Deconstructing Lady Gaga: Pop Culture as a Toolbox

Lady Gaga performing at MOCA's 30th Anniversary Gala on November 14, 2009. The Steinway grand piano was made by Damien Hirst. Lady Gaga was dressed in a costume created for the occasion by Miuccia Prada and a hat designed by Frank Gehry. Courtesy of WireImage and Museum of Contemporary Art | Los Angeles.

By F. Javier Panera

At a time when technology is starting to blur copyright boundaries, more and more voices are indicating that the contemporary artist has become a mere manager of information, destined in some cases to imitate himself and in others to “reprogram existing works,“ in a strategy similar to that of a disc jockey or record producer. Musical similitude is not unwarranted, and it feels more and more imperative when we refer to artists who dismantle prior works so as to decode and manipulate their elements in order to create a new work, as the rapper Kanye West recently did in his record My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,¹ constructed from dozens of samplers of songs by Mike Oldfield, King Crimson, The Byrds, Smokey Robinson, Rick James, Bon Iver, Black Sabbath, Manfred Mann and Aphex Twin, among others. This is also done in an even cruder-although no less effective-way by internationally renowned DJs such as David Guetta or the artist who is the subject of this text.

The written and audiovisual cultural products that Bauman has called “liquid modernity”² are definitive proof that the concepts “creatio ex nihilo,” or the “blank page” no longer exist; instead, the artist answers to the figure of the semionaut, a kind of nomad in the midst of proliferating signs that enter-as Barthes foresaw³-”into mutual relationships of dialogue, parody or controversy.” Thus, it is not surprising that in Great Britain there is a publishing house (Quirk Classics) devoted to transforming classic texts into “trash literature.” Among its most successful books are Sense and Sensibility and Marine Monsters by Ben H. Winters and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Steve Hockensmith, in which Jane Austen’s characters are either being devoured at the lakeshore by killer octopi or are themselves chasing after beings from beyond the grave. They have even dared to transform Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina into a robot in Android Karenina, also by Ben H. Winters, and to change Kafka’s Metamorphosis into The Meowmorphosis by Coleridge Cook, in which the protagonist from Kafka’s novel wakes up one morning turned into an endearing domestic cat, or cases such as that of the Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo, who performed a similar operation with El hacedor (de Borges) Remake.⁴ The structure and titles of this book coincide with those of Borges’ El hacedor, but the text reads like  a subjective, digital and pop pastiche containing links to Web pages, YouTube videos, music, monologues, Wikipedia descgriptions, etc. In short, they are trying to apply to literature the same strategies of appropriation, remake and sampling that have been used for decades in the movies, music and visual arts.

This strategy, which theoreticians such as Nicolas Bourriaud have rushed to classify with labels, such as “Postproduction” or “Altermodernity,”⁵ questions both the cult that modernity praised to “the new” and the cult that romanticism praised to “the original” and is comparable to Web surfing, the reading through links and the addiction to social networks. In short, we speak of the advent of a new audiovisual regime; of the introduction of an ecosystem of “screenocracy”⁶ for some and “the fascism of the image”⁷ for others, in which “we have a life on the other side of the screen,” and where it has never been easier to turn a biography into a kind of copy-paste product.

Yet another audiovisual product responding to this paradigm carries in its own stage name a quote and parody.⁸ I refer to Lady Gaga, the shrewd New York artist whom People magazine named one of the 10 most influential people of 2010 and whom Time magazine included in its coveted list of the 100 most relevant people of the year. Lady Gaga is to the YouTube generation what Madonna and Michael Jackson were to the MTV generation. It is no wonder that the videos of the songs Bad Romance, Telephone or the recent Judas have been visited by more than 200 million people since being posted, but there is a difference in Gaga’s endeavors, as her efforts are examples of  “the fascism of the image” approach we denounced before. While Michael Jackson and Madonna-and before them David Bowie-made their chameleon-like quality their chief trait, and every three to four months the world awaited a new image change to coincide with the launch of a new video clip or a new record, Lady Gaga’s mutations of her identity take place on a daily basis, and on many occasions several times a day. The viral system of social networking has been a much more effective means of turning her into a global icon than the recording industry’s publicity machine.

