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

By Roland Betancourt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his collaborations with Tsui and others, Kurt Hugo Schneider’s videos (beside the ones produced for Tsui) capitalize on a clever understanding of his medium, while also deploying product placement as a creative and generative part of this production – an aspect that speaks to the experience of YouTubers operating on the brink of virality and thriving on such forms of advertising-patronage. See, for example, his recent Coca-Cola video that uses Coke bottles to produce various songs, including Of Monsters and Men’s “Little Talks,” and Calvin Harris’s “Feels So Close” (with Sam Tsui).  

His 14 December 2012 “Holiday Medley” featuring Victoria Justice and Max Schneider deployed Sprint-sponsored smartphones to unfold the narrative of the music video. The camera focused on four phones that were moved around as video played on them: the singers walked through and across the phones, while scene changes occurred as Schneider moved the phones or ‘swiped’ through different screens. The video was filmed in one continuous shot and was not digitally altered. Not only did the video cleverly utilize product placement, but it also unfolded through the kinesthetic, gestural logics that smartphones have enabled, and it was true to the YouTube trope of the challenge video since it was shot in one take, which required repeated practice and training so as to be able to pull off the feat.

Schneider’s earlier Maroon 5 and Bruno Mars medleys also employed the one-take format while the singers, again Justice and (Max) Schneider, walked through a house singing and dancing along with (Kurt) Schneider. In the “Maroon 5 Medley,” Schneider ups the challenge from the Bruno Mars iteration by combining this one-take format with a lyric video. This “live lyric” video includes the trio moving around the house singing the medley as the lyrics appear on pillows, posters, clothing, walls, etc. In all these subsequent iterations, we witness Kurt Schneider always attempting to outdo himself, pushing his medium further while actively responding to new YouTube video formats and tropes.

However, this process of out-doing oneself also operates as a kind of constantly “covering” one’s own productions. When he utilizes Victoria Justice and Max Schneider as singers in subsequent videos, Kurt Schneider is, in a sense, manifesting his medium and articulating that each subsequent iteration is a sort of cover of his own previous works, as much as it is a cover of another performer. Of course, this process crescendos in his “Holiday Medley” on smartphones, as it neatly encompasses the various levels of the cover’s logic by deploying the very technical apparatuses on which most of his viewers watch his videos.

In one of Kurt Schneider’s most recent collaborations with Sam Tsui, he covers Kendrick’s “Cups” song – done in one take, in a park, with four people who continuously pass the cups among one another as the camera spins around them and they take turns singing. Here Schneider introduces a host of variables, from ambient noise to a camera man tripping. What is most fascinating is the manner in which “doing the Cups song” has become a common challenge video on YouTube, analogous to the infamous “Cinnamon Challenge.” Mega-YouTubers like DailyGrace and GloZell have done such challenge videos, and some of the particularly successful iterations – by non-YouTube stars – have even gone viral.

Here, we seem to have come full circle. But it now becomes difficult to consider which came first if we try to ascribe some sort of developmental, creative narrative. (Particularly, when we consider that viewers often encounter a cover before they encounter the original. This happens often with Glee, which leads in turn to the original song’s newfound popularity.) While we can chart these iterations on a temporal timeline, I would have a problem saying that Kurt Schneider’s rendition of “Cups” is a cover of Anna Kendrick’s, since in a sense Kendrick’s performance was a cover of Schneider’s, Karmin’s, and a slew of other pioneering YouTubers. The Wikipedia entry for the “Cups” song best manifests the intricate and deep history of the cover through which this song has been refracted. As the Wikipedia entry reads:

“Cups” (also known as “Cups (Pitch Perfect’s When I'm Gone)”) is a song popularized by American actress Anna Kendrick from the film Pitch Perfect. The basic song, “When I’m Gone”, was written by A. P. Carter and Luisa Gerstein^[1] and was performed in 1931 by the Carter Family, with later versions by J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers and Charlie Monroe.^[2] In 2009 the band Lulu and the Lampshades combined the song “When I'm Gone” with a common children's game known as the Cup game, in which plastic or styrofoam cups are tapped and hit on a table to create a distinct rhythm. This created the modern version of the song known as “Cups (When I'm Gone)” or alternately “When I'm Gone (Cups)”. In 2011 Anna Burden uploaded a version of the song on YouTube that then went viral and became the inspiration for Kendrick’s version.^[3] The Kendrick version of the song is considered a sleeper hit in the United States, and Kendrick’s first top 10 on Billboard Hot 100 chart.

