"Can't Read My Poker Face": The Postmodern Aesthetic & Mimesis of Lady Gaga
By Ella Bedard
According
to Gagapedia, the online encyclopedia dedicated to pop phenomenon Lady
Gaga, the 24 year-old singer-performer’s real name is Stefani Joanne
Angelina Germanotta. She was born in New York, New York, is of Italian
heritage, and has classical piano and vocal training. The ‘wiki’
biography goes on to explain that Gaga started performing in 2005,
after dropping out of university to pursue her musical career. In 2007
she was signed to Streamline/Interscope Records, which produced her
debut album The Fame in 2008. By the time her second album The Fame Monster was released the following year, Lady Gaga had become a multi-platinum international star.[1]
It is typically considered appallingly bad form to cite a fan-run
website in an academic analysis. In this case, however, there are two
reasons why this practice is permissible: first, Lady Gaga is so recent
a phenomenon that little critical scholarship exists on the artist’s
life or work at this time. Secondly, (and this is the argument I will
further elaborate in this piece), the performer’s actual biography is
not only inconsequential for the purpose of this analysis, it is
unimportant to the point of being inconvenient for the success of Lady
Gaga’s career. It is not simply that Stefani Germanotta’s normal
American upbringing clashes with the ultra-glamorous persona of Gaga.
What potentially tarnishes her image is the fact that Lady Gaga has any
history at all prior to her rise to fame.
What
is most notable about Gaga, and what I will analyze here, is her
visual aesthetic. Gaga has a highly allusive, almost grotesque,
haute-couture style. Sometimes she resembles other pop stars, sometimes
a character from Japanese animation, or a Roy Lichtenstein print. What
one might call her ‘actual’ or ‘natural’ visage is virtually unknown
to the public, since she always appears in costume, mimicking a
plurality of feminine archetypes, but also performing more androgynous
roles. Because she is seemingly without origin and constantly shifting
her aesthetic self-presentation, Lady Gaga is quintessentially
post-modern. From a feminist perspective, the fact that Gaga’s
celebrity persona amounts to little more than a collage of gender
citations is potentially subversive, while from a more traditionally
Marxist perspective, it is the lack of grounding contexts that makes
Gaga into a pure commodity fetish without inherent use-value beyond her
aesthetic appeal and wide-scale marketability. In any case, that Gaga
has adopted non-essentiality and pastiche as her persona is evidence of a
bourgeoning trend in popular music culture: fragmentation,
self-reflexivity, and the surface play of signification – the criteria
used to periodize post-modern culture – have been overtly adopted as the
dominant aesthetic in what is (over-simplistically) referred to as
‘mainstream’ culture. The paradox, of course, is that to adopt
post-modernity as an aesthetic is to avow the loss of any grounding
principle as a meta-narrative and as a practice that can be imitated
and reproduced. Thus, what we see with Gaga is a redoubling of the
post-modern. Through her aestheticization of post-modernity, Lady Gaga
is able to capitalize on its marketability, while simultaneously holding
up the practices of late-capitalism for critical analysis.
It
is hard to say exactly what about Lady Gaga warrants so much
attention. Musically, she is not particularly distinctive. Heavy beats,
repetitive melodic hooks, and catchy lyrics are what make every pop
song infectious and Gaga hardly deviates from this form. But it is not
the music so much as Gaga herself that is being marketed. Not
insignificantly, Gaga identifies herself as a performance artist as
opposed to a musician. What she seems to acknowledge with her
spectacles and self-presentation is that the essence of the Gaga persona
and the engine behind her celebrity is fame itself. Much of Gaga’s
allure is derived from her immediate ascent to superstardom. As dance
music icon Kylie Minogue explains, “[Gaga] is like a meteor that just
came from outer space and landed on the pop landscape or pop/dance
landscape. And just… there was dust in everyone’s face.”[2]
Gaga has barely released a second album and already she is being hailed
as the new Queen of Pop. The titles of her albums are somewhat
prolific (or one might say performative), since they refer to her
extreme popularity, which occurred simultaneously to the release of
those albums. In other words, there was no Gaga before her fame, and no
fame before The Fame.
During interludes at her “Monster Ball” concerts, Gaga reads the “Little Monster Manifesto” which articulates this point:
So,
the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this
sentiment: They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the
history of the kingdom, and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is
in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the
lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image.
Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we
perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future. When
you're lonely, I'll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.[3]
Like
pop-artist Andy Warhol whom Gaga cites as an artistic influence, Gaga
acknowledges that fame is at once an obsession and the constitutive
feature of her identity. The relationship between Gaga, the “Mother
Monster,”[4] and her “Little Monster” following resembles the dialectical relationship between Master and Slave. She is only
insofar as she exists before the eyes of the public: as much as her
audience is captivated by her performances, she is not only captivated
but produced as a result of the devotion and constant attention of her
fans. The actual facts of Germanotta’s life, including where she was
born, where she was trained, and what her artistic intentions are, are
no more real
than the information that circulates about her on the Internet. Gaga
is, as Jean Baudrillard would have it, pure simulacrum, “a real without
origin or reality: a hyperreal.”[5]
Put differently, Lady Gaga does not exist. Those potentially
inaccurate shards of signification found in the media and on the
Internet are what constitute “the history of the kingdom” and amount to
the “spiritual hologram” that is the Lady Gaga phenomenon[6].
As Gaga seems to acknowledge in the “Little Monster Manifesto,” she
‘is’ only insofar as she exists as performance and image.
One
might argue that every celebrity that we become familiar with via the
mediation of Internet and magazine exposés is a simulated construction
in this same way. The difference with Gaga, however, is that her
performance highlights and plays with the illusory nature of reality.
In this age of spectacle, as
Baudrillard would have it, the difference between what is ‘real’ and
what is ‘artificial’ is almost arbitrarily determined by way of
convention. For example, celebrities are presented as having a public
persona that is revealed during designated instances of performance, but
they are also ‘caught’ by the paparazzi in private leading their
‘real’ lives with friends, family, and sweatpants. The constancy of
Gaga’s staged persona works to problematize the false dichotomy between
the performers’ ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ identity. At her younger
sister’s high school graduation, for example, Gaga turns out in a white
lace body suit and an enormous black hat with a veil and a lace train.[7]
There is little difference between this costume and what she wears
when performing on stage or in music videos. She is never ‘caught’ by
the camera off-stage since there is no ‘real’ Lady Gaga behind her
performed identity.
In
her essay “Grab Your Old Tricks: Lady Gaga and Reflective
Performance,” Kathryn Leedom notes how Gaga does not project an image
for her audience’s consumption so much as she reflects the (consumer)
habits of her audiences back to them. Perhaps the best example of this
is the way in which Gaga has imitated her interlocutors in certain high
profile interviews. During a Larry King interview aired June 1, 2010,
Gaga is shown with her hair cut short and slicked back, wearing a white
collared shirt, black suspenders and a black tie, mirroring King’s own
characteristic style and gestures.[8]
This is what Leedom calls the “reflective performance” of Gaga. Though
she is incredibly cooperative in this and other interviews, there is
never anything genuinely revealing about these encounters. With Barbara
Walters (whom Gaga is also dressed to resemble) Gaga humbly admits
that she never takes off her glasses but will do so in this interview.
Though it may seem that she is here exposing her ‘true’ self, she is
simply playing into Walter’s publicly established disarming style.
Later, she confesses to being a family-loving Italian girl, echoing
countless other stars that have made the same appeal to authenticity
when sitting with Walters.[9]
In this performance, Gaga succeeds in imitating the form of the
Barbara Walters interview, even tearing up when discussing her family
-the way celebrities invariably do in a Walters exposé. In the
reflective performance, Gaga mirrors the context in which she is
situated rather than revealing some ‘inner truth.’ When sitting with
King, she reflects King; when sitting with Walters she is any and every
celebrity who has been interviewed by Walters.
In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson defines this ever-shifting mimetic practice as pastiche:
Pastiche
is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the
wearing of a stylistic mask […] but without parody’s ulterior motive,
without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still
latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.[10]
Parody
can only occur if the unique style being imitated is perceived as
having deviated from some norm. In this regard, Jameson explains, it is
a distinctly modern practice, since it implies belief in the existence
of an essential, stable reality. The postmodern equivalent of pastiche
is a form of dumb or blank parody; it plays and mimes various styles
without calling these styles back to any whole or constant reality.
Thrashing
dance choreography, video sunglasses, and the characteristic hair bow
(literally a bow made out of hair) have become part of Gaga’s distinct
aesthetic. However, she is equally known for the slipperiness of her
appearance. In the music video for “Bad Romance,” which inaugurates the
current high-art/fashion phase of Gaga’s career, she looks radically
different in almost every shot. In one scene, her eyes have been
digitally enhanced to give them the glossy, doe-like quality of a
Japanese anime character. In the video for “Alejandro” she