Gaga/Lacan: ARTPOP and the Discourse of the Hysteric

By Jacob W. Glazier

In quest, without respite, of what it means to be a woman, [the hysteric] can but stave off her desire, since this desire is the other’s desire, never having achieved that narcissistic identification that would have prepared her to satisfy the one and the other in the position of the object.

Écrits by Jacques Lacan, p. 378

I’m not a wandering slave, I am a woman of choice.

My veil is protection for the gorgeousness of my face…

Do you want to see the girl who lives behind the aura?

Behind the aura, behind the curtain, behind the burqa?

“Aura” by Lady Gaga

The notion of hysteria as that of a suffering or wandering womb has been around since Antiquity. Yet, it was not until Sigmund Freud, in his famous case study of Dora, that hysteria became systematized vis-à-vis psychoanalysis as a form of pathology. In the middle of the twentieth century, Jacques Lacan took up hysteria and articulated it as a kind of discourse – an intersubjective relation or language game that we can inhabit. The following is a reading of Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP project and album, pre-release, through the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, especially in regards to the hysteric’s discourse. These two thinker-artists, Gaga and Lacan, converge not only in their relation to the discourse of hysteria, but also in their project to commandeer desire, which it seems enables them to be read in tandem in a very complementary way.

As has been argued in numerous Gaga Stigmata (GS) articles, “Applause” acted as a preparatory setting-the-stage or, in the psychoanalytic sense, as a void or lack pregnant with possibilities from which ARTPOP proper could spring forth. Little attention, however, has been given to the chronological and structural primacy of the song “Aura” in its provision of the imaginary framework that foregrounded the possibility of the ARTPOP project in the first place. Being the very first song “leaked” from ARTPOP (even before “Applause”), “Aura” frames and situates the entirety of the ARTPOP project within the discourse of the hysteric, which lends support to the reading of Gaga’s project as necessarily subversive insofar as the hysteric’s discourse goes after the hegemony of the master through the demand that the master legitimate itself even though this is ultimately impossible.

That is, the hysteric is structurally situated within discourse in such a way that casts her very being into doubt – who am I? – and, consequently, she commands the master to fill this lack for her by answering the injunction – tell me! However, this commandment veils the fact that in the very act of questioning/demanding, the hysteric gives herself over to the master, thereby setting-up a symbolic dependence via the hysteric-master tension. “Aura” is precisely about this back-and-forth tease between the hysterical Gaga and the master: her fans, the media, the paparazzi, Perez Hilton, et al. – all of these constitute her big Other in the Lacanian sense, the master she desires to interrogate and to incite into performance for her pleasure.Gaga sings “do you want to see me naked lover?” Only if you perform for her first by telling her who she is. Read in this way, “Aura” situates the ARTPOP project within the sadomasochistic hysteric-master relationship and, thus, the songs, performances, etc. that fall under its auspices can be understood as various riffs off of, what is first and foremost, Gaga as hysteric.

Indeed, the very title of the album, ARTPOP, alludes to its hysterical intentions: to destabilize and conflate meanings. That is, it amalgamates disparate domains – ART + POP – not only literally, to the letter, but more metaphorically within the semantic field. Gaga wants to fasten the binaries of the ART-POP dialectic: “we could, we could belong together.” In so doing, the signifiers of each domain are engendered into confluence, thereby creating a unique and different realm of meaning.

Lacan calls these nodal points of reference the point de capiton, quilting or anchoring points, whereby desire vis-à-vis meaning is allowed to flow in unique and particular ways. Importantly, though, these channels are always contingent or, in other words, the signifier may be coaxed into adjoining another, different signified. In a sense, then, the point de capiton is a kind of tautology, a dialectic that is reflexive and self-referential. In “Applause”, Gaga captures this quite nicely when she sings,

          One second I’m a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me.

          Pop culture was in art, now art’s in pop culture in me.

In these seemingly menial tautological iterations, Gaga is quilting herself and the entirety of her pop-culture, fantasmatic, and ideological project to the world of Art. She, in part, accomplishes this by calling-forth desire through her refusal to satiate meaning; or, to say it differently, through the hardcore polyvalence of her signifiers. The way in which she sings certain lyrics leaves their manifest meaning (i.e. what she is “actually” saying) largely ambiguous and up for interpretation, suspended in a hermeneutics of difference. This led some to label “Applause” as the victim of a “bad mix.” That is, the volume levels of the vocals and music seemed off: it was hard to hear what Gaga was saying because her voice was so similar to the production. RuPaul’s producer Lucian Piane was one such critic,

What these critics fail to realize, though, is that it is the polyvalence of signifiers as such that titillates and gets desire flowing. For example, when Gaga spells out A-P-P-L-A-U-S-E in the backing track, I first heard this as “it is the end of you.” It was not until the lyric video came out that I recognized there was a discord between what I heard and what the “official” lyrics were. Realizing this, I could not help but smirk because, in a sense, I felt as though I had been duped – of course she is spelling applause, I thought; that is the very name of the song! There are also other parts that tricked me. In the chorus the official lyrics are “make it real loud,” but it can also be heard as “make it real love.” Certainly, too, the utterance “Koons” is highly ambiguous (Koons ≈ coon ≈ cunt). This is not to say that there is some hidden or sinister meaning that Gaga is trying to sneak by us à la the alleged backmasking in Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Rather, it is the exact opposite. There is no one secret meaning that Gaga wants us to hear; she wants us to hear legion meanings, meanings without enervation in order to arouse our desire.

