5 23 11

What was life *BG?

Furthermore, what was life **BTW?



(* BG = Before Gaga)
(** BTW = Born This Way)

Judas Kiss / Gaga Kiss

In her new video for her second single Judas from her third album to be released 23 May Born This Way Gaga reenacts the story of Jesus and Judas, modernized, with a middle Eastern aesthetic. There is so much happening in this video but I think the most provocative moment is the Judas kiss/Gaga kiss.

The Judas kiss is known to signify the betrayal of Christ.
Gaga inserts hereslf as a median between these two oppoisites - Jesus/light/goodness and Judas/darkness/evil. She not only inserts herself between them but also gives Judas a deadly kiss perhaps cancelling out the effect of his kiss that signifies the betrayal of Christ. She 'kisses' Judas wi th a gun that shoots lipstick as a bullet that Gaga smears on his face. The gun appears again in this video as a symbol of the phallus that Gaga herself is wielding, robbing Judas of his power.
Perhaps all of this also speaks to the need to abolish stereotypical dichotomies - light/dark, evil/good, the I and the other, activity/passivity - and recognize that in fact opposites are one.

Ergo, Gaga is not merely playing the role of median bringing opposites together, she is abolishing them completely demonstrating the Christ and Judas are one in the same.

gagamagoria

Wednesday night W.J.T Mitchell came to give two talks in Montreal. One at 12h30 at UQAM - Idolatry: Nietzsche, Blake, Poussin, and one at 18h30 at MAC - The Historical Uncanny and the War on Terror. In the second he talked about cloning terror, the phantasmagoria from the 19th century, and the viral effect images now have today - spreading like wildfire across the internet, being instantly accessible, even encoding time and place stamps on images to retrace where and when they were taken - which was the case of the hooded man, thought to be a terrorist who became the staple image for the war on terror and the ending of it (which will never happen). He said that it was thought this image could end the war on terror - are images so powerful that they could in fact end an entire world?

Transpose all this onto the mega pop queen transforming identity politics - Gaga. Her new video is literally a gagamagoria.
phantasmagoria is defined as: a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream. in the 19th century there were phantasmagoria theatres where images of ghosts were projected onto smoke - they seemed to hang suspended in the air creating a dream like reality.
isn't it just this that gaga is doing? creating a race empty of prejudice, modeled after herself, the mother monster.

we live in gaga-magoria.


(image from Lady Gaga's new release "Born this Way")

A New Religion

In Le Gai Savoir para. 125 Nietzsche, for the first time, pronounces God is dead, and that we have killed him.


(Giuseppe Sanmartino, Vieled Christ, detail, 1753. Naples, Cappella di Sansevero)

N’avez-vous pas entendu parler de cet homme insensé qui, ayant allumé une lanterne en plein midi, courait sur la place du marché et criait sans cesse : « Je cherche Dieu! Je cherche Dieu! » - Et comme là-bas se trouvaient précisément rassemblés beaucoup de ceux qui ne croyaient pas en Dieu, il suscita une grand hilarité. L’a-t-on perdu? dit l’un.

S’est-il égaré comme un enfant? dit un autre. Ou bien se cache-t-il quelque part ? A-t-il peur de nous? S’est-il embarqué? A-t-il émigré? – ainsi ils criaient et riaient tous à la fois. L’insensé se précipita au milieu d’eux et les perça de ses regards. « Où est Dieu? cria-t-il, je vais vous le dire! Nous l’avons tué – vous et moi! Nous tous sommes ses meurtriers!

Embrace the new religion.
Follow the revolution.


(Lady Gaga, posing with veiled ensemble)

Re-incarnation.
For the love of little monsters, fame, bad girl meat and free bitchez.

Nietzschean Eternal Return

eternelle retour à Gaga

other. in-between. border.

(Lady Gaga posing with a dildo in her pants, for Q Magazine photo shoot)

The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Zeigfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.
(Mulvey, Laura, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1973)

embodying the ugly

(Lady Gaga in Bad Romance, decked out in faux Polar bear fur coat, about to torch the man who bought her at auction, with a fire spurting bar.)

