herself rejected by the music world after she was dropped by Def Jam in 2006, after which accepting herselfbecame all the more difficult. In the video, Gaga crouches beneath five other ballerinas who stand tall on stage, their condescending eyes gazing down on her. Gaga, sobbing, stares up at them as she struggles to cover her bare breasts while also grasping at the heels of another ballerina. Eventually, though, Gaga too learns self-acceptance. As Peter Kline notes herein his analysis of the “Marry the Night” music video, “Marrying her own pain and suffering has freed Gaga,” who now relishes in “her newfound courage and strength.”

Like Koons, Gaga has thrust herself into the music world “by making new work” with centuries-old ideas and materials.

III. On performance

Though Gaga’s performance is very much about Gaga, it is also about her fans and her intimate relationship with them. Her performance of “Applause” at the VMAs is her first performance since her hip injury and surgery earlier this year, and it is therefore a reunion with her Little Monsters. Less than a week before her performance, Gaga remarked on Good Morning America that the worst part about her injury was that it had taken her away from her fans: “That was the hardest part, not seeing the fans, not performing, not playing the music,” Gaga said. “I would play [“Applause”] and I would do the choreography on my back and visualize the fans. I thought of them every second.” She also used her GMA appearance to refute criticswho had said the song is “entirely about beingLady Gaga.” Instead, she said, “What I mean is not that I live for attention, but I live for making [the audience] happy. And that’s when the applause happens. When the audience loves it.”

In the aforementioned New York Magazinestory, Koons comments on this very concept: the spectacle being not for the artist, but rather for the audience. Describing a time when gazing balls were popular lawn decorations, Koons notes, “People put them in their yards because they enjoy the visual aspect of the ball, but they really do it for their neighbors.” Similarly, when Gaga takes the stage, she does so primarily for the audience. In that way, Gaga is herself a gazing ball, on display largely for the enjoyment of others. At the VMAs, the audience even became a part of the spectacle, as Little Monsters’ faces reflected in Gaga’s gazing ball.

Author Bio:

Jon-Michael Poff is a recent graduate of Lyon College where he earned a bachelor's degree in English. Beginning in September, he will be a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Spain. He has previously written for Edutopia magazine and Numbers, Inc: art journal. Tweet him all things Gaga @JonMichaelPoff.

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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.

Her costume recalls the experimental performance pieces of Hugo Ball, (of the Zurich branch of Dada) – and in particular it recalls “The Magical Bishop” performance from 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. This performance revolved around the recitation of nonsensical, sound poetry – such as “Karawane.” Not only did such a performance, along with the similar poetic compositions of the Futurists, bring the sonic into the field of the visual arts, it also set the foundations for the development of performance art. In a sense, the work of Hugo Ball and his contemporaries functions as an origin myth that establishes the foundations that make possible the ARTPOP project. It is Gaga’s Ur-medium.

The religious association suggested by the comparison to the icon is also stressed by the fact that this costume references the Born This Way era, as it is similar to the “Bloody Mary” costume of the Born This Way Ball, where Gaga appears as the Trinity with two backup dancers, the three of them moving mechanically along in unison throughout the stage (an aspect that Meghan Vicks has expertly discussed here). This song explicitly addresses the apocryphal narrative of Mary Magdalene following the death of Christ as detailed in the medieval Golden Legend.

Note, in particular, the string of pearls around her neck. These are a curious addition that gender the figure as feminine. In this context, it would seem that Gaga operates as the allegorical manifestation of the tabula rasa – the blank slate of the medium – configured as the body of the feminine. This femininity is crucial: allegorical figures are often depicted through images of women. But furthermore, as I discussed earlier, because of its image-bearing, reproductive capacities, the feminine has come to be associated with a site of unregulated, infinite viral reproduction in pop culture – a notion that bears a striking intellectual resemblance with the notion chora, (translated as space), as described in Plato’s Timaeus.

For Plato, chora is the ever-receiving receptacle from which all forms emerge. It can never be described or made fully manifest, but only approximated through a form of “bastard reasoning,” or through metaphor and analogy. Thus, he likens the chorato a nurse of becoming, the virgin wax upon which forms are impressed, or a mother. While Jacques Derrida would come to characterize chora as wholly imperceptible, John Sallis would later counter that in Plato’s cosmogony, chora can be said to be perceptible – perhaps not as a realized form, but rather through its movements: through the tremors and quakes that occur in the chora as forms come into being and change form.