As such, the success of “Cups” has not only been its D.I.Y. aesthetic that has encouraged mega and minor YouTubers alike to perform it as a challenge, but also the manner in which it operates within the very medium of the viral cover video, and within the logic of the cover, to perform the song.

Hence, a good YouTube video is not one that necessarily produces something we have never seen before, but rather one that is hyperaware of the tropes and formats of YouTube videos, and actively works to produce videos that play with those systems.

It is not about creative genius, defined by some unrealistic notion of pure originality that breaks with established canons – originality is not creative, it is merely a copout. Yes. I know that what I am saying here is not something new or unique; in fact it’s a pretty simplistic and dated, a banal notion of artistic production. And yet, the problem is that most of the attacks on such popular productions, or even on the pop superstar, are precisely criticisms of their citations, references, and rip-offs; such criticisms operate with the implicit desire for some radical and unique artistic break.

The problem with such breaks, with this notion of the event reified into an aesthetic theory, is that the eventproper is fundamentally outside of history. It is that which is fundamentally unthinkable. It cannot be construed as part of any aesthetic manifesto, for it must be outside the skill of the artist. Instead, the event in the image can only manifest itself through that which is imparted upon the image outside of skill, that which occurs as a truly unthinkable and uncontrollable break. The event in the aesthetic can only exist in the realm of virality. To go viral is the event.

Hence, if we allow this shorthand logic to fully develop, I would have to say that, (if you allow me to identify originality as eventness), originality in the work of art only exists in its capacity to go viral. Originality is virality and nothing more.  If the event as originality could be reduced to aesthetic innovation then it could not go viral, because to be wholly, unthinkably unique is a mode of isolation and alienation – it is to distance oneself from fields of discourse, from being comprehended, understood.

The most crucial artists in history were not innovative geniuses that broke from the past and inaugurated something new; they were the ones who deeply and intimately understood their field of operation and their field of discourse, their peers and their colleagues.

With this in mind, let us now return to Karmin, and consider the video for their single, “Acapella.” In this video, Karmin dances with four others against a white backdrop while clothed monochromatically in accordance with each specific scene. The shots of them dancing are interwoven with literal depictions of some of their key lyrics: “I thought he was gluten free, but all I got was bread,” for example, is accompanied by a vulgar yellow loaf falling upon a dimensionless blue ground. The creative direction and choreography was done by Lady Gaga’s choreographer, Richard “Richy Squirrel” Jackson, and the video seems to be reminiscent in its approach to Lady Gaga’s own “Applause,” which would come out months later. Given that Gaga described the “Applause” video as a battle between black-and-white and color – and her consequent deployment of Pierrot’s white body – the white ground of the video and its monochromatic scenes almost seem to riff on and be in sync with a similar (if not more literal) chromatomachy, as that alluded to by Lady Gaga.

While Lady Gaga’s “Applause” captures the virality of the music video in its embrace of the cheers and acclaims of her adoring fans, “Acapella” manifests the response of the fan in their production of D.I.Y., a cappella covers, while also embodying the manner through which Karmin became famous. Because of this, Karmin’s video operates as a proleptic coverof “Applause.” Karmin’s video was essentially a cover of the “Applause” video even before it came out.

By being closely tuned in to pop-culture, Karmin produced a video that riffed on the same aesthetic concerns with color that Gaga’s video would later manifest, while also reflecting on the processes of fame-production, particularly that of a YouTube success. In these respects, Karmin’s video is more successful than Lady Gaga’s because it speaks fluently to the production of its own fame and to the logic of the music video as a pop-cultural phenomenon in its own native language. They are simply both covers of one another.

Whereas Gaga delves into the archive to produce a video that deploys images of circus and jesters, Karmin more simply presents its concern with chromatics as a sort of color swag that is constructed through a kitschy aesthetic of American Apparel clothes on a simple white ground. Karmin’s overly-literal depictions of lyrics almost operate as a visual lyric video, reminiscent of Jay-Z’s music video for “On to the Next One,” for example. When Amy Heidemann dances in a blue forced-perspective hallway with fluorescent lights, with her leathery blue costume and the fisheye lens view, it reads like a scene out of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” video.

There is something wonderfully terrible about Karmin’s video that is not nostalgic, but rather embraces the logic of the cover as a distinct cultural production.

Author Bio:

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

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Behind The Burqa

By Alexander Cavaluzzo

Do you wanna see me naked, lover?

Do you want to peek underneath the cover?

Do you wanna see the girl who lives

Behind the aura, behind the aura

Lady Gaga kicked off her #iTunesFestival concert kneeling in darkness, dressed in warrior-like garb, holding a microphone in one hand and a knife in the other. The intro begins, a sound we’ve all heard before, from her leaked song “Aura,” also known for the past year as “Burqa.” A sound that she has now officially relinquished to the public, but a sound we’ve known before her authority allowed its release. We first knew “Aura” because of our culture’s agency, not because of Lady Gaga’s.