What’s more, Gaga invokes what is the sine qua non of our desire: the Thing or, das Ding. She sings, “give me the Thing I love.” The Thing is a fantasmatic object that generates the perpetual deferral of desire and that we hope will fill our lack thereby providing us with unmediated jouissance– unbridled orga(ni)smic pain-pleasure. We use various objects in the world to try and incarnate the Thing only to become frustrated by their necessary incompleteness. In ARTPOP, Gaga manifests this chiefly as Jeff Koons’s gazing/garden blue ball sculpture.

She inscribes the dignity of the Thing into one of the most banal objects possible: a simple sphere, something that we might find in the clearance bin at Wal-Mart at the end of summer, lest we forget its label status. It is not McQueen or Mugler this time, but a Jeff Koons sphere – and that makes it different in kind from the blue garden balls you find at Wal-Mart (or, does it?). This is, of course, subversive in its conflation of high culture with low, the former being art and the latter being pop, and is in line with Gaga’s continual project of raising the superficial to the level of the real.

Simultaneously, the blue ball is also a semblance of the frustration of the analysand’s desire during analysis, similar to Rifai’s description of glamouring in GS – a trick that keeps the listener frustrated and desire coursing. Any G.U.Y. reading this will understand the feeling of having his libido terminated before he is able to achieve completion. The result: blue balls. Or, blue Koons balls to be more precise. It is certainly noteworthy where the Koons blue ball is placed on the ARTPOP album cover – in front of Gaga’s intimate, private parts. In one sense, this placement crashes together the antinomies of testicles-vagina, male-female, public-private in traditional Gaga-trickster fashion. However, in another sense, she also recapitulates the phoenix theme from Born This Way by actually birthing the blue ball. In this way, with ARTPOP, she is giving birth to male frustration as such.

But in the Lacanian sense, not only Gaga, but also femininity in general, is a midwife to the male subject insofar as woman is a symptom of man; that is, femininity can only ever be an object of desire for the male gaze. On the album cover, the blue gaze-ing ball creates the statue of Gaga; it reifies the female as object. This is not only true in a psychoanalytic sense but also in a very literal sense since Jeff Koons created both the blue ball and the statue of Gaga.

Similarly, during the early ARTPOP era, Gaga has continually displayed herself as the Roman goddess Venus in a huge, voluminous wig with ‘hair to the gods’ (think a disheveled, crazed hysterical woman). By embodying Venus, the goddess of love, desire, and fertility, Gaga is positioning herself as an object of the male gaze, par excellence: the divine nexus of jouissance that remains eternally unattainable and therefore excruciatingly frustrating. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this is known as the objet petit a, or the object of ultimate desirousness.

“Aura” is perhaps Gaga’s way of laughing at our frustration, and there is no better theme song for the hysteric than “Aura.” The inaugural lyrics disclose this fact: “I’m not a wandering slave, I am a woman of choice!” The lyric points to the horrific and hidden kernel around which the hysteric’s discourse eddies; namely, the impenetrable lacuna and question of “am I a man or a woman?” The very speech-act in the lyric – “I am a woman!” – belies this underlying and incessant questioning that challenges the hegemony of the master: What is a woman? Who am I? What do you want? Che vuoi? In “Aura,” Gaga speaks for us through the hysteric’s injunction to the master: Tell me!

She needs us to define her as a woman, as a subject that does not wander but possesses some viscosity of substance. This is hysterically humorous in the psychoanalytic sense precisely because the woman as subject does not exist. Gaga seems to be in on the joke when, in a quintessential act of trickery, she inverts the etymology of hysteria. The word hysteric has its roots in the ancient Greek meaning belonging to the womb, suffering in the womb, and in the nineteenth century was generally thought to be a disturbance of the uterus, a wandering of the womb. No, Gaga declares, she is not wandering – she is a woman of choice!

Furthermore, in the hysterical condition, the nervous system has gone awry such that paralysis or pains occur sans any organic etiology. In other words, the hysteric slips through the iron fist of medicine or of any kind of technical manipulation of the body. In this way, Gaga as hysteric is able to render herself diffuse, to become an effervescent and ephemeral aura, and to thereby escapeeven the medieval humiliation/torture masks that Betancourt analyzes in the Swine iTunes Festival performance. The body of the hysteric is a conundrum, an in-assimilable anomaly that, by its very nature, thwarts any kind of totalized symbolic interpolation. This is made explicit by Gaga in the lyrics to “Do What You Want (With My Body)” featuring R. Kelly:

The body, in the hysterical sense, is an incendiary irrelevance – a technical means to an end, a medium of signification, a canvas on which to paint (cf. Pierrot). This, of course, has been a central motif in Gaga’s project since the very beginning. That is, the coding and recoding of the body vis-à-vis fashion, makeup, hair, or, more generally, costuming. The difference in ARTPOP, however, is the explicit adaptation of the hysterical position that has allowed Gaga to position herself against her old way of costuming by literally stripping herself down (e.g. the naked pictures in V Magazine, the onstage changing during the iTunes Music Festival, the performance of “Applause” at the MTV Video Music Awards).

Her “voice” and her “heart” will go on, will endure sans a body. In the “Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” Žižek reads Friedkin’s “Exorcist” as illustrating how the voice acts as an alien intruder, a foreign entity that possesses us and speaks not on our behalf, but from somewhere else. In this way, the voice is not at all part of the organic body and, least of all, speaks on our behalf. The voice, for Gaga, constitutes a creative and sublimatory means of persistence in the face of having her body snatched away from her – her significations come from a realm beyond the organic, beyond the body, and are fed primarily by us, the fans. 