The poet makes use of the ugliness of forms: what use of this is granted to the painter? Painting, as an imitative faculty, can express ugliness: painting as a fine art cannot express it. In the first case all visible objects belong to it; in the second it includes only those visible objects that arouse pleasurable feelings [...]
The same holds for the ugliness of forms. This ugliness offends our eyes, clashes with our taste for order and harmony, arousing repugnance without our taking into account the real existence of the object we perceive as ugly. We should not like to see Thersytes, either in nature or in an image; and although his image displeases us less, this happens not because the ugliness of his form ceases to be ugly in an imitation, but because we possess the faculty of abstracting from ugliness, and we delight only in the painter's art. But even this delight is constantly interrupted by the reflection on how art has been badly employed, and seldom will this thought fail to bring with it the devaluation of the artist [...]
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoon (1766)

Nietzsche + Heidegger - God = Gaga

At the age of twenty-eight, as a professor in Basel, Nietzsche writes (X, 112):

"There are times of great danger in which philosophers appear - times when the wheel rolls ever faster - when philosophers and artists assume the place of the dwindling mythos. They are far ahead of their time, however, for the attention of contemporaries is only quite slowly drawn to them. A people which becomes aware of its dangers produces the genius."

(Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche: Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell, (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1979) pg. 3)

Having studied Nietzsche and realized God is dead, Maëva at the age of 27, dedicates herself to the study of thinkers, art and the religion of Gaga, praying to the leopard clad deity for a safe journey through the next stack of books dedicated to Nietzsche.

paparazzi

Being photographed by the constant mob of paparazzi photographers who chase me around Montréal day in and day out.
Oh, life is so hard!



Maeva and Brendan Fernades, nominee representing Ontario, captured at the 2010 Sobey Art Award Gala, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.

Check out Brendan's great work here.

say goodbye to my bad girl meat

because she's gonna be writing essays till the days turn golden and warm again.

wanted: your help

If you were to write an essay about Lady Gaga and her place within the visual arts in the 21st century, which lyric (of the following choices) would you choose for your title:

a) He ate my heart, and then he ate my brain
b) I want your ugly, I want your disease
c) Silicone, saline, poison, inject me
d) show me your teeth
e) other: please state.

Gaga + TK = eaten heart

Lady Gaga has already mimiced many famous amazing milestone artists.
Now Gaga teams up with Canadian performance artist Terence Koh. On several occassions. Anyone see the co-performance with Elton John? Where Gaga is thrown into an inferno machine and emerges with him at a double ended piano with arms extended raising from the middle? the piano was designed by Terence Koh.

then there is the odd performance where the two (Gaga and TK) count out and place in a tea cup 88 pearls. (called 88 pearls). but they skip numbers, recreating their own system for counting.

Now I found, via Gaga journal, GAGAKOH - a performance that they performed together in Tokyo.


(images c/o littlemonster.blog.com)

You can read more about the performance as well as Gaga's role as HIV/Aids activist - one of many activist roles she incorporates - in the latest entry to the Gaga Journal (here!)
the title is one of my favourite of her lyrics: I want your disease.

Gaga Does Dada

In a wild turn of events, Gaga uses her mimetic skillz on one of the most famous Dadaist works by one of the most famous 20th century artists.


Armitage Shanks: "I'm not Fucking Duchamp but I love pissing with you"
(image courtesy of Gaga Stigmata)

It seems like the logical next step in this ever evolving machine of spectacle and flux.
There has already been homage to the body and the performance art that emerged from the 60s notably Carolee Schneemann. Then the mimesis of Madonna, MJ and other landmark big shoe pop stars that Gaga somehow can over shadow despite the shortness of her career. the move from fame to fame monster was an interesting step - we are in love with a monster who is nothing but grotesque.
More mimesis - too literal maybe of Jana Sterbak and the meat dress Vanitas, but also recalling the ideas of decay and mortality that is present in the amazing work of Kiki Smith.
more outfits than we could ever imagine, that are so intense in and of themselves. one must wonder where she stores them, and how she can stand wearing them. forget comfort folks. life is a performance.
Jo Caledrone - alter ego of Ms. Gaga.
And finally Dada. It is very logical, I wish I could have foreseen it but I wasn't at all prepared for this, despite her work already resonating the Dadaist vision quite a bit.
*sigh* when will I learn.

need I say... anything?!

Gaga academics has already exploded all over the internet.
How you ask?
By Gaga Stigmata the "new technological breed of journal" dedicated to the theoretical study of the Gaga monster.

And I seriously dig that.
And I will likely read through every single piece written in this journal.
Thank you Lord, for granting me the researching skillz to find this gift to just further mind fuck my brain.

Bisous,
Maëva.

GAGA


(image courtesy of V magazine)

I'm in the genius camp.
and more to come on this.
including (probably/possible) academic paper (i hope) in french (i hope).