By childishpropaganda
Friday, 22 July 2011
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
YOGAGA
By Meghan Blalock
Cut the ignorance-born doubt abiding in your heart by the sword of Self-knowledge, and get up (to fight), O Arjuna. In the battlefield of our hearts we all must face both our virtues and our vices, our Jesuses and our Judases. Sex, money, vanity. By approaching both the dark and light parts of ourselves, we aim not to destroy but to acknowledge them as inextricable and equally powerful elements of our Selves. They will aid us in fulfilling our destinies, in realizing the Highest version of our Selves. Jesus is my virtue, and Judas is the demon I cling to. Without the Fame there would be no Fame Monster(s) and without the Fame Monster(s) we could not have been Born This Way. A Karma-yogi gets freedom from both vice and virtue in this life itself.
My cocaine soundtrack was always The Cure. I would lock myself in my room and listen to “Never Enough” on repeat while I did bags and bags of cocaine. Bullying damaged Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta’s ego and her damaged ego drove her to anger and her anger drove her to self-worship. Then her self-worship unconsciously drove her to achieve self-realization and her self-realization has spawned the self-realization of millions. Therefore, Gaga is a yoga teacher. Because yoga is learning to deal with the consequences of who you really are.
She leads us by example, a warrior queen living passionately tonight. Considering also your duty as a warrior you should not waver. Because there is nothing more auspicious for a warrior than a righteous war. Only the fortunate warriors … get such an opportunity for an unsought war that is like an open door to heaven. Warrior queen, warrior one, warrior two. It is this that constitutes the essence of yoga: this self-realization that we are all seeking, consciously or unconsciously, and towards which we are all gradually evolving. Reverse warrior.
It is only our own ignorance, our inability to discriminate between the real and unreal, that prevents us from realizing our true nature. In typical Gaga fashion, it is through her yoga that she also defies yoga, as by all accounts she is realizing her true nature precisely by refusing to discriminate between the real and the unreal. I know not the difference between the hair that grows from my head and the teal wigs that grow from my imagination. They are the same. When we practice yoga, we are encouraged to penetrate illusion to become one with the true nature of our Selves; Gaga continues to discover her core Self by not only penetrating illusion, but also by immersing herself in it, so that there is no meaningful difference between what is illusory and what is real. I’m in a permanent state of Gaga.
It’s important, though, to discern between illusion as performance and illusion as expression. Yoga teachers young and old will warn against yoga as fashion show. Yoga, they will say, is for the practitioner to work on herself and not to create a display for others; the former aims to transcend the ego – the ultimate goal of yoga – while the latter feeds it. One may ask which, if either, if both, Gaga has achieved. People criticize her for trying to divert attention away from her music by wearing “outlandish,” “weird,” and “bizarre” things. But that verbage only has meaning in the context of a subject judging an object. Does her motivation for wearing teal wigs originate from her Self or from the desire to please others? The former is yoga, the latter is not. We all exist as images in the minds of others, but yoga and Gaga posit that even without those subjective minds making us into objects, we would still exist. Life is not slain! Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not. Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever. This reflects Gaga’s now-infamous philosophy of Fame: I want people to find a sense of inner confidence and Fame for themselves that has nothing to do with being famous.
Another thread in Gaga’s narrative is the transformation of reality into dreams, and the melding of the two so they are intertwined as to be inseparable, in the same vein as reality and illusion. We just told lie after lie after surreal dream after moment, ‘You can do it, you can do it, you can be it.’ And then we woke up one day and we were like, ‘We are. It worked.’ I told so many people for so long that I was a superstar [when] I wasn’t, and one morning I woke up and the delusion was real. This yoking together of dream and reality is in line with the textbook definition of yoga: The word yoga means literally “joining.” Of course, in yogic tradition, the two aspects of Self being joined together are body and mind (the third element being the manipulation of breath as a method of tying the two together), but this body/mind duality parallels both Gaga’s reality/fantasy and reality/dream dualities. 26 postures to freedom. Possible yoga junkie, is there such thing as Bikram rehab? Before you can get into Bikram’s standing head-to-knee posture, you have to have an idea of what that is; Gaga teaches that by simply having that idea, by imagining it to be real, we manifest its reality.
The underlying purpose of all the different aspects of the practice of yoga is to reunite the individual Self (jiva) with the Absolute or pure consciousness (Brahman). It might be argued then that what Gaga has done is to reuinte her Self (reality) with the Absolute consciousness (fantasy and dreams): she continues to yoke together Stefani and Lady Gaga, Judas and Jesus, human and pop superstar, pedestrian life and theater. While we know Gaga practices yoga – I’m feeling great! I just went to yoga in Singapore. Red lipstick all over the place. – we can see that she also lives it.