So, too, with the “heart” or love from her fans Gaga is able to endure. This relationship can be read as a relation between the hysteric and the master with Gaga being the former and her fans being the latter – as she sings in “Government Hooker,” “I can be anything, I’ll be your everything.” She creates a symbolical dependence with her fans to tell her who she is, what she can be; she is whatever they desire her to be, which in turn keeps their desire fluid and pulsating (think: fans as poppies/opium during the “Applause” performance on GMA). The hysterical Gaga is too wily, though, to be rendered qua object and, instead, flees from any formal attempt to pin her down and assimilate her within a libidinal economy. She shape-shifts in order to remain forever desirous and is therefore eternally elusive, always as the objet petit a.

In a previous analysis of “Aura” on GS, Cavaluzzoreads the female-burqa dialectic as a double-dare to the hegemony of phallogocentric culture: “can a masculine culture handle a woman’s soul?” If the woman removes her makeup, her wigs, her clothing, her shoes, her jewelry will the man still be able to bear what lies underneath? Will patriarchy be able to accept the woman just as she is, stripped down to her bare essence? If we situate this song within the hysteric’s discourse of psychoanalysis we see that the foregoing analysis misses the point completely. In fact, it is the exact opposite.

The whole point of “Aura” is that there is nothing; there is nothing underneath all of the covers; there is only a lack fetishized by the male gaze.

Or, more precisely, there exists a woman that does not exist, nor has ever existed. There are only burqas and more burqas all the way down.Further, though, masculine culture or the male libidinal economy can never, in the psychoanalytic sense, “handle a woman’s soul” because its very existence is predicated on the female as object of desire. There can never been an assimilation between the two opposites, male or female, since there is “no sexual relation” to begin with.

Gaga changing mid-performance and onstage during the iTunes Music Festival 2013.

It follows, then, that “Aura” and perhaps Gaga proper, in their very essence, are a joke. A joke by way of inviting and enticing us to see the real beneath the artifice, the woman behind the burqa. It is in this sense that when Gaga changes on stage and unveils the popstar, she is actually doubling down on the joke.She is saying: “Look! I can show my body underneath all of this costuming, underneath all of these burqas, but you are still not going to get what you want. The truth is, you can never get what you want. I am just as elusive and desirous as ever!”

The realization of this joke, in some respects, is similar to the end of analysis for the analysand. Namely, the neurotic analysand comes to have a flash of joui-sense(pleasure-meaning) when his narcissistic and imaginary fantasies collapse, and he realizes that the analyst has no new knowledge to offer, no secret access to jouissance, and no better contact with the Thing. The funny thing is that Gaga gets the joke even before “Aura” starts – at ARTPOP’s very conception. She laughs hysterically: “HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

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Additional Works Cited:

Fiennes, S., Žižek, S., Eno, B., Myers, T., Amoeba Film., Lone Star Productions., & Mischief Films. (2006). The pervert’s guide to cinema. London: P Guide.

Freud, S. (1952). The case of Dora and other papers. New York: Norton.

Hysteria. (1961). In The Oxford English dictionary (5th Vol.). Great Britain: Oxford University Press.

Lacan, J. (2007). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.

Author Bio:

Jacob W. Glazier, M.S. Ed., NCC, is a Ph.D. Student pursuing a degree in Psychology in Consciousness and Society at the University of West Georgia. He has his Master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and practices at the Center for Counseling and Career Development at the University of West Georgia. Jake is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Jake is working on his dissertation with the aim of appropriating queer theory in light of Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially in regard to the arts of drag and fashion.

Let’s be friends: http://www.facebook.com/tfcjake

Or email: jacob.w.glazier@gmail.com

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“The Witch’s Dorothy”: On Gaga’s conflation of hero, villain, and witch

By Sarah Cook

In which I get one step closer to articulating Gaga’s intriguing use of failure, if we can equate failure with evil (i.e. witchery). If failure can be the same thing as a bad witch. If a bad witch can be good for certain things.

These notes are in response to Gaga’s performance of “Applause” (Applau-Oz) on Good Morning America, 9 September 2013.

1. That Gaga hovers somewhere between witch, villain and monster. That this hovering is the crucial source of her difference, i.e. her creativity, her power.

Audre Lorde: “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”*

1.2. Gaga embraces various differences – between her repeated incorporation of disability, multiple sexualities, the burqa, & her invitation to those who are “broke or evergreen…black, white, beige, [of] chola descent,” or Othered in any variety of ways – is this her endorsement of the creative power of difference? Does Gaga herself descend “into the chaos of knowledge,” the chaos of identity?

And can a rich white female ever invoke the power of Others in a way that is not problematic?

2. Gaga’s monstrosity has perhaps been established since The Fame Monster, sometimes occurring with a cyborg twist à la “Born This Way,” sometimes as manifesto (think of those haunting images that accompany the “Manifesto of Little Monsters” video done with Nick Knight). But with the inauguration of the ARTPOP era, I think we are seeing a new extension of Gaga’s monstrosity, one that harnesses magic and transformation – the bubbling cauldron and colored smoke in the “Applause” video – along with the multiplicity of stage presences that have occurred during each of her recent live performances. A magical, playful monstrosity. And now, with the incarnation of Oz, we see the previously clear distinction of the hero/villain binary made messy – or perhaps made articulate, specific – through the conflation of wizard/witch/Dorothy.

