Do Ask Do Tell: Lady Gaga and the Politics of Mimesis

by Willow Sharkey

On Saturday Night Live’s September 25th, 2010 episode, in the sketch of Weekend Update, the writers submitted, in their de rigueur amalgam of wryness and serious political commentary (a tone that is both to be taken seriously and just kidding), that Lady Gaga’s efforts on behalf of repealing the policy of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” while commendable, could not be taken seriously because she had only days before worn her dress made of meat to the MTV Video Music Awards.

 

The incongruity of one day seeing her in a costume so adamantly grotesque and hideously funny, a costume that made its aspirations to the carnivalesque so obvious, and the next day in suit jacket and tie, in a black and white home-made digital video, purposely low-tech and under-produced, pleading with fans to make a concerted effort to engage their representatives and congress-people to repeal DADT, were too much; the nature of one would discredit the polarity of the other. She could not wish to be taken seriously, so suddenly. One does not segue from jester to lobbyist. It is an odd submission for SNL to make, given that the formatting and tone of the show itself seems predicated on the belief that parody and provocations to effect political change are mutually supportive modalities (an idea keenly reflected in the output of Lady Gaga).

Lady Gaga’s project is not quite as binary as this characterization. As has been argued elsewhere, Gaga repeatedly employs a mirroring technique in her work to reflect the spectacle of late-capitalism and pop-culture back to itself.[1] Her overtly political video is more than a ploy to be suddenly taken as something beyond a pop-culture provocateur, a serious voice for reason. The cultural landscape, for one thing, is just too populated with an ironic vernacular of the parodical for that, and Gaga has consistently shown a savvy awareness of how the varying channels of media create and respond to images of her.

Gaga’s work, if reducibly about anything, is about life in spectacular culture, and what riposte may be made. In Guy Debord’s pioneering thesis establishing the codes and characteristics of spectacular culture, he asserts that within spectacular culture, the image is privileged, and the populace submits to the monolithic power of those in control of the image.[2] Gaga’s video may have made her project more explicit and less obliquely political, but it was not a departure from her previous aims and modes of expression – those that seek to create pervasive images that may be democratically engaged with by a public.

Lady Gaga’s constant appropriation of cultural tropes is not only post-modern pastiche methodology, but is also an object lesson for her massive audience in the use of appropriation. In her “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” video she made explicit what had already been implicit: we live in an age when the seduction of the image can isolate and make one apathetic, but it can also be quite easily appropriated, responded to, and virally spread. It was not by accident that the video was so lo-fi. It was telegraphing the notion – anyone can make this, anyone can participate in civil life, and you can even do it in the modes that feel comfortably like your own.

In the digital age, it is true more than ever that the image, and increasingly, the Internet meme, is a most powerful disseminator of what information the culture at large deems important and captivating. Lady Gaga’s output is a cipher that privileges and empowers reinterpretations of her projects, just as she has used the force of outstanding cultural tropes and excavated, mashed-up, and fed them to the public in her own work. This transposition of agency and responsibility, from pop star to anyone, is itself a kind of emancipatory political stance. Gaga has stated in interviews that her work is about trying to make it “a bit easier to swallow this kind of horrific media world we live in.”[3] This may be accomplished by problematizing the glorification of fame, but also through minimizing perceptions of distance between designated cultural producers and consumers.

The intent to minimize this distance is apparent, for example, in the way Gaga and her choreographer intentionally create dances for her music videos that are stylistically “D.I.Y,” Do-It-Yourself. Of course, one motivation for including dance moves simple enough to be mimicked by an audience and used in their own mimetic viral videos is a marketing savvy that recognizes the popularity of dance in video. And yet with Gaga, there is something else going on: a juxtaposition of the hyper-saturated, hyper-stylized vocabulary of the music video alongside the problematized, strange, anti-pop-star nature of Gaga. Her choreographer stated in an interview that in the process she “created the movement with someone who wasn’t so perfect.” She went on to say “I think that’s what a lot of people identify with. You don’t have to be perfect when you do the ‘Bad Romance’ dance or ‘Poker Face.’ The rhythmic emphasis falls on unexpected beats: They’re based out of an emotion, so when you hear the record, it’s choreographed as an emotional dance, and it’s kind of like people are experiencing her when you do the movements.”[4] Gaga intentionally creates a simple dance vocabulary that can be quickly absorbed and reiterated, a vocabulary that is simultaneously Gaga’s movements and one’s own.