It almost goes without saying that the exceptionality of Lady Gaga is not to be found in her conceptual originality or her contributions to the history of music. Instead, her strategies of media omnipresence and keeping live performances in a perpetual state of mutation represent the desires of the new spectator perfectly. Of concern is that she goes beyond the limits of show business, becoming the deformed mirror in which many current artists regard themselves. It is not in vain that in the last two years Lady Gaga has collaborated with visual artists of the stature of Damien Hirst, Francesco Vezzoli, Frank Gehry and Terence Koh⁹, prototypes of “postproducers” who feel in their element in the world of show business, an obsolescent territory in which the artistic genre does not exist in its pure form.

Zang Huan, My New York, 2002. Performance, Whitney Museum, New York, USA. Courtesy Zang Huan Studio.

On the 30th anniversary of MOCA in Los Angeles on November 14, 2009, there was a multimedia event created by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli entitled: Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again) in which Lady Gaga interpreted the song Speechless, playing a Steinway grand piano made by Damien Hirst, while dancers from Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet danced in costumes and masks designed by the Australian movie director Baz Luhrman and the art director Catherine Martin. Lady Gaga was dressed in a costume created for the occasion by Miuccia Prada, and she wore on her head a hat designed by the architect Frank Gehry…

In her music, as well as in the image she projects in her videos, her concerts and her calculated appearances on television, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta-Lady Gaga’s real name-acknowledges a debt to a lineage that extends from David  Bowie to Madonna, passing through Dalí, Andy Warhol, Orlan, Leigh Bowery, Matthew Barney, Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Grace Jones, Cyndi Lauper, Betty Page, Cher, Marilyn Manson, Gwen Stefani, burlesque, Donatella Versace, Alexander McQueen…and a lot of other less popular references. Gaga devours these through a grotesque, hyperbolic and profoundly Neo-Baroque,¹⁰ or as Baudrillard would say, “scopically orgasmic,”¹¹ fantasy given the importance of sexual provocation in her work.

In effect, just like Madonna, Lady Gaga has turned ambiguity regarding her own sexual orientation and her commitment to causes, previously controversial and today “politically correct,” such as AIDS or gay and lesbian rights, into distinguishing characteristics. In the video clips of songs such as Alejandro, Judas or Born This Way, there is a calculated mixture of sex, religion and sadomasochism that has obvious antecedents in the videos of Madonna; for example, Like a Prayer (1989) or Justify My Love (1990). However, beyond the minor scandal that said videos may provoke in some ultraconservative circles, there is very little of rupture or transgression in these works, making it difficult to know if they are simply attitudes of outspoken decadence or gestures of cynicism in which theatricality has replaced any critical strategy. As Eloy Fernández Porta points out in his book Homo Sampler¹² (a qualifier that would also be perfect to define Lady Gaga), each supposedly radical creation carries with it its own mechanism of self-destruction, and this is where these innocuous acts of transgression end up acknowledging their parodic structure. Although it is clear that in all parody there is a link between desire and ambivalence, the proliferation of plagiarized styles reveals only a pathetic desire for notoriety, an urgency to attain, “fame,”¹³ as precarious as this may be, at all costs, assuming “the irony itself has grown stale.”¹⁴

During the 2009 MTV Awards, Lady Gaga collected one of her nine awards, in this case for the music video of her song Bad Romance, attired in a dress made of pieces of raw meat-to which, as was to be expected, no one was indifferent.¹⁵ Those who habitually search for the iconographies used by this artist as sources of inspiration hurried to relate the already notorious meat dress with the famous Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic created in 1987 by the Czech-Canadian artist Jana Sterbak or the performance My New York, by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan in 2002. They did not suspect that these works could in turn have other antecedents that, considering Lady Gaga’s fondness for punk iconography, were surely also known to her image consultants,¹⁶ like the album cover All Wrapped Up by the Northern Ireland punk rock band Undertones released in 1983, on which a model also wore a meat dress and a sausage collar-or even further back, the 1978 performance of the British artist Linder Sterling at the legendary Manchester club The Hacienda in front of her band Ludus, in which she also wore a meat dress-topped off with a menacing dildo-similar to the one that Gaga wore for the MTV Awards.¹⁷

Tania Bruguera, El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt), 1997-1999. Re-enactment of a historical event. Decapitated lamb, rope, water, salt, Cuban soil. Courtesy of Studio Bruguera. Photo: Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela.