3. The Wizard isn’t the real villain of the story, we know that. His innocent folly and simple-minded desire for the mask of power – layered upon his own desire simply to go home – is ultimately dismissed: the true villain, the Wicked Witch, is rightfully killed and the Wizard actually provides Dorothy and her friends with what they need. With Gaga’s manifestation of all three of these figures on the stage – good, somewhat evil, more evil – she is therefore complicating our distinctions between the good figure and the bad one. How do we distinguish maniac from evil sorceress from small-town girl when they’re all showing up within and hovering so closely to the same body?

3.2. How does body become the medium in which we conflate our predetermined evaluations? How do bodies make things messy?

4. Gaga’s continual performances of gender identity: the constant conflation of man/woman/androgyny, of monster/pop star/fan (most recently, the blurred distinctions between performer and audience, as in her use of fans during her performance of “Swine” at the iTunes festival, and now the living poppies during her GMA performance, seen as costumes worn by audience members themselves). The conflation of Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone. We might also consider her infinite rebirths here, from “Born This Way” Gaga to the current multiplicity of wig changes and the monstrous multiple personas. This process of watching Gaga manifest over and over again, confusing us with her various representations (which one is real? which one is good?).

4.2. By imbuing these transformations with the Oz archetypes, so to say, Gaga has signaled clearer distinctions than before. It is hard to evaluate and define, for example, Gaga’s various personas in “Applause” – is Venus Gaga better than blonde Monroe-like Gaga in a birdcage? – but we can understand and separate Dorothy from Wicked Witch from the powerful Oz figure himself. By the end of her performance, however, Gaga further complicates her manifestations once again, and she clarifies her complication in her post-performance interview (see 8.1).

5. Toward the end of the performance on GMA, the camera suddenly cuts to the audience, suggesting two things. First, it reinforces the audience’s presence in the performance itself (for that moment, the performance is literally replaced by the cheering fans outside). Second, it suggests a mistake that had to be covered up. In this case, not so much covered up but distracted from: we simply see the fans instead of whatever else was happening onstage. The fans, then, became the remedy for some temporarily occurring failure.

5.2. Failure requires the presence of fans, requires community, requires applause. The presence of multiple others. In failing, we need multiplicity; or perhaps we fail by being multiple.

John Pluecker: “We” seems even more doubtful than “I.”*

The multiple spaces in which we can fail, become messy, become articulate, and honor the natural inconsistency of lived experiences.

Rachel Zucker: Why…did it take co-writing a book about giving birth at home and subverting the “I” voice of single authorship for me to see that I’d been speaking, always, in a borrowed language and pre-made forms?*

We might become the productive doubt of creativity, i.e. the creative source based upon multiplicity, based on difference. We are also a subversive source against the patriarchal and limited “I.”

5.3. Question: Which I/eye is Gaga?

5.4. Answer: all of them.

6. When Gaga-as-Dorothy and her Yellow Brick Road friends freeze during the second verse of “Applause,” they line up single file with Gaga in front, who holds a bright red apple. The arms of Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are splayed around Gaga’s body, like a tree. Collectively, they become the physical, bodily tree of knowledge, where the forbidden fruit rests in Gaga’s hand.

Enter Wicked Witch, stage right: like a transgressive Eve, she wants that which she is denied. Perhaps she just wants to know things. It’s the apple that Eve/Wicked Witch desires, and in the fleeting moment where she grabs it out of Gaga’s hand, it is somewhat unclear who is taking/giving the apple from/to whom. The exchange of fruit, i.e. knowledge, becomes messy, and suddenly Gaga represents a Snow White figure, while the Wicked Witch becomes yet another evil witch, corrupting Gaga-as-Dorothy-as-Snow-White’s innocence. The conflation of stories & fairy tales, of good & bad, of knowledge and evil. Of one witch for another. (Why is it always so bad to be a witch?)

Anne Sexton: I have gone out, a possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night; / dreaming evil, I have done my hitch / over the plain houses, light by light: / lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. / A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind.*

7. During the performance, all it takes for Gaga to defeat the witch is that she pull the green wig off her head.

Then, like a victorious warrior, she swings it around triumphantly, even playfully setting it on top of her own then-wigless head. Herein lies the transformation I am most interested in: how easily she goes from being hero to villain. The playfulness required in being evil.

She doesn’t completely put the wig on, which we’ve seen repeatedly: we know she is capable of a thorough wig change while on a live stage, even if it means bringing her stylists out onto the stage itself. This choice, then, seems important – that the wig is just playfully held. That transformation can happen simply from play.

8. In the end, Dorothy is transformed. Her wig is bigger, and it houses one of her signature gigantic bows. Her shoulder-pads are huge, suggesting “Born This Way” implants beneath the blue plaid dress. Dorothy has been reborn, and now Stefani Germanotta’s natural short black hair (she begins the performance with a short black bob wig) is blond and huge.

Alice Notley: “A woman” “who is standing,” “waiting” “for the train”…“wears a business suit / big shoulders” “Her animal familiarity” “to us is” “powdered over,” / “pearlized” “She’s attractive,” “is suffused with” “her powers”*

8.1. Gaga explicitly analyzes this performance in the interview that follows: “Well you know, I think it really is an explanation in a way for my entire career so far…Dorothy was able to transform in order to survive, by transforming into Glenda, and then by transforming at the end back into the wizard who is just Dorothy herself – me.” So Oz the wizard is actually Dorothy, who is actually Gaga.

Notley again: “She belongs to” “the tyrant,” “though she thinks she’s” “her own” / “Now this is” “what happens:” “There is a figure” “in her body” / “another one, it” “steps out of it” “Leaves her body.”