Large swathes of fans have already responded to the absorb-able information by, indeed, creating their own videos that represent Gaga’s source material (and dance moves) along with their individualized expressions. This framework is again witnessed, when on September 17th, 2010, Gaga appealed to her Twitter followers to make their own anti-DADT videos addressed to their governmental representatives. Gaga created source material that could be mimicked and re-iterated by anyone; hundreds of response videos flooded back to her, which she in turn made into a video feed linked from her official media channels and accessible on YouTube. Gaga translated the back-and-forth, call-and-response trait of Internet memes into a direct appeal to political change.

This brings us back to the meat dress. Gaga operates fluidly, demonstrated by her elegant combination of the meat dress and the central metaphor of her anti-DADT speech (“The Prime Rib of America”) delivered in Portland, Maine. Gaga wants to make a case not only for the repeal of an unjust policy, but also to celebrate and instigate any instinct that would counteract the cultural entropy Debord saw as endemic to life in spectacle culture. The Prime Rib of America is composed of, in Gaga’s vision, the individuals who resist that entropy, who counteract it and the life it would create. The Meat Dress was a major publicity moment, one that was endlessly tweeted about, immediately parodied, and recapitulated everywhere, sometimes nervously, sometimes abhorrently, sometimes ecstatically, because it was imaginative.

The major cultural spectacles Gaga produces that are reiterated and generated as memes capture the imagination of a public that craves to gaze, but then feels inspired to respond, to co-own, to absorb, to participate. The inspiration of insistent, idiosyncratic production and guerilla creativity, builds a kind of momentum that generates the force of hope necessary to commit to an activist action.

[1] Vicks, Meghan. “The Icon and The Monster: Lady Gaga is a Trickster of American Pop Culture.” Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art about Lady Gaga. 19 Mar. 2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. 

[2] Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 2008.

[3] “Getting to Know Lady Gaga.’” The Oprah Winfrey Show. 15 Jan. 2010. 30 Sept. 2010 http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Lady-Gagas-First-Oprah-Show-Appearance.

[4] Bloom, Julie “D.I.Y. Music Videos Inspired by the Pros.” New York Times 30 April, 2010. 2 Oct., 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/arts/dance/02videos.html

Author Bio:

Willow Sharkey is a first semester Art History graduate student at California State University, Chico. She’s interested in performance/time based art, and all things pop culture. When not staying up all night reading critical theory, she’s usually riding her bike in Bidwell Park listening to dancey things on her headphones. You can view more of her writings at http://willowbunny.blogspot.com.

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mad props: lady gaga invitation number three

Artist Bio: Jon Rutzmoser (b. 1982) is an artist, writer and educator living in Los Angeles.  He recently received an MFA in Writing and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. His work engages with notions of ethical subjectivity within a world of collapsed metaphor, linguistic slippage, and self-exploitation.  His blog is www.hystericallyreal.com.

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The Monstrous Art of Pop

by Davide Panagia

[This is a revised version of a piece that appeared in The Contemporary Condition (March 20, 2010)].

The issue is one of coming to terms with one’s relation to one’s culture. Nothing less is what the intensity of Lady Gaga’s feats of the spectacular make available.

Her songs and videos – and her artistic life in general – relentlessly pursue the limits of Pop, not as a representational genre but as a medium. It is in this sense that she is an inheritor of the Warhol legacy; but, I would say without reservation (though with an awareness of the unpopular claim I am about to make), she surpasses Warhol through her discovery of the medium of Pop. For where Warhol transformed art into Pop and thereby created a new representational genre, Lady Gaga has transformed Pop into an art with a set of aesthetic convictions, possibilities, and ambitions all its own.

As absurd as this might sound to those lackluster critics who will (and do) insist that Lady Gaga is all style and no substance, the simultaneous release of two major concept albums – The Fame and The Fame Monster – prove the extent to which in our contemporary condition style and substance are incompossibilities of one another. And before readers think that I am claiming that the incompossibility of style and substance means a kind of postmodern irony at the heart of Lady Gaga’s performances, please allow me to correct any misapprehensions of the sort: the claim about the irony of performativity wants to grant purpose to multivalent objects of aesthetic worth and thus betroth to them an intelligibility that makes them accessible and available to our interpretive expectations. My point, instead, is that what defines an aesthetic object is its ability to place the listener or viewer (in this case, both) in an uncertain situation where one’s capacity to give priority to either style or substance as the ground of judgment is disoriented. This, because our modes of sensorial apprehension are discomposed by the experience of the object. Aesthetic experience, in other words, occurs at the dark precursor, somewhere between sensation and reference. And the incompossibilities of sensation and reference are the tools of Lady Gaga’s art.