The performance begins and she is aggressive, confrontational, a pop terrorist donned in a transcultural garment that extends from the Islamic dress to ninja gear to classic Mugler to Catwoman to Hannibal Lecter Realness. She is hysteric. She is unpredictable. She’s a menace to society.

Wrangled into a medieval torture device, hoisted above the audience, she croons out the song as her captors dance, perhaps in celebration, beneath her. She descends and catapults into typical pop star style, performing standard choreography as she sings, still covered except for her eyes and Lady Starlight-esque wig, until the song concludes when she unmasks herself and lipsyncs a robotic “ARTPOP” as her hazel eyes stare into the camera.

Ever since the suggestion that “Burqa” would be the title of a track on ARTPOP, many commentators have written compelling and accurate arguments deriding Gaga for cultural appropriation and fetishizing a solemn garment that many women in the world hold close to their expression of identity. Now that we know the official title is “Aura”, does it make it better? Is she implying the Arabic word  عورة‎ [“Awrah”], meaning intimate parts? Is that just as bad as “Burqa”?

Thinking beyond the burqa as a specific cultural object and considering it as a symbol present within human culture,the concept of “covering” and “masking” is a universal trait that informs many, if not all, identities. The lyrics drip of objectified sexualization because they are created within Lady Gaga’s medium: the pop song. The aura, the curtain, the burqa represents that which we drape ourselves in everyday – clothing styles, hair color, emotional defense mechanisms, attitudes, platitudes – every construction we use to present ourselves to the public. When Gaga later removes this “drapery” when she takes off her wig to display her “authentic” self to her fans, she connects it back to the message of this song: challenging her object of desire to experience her authentic self if he can handle the woman who exists behind the aura, behind the makeup, behind the wigs, behind the clothes, behind the money, behind the fame, behind the breasts, behind the ass, behind the pussy. The heart of the song is asking: can a masculine culture handle a woman’s soul?

My veil is protection for the gorgeousness of my face

Prompted by a variety of factors, the early 21st century has seen a pitiful revival of Orientalism in Western culture – clothing associated with Islam has provoked violent attacks in America, while France has worked to ban the burqa, and Mohammed Saleem was brutally stabbed to death just a month ago in the UK. But the burqa, in particular, has been a nexus of dichotomous opinions on the semiotics of dress and the expression of culture. For example, is Marjane Satrapi culturally insensitive for decrying the veil as a state-imposed symbol of misogyny in her seminal graphic novel Persepolis? Is Hebah Ahmed antifeminist for heralding face and body coverings as feminist choices that, among other things, prevent the unwanted male gaze?

Choice or force?

It’s a question the extends beyond the burqa, into all aspects of visual culture that project the concept of femininity. From the burqa to the bikini, all clothing gendered as female has in its DNA some form of misogyny – female bodies are constantly viewed and judged by the male gaze, and clothing is merely an extension of that. The iron maiden-like body cage in which three men secure Lady Gaga after she confesses to cultural murder illustrates the repressive, torture-like view male eyes impose on female identities, especially as she was hoisted above the proscenium as merely an object to be ogled. And, of course, Hollywood is the utmost representation of how society inflicts damage on women – Gaga the projection killed her former self, and beseeches you to send the weapon of demise to the location where her spirit now lives, free of her body. She asks her male lover – a male-dominated culture – if he can handle seeing what he hasn’t seen.

Do we want to see the authentic Gaga, or the image she projects?

We may find the answer in #ARTPOP.

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

By Courtney Constable

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

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

Gaga set the “Swine” performance apart from those preceding it by stripping off the outer performative layers of both the music and herself to begin the song. Fans were afforded a rare glimpse of the singer without any form of headdress or wig: Gaga donned only what she declared her “real” hair and a white t-shirt as she delivered a heartfelt speech about darkness, personal struggle, and devotion. While moments of tearful promise to her fans are a regular occurrence during her concerts, the speech at the beginning of “Swine” marked one of the first times Gaga has opened up about her feelings regarding her 2013 hip injury and media blackout. She began singing accompanied only by her piano, playing an acoustic introduction to a song that many had speculated to be a possible dance club hit. The dynamic between the stripped down sound and her own “natural” appearance once again suggested Gaga as a blank canvas; here we saw the girl underneath the glamour and fame, upon whom the art of the persona is created. 