8.2. Multiple Dorothy, monstrous Dorothy. Cyborg Dorothy?

8.3. By becoming Oz in the end, she becomes the source of the needed brains, heart, and courage, as well as of the ability to return home.

8.4. What does home mean for Gaga?

8.5. I don’t know that Gaga is pining for home the way Dorothy does (or perhaps Gaga is revealing a deeper motivation for Dorothy all along). Home, where Stefani Germanotta originated from and perhaps still waits, is not the ultimate goal.

9. So Gaga becomes the source of things – of multiple characters, of creative difference – of the power to transform the self. This is done through wigs, shoulder extensions, cheekbone implants, and alternate personas, and she harnesses them for her own transformation. She has firmly established her interest in “magic,” which she discussed during her last GMA visit. Since then, we’ve watched her magically transform on the VMAs and in London at the iTunes Festival. Gaga has expanded her “you were born this way” anthem into something like, be your own source of magic. Get what you need for yourself, and if it doesn’t exist, create it. Even if it means (re)creating yourself in the process.

In her conflation of villain and victim, Gaga hovers somewhere between monster and witch, between Notley and Sexton, between and among dresses, wigs, and creative chaos. As the source of magic, she could easily return to Kansas at any point but chooses not to, redefining the narrative of what it means to (re)turn, and complicating the traditional boundaries of body and home.

+ + +

Works Cited

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” The Feminist     Philosophy Reader. Ed. Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 49-51. Print.

Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette. New York: Penguin, 1992. Print.

Pluecker, John. “These Little, Little Men.” Evening Will Come. The Volta, Dec. 2012. Web.         <http://www.thevolta.org/ewc24-jpluecker-p1.html>.

Sexton, Anne. “Her Kind.” The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Print.

Zucker, Rachel. “a homespun of questions pulled over a loom of gender and race with the voices of ancestral (mostly living) women speaking in the lacunae.” Evening Will Come. The Volta, Jan. 2013. Web. <http://www.thevolta.org/ewc25-rzucker-p1.html>.

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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#throwback – Lady Gaga’s Disease: Jo Calderone and the Pathology of the Image’s Virulent Body

By Roland Betancourt

Note: This essay was presented at the Northeastern Popular Culture Association’s Annual Conference at Western Connecticut State University on 12 November 2011. This paper – which addresses the crucial aspects of image virality, Jo Calderone, and Pierrot – has not been altered in any fashion since it was written back in 2011. The original draft from which this derived was written before the “You and I” video and before Jo Calderone’s manifestation at the 2011 VMA; as such this essay bears witness to the coherent unfolding of Lady Gaga’s project over these subsequent years in a salient manner – particularly given the role that the figure of Pierrot played within this very argument, a figure who has recently come to the forefront of Gaga’s work in “Applause.”

The image comparison has been a central feature in the way art historians understand and study images. Since the inception of slide projectors at the end of the nineteenth century, the slide lecture with its side-by-side image comparisons became the standard format of the art historical presentation. By its very format, this lecture type served as a model of and model for the foundations of art history as a formalist, scientific, and connoisseurial discipline. While relatively liberated from this model by virtue of the more flexible formats offered by digital slideshows, slide comparisons are still the norm in most university surveys and exams. This art historical visuality of close, comparative looking is tied to notions of scientific study and investigation drawing from the discipline’s foundation in the connoisseurial museum. For the connoisseur, the images in one’s repertoire are replete with their own bundle of metadata that structures a system of constant comparisons for two basic judgments: value and authenticity. By looking at the minor features of works of art, early-twentieth century connoisseurs like Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson focused on hands, noses, ears, and other minutia to determine the hand of the artist and make attributions.

Lady Gaga’s images often find themselves subject to this visuality. Countless examples on YouTube, stage the popular Madonna “vs.” Gaga discussion through the sequential or even side-by-side comparison of clips and images. These are not innocent comparisons, but rather speak to the longstanding discussion regarding Gaga’s authorship, originality, skill, and merit. Therefore, in a popular cultural milieu in which the image is central, the slide comparison is used as the primary mode in structuring an argument about Gaga’s work. Through close visual analysis it becomes self-evident what the parallels and contrasts are between any two images and thus a series of value judgments are expected to emerge based on what are staged as shared criteria for evaluating contemporary pop-culture. For example, nearly without fail, the YouTube video comparisons are accompanied with a statement by the compiler that seeks to discredit Gaga’s work through a criticism regarding “originality” and “copying.” Thus, one finds a convergent methodology between early-twentieth century art connoisseurs and contemporary pop-culture connoisseurs.

In the last week of June 2010, culture bloggers were conducting similar research into the images of a new model for Vogue Hommes Japan, shot by photographer Nick Knight, with whom Lady Gaga has previously worked, and Nicola Formichetti, Gaga’s stylist. The images first appeared on Formichetti’s blog on June 25th 2010, but it was not until June 29th, when close-ups were posted, that the images began to draw attention. The photos of Jo Calderone, a new Italian model from Palermo, Sicily, looked suspiciously like Lady Gaga. Perez Hilton tweeted extensively on the images, yet he did not cover the story or the rumors on his popular blog. Interestingly, he referred to Calderone as his “husband,” a parallel to his usual citation of Gaga as his “wife.” The entire release of the images was a well-staged work in its own right, just as the alleged leak of Gaga’s “Paparazzi” video on PerezHilton.com back in 2009.