But I digress.

As we are incessantly reminded, Lady Gaga’s music follows a line of descent with some of the more relevant music and videos coming out of 1980s MTV pop culture, most notably the rhythmic flows of Madonna, the dance hooks of Michael Jackson, and the lyrical voicings of Cindy Lauper (though, as a note of personal insight, I would also add the profound influence of Cameo’s “Word Up” song and video). “Dance in the Dark,” from her recently released The Fame Monster, is most explicitly indebted to Madonna’s lyrical montage with its free-flow rambling in the middle of the song that revisits Vogue’s “Rita Hayworth gave good face” moment:

Marilyn

Judy

Sylvia

Tellem' how you feel girls!

Work your blonde (Jean) Benet Ramsey

We'll haunt like Liberace

Find your freedom in the music 

Find your Jesus

Find your Kubrick

You will never fall apart 

Diana, you’re still in our hearts

Never let you fall apart

Together we'll dance in the dark

But her successful partnership with the Swedish director and video artist, Jonas Åkerlund, betrays another line of descent in her aesthetic stylings found in some of the more progressive of the current Swedish synth-pop disco bands; including (I would say) Fever Ray and The Knife, but also Abba (listen to “Alejandro” and you will hear “Fernando”) and Roxette. Like her collaborations with the recently deceased Alexander McQueen (who premiered Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” in his Spring 2009 show) and the Italian installation artist Francesco Vezzoli (at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), the videos that Åkerlund has produced and directed for Lady Gaga screen her insistence that what is crucial to our contemporary condition is our capacity for interface: that is, that our handling and beholdings of the objects of our culture speaks to our willingness to handle and behold one another. The simultaneous release of the song and video “Telephone” (on March 11, 2010) is a case in point.

Telephone’s lyrics are about a young woman at a dance club who does not want to be bothered by people calling her on her cell phone because she is too busy having a good time. “Stop callin’; Stop callin’; I don’t want to talk any more! I left my head and my heart on the dance floor,” proclaims the ritornello. Simple enough.

The song, however, announces something different than the lyrics. Upon first listening to it, I was disappointed by Gaga’s use of Auto-tune, something I didn’t think she needed given that she has an excellent voice. Auto-tune is the controversial audio processor (used by many in the music industry) that allows anyone to sing at perfect pitch by adjusting off-key performances through the use of a phase vocoder – it is the device that made Cher’s altered vocal effect in “Believe” possible and catchy. Upon second listening, however, I realized that the placing of the Auto-tune alteration in “Telephone” is not intended for pitch correction, but is an attempt to mimic through voice the sound of a ringer and to give emphasis to the artificiality of everyday life. The prominence of Auto-tune and the fact that “Telephone” lyrically and melodically swings to the beat of a busy dial-tone makes available our integration with multimedia technological culture so that the “Stop callin’” of the ritornello isn’t merely a request but is also a marker of our cultural interface: there is no naturalness to voice, especially in the digital age. 

Åkerlund’s music videos are known for their mock movie-trailer stylings. And though at times humorous, their real effect is not one of parody but of intensity. The colors, contrasts, and close-ups throughout the “Telephone” video, for instance, are exaggerated to the point of the monstrous. It’s almost as if Åkerlund is trying to show the viewer what a video can do, and not simply what it can represent. And, indeed, with “Telephone” this disconnect is especially palpable given the fact that the video has nothing to do with the lyric’s themes of being in a dance club and not wanting to answer one’s phone. 

Correction: Lady Gaga is in a club of sorts – a rough trade women’s prison in the middle of a desert – and we can surmise why she ended up there if we think of “Telephone” as a sequel to the other Gaga/Åkerlund collaboration, “Paparazzi,” wherein Lady Gaga kills a boyfriend who, in turn, had tried to kill her by throwing her off a balcony. A further disconnect: Gaga’s collaboration with Beyoncé in the song “Telephone” is turned into a “Thelma and Louise” partnership when the two ladies – in full dis/fashion regalia (including makeup whose colors recall the pastels of their automobile) – board their “Pussy Wagon” (the pick up truck that Uma Thurman had used to escape the hospital in Kill Bill, Vol. 1) and go on a highway diner killing spree. Once again, a monstrous disconnect that is perfectly in-line with the theme of The Fame Monster – the ugly side of fame where makeup is transubstantiated into black tears, or even spilled blood.