In examples such as the one we have just seen, it is as though popular culture were establishing a symbolic “system of rewards” based on mutual appreciation among spectators, musicians and artists not necessarily corresponding to nostalgia or the lack of ideas, but rather to the symbolic act of suppressing the propriety of appearances. Thus, it is not surprising that both the music and video of Alejandro are perceived as barely disguised reinterpretations of the Madonna songs La Isla Bonita (1987) and Like a Prayer (1989), that the rhythmic structure and refrain of Born This Way have been defined by some as a remake of Blonde Ambition’s Express Yourself (1989), or that in the video of this song Lady Gaga appears with a hairdo and prostheses on her face very similar to those that the French artist Orlan has worn implanted for years, or that they contain parodic references to lesser known artists like Bjorn Melhus and Olaf Breuning. As Bourriaud points out, “postproduction looks at global culture not as a source of knowledge” but rather as a “toolbox” in which a volume of unpublished audiovisual human history is transmittable, editable, actionable, reusable…and with the setting up of the great collective repository, Web 2.0 files, also very easy to share.

In this sense, there is nothing more entertaining than deconstructing, sequence by sequence, each of Lady Gaga’s video clips and discovering that there is nothing in them that does not function as an infectious network of references, bricolages, parodies, remakes, pastiches and recycling of all kinds. Thus, in the nine and a half minutes that one of her most successful works lasts-Telephone, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, we witness a hyperbolic and frenetic collection of iconographic references previously emptied of content. Gaga and Åkerlund saturate the clip with an infinite number of “links” “that move as much on diegetic as on extradiegetic planes,”  making us look at pop culture not as a source of knowledge, but rather as an infinite palimpsest in which citations and references to movies and television series flow freely, such as Batman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Thelma & Louise, Natural Born Killers, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Death Proof, Lock & Stock, the movies of Russ Meyer, David LaChapelle and Erwin Olaf’s photofreaks, the transgenders of Del LaGrace Volcano…as well as narrative and choreographic clichés by Michael Jackson or Madonna exploited ad nauseam.

This video clip, as well as many others by Gaga, does nothing but redefine images that were already in the viewer’s mind. The citations, signs and references to which we allude are understood by a vast public, but especially by those who have been educated in “pop discourse,” without the viewer necessarily being mindful of the most profound connotations and implications of this fact. These references, which often appear in a frenetic, surreptitious and even subliminal manner, have the ability to unleash a “tidal wave of idea associations, implying the possibility that there may be a familiar although different interpretation each time the video clip is viewed. In this way a new relationship is established with the viewer based on the knowledge-or simple intuition-of the different generic codes of cultural exchange and the sensation of participating in a game of deciphering private jokes, which makes him or her identify with the artist.

As has happened with other recent audiovisual products such as James Cameron’s movie Avatar, with their para-encyclopedic nature, Gaga’s videos become a hypertext for aficionados of pop culture at a basic level, and that is precisely the reason for its success as a product for mass consumption. It may be that her detractors are right when they reproach her for her cultural cannibalism, but that strategy is nothing more than the answer to a spectator who has become lazy and to whom one must spoon-feed everything. Lady Gaga is nothing more than a symptom of what we deserve, not as spectators but as consumers.

NOTES

¹ Kanye West. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Roc -A- Fella / Def Jam), 2010.

² Zygmunt Bauman posits that in reality identities are similar to a volcanic crust that hardens, melts once more and changes form. According to Bauman, the only hetero-reference value is the need to have a flexible and versatile identity in order to confront the different mutations that the individual must confront throughout his life. See, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernidad líquida (Liquid Modernity). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999.

³ “A text is made up of a multiple writings, taken from diverse cultures that enter into reciprocal relationships of dialogue, parody or controversy, but there is a place in which this multiplicity is centered, and that place is the reader.” Roland Barthes. La muerte del autor (The Death of the Author), 1968.

⁴ Agustín Fernández Mallo. El hacedor (de Borges), Remake. Alfaguara (Madrid, 2010) In September 2011, Alfaguara publishing house, at the behest of the attorneys of María Kodama, Borges’ widow, withdrew unsold copies of El hacedor (de Borges), Remake from bookstores due to alleged plagiarism.