Yoga is to put together your spirit with the movement. You become.
And this is what life is - to become.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
Don’t believe your limitations.
Works cited:
1. Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā
2. Lady Gaga, “Judas”
3. Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā
4. Lady Gaga: Just Dance: The Biography, Helia Phoenix; Orion 2010
6. Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā
7. The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983
8. The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983
9. Lady Gaga, V Magazine, July 2011
11. Krishna, The Bhagavad Gītā
14. The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983
15. Lady Gaga, Twitter, November 2010
16. The Sivananda Companion to Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Center; Simon & Schuster 1983
17. Lady Gaga, Twitter, July 2011
19. The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran; Wordsworth 1996
Author Bio:
Meghan Blalock is a writer living in New York City. She writes for Gotham magazine, and has also written pieces for the local music blog Sound System NYC, The Rumpus, Southern Living, Gaga Stigmata, Woman's Day, and other publications. Her poetry has also been published in amphibi.us. Her work is viewable here and here. She's currently training to be a Yoga instructor.
Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
Puke On Gaga – Honoring Vomit
By Rachel Clark
In this short film, used both as an opening to the second act of the Monster Ball tour and previously exhibited within the SHOWstudio exhibition “Inside/Out,” Gaga is first seen elegantly dressed in a Marko Mitanovski gown. Standing atop a small marble podium in a plain studio setting, her all white costume and stony expression are reminiscent of the classical sculpture of Greece and Rome. The sharp constructs of Gaga’s dress, whilst shifting gracefully in the breeze of a wind machine, reflect the textual carving of fabric in Renaissance masterpieces such as Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.” In an unflinching, powerful stance, Gaga embodies these two celebrated canons as a perfectly constructed object, stationed in homage to fine art and high fashion for the twenty-first century.
Yet, within seconds, the image is disrupted. We hear Gaga scream “Make it Stop!” on the overlaying soundtrack as her legs are reversed, thereby challenging the previous illusion of the ideal, and forcing its reassessment in the wake of this now divided human body. She is at once a beautiful object and a physically fractured human subject as the statement “I’m A Free Bitch” begins to permeate the disco beat soundtrack. These two declarations provide a subtle commentary to the visual discord. “Make It Stop!” is screamed like a battle cry, functioning as a catalyst for the corruption of the harmonious opening scene. The classical quest for visual perfection is abandoned in favor of the twisted image Gaga becomes. In this disruption, Gaga is freed from art’s confining rules regarding the beautiful and logical, and becomes capable of embodying the monstrous and fantastic in its place.
The title “Puke On Gaga” is taken from the film’s following segment, wherein the New York performance artist Millie Brown is seen straddling a now seated Gaga, vomiting a stream of sparkling, luminous paint upon her. Significantly, Brown is dressed in all black, wearing an outfit that fans of Gaga will associate with her pre-Gaga Stefani Germanotta Band stage attire. Gaga has also previously referenced Stefani Germanotta in the video for “Telephone,” where she cast her younger sister as her younger self. The effect in this case is that we bear witness to Stefani Germanotta vomiting on Lady Gaga.
Some have suggested that the vomit should be interpreted as an act of disgust, an expression of a repressed disappointment felt by Germanotta that her past identity had to be erased in order to achieve worldwide success as Lady Gaga. It could be that this is an act of rebellion against the superficiality of the Lady Gaga construction, but then, how does this sit with Gaga’s frequent refusal to separate these two personas? As she herself often attests, Stefani Germanotta was always Lady Gaga: “I don’t want anyone to separate who I am with my makeup on from who I am without it. I’m the same person.”
Modern artists have frequently explored their relationship to their own bodily fluids. Marcel Duchamp upturned his urinal, Piero Manzoni canned his “Artist’s Shit,” and today, Millie Brown performs by vomiting rainbows of colored milk onto blank canvases in order to “use [her] body to create art in a way that challenges people’s perception of beauty.
In a literal act of artistic regurgitation, Brown/Germanotta turns her insides out, and splatters the superficially ideal image of Gaga with the glittering colors of her interior self. There is no medium of creation other than the physical body in this moment. Against the traditions of formal art training and beauty, which the unwavering Gaga-as-sculpture represents, there are no words, no consumable images, only a visceral demonstration of the potential of turning what is inside us into an artistic act.