That Lady Gaga has made a concept album with both The Fame and The Fame Monster worthy of a Patrick Bateman monologue is a notable achievement; even more remarkable is that this conceptual artifice ties into some of the best instances of American popular culture, especially the pulp crime genre that Robert Warshow had written so elegantly about in the 1940s. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Warshow claims that “What matters is that the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans” (The Immediate Experience). It is universal to Americans, he goes on to explain, because Americans react to it immediately, at once sympathizing and dissociating themselves from it: the gangster, Warshow says, “is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.”

The persona of the gangster is transubstantiated, for Lady Gaga, into the persona of the Fame Monster (notably, a trope Michael Mann has also explored in his recent film, Public Enemies): the fashion icon/victim, the doer and the sufferer, the one who projects an image and is defeated by that same projection. And isn’t this what we all do? Do we not all project images and bear the weight of others’ projections? Facebook, the iPhone, wi-fi, and 3-G (soon to be 4-G) wireless networks are not merely the ornamental contexture of contemporary culture, they are the instruments of interface with it; they are the mediums through which events of relata emerge in our contemporary condition, they are the objects we handle and behold when we handle and behold one another.

It’s precisely this aspect of Gaga that the lackluster critics overlook with vertiginous accuracy. Most stunningly, Camille Paglia’s recent iconoclastic rant in the pages of The Sunday Times (“Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex.” September 12, 2010) mumbles such incomprehensions by accusing Gaga of being a “ruthless recycler of other people’s work,” citing the recent “Alejandro” video as an instance of Madonna-theft and then asking “at what point does homage become theft?” Despite Paglia’s clichéd vitriol, the question is the right one to ask. And, in fact, Paglia gives us the answer to her question in declaring that “Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age.” What might I mean by this? 

Simply put, the song (and video) “Alejandro” are Gaga’s attempt not so much at homage but at putting into view what the digital age affords. Let’s think here about some of the major events that might be associated with our digital age. Other than the monumental advent of personal computing and the Internet, one major digital age phenomenon that comes to mind is the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. A second major event: cut and paste interface technology like that available in software programs such as Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop, Quicktime, Vuze, and Hardware. And a third: the proliferation of virtual venues for the projection and transmission of the products that emerge from our use of digital manipulation software – virtual venues like You Tube, Facebook, Pirate Bay, and so forth. Such conventions, software, and venues make the adoption, extraction, manipulation, appropriation and transmission of audio and video, song and image, immediately available elements of popular culture. The idea here is a complex, though not complicated, one: to live in the digital age means that we no longer submit to the position of passive spectatorship. That is, we are no longer merely consumers: we are also handlers. And by “handlers” I mean people who engage popular culture through transmission as much as through reception. This, it seems, is one of the key ontological shifts that comes with new media digitality. The song and video “Alejandro” places that ontological shift into full view.

To put this slightly differently, and in the hope of comforting some of Camille Paglia’s acerbic distress: What Lady Gaga is up to with “Alejandro” is neither simply homage nor theft but indexing: through such performances she indexes the handlings that our digital age makes available. One need only take a closer look and listen at “Alejandro” to note how forceful her commitment to and aesthetics of handling is. The song (as already mentioned) betrays its indebtedness to Abba. But one can’t help also hear resonances of Roxette and, in the opening hook, a stunning recall of Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.” “Alejandro” (the song) is neither homage nor theft but a mash-up; and “Alejandro” (the video) is also neither homage nor theft but a photo-shopped assemblage. This is what the nature of Pop in the digital age is; and Lady Gaga is, in this regard, not simply a media Pop star but a New Media Pop artist. 

In his book on film, one of the first books in the study of film ever written by an American philosopher, Stanley Cavell declares (in 1971) that “it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself – to declare, from itself, the art as a whole for which it speaks” (The World Viewed, 103). For Cavell the task of the artist is to make available in his or her art the conditions of possibility (and therefore also the limits of possibility) of that art. Anything less amounts to formulaic reproduction and artistic failure. The task of the artist in the modern period, in other words, is that of making available the immediate experience of an art-form by making present the constitutive elements that make that art-form possible.