As if following the regiments of connoisseurship set out by Morelli and Berenson, bloggers scrutinized Jo Calderone’s image by looking carefully at the nose, eyes, hands, and profile in order to find the unconscious slips of the artist’s defining features. It was Morelli and Berenson’s belief that these minor parts of the body, given their relative unimportance in the whole of the painting, revealed the innate style of even the most skilled master. By comparing these details to other images of Lady Gaga, journalists and bloggers alike produced formal, side-by-side comparisons in order to argue that Jo Calderone was indeed Lady Gaga.

It would seem at first that there is a difference between the object of the art connoisseur and the journalists analyzing Calderone’s image. This difference resides precisely in the possessive of the latter statement: Calderone’s image. While the connoisseur studies the treatment of materials used to construct a painting in order to identity the artist, the journalists used the image as a document to identify its sitter. For this reason, the Calderone image is best conceived as an image of an image, a representation proper of a painting. The painting, which is under scrutiny, is not the image itself, but rather the body it re-presents, the body of Calderone. Thus, the Calderone image is semiotically an order removed from the object studied. The connoisseur studies the paint on canvas to judge the painting itself and to identify its author, which is indexically one-step removed from that object. The body of Calderone is the concern here, not the material of the photograph itself; thus the artist’s body is equated in this process with the corpus of her work.

Gaga’s artistic style is linked in part to this image, as is the case with all connoisseurship. Every time a new, groundbreaking attribution is made to a famous artist, the canon that defines how the discipline understands said artist is changed. Thenceforth, this corpus determines the categories by which further images may be analyzed and attributed to her hand, workshop, and influence. As such, the artist’s definition through her objects is caught in a perpetual tautological cycle, whereby the objects of the physical artist constitute the very body of the historical artist. Jo Calderone demands that the image be engaged with in the terms of traditional art history; it demands close observation, careful analysis, comparison, and so on.

Gaga made art connoisseurs out of even the most distracted spectators. In a culture of massive image sharing, the Calderone image caused viewers to stop and contemplate the image. In an effort to restore the transparency of the signifier, to resolve the puzzling, uncanny image, the viewer is forced into using a particular visuality as the technology for comprehending our otherwise ready-made image-world. This process was achieved through the seemingly unscripted release of the images, which lacked any cohesive narrative or interpretive schema in which the image could have been readily understood. Through this response, Gaga is engaged by viewers via this image as an image herself. The body of Gaga is therefore inseparable from the body of the image. This body may be in its nature that of Lady Gaga, but it presents another form foreign to her, that of Jo Calderone. In this regard, the body of Gaga is not merely the image itself, but the topography in/on which images are formed. In crafting her body into that of Calderone, Gaga continues in a long trajectory of visual production in which her body is the matrix in which the image may (re)produce.

One could call her body the prototypical canvas, that spatial grid upon which images are grafted. In analyzing the representation through photography of the stock-character Pierrot by the French photographer Félix Nadar, Rosalind Krauss focuses on the question of the photographic medium as being capable of capturing the indexical trace of its image. In analyzing the figure of Pierrot, Krauss suggests that the mime’s white clothing echoes the photographic medium in its ability to capture the traces of light like the camera to which he points. In Nadar’s image, the focus is on the trace, on the power of the photograph to capture, by the physical contact of light, the objects that it represents. The notion of the trace, crucial to the nineteenth century’s conceptualization of the photograph, has been supplanted today by a cultural logic of a viral image economy.

Unlike Krauss’s Pierrot whose body captures the projected indexicality of the shadow, Gaga’s image economy presents a body from whose flesh the image is incarnated. This is an economy focusing on a definition of mimesis that is not based on imitation, but rather on manifestation. In this proposed model for our contemporary image, the form of the image is the digital code, the computer is its flesh, and from this combination of code and flesh emerges the “image.” Therefore, this figurative and literal body becomes the unseen nexus of investigation – since after the viral image invades the body, the body fades in service of the faithful representation of the image through it.

Recently, touching upon similar issues, W.J.T. Mitchell’s exemplary work, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, argues for a parallel structure in the fear of cloning to the viral distribution of the contemporary image of terrorism. Mitchell’s work investigates the clone and its processes of reproduction, considering issues such as the “biopicture” and its politics. After September 11, Jacques Derrida paralleled terrorism to an “autoimmune disorder,” whereby the body’s own defenses attack itself. Derrida’s comments focus on the crippling panic over terrorism in the wake of September 11 as a Cold War aftermath through a bodily metaphor, but as Mitchell observes, this was also joined in practice by a fear of biological warfare with the Anthrax scares. Thus, these authors understand the image through its virology; here I instead wish to consider the pathology, the study of the virus’ effects and sufferings on the body.

Through the performance of a comparative anatomy of Gaga and Calderone’s image, one has begun to undertake this very pathological study. The collusion between Calderone’s image and Gaga’s body echoes the very economy of the viral image, whereby Calderone as a concept partakes of Gaga’s body in order to be incarnated. By virtue of the secrecy and hype in which the image was released, however, one cannot simply understand Jo Calderone as another persona created by Gaga, but rather as a terminus of sorts, a capstone and synthesis in a longstanding discourse on Gaga’s body and its image virality. In the interview accompanying the images in Vogue Hommes Japan, Jo Calderone is asked, “How would you describe what you do/your occupation?” He replies, “Mechanic for my dad’s business. This is the first time I’ve had my picture taken.” While staging him as a naïve ingénue from Palermo, this statement also circumscribes Jo Calderone, image and model, into a discourse on the being of an image. He exists as a mechanic, one who fixes technology and allows it to continue operating, yet at the same time he has shockingly never been photographed, a statement difficult to believe in today’s world.