The scene represented a retroactive glimpse into what and who existed before (or perhaps underneath) Lady Gaga, and was likely the closest an audience might come to experiencing the mysterious Stefani Germanotta in person. This girl is the blank canvas upon which the artistry of the Lady Gaga phenomenon was built.  

Once the song’s dance beat dropped, the audience was confronted with several significant visual cues that hinted at the coming artistic spectacle. Dancers emerged dressed in pure white coveralls and white pig-shaped gasmasks. The stage was covered by a white sheet that a painter might use to protect the floor, bearing the words “SWINE FEST” in aggressively painted black letters. Here, again, was the imagery of the canvas, but this time marred and impure, no longer blank.

Suddenly, as Gaga sang while banging on drums in front of a backdrop of cartoon flying pigs, actual white canvases were lowered around the dancers, each with a word scrawled in black ink, including “Lady Gaga,” “MANiCURE,” “SWINE,” and “ARTPOP.” The scenery recalled street graffiti, a type of guerilla art, with its phrases illegally scribbled on walls for the public eye to interpret or disregard. The pig dancers used their gasmask noses to haphazardly spray paint upon the canvas, covering the words in bright colors that stood out against the stark white and harsh black. Clearly this was the ‘paint zone’ that Gaga alluded to, and the audience was left to make connections between what they were seeing on stage and the previously mentioned notion of “live art.” The canvases were not painted before the performance, but rather altered in the same time and space as the live performance itself. Hence, the dancers embodied the metaphor through which Lady Gaga, the artist, expresses an idea (i.e. they are the “Swine”), but they also became artists themselves as they defaced the canvases. They were more than just tools in the performance; they actively participated in the creation of Gaga’s artistic vision.

As pig dancers began flying through the air on bungee cables, other dancers passed the worded canvases to audience members, who smeared the brightly colored paint across the words with their arms and hands. The audience members did not take turns, and yet they did not push for a chance to participate either. Instead, groups of fans held the canvases together and spread the paint simultaneously, working as teams. With this action, the performance genuinely embodied the notion of “live art,” and the audience became not simply vessels through which, or to whom, Gaga can express her own artistic ideas, but rather active participants in creating visual art pieces. Each audience member interacting with the messy canvas helped bring to life the message that Gaga’s lyrics communicate: despite the reality that harsh words and actions can make a person seem no better than a pig, the lyrical change before the chorus – where Gaga stops describing another person as a swine and states that she acts like a swine herself – communicates that we all possess this inner “swine,” but only if we let ourselves behave in such a negative, messy way. By collaborating on the painted canvas, rather than struggling to compete with one another for a chance to participate, the audience made the choice to suppress their inner swine in favor of working together to achieve a goal. The fan-painted canvases were later thrown into the audience, a memento for those lucky enough to catch them and yet another method of making the fan a true part of the experience.  

What Lady Gaga achieves with the “Swine” performance goes beyond the idea that “art” necessitates “paint on a canvas,” despite the fact that these are the literal tools used. Here, both the dancers and the audience members acted as artists, making their unique mark on the performance and rendering it more than merely Lady Gaga singing on a stage. These elements avoid the over-simplification of what form art can take, and render the performance as a type of performance art through the active participation of Gaga’s fans. This establishes clear connections with Gaga’s ideas that “ARTPOP could mean anything,” and “art’s in pop culture in me.” The “Swine” performance involved the audience in the process of creating art, rather than merely asking them to be passive spectators. Those that touched the paint left the show with literal pieces of the performance on their bodies. They acted as a tangible part of the performance, which inherently affected how the performance played out. Much like Lady Gaga wants to embody art to bring it more concretely and definably into modern pop culture, the audience members here embodied “art in pop culture” by interacting with “live art” during the performance of a contemporary musical icon. With this rendition of “Swine,” Gaga has already used the ARTPOP era to transgress the boundaries of what it means to be a musical artist, how one might interact with the audience, and in what forms art and performance art might be manifested, by whom.

If this performance was any indication, the ARTPOP era really could mean anything.  

Author bio:

Courtney Constable recently graduated with a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Carleton University. She wrote her masters thesis on Lady Gaga’s “You and I” and “Haus of U” music videos as a contemporary form of identity activism through social networking. She is currently working in furniture sales, but hopes to attend cosmetology school at New York’s Makeup Designory sometime in the near future. Courtney recently met Lady Gaga in New York, where she gave Gaga a copy of her thesis and had her own copy signed. This copy is now on prominent display in her apartment. Courtney grew up as an ‘air force brat’ and enjoys traveling, taking pictures, reading murder mysteries, pole dancing, and circus aerial.

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