The elements that make New Media Pop art at once possible and convincing are not qualities that belong to the object, they are effects that arise from one’s interface with it; specifically, I’m talking about the sense of conviction that comes with an immediate grasp of a work. New Media Pop art is New Media Pop art because it affords an immediate grasp. Hence the importance of the shortness of the pop song, for instance, and its hook. In a two-to-three minute period the artist must convey a sense of absolute precision and certitude that will resonate or hold beyond the moment of impact, thereby creating the sensation that nothing else matters to the art-form at that moment other than that work, as if that work is the only thing that can count as Pop. Through this experience of absolute – almost theological – conviction we discover that the task of New Media Pop art – the “muse of the art itself” – is to declare immediacy for itself. Nothing less amounts to artistic (and not just commercial) failure.

Therein lies the mendaciousness of the aesthetic object: a work’s prestige, or its conjuring trick, is its conveyance of a conviction without authority or ground to validate that conviction. It’s in this sense that Lady Gaga is absolutely right to declare, in the Summer 2010 double-issue of Rolling Stone, that “Music is a lie. Art is a lie. It is a lie. You have to tell a lie that is so wonderful that your fans make it true” (Rolling Stone, July 8-22, 2010, p. 71). Art can only afford sensations; but sensations (as David Hume showed long ago) do not belong to the province of verification, or to that kind of knowledge that would give veracity to one’s judgments. The mendaciousness of which I speak, marked by the “as if” of my previous paragraph, thus returns us to the condition of incompossibility discussed in my introductory remarks. The wonderful lie made true through receptivity is another way of suggesting that the incompossible ground of aesthetic experience is sourced and sustained only through our expressions of conviction in the face of the vivaciousness of our sensations. 

This is the aesthetic ambition that Lady Gaga claims for New Media Pop art in and through her music, her videos, and her performances. The task now is to come to terms with it; that is, to conjure the terms of its possibility and to think through what the new criteria of judgment, appraisal, and (indeed) disapproval might be in the face of Gaga’s projection of this New Media Pop aesthetic. 

Through The Fame and The Fame Monster Lady Gaga has made the claim that Pop commands an immediate attention that no other medium of art can pretend to or duplicate, and it is precisely the immediacy of her stardom, and Pop’s availability through it, that marks for Lady Gaga one of the cornerstones of our contemporary condition: our interface with and handling of culture as opposed to our subjection to it. 

Author Bio: 
Davide Panagia is a political and cultural theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He is the Co-Editor of the cultural and political theory journal, Theory & Event, and is a contributor to The Contemporary Condition.

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Golden Arrow Holy Face Devotion: Thoughts on a Catholic Gaga