Furthermore, Gaga and Calderone’s relationship begins in the space of the photo shoot. Anxious about his first image about to be produced, Gaga comforts him by saying, “you were ‘born this way.” Born This Way, the title of Gaga’s 2011 album, is Gaga’s consolation and the mantra by which he comes to define himself by the end of the interview. Staged as a naïve and amateur exchange, the antecedent of the relative pronoun, “this,” suggests that she is comforting him regarding his appearance perhaps, but the statement does not quite make sense. In the context of the interview’s text, the antecedent of “this” is more strictly suggested to be the shoot itself, precisely “to start shooting.” One should take “this way” adverbially to mean: You were born in this manner. Gaga’s quoted comment does not console Jo Calderone; instead it cites him for what he is: his own birth, his creation, is the photo shoot itself, his induction into the viral image economy.

I wish to turn now to the crucial question in this analysis: how does one prepare the body to partake in the viral economy?Gaga’s early music videos, primarily “Love Game” and “Poker Face,” feature prominent amounts of citation in which Gaga appears as various pop-stars – such as Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Gwen Stefani. Her image is caught in an infinitely uncontrolled state of re-production that cites her desire to exist as one partaking of the Fame. The Monster is a viral entity, transforming her and itself from The Fameto The Fame Monster. Nevertheless, it was not until the “Bad Romance” music video that the Monster found its foundational argument.

What little narrative is offered by the video depicts the progression of an (at-first) virginal, doll-like Gaga, clad in latex, through a process of prostitution that concludes with a fiery consummation and her formation into the image of the late Amy Winehouse.

As the music video begins, the viewer is confronted by a series of coffin-like sensory-deprivation pods, with the center one bearing the name “Monster” and a crucifix. The action of the scene begins as a beam of light trails across the pods and hits a frame on the wall that echoes its shape. The imagery harkens to popular archaeologically themed movies, from Indiana Jones to The Mummy, where the alignment of sunlight and architectural features in an Ancient Egyptian tomb, for example, open a corridor to a treasure or demon. There is a distinct tomblike tone to the whole scene.

Upon this solar alignment, Gaga and her dancers emerge from their pods in a reptilian manner with contorted gestures and choreography. The hand gestures, which riff on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance, would become the gesture known as the “Monster paw,” which Gaga and her “Little Monsters” produce as a sign of community and solidarity. The “Monster”-pod in the center bears forth the body of Lady Gaga, while her backup dancers, also clad in white, emerge from the surrounding pods. The costumes cover their faces: the backup dancers have only eyeholes cutout in their masks, while Gaga only has an opening for her mouth. The singer is given the power of speech, while the dancers are given the power of sight – as if there is a sensory manifestation of their respective roles in their costumes. Nevertheless, this power is only schematic as the costumes provide the viewer only with a white, headless body that seems to recall again Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of Pierrot’s white garb. This protoplastic “Monster” exists as a grid, a space of transposition and projection.

There are three distinct phases in the music video: virginity, auctioning, and consummation. In the first phase, Gaga is depicted in a bathtub, plugged into headphones, with an appearance reminiscent of contemporary Japanese dolls with large-circular eyes and pinkish hair, clad in latex. Throughout this first section, the dance sequences are undertaken by the clone-like white monsters. Following this, Gaga is pulled out of the bathtub, stripped of her latex cladding, and force-fed what is assumed to be vodka.

At this point, her dancers and Gaga are revealed, still wearing white, but with open faces and covered in jewelry. Gaga is wearing a brown coat with sexual terms written across it, which is forcefully removed by her dancers before a group of male bidders who use Wii Nunchuks to place their bids. The dancers remain the same until the final phase of the video, where Gaga approaches the winning bidder who awaits her lustfully on a bed.

Now, the dancers are clad in red, lacey body suits. The dance sequences parallel the progress of the harlot in the video.

In “Bad Romance,” the innocent Gaga is stripped of her protective covering, sold for sexual favors, and consummates that exchange with the death of her suitor in the flames of passion. The white, palimpsest body of the dancers is equated to virginity, the revelation of their faces to the auction process, and the red lace to sexual consummation.

Quite notably, unlike in “Poker Face” or “Love Game,” Gaga never takes on the guise of another artist except in the final image of Amy Winehouse. The virginal Gaga is not allowed to partake in a viral image economy.While being plugged into headphones and subjected to the gaze of an audience of men, her image does not emulate anyone in particular; she merely exists as a protoplastic blank space – a headless creature, or a generic doll. Only after her consumption in the literal flames of passion can she become the image of Amy Winehouse. Crucial to understanding this video is her latex costume when she is depicted as a virgin.

When Gaga appeared on Good Morning America on behalf of MAC’s Viva Glam campaign on 17 February 2011 wearing latex, she said, “…today was a latex condom inspired outfit because we had to talk about safe sex.” Utilizing a similar color palette and material to that seen in “Bad Romance,” the statement confirmed the importance of the imagery of virgin-Gaga being stripped of her latex sheath. The rehab-resisting Winehouse (a signal of promiscuity and drug-use) toward which Gaga is being propelled, cannot be embodied in Gaga until Gaga’s body is primed as a receptacle for images. Gaga’s capability for embodying an image does not rely on a mere sexual encounter, but rather from an acquired virality.