In this opening image, Gaga takes on the notion of chora as a site of generativity who lacks being in its own right, but who can be made manifest through the movements of forms emerging upon her. The performance takes on an iterative process whereby we begin to see Gaga cycling through her key eras – from Born This Way to The Fame to The Fame Monster (and Born This Way)and on to the present ARTPOP. This trope naturally riffs on the popular “Evolution of Dance” viral video, and thereby generates not only the idea of nostalgia or a career retrospective (as many have been quick to observe), but also the idea of a historical emplacement and self-aware knowledge, captured by the line “we just like to read.”

After the camera pans out, we hear the jeers and boos of an audience; while many bloggers alleged that these were real boos, it turns out that they were simulated – they were part of Gaga’s audio track. The boos and jeers respond directly to the opening lines of the song, transitioning us from this virginal, formless space into the domain of the critic – as if her form is forged from the critique and jeers. This, of course, speaks directly to the current themes of the ARTPOP project, which argues that “Lady Gaga is Over” in the promotional Haus film by the same name (which I have discussed herepreviously).

On stage, she is joined by a series of backup dancers wearing black leotards and skullcaps. This costume cleverly manifests the true medium condition of Lady Gaga, allowing for her quick transition between various costumes. Additionally, this costuming operates as a minimalist rendition of the Pierrot figure, and – as I have discussed here and here – Pierrot’s association with a medium condition is heightened by this costuming. However, in this case we do not see the white body of Pierrot, but are rather presented with the black leotard fitting neatly over bodies as the true medium of Lady Gaga’s performance – mechanically allowing her to cycle through a series of quick costume changes. Hence, the original flatness of the modernist medium is subverted – demonstrated to be an artificial construct, as artificial a construct as any other apparatus of the body.

Lady Gaga uses this medium condition of the black leotard and skullcap to transition through her various phases – and the perceptibility of the medium is only made visible through the movement of different forms (different versions of Gaga) manifesting. That is, the medium is perceptible only in witnessing the manifestations and transitions of forms through its space, but not as an ontological category, which can be reduced to flatness, whiteness, or two-dimensionality (as art historians and critics Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss would champion in the height of post-war, late-modernist art). The flatness of the paper-cutout backdrop further plays with these notions: not only does its flatness manifest images through the cutout silhouettes, but also its color is constantly in a state of flux, changing according to the lights shined upon it.

At first, she takes on the image of The Fame’s Lady Gaga, with her blue bedazzled skirt and blazer, and iconic blond bob. While in this era, (which first articulated the artistic drive of her project before having the full capacities to enact its realities), the song mentions her own transition from being a “Koons fan” into being the “Koons” herself. Interestingly, as she references pop-artist Jeff Koons, Lady Gaga and her dancers take blue gazing balls into their hands, much like the ones you would find in a kitschy garden.

This operates as an explicit reference to Koons’s recent series “Gazing Ball,” which deploys white plaster copies of famous artworks and riffs on them, while adding this signature gazing ball into their compositions. As such, Gaga has doubly cited Koons in her lyrics andperformance, and has also cited a series that operates on the white, malleable matter of plaster as a way of articulating the reproducibility of art and its circulation within a popular economy.

Then, she is formed into The Fame Monster (and arguably Born This Way) era’s blond skunk-roots wig, which was featured in the “Telephone” music video, and which also made an appearance in the caged Gaga of the “Applause” video. The heightened, garish blond of the wig, as I have described previously, alludes not only to Andy Warhol’s renditions of Marilyn Monroe, but also to Madonna’s own citation of Andy Warhol on the Celebration album cover, making this a particularly salient image.

It is significant that she is presented her wig by a dancer who carries a mannequin head on each of his shoulders – which reads as if the wigs for The Fame and The Fame Monster came from those very mannequin heads on his shoulders. The two mannequin heads on the shoulders of one body indicate that The Fame and The Fame Monster are two sides of the same coin, operating as a two-faced Janus-like creature, with the tabula rasa dancer positioned between the two as a literal site of mediation. This recalls the same trope Gaga used when posing with Shangela following the drag performance of “Applause,” where the two of them held together the blank bust of a Styrofoam head, an issue I discussed earlier. In Terry Richardson’s images for the performance’s rehearsal, the wigs are precisely mounted on such heads. Here, Gaga has an animate, moving, breathing wig-bearer.