by Joyelle McSweeney

1. I read that singer Katy Perry called Lady Gaga’s Alejandro video ‘blasphemous’ so of course I had to watch it again.
2. I was the 82, 307, 530th person to do so. That is, mine was the 82, 307, 530 viewing on YouTube. Am I a person or a viewing?
3. Je suis un visionnement (Rimbaud.)
4. Blasphemy: it is a verbal injury against the name of God. The concept of a ‘verbal injury’ is already a mixed metaphor—that is, it’s mixed media. The word hurts the flesh of the name, and the name in the flesh. That’s Jesus, after all. In-carn-ation.
5. Flesh itself, the meat dress.
6. Jesus dialed up the spirit telephone in 1843 and told Carmelite nun Sister Marie of St. Peter that blasphemy pierces His sacred heart like a ‘poisoned arrow’.
7. 82, 307, 530 poisoned arrows from this video alone.
8. The specific blasphemy Jesus was thinking of, during this timely chat with Sr. Marie, was “the blasphemies and outrages of 'Revolutionary men' (the Communists), as well as for the blasphemies of atheists and freethinkers and others, plus, for blasphemy and the profanation of Sundays by Christians.
9. In Jesus’s poison arrow imagery, we can see that Jesus/God is a word that can be injured by other words. Simultaneously, God is a body and an evil word has a body too, a poisoned arrow. The injury works in both registers at once. The wounding mixes media.
10. Don’t call my name, Don’t call my name, Alejandro. Fernando. Roberto. Don’t take my name in vain. It wounds my sacred heart like a poison arrow. Like a poison arrow in the vein.
11. Being able to think among many materialisms and see them as cognates, as incarnates of one another, is a Catholic way to think (Alejandro = Alejandro, Fernando, Roberto) (Gaga= Klein= Alejandro) but (Gaga ≠ Germanotta). At Baptism, the baby is baptized in the Name (singular) of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (plural), but the baby (infans—without speech) is also ventriloquized by his godfather and godmother (not his actual mother and father), who speak for him in the first person. At Confirmation, Catholicism lets you change your name. Then the Holy Spirit calls you by your assumed name. Your business name.
12. Names, names, names. The bad name is a poison arrow. Jesus’s body is a real body that goes on being pierced every time someone sins or blasphemes him. 82, 307, 530 times and counting. Gaga is a name that repeats itself (ga. And then ‘ga’ again). Alejandro is repeated as Fernando and Roberto, when Gaga calls his name, telling him not to call hers.
13. It’s fitting that, etymologically, “blasphemy” is related to “pheme”, utterance, also the source of our word “fame.” And “blas”, to blaptikos (hurtful) or possibly “blak”, “slack (in body and mind), stupid.”
14. Slack fame. Slackjaw fame. Blah, blah, blah. Is Blasphemy. A mouth hanging open.
15. Blasphemy is a sin against Jesus’s fame. As Gaga knows, Name = Fame. That’s why we say her name so much. Also, Fame = Face, Alejandro. That’s why Jesus came to Sr. Marie to prescribe a universal “devotion to his Holy Face.” The specific image of the Holy Face to be adored is derived from Veronica’s napkin—that is, the image of His Face transferred to Veronica’s veil when she wiped Jesus’s face of sweat and blood and spit as he processed with the Cross to Calvary. A transfer from flesh to fabric. An image in spit, sweat, and blood.
16. To blasphemy Jesus is to sin against his name and his face, according to Sr. Marie. It adds more spit to his face.
17. It oversaturates the image. It clots the image with too many images, until the image is obscured.
18. Bodily fluids are a transaction in Catholicism. You can’t take them in vain. Sex without transmission of seed is a sin. But conception transmits both souls AND sin. Infants are thus born with both souls and original sin. Bodily fluids are a kind of medium here, carrying sin or holiness back and forth from body to body, from body to cloth or clothing, from soul to soul.
19. Unsurprisingly, then, Jesus also revealed to Sr. Marie that for each blasphemy, a reparation may be made. An exchange of one for another. He then dictated her a prayer which, recited, would make reparations: The Golden Arrow Holy Face Devotion.
20. He moreover stated that The Golden Arrow Holy Face Devotion will re-pierce Jesus, but this time ‘delightfully’.
21. It is supposed to balance the books—a golden arrow for a poison arrow. A delightful piercing for a wounding piercing.
22. 82, 307, 530 times.
23. But just the pile up of nouns in that prayer’s title ‘’”The Golden Arrow Holy Face Devotion” signals a kind of anxiety in His accounting. Because for every blasphemy, there’s now two arrows in His Heart.
24. 82, 307, 530 times 2 arrows = 164, 615, 060 arrows. From this video alone.
25. Alejandro, alejandro, alejandro.
26. Machine guns for breasts. A chest that is continually pierced with arrows. A repeating rife—I mean rifle. A Gatling gun. Go, go, Ga ga.
27. All this and we haven’t actually spoken of the blasphemies of ‘Alejandro’, the video.
28. I suppose the blasphemousness is supposed to revolve around the image of Gaga in a red rubber nun’s habit, lying in a coffin bed, holding a black rosary which one senses will shortly go into her mouth, and then it does.
29. This image calls up the mediumicity of saints, and their importance in the Catholic church as a medium of religion.
30. Let’s begin with the veneration of saint’s relics in the Catholic church. Because some saints are ‘incorruptible’, that is, do not decompose after death, their actual bodies are available for veneration. First degree relics are little bits of saints bodies—bones, hair, etc. Heads and hearts are the best, unless special miracles are associated with other parts of the body. Second degree relics are their clothes and their personal affects. Third degree relics are things they touched.
31. Obviously, there is a metaphysics (or just physics) of touch, proximity, and contiguity here which both ratifies and derives from the fact that the saint’s body is itself a medium, and that his Godly signal, concentrated in his person, may be transferred by touch and nearness, but is degraded like WiFi by distance from the source.
32. To me, the replacement of the nun’s habit with red vinyl is a metonym of this transfer from one material to another. It also calls attention to materialism of the saints—the sense that the saint experiences suffering in the flesh because he or she is a medium for Jesus’s suffering, a go-between for mortal and immortal bodies. The most obvious image of a saint as a medium or channel is the stigmata itself, a spectral (yet literal, that is, actual) wound through which the sacred blood flows.
33. The transfiguration of the nun’s habit to red vinyl for me materializes the many material transformations and transfigurations a saint encounters—an ability to change state, a total mediumicity, a vulnerability (etym: wound-ability) to both the depredations of infidels and the ministrations of God. The swallowing of the rosary evokes communion but also the rhetoric of piercing, with its troubling of interiority and exteriority, that saint’s accounts are riven with. Sister Marie processes Jesus’s definition of blasphemy through a rhetoric of piercing, while many important saints were visited with ‘transverberation’, depicted in Bernini’s infamous ‘orgasmic’ statue of St. Theresa of Avila, which involves a piercing of the heart of the saint by a seraph with a fiery arrow (again). The piercing of the heart causes unbearable overflowing of faith, as well as palpable wounds, such as the wound in Padre Pio’s side, from which his odor of sanctity leaked along with blood; the marks of the piercing of St. Theresa’s heart are apparently apparent on her extant, incorruptible heart, held up for veneration to this day in Avila.
34. And is that not a pierced, bejeweled, transverberated, made-sacred heart carried by Gaga before the funeral procession? Or some other organ, so exposed for veneration?
35. The bodies of the saints are also important as avatars that move around in the narratives of their lives. Depicted in folk art, church art, stained glass, they become mass media. The best example of this mediumicity piled upon mediumicity are depictions in word and image of the Mexican shepherd-saint, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin. When the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego in a field, his skeptical bishop sent him back to collect evidence. The Virgin then directed Juan Diego to collect flowers from a bare hill (a paradox)in his cloak. The hill produced the flowers, which Juan Diego collected; when he opened his cloak before the bishop, flowers fell out and the cloak was imprinted with the famous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It’s a story of revelation, mediumicity, and inscription, as a signal or image is transferred from body to body, spectator to spectator, material to material. Moreover, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe seems almost literally contagious, having replicated itself in this story and onto Juan Diego’s cloak but also into millions of tattoos, t-shirts, sacred candles, bumper stickers, sacred and decorative art.
36. The power shifts that go on in Alejandro for me allegorize this shape shifting, this mediumicity, the image that transfers through a medium and becomes both a material and another medium in the chain through which another material might pour. The recuperation and recirculation of costumes and choreography from various referents including 30’s Fascism, the Weimer-cum-Fosse stagecraft of Cabaret, Gaultier/Madonna’s cone-bras literally weaponized as machine guns, enacts this kind of vulnerability, the wound of the image itself, that might suddenly become an aperture of transmission for something else. Jesus’s wounds, after all, are eternal, always open for business. Eternally re-opened by sin, blood and water issues from them eternally. Like images.
37. The rise-and-fall of the saints, usually drastic, convulsive, the way their stocks rise after their death, retroactively infusing their many materials with mediumicity, is also replicated in the shifting power dynamics of the video. Gaga with her goggles seems to be running the show in her spectatorship, then becomes a participant in sex, then the center of a kind of gang rape, whereupon a new spectator emerges, the blond black-hatted military figure. As the name ‘Alejandro’ is continually repeated, it begins to be invested a little more each time with this blond man’s image—and vice versa?-- until he, finally, appears to be Alejandro.
38. He incarnates the word. The name. Alejandro.
39. But the last ‘word’ in the video goes not to a word itself, but to something else. A close-up of Lady Gaga-as-the-red-nun suddenly disintegrates; what looks like drops of red blood, as from Christ’s crown of thorns, turns out to be pinpoints of fire as the image burns through itself, as if from the heat of the bulb of a film projector behind it, leaving a crude white smile among the melted element. Thus a face is transferred like Christ’s to Veronica’s veil— except this time it’s technology itself that burns through itself to make the image. It’s a kind of stigmata, a channel burned through the medium itself, and more media flows through. Media as testimony to its own sanctity, its own saintly mediumicity.