⁵ In Postproduction, Bourriaud describes a type of artist who works on cultural and artistic material of the second order, notably referential figures like the DJ, whose function is to revive the history of music through the copy-paste of different fragments of sound and the semionaut who reads the signs that appear in that sea of information circulating throughout the Web and stores them in his “bookmarks.” Nicolas Bourriaud. Post producción, Buenos Aires: Ed. Adriana Hidalgo, 2004, p. 114. See also: Radicante. Buenos Aires: Ed: Adriana Hidalgo, 2009. Regarding the idea of the artist as DJ, also recommended is an interview with Humberto Beck in <http://www.desta4ever.com>. Accessed, Thursday, April 30, 2009.

⁶ Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy. La pantalla global. Cultura mediática y cine en la era hipermoderna (The Global Screen. Media and film culture in the hypermodern era), Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009. [L´écran global, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2007]

⁷ F. Javier Panera. ¿“Pantallocracia“ o fascismo de la imagen? Nuevos regímenes audiovisuales en la era de la circulación promiscua de la información (“Screenocracy“ or Fascism of the Image? New audiovisual regimens in an era of the promiscuous circulation of information). Conference held during the inauguration of the Digital Life 2 exposition. Fondazione Romaeuropa, Rome, October 26, 2011.

⁸ The “surname” Gaga is a parodic reference to the song Radio Gaga, recorded by Queen in 1984, in homage to its lead singer Freddie Mercury. Lady Gaga is said to be a devoted fan.

⁹ Terence Koh is one of the artists who has collaborated most with Lady Gaga. For the 2010 Grammy Awards ceremony, Koh designed a surrealistic double piano with dozens of hands sticking out of the top (The Monster Claw Piano) so that it could be played simultaneously by Lady Gaga and Elton John. Months later, Koh and Gaga joined forces in another performance that took place in Japan entitled GAGAKOH, in which the New York artist played another customized piano (The Rubberman Piano) and wore clothes designed by the Canadian artist.

¹⁰ In fact, it would be very easy to apply to each and every one of Lady Gaga’s videos all of the dual categories that Omar Calabrese applied to La era neobarroca, Madrid: Cátedra, 1989: “(…) limit and excess; instability and metamorphosis; distortion and perversion; disorder and chaos; node and labyrinth; rhythm and repetition; detail and fragment; complexity and dissolution (…) and, of course: “more or less” and “whatever.”

¹¹ Baudrillard speaks of the escopic pornographic drive and suggests that “perhaps porno is nothing more than an allegory; that is to say, an activation of symbols, a baroque attempt at oversignification.” In: Jean Baudrillard. De la seducción (Seduction), Madrid: Cátedra, 1981, p. 33. Also recommended is the compilation of texts by Fabián Giménez Gato. ¿Qué hacer después de la orgía? El destino de la imagen en la cultura. Mexico: Cenidiap, 2007.

¹² “Every system of rules has its regulation and deregulation,” indicates Eloy Fernández Porta in Homo Sampler, Tiempo y consumo en la era Afterpop. Madrid: Anagrama, 2008.

¹³ The Fame is the title of Lady Gaga’s debut album, released in August 2008 by Interscope Music, and The Fame Monster the third EP, released in November 2009 with a cover by Hedy Slimane. According to Gaga, the record deals with “the dark side of fame,” and some of her most successful songs appear on it: Bad Romance, Telephone and Alejandro.

¹⁴ Fernando Castro. “Tribulaciones y lección de sombras. Citas y pensamientos deshilachados sobre el barroco que no cesa.” In Javier Panera (ed) Barrocos y Neobarrocos. El infierno de lo bello. Salamanca: DA2. Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura, 2006, p. 237.

¹⁵ Lady Gaga appears in similar clothing, photographed by Terry Richardson, on the cover of the Japanese edition of Vogue that was issued a few weeks after the 2009 MTV Awards ceremony.

¹⁶ Lady Gaga surrounds herself with a group of multidisciplinary artists called the Haus of Gaga, whose members take care of the costumes, scenography and music in order to achieve cohesion among the three elements.

¹⁷ One could discover other evident antecedents in the performance of El peso de la culpa (The burden of guilt) by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera in the 1990s and long before on the legendary album cover of Yesterday and Today by The Beatles, 1966, which back then sparked fiery controversy when the four members of the band appeared dressed as butchers covered in pieces of meat and the body parts of decapitated dolls.