During this very stage, another dancer approaches Gaga and speckles her face with paint, creating an allusion to the iconic cover art for “Applause”, which worked well with the leotard – reminiscent of the Pierrot costume. It is important to note, however, that the paint is dabbed off a painter’s palette, which suggests, once again, that Lady Gaga is precisely an artistic medium whose veritable manifestation is only made visible via her rapid-fire, successive permutations and transformations. Her face is messily streaked with the primary colors, which suggests that Gaga is not a fully manifest artwork, but rather contains all the primers and basic rubrics for the enactment of art – art existing as a potentiality, but not yet (or ever) fully embodied.

The key to these two figures – the wig-bearer and the painter – is that they are not dancers: they are Gaga’s actual hair stylist and makeup artist. Her hair stylist, Frederic “Freddie” Aspiras, wears the two heads, which (as we can tell from Terry Richardson’s useful rehearsal and preshow pictures) are simply Styrofoam wig heads that have been spray-painted black. This is why he does not join the dancers and exits the stage after every change. Tara Savelo, Gaga’s makeup artist, appears to be the painter with the palette, streaking Gaga’s face with colors. While she carries the palette over her face, hiding her visage, we can tell by her profile that this is Savelo – this is corroborated by the fact that in one of Richardson’s images, we see Savelo in full makeup and in profile.

Superficially, it makes sense that Lady Gaga would want her hair person on hand to strap on her wigs, given that a wig malfunction would undermine the fluidity and speed of the transitions. However, Savelo’s appearance causes us to question a purely practical reading of this inclusion: after all, the streaking of color could surely have been accomplished by any of her dancers. This is not to say the color was haphazardly applied. In fact, Terry Richardson’s images also demonstrate the various makeup tests that were done until the proper combination was achieved, which lends extra significance to the choice of colors and the way they are applied to Gaga’s face. Nevertheless, it would not have been a difficult task to train one of her dancers (who clothed her in The Fame transition) to dab on the streaks of color. One of her skilled dancers could surely have also been trained to put her wig on.

So it seems that Gaga wanted her actual hair and makeup team to have a presence on the stage. Note that while Aspiras stands stoically in the spotlight, Savelo does not seem as comfortable and chooses to hide her face with the palette – as if concealing the very object she is there to operate on (i.e. the face), or perhaps even to conceal the fact that her makeup, done specifically for the award ceremony, might not match that of the dancers around her. Whatever the reason, the inconspicuous nature of their appearances should not be mistaken for a desire to disguise or wholly conceal their presence. Like the jazz-hands that “cover” the placement of her Famewig, these acts of hair and makeup are embraced through a thin veil of misdirection. In fact, we are confronted precisely with their operation: their liminal and transitory action both becomes visible itself, and makes visible the quakes and shivers of Gaga’s body-as-medium metamorphosing before us.

Finally, we encounter a stripped Lady Gaga in her seashell attire and Venus wig, signifying the ARTPOP rebirth of Lady Gaga. Notice that for this costume change, she leaves the stage for a period of time rather than just changing onstage as before – despite the fact that it appears she is already wearing the seashell bikini underneath the leotard. This literal absence from the stage manifests her actual absence from the stage in the period before ARTPOP, following her injury. Here, the imagery is straightforward as she manifests the current stage of her work through the guise of Venus, particularly in a manner similar to that of Botticelli, who depicted the birthof Venus in his well-known image.

We must view this process, then, as Lady Gaga demonstrating herself not through a nostalgic rehashing of her career, but rather through the infinite malleability of her image over time in rapid-fire succession. In a moment where she is expected to top herself, Gaga has chosen to meet that challenge not with some new aesthetic form, but rather by manifesting herself as a state of being through which an infinite succession and iteration of images are always flowing – she is always topping herself.

Hence, she has made her point not by playing into the game, but by simply pointing out that she is that game itself.

Author bio:

Roland Betancourt is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art Department at Yale University.

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