---

[i] http://advocate.com/Arts_and_Entertainment/Entertainment_News/Katy_Perry_calls_Lady_Gaga_blasphemous/

[ii] http://www.holyface.org.uk/content/srmariestpeter.htm

[iii] http://www.holyface.org.uk/content/srmariestpeter.htm

[iv] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=blasphemy

[v] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_Veronica

[vi] http://www.holyface.org.uk/content/srmariestpeter.htm

[vii] “May the most Holy, most Sacred, most Adorable,
Most Incomprehensible and Ineffable Name of God
Be always Praised, Blessed, Loved, Adored and Glorified,
In Heaven, on Earth and under the Earth,
By all the Creatures of God,
And by the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
In the most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.
Amen.” See http://www.holyface.org.uk/content/srmariestpeter.htm

[viii] http://www.holyface.org.uk/content/srmariestpeter.htm

[ix] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_%C3%81vila

[x] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Diego

[xi] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe

Author Bio: Joyelle McSweeney is the author of two intergenre novels-- _Flet_, a science fiction in prose poems from Fence, and _Nylund, the Sarcographer_ , a baroque noir from Tarpaulin Sky, as well as two books of poetry from Fence and another forthcoming in 2012. She is working on a book about genre, media, and bodies entitled "The Body Possessed by Media" and blogs on this topic for Montevidayo.com. She is co-editor of Action Books and teaches poetry, prose, and poetics in the MFA program at Notre Dame; please apply!