In Gagavision 43, Gaga states, “the creative process is fifteen minutes of vomiting … it all happens in fifteen minutes this giant regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings, then I spend days, months, years fine tuning. But the idea is you have to honor your vomit, you have to honor those fifteen minutes.” What does it mean to honor one’s vomit? Why does Gaga feel affinity with what would be an abject act? The answer, I believe, lies in the physicality of the act itself. Our bodily expulsions are the most primal of life experience, and we are often powerless to control them. When our bodies reject these fluids, they are forced outside ourselves as we are forced outside of ourselves when we observe them. As Julia Kristeva has argued, they are made by and of us, yet they embody an entire otherness in their gross exterior existence. To observe the abject is to briefly rupture consciousness, as the many paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity come to dwell upon a terrible truth of physical existence. To honor one’s vomit is to honor the power of this realization: that we can never escape bodies, that before culture we are animals, and that understanding is not akin to reality. This sensation, a compelling leap into deep thinking and primal repression, has been described by Giles Deleuze as a “discordant accord,” and its potential to create a collision of the senses can be understood as central to the world’s most affective works of art. Via a stream of shimmering blue Gaga invites us to find this artistic potential inside of ourselves, and regurgitate our own thoughts and feelings without shame or regret.
As we hear Gaga scream “Make It Stop” once again, the film cuts to a close up of Gaga eating a raw bovine heart. The story goes that Nick Knight challenged her to do this as means of externalizing the traumatic fears she faced concerning her father’s heart surgery. The effect is a conceptual reversal of the previous image of externalized artistic creativity, as we watch Gaga devour the symbolically laden internal organ.
One must not only produce to create art, but also consume: such is the cyclical nature of creativity. In her first V Magazine column, Gaga asserts the necessity of consumption to inspiration: she considers the act of re-appropriation as both transformative and radical. In Gaga’s interpretation, the creation of art is marked with violence and suffering, as illustrated in the grotesque images of self-induced vomiting and eating raw flesh. As tears of blood are seen to run down her cheeks as she bites, her voice is heard listing the names of tragic beauty queens in what is both a tribute to the damages of fame and a testament to its immortality.
The final scene shows Gaga in the studio being decorated, powdered, gagged, and bound by Matty Dada (the creative director of Haus of Gaga at the time of filming). Gaga retains her silent, objective composure, becoming the passive puppet of fame that the world’s superstars are commonly imagined to be whilst her image is physically developed by a rough-handed assistant. Her alteration by the hands of Dada becomes gradually more aggressive, the connotations of bondage increasing as Gaga is bandaged, blind-folded, braced, and strapped to pieces of wood that imitate the hoisting of a figure onto an easel, or even crucifix. Again a theme of immortality emerges, and the famous vessel becomes an icon of worship. Gaga has adopted religious iconography across her oeuvre, and here, once again, we find fame fashioned as a new religion and Gaga suffering for the love of her fans.
This construction via an act of extreme styling represents the modern-day public persona. Manipulated to the point of abstraction, Gaga objectifies herself as a celebrity, whilst casting a shade of violence over the ritual of getting done one’s “hair and make-up.” Beauty and pain go hand-in-hand for women the world over, but Gaga pushes the boundaries of these expectations, forever forcing confrontation with unspoken truths through her elaborate performances of celebrity such as this.
In all, the film’s sequence works to remind us of what we often forget – that our sense of reality is a fragile construction. She challenges first the classical notion of beauty, severing it with a simple twist of her legs, before “honoring her vomit” across the ideal object and staining it with her creative juices. In the final scene, we see the literal process of beauty being constructed, but it is rendered exploitative and disabling. This seemingly innate sense of what makes another person attractive is one of the many false truths our lives are constructed upon, and Gaga pushes us to examine what thought really is. By tapping into the Deleuzian “discordant accord,” she liberates her Little Monsters by making these strict social expectations ridiculous, and by offering art as a means of salvation. The real art here is not the beautiful mannequin the viewer is first introduced to, or her final subtly Christ-like transformation, but the artistic regurgitation upon them. By honoring our vomit, we confront our subjective existence within the raw meat of our bodies and recognize that it is only through imagination and creative expression that we can be free.
Author Bio:
Rachel Clark is a 22-year-old Cultural Studies postgraduate student, BA Hons in Art History and Museum Studies, with a keen interest in contemporary art, memory studies, and postmodern theory. She is currently based in Leeds in the North of England. As an avid fan of techno and electro, Gaga isn’t her usual cup of tea, but she was ‘enlightened’ by her dear Mum, who took her to see the Monster Ball live – She’s been a little monster and proud ever since!