“Bad Romance” is the first time the viewer is allowed into the Haus of Gaga, yet it is staged as the “BATH HAUS of GaGa.” The Bathhouse, infamously the site of the proliferation of HIV/AIDS in the gay community, is the space of Gaga’s creative Factory from which her images are produced. The entire video occurs in the circumscribed space of the bathhouse. The video parallels Gaga’s own ability to take on the image of another with a presumably unprotected sexual act. The song stresses this crucial element in stating that Gaga wants “your disease.” This disease is the incubating “Monster.” Our contemporary image may be viral, but the body has its own immunity to viral strands. The image may exist in technology, but that hardware must first have the operating system that allows for it to partake in a network and manifest the image. Thus, the body and the technology must be primed for virality; they must somehow be purged of their defenses in order allow for the incarnation of the image. Derrida was right to observe that within this conceptual currency of the viral autoimmunity plays a crucial role; however, in the realm of pop-culture, unlike that of terror, it is not an autoimmune disorder that afflicts this body, but an autoimmune deficiency syndrome. In this nexus of metaphorical thinking, the virology and pathology of the image are intimately connected to the AIDS virus; it is through it that Gaga may prepare her body as a site of viral reproduction. “Bad Romance,” precisely posits a sexualized, AIDS-equivalent pathology for the image, utilizing Gaga’s body as the hardware.

In music videos, the body of women and gay men are often seen in infinite multiples, while the heterosexual male is afforded a level of monolithic stability. Kanye’s music videos, for example, often depict the singer statically; even changes between shots or scenes still give a sense of the artist remaining in place, unmoved, just obscured temporarily – images move around him, rather than the opposite.

On the contrary, in Beyoncé’s “Video Phone” featuring Lady Gaga, Beyoncé’s image flickers endlessly in multiple triplicates when she is most highly sexualized. Likewise, gay men in popular viral spoofs – such as Ryan James Yezak’s cover of Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” entitled “California Gays” – are seen as interchangeable images. Throughout the video, the choreography progresses with the dancers rapidly alternating positions or finishing off each other’s movements through seamless cuts. The female and gay male bodies equally partake in a limitless viral economy, while heterosexual male icons are static, fixed, and unique.

In her 2010 Video Music Awards acceptance speech for Best Female Video for “Bad Romance,” Gaga thanked precisely “all the gays who remade this video over and over again.” Even in the role of image-makers, “the gays” were articulated by Gaga as a source of viral and unmitigated reproduction. The female body, itself reproductively associated with the possibility of bearing forth an image, is thus united to the viral gay body in this metaphoric image economy – a subject beyond the scope of this paper.

While Gaga’s various embodiments have depicted a wide variety of female superstars, her body has never partaken of a male image, except, of course, as Jo Calderone. The Calderone shoot and its accompanying interview serve as an early propaganda blitz for Born This Way, given that the phrase appears throughout the one-page interview multiple times. Thus, the question must be asked: Why was Jo Calderone a heterosexual male, who speaks of wanting to find a hot blonde and owning muscle cars? Quite simply: because it was the only manner in which Gaga could produce an image that would not be subject to an uncircumscribable virality.

In the process of incarnating and bearing forth Jo Calderone, Gaga manifests an image that is in itself, as an image, liberated from the endless virality to which her female and gay-male counterparts are subjected. In one image from Vogue, Calderone is depicted carrying a large pipe, to which Perez Hilton commented that his “husband” was well endowed. In another image, he is depicted looking into a Duchampian urinal. The images and their iconographies articulate his masculinity – precisely in the plumbing.

The body of Jo Calderone has three natures: Gaga, Calderone, and Stefani Germanotta, but only two persons: Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone. In contemplating the image of Jo Calderone, Gaga is revealed as both the producer and the one reproduced. However, upon closer analysis, one comes to understand that in the end there is merely one person in the image. Through the process of contemplation and analysis one compares images of Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone to see the physical evidence: the nose, the ears, the lips, and the chin of Stefani Germanotta. Through the process of comparison, one may find the artistic intentionality of Gaga as a looming presence, but it is the flesh of Stefani Germanotta with which one is confronted. Through the process of close-looking and analysis, the image of both figures take on the order of separation from the artist as that shared between a painting and its painter. Both Gaga and Calderone have common features, which Stefani Germanotta shares.

This is not to suggest the heretical notion that Lady Gaga herself has two natures and two persons – aka: a division between Stefani and Gaga – since she has made it explicitly clear that this is not the case. Instead, what one encounters is the protoplastic flesh of Stefani Germanotta as the virgin, doll-like Gaga in the Bath Haus, the undefiled flesh of the Virgin’s body. Jo Calderone becomes the most sincere image of Lady Gaga, not because in comparing their two images one is able to see beyond the alleged artifice of both, but because in seeing the common characteristics of both their union is stressed. In the display of this union, Lady Gaga, Jo Calderone, and Stefani Germanotta are each seen as mere images reproduced in hardware. As an artist, Germanotta has primed her body with an operating system that may display her high-definition image. As the “Born This Way” music video would come to argue: birth is not finite, it is infinite. Gaga equalizes identity to show the artifice of truth in each by presenting her body not as attached to an ingrained identity, contingent with the flesh, but the body as a medium for endless reproduction. In his stability afforded by music videos to a heterosexual male image, Jo Calderone forces us to confront the static image in order to see the hardware that underlies his very existence.

Author bio:

Roland Betancourt is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art Department at Yale University writing a dissertation entitled, “The Proleptic Image: An Investigation of the Medium in Byzantium.” In April 2012, he co-chaired a major symposium at Yale entitled Byzantium/Modernism on the mutually generative collision of Byzantium and Modernism. In addition to various other projects, he is currently editing a special volume of the journal postmedieval entitled, “Imagined Encounters: Historiographies for a New World,” which asks scholars to suspend disbelief and create cross-temporal analyses using artworks and theories from different historical spaces.

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