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rixatrix

by Angela Simione

Artist Bio: Angela Simione is a multi-disciplinary artist working in San Francisco, CA. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing with High Distinction from California College of the Arts in 2008. Her work is held in both private and corporate collections, most recently The Microsoft Art Collection.

Her creative work explores the nature of loss by examining the act of redaction and erasure as both fact and metaphor. She creates her own 'redacted documents' as a way to explore  events of loss as a major component in identity construction.  Her projects focus on presenting the experience of loss as a site of new hope where understanding and compassion become possible.

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mad props: lady gaga invitation number two

Author Bio: Jon Rutzmoser (b. 1982) is an artist, writer and educator living in Los Angeles.  He recently received an MFA in Writing and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. His work engages with notions of ethical subjectivity within a world of collapsed metaphor, linguistic slippage, and self-exploitation.  His blog is www.hystericallyreal.com.

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The Mall

By Jon Leon

 

THE MALL

I'm at the mall with Sasha. He's wearing new Marithe + Francois Girbaud jeans held in place with a braided leather belt. The slack tip of his belt is looped twice at the waist and hangs toward his crotch. He's sort of sagging wearing a t-shirt that says Just Do Me above an upside down red swoosh. I'm talking to some babes from out of town in front of a large cardboard display of Lady Gaga and this one girl is like uh hot and kind of slutty enough. She's 16. I'm like Do you want a Fanta, and we go to the food court where I try to finger her a little bit under the table next to Doc Wok's. We go to the multiplex and see a movie starring Megan Fox and I text Sasha "2nd base," kind of high. I lick my lips coming out of the theater into dusk and drop her off at her aunt's duplex. Go home to the exurbs, time out, and tweet forever or never.

PEOPLE SKILLS

I realize I have no people skills when 3 people walk by and I stare at my Nano. They're my family. A song from another era comes on. It's the same song I heard at the mall. The people go inside and rummage through the dishwasher while I listen to tinny beats and vocoder. I think about saying Hi, how was the movie, Did you go to Macaroni Grill? But I go in my room instead. The sixth room on the left upstairs with a Wii and The Fame Monster poster. I look at myself in the mirror that faces the window and see ten dozen other houses just like this one. Then I lie down on my bed and watch Heathers.

LIGHTEN UP

I try to lighten up with a joint and a hydrocodone. My legs buckle and I fall off the stool into a line of elves at the mall. It's Christmas. My wife is in Sephora and I'm so zonked right now I can't tell how old these girls are who work at H&M. I think we're in the valley and it feels like 200 degrees when I emerge into a parking lot the size of Yellowstone with a tanned fox I coaxed out of Sbarro. We sit in the van listening to "Alejandro." She hits crank off my dash and starts to spasm. I'm scared 'cause I see my wife coming out of Nordstrom with a red balloon that says Happy Anniversary, and I'm so high I don't realize this girl is like 16 until I see her ID as she's splitting a line with it.

V-NECK

I spend most of my time partying. I don't even feel into the mix until I'm at a party. The mall is closed so I end up at this house party drinking Budweiser from a can and mouthing off about cars. Then I see 2 girls I want to take back to my place. Do you want to go back to my place I slur. They say Sure, and we go back to my place and do stuff to each other. They're both wearing oversized sweaters with plunging v-necks, gray wife-beaters underneath the v-necks, no bra, and tanned hot tits. "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich" is blasting from a Bang & Olufsen tacked to the wall. We're in a waterbed. I cum all over their tanned hot tits. I get up and stand in front of a mirror in tiger-striped briefs and a fat elephant chain, smoking a Montecristo and thinking about the good times.

Author Bio: Jon Leon is a Los Angeles-based writer. He is the author of The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar Editions, 2009), Hit Wave (Kitchen Press, 2008), Alexandra (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008), and The Artists Editions: 2006-2010. His poetry and criticism have appeared widely in periodicals such as Fence, The New Review of Literature, Soft Targets, East of Borneo, and Art in America. He currently runs the boutique publishing house Wrath of Dynasty.

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