Monday, 18 July 2011
GAGAGRAPHY: “Born This Way” & Jemima Wyman
Definition: Gagagraphy is the branch of Gaga studies that seeks to identify, describe, and interpret the content of images depicting Lady Gaga. A Gagagraphy studies all the various components of an image of Gaga, mining for meaning the image’s positioning of its figure, her gesture, her costume, her props (animate and inanimate), her facial expression, her makeup, etc. A Gagagraphy also studies potential visual precursors to images of Gaga, seeking to understand from where Gaga’s iconography draws its inspiration, its influences, its visual quotations. Gagagraphy often necessitates comparative analysis, drawing meaning from the exercise of comparing and contrasting Gaga’s images with her visual influences.
Please leave your analyses of the following images in the comments.
Image 1
Jemima Wyman: A Special Variety of Soft-Skinned Dangerous Game
From the “Artist’s Statement” (also first published October 31, 2010):
The “Gagaesque” protagonist looks out from a body that desires the viewer’s gaze, from a complicated ever changing, non-classical body that is in the process of understanding its own parameters. The two-in-one body that is represented mimics one of the fundamental tendencies of grotesque imagery, that is it exceeds its own limits. She goes further than her own meatiness; she gives birth to herself over and over again!
Image 2
Lady Gaga: “Born This Way” video
First released February 27, 2011
Friday, 15 July 2011
Write for Gaga Stigmata!
Interested in writing a short critical piece for Gaga Stigmata’s upcoming series on Lady Gaga’s next video? Email your resume/CV and a short sample of your writing to Meghan Vicks at gagajournal@gmail.com. Also, please share with us your general ideas about Lady Gaga’s project, and why you’d like to write for Gaga Stigmata.
The next video is rumored to come out soon! Email us your information today!
Saturday, 9 July 2011
Help Soto Go Gaga: Paws up, everyone, and let’s make a GAGA MUSICAL!
Hello Gaga Journal!
My name is Soto. I’m a devoted little monster and a film student seeking the support and help of the Gaga community. For my final thesis I’ve decided to make a musical based on my artistic interpretation of Gaga’s hit song “Bad Romance.” But the Film School won’t let me do it unless I get Gaga’s approval to use the song.
Undaunted by this task, I decided to create an online movement titled “Help Soto go Gaga.” The campaign consists of a YouTube video where I explain my dilemma, showcase my film idea, and ask for the support of fellow monsters and Gaga herself. I’ve also created a petition and website where we’ll be adding content such as concept art for the project.
I reach out to you guys because I’d like for you to help me spread the word by any means; link the video on your site, tweet about it, it’s very simple!
I hope I can count on my fellow monsters!
Paws Up,
Soto.
UPDATE!!!
July 20th is “The Day we Reach Gaga”! A massive online collaborative effort taking place on Twitter and Facebook, where all our supporters and friends will tweet/wallpost Gaga and her close friends a key message: Gaga go Soto!
It’s the grand finale to make my Gaga musical. We’re now one step closer to make it a reality as the campaign has gotten the attention from the Mexican division of Universal Music.
Over 20 newspapers have published articles on the event and over 300 little monsters from all over the world have joined the Facebook event page as well as our twitter account (@sotobadromance).
Friday, 8 July 2011
Gaga Stigmata Seeks Assistant Editor for Creative Works
Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga seeks an assistant editor to read creative submissions for the online journal, respond to creative queries, solicit creative work, share creative-development ideas, and to potentially make creative works for the site. The assistant editor will also be in charge of developing Bled Threads, our Gaga fan couture section. Ideally, new works would be posted on a weekly basis.
If interested, please submit a CV or resume and a paragraph detailing your ideas for the kind of artworks (poetry, fiction, video, image-based works, mixed media, creative-critical works, etc.) you’d like to see in the journal. Please name some artists and creative writers who you believe would be a good fit for the journal, and why you think so.
Also, please tell us why you want to work with Gaga Stigmata.
Unlike other journals, Gaga Stigmata does not simply read submissions—we solicit work, and create our own work in response to Gaga, oftentimes in collaboration with one another. We champion risk taking, boundary-blurring between the creative and the critical, and radical ideas that evolve alongside Gaga’s ouevre. We cannot say for sure what the next six months will hold, as we are not sure how Gaga will evolve—but we seek a fellow ambitious, hard-working, and forward-thinking person to evolve with us and with Gaga. Your ideas will be valuable to us, and the democratic/synergistic nature of the journal allows space for you to experiment in ways that other journals won't.
All creative works posted on Gaga Stigmata will pend final approval from founding editor Kate Durbin, with whom you will work closely on a regular basis.
This is a six month position, to be potentially renewed at the end of six months.*
Submit your information to: gagajournal@gmail.com, and please spread the word!
*The position is not currently a paid position, though it could develop into that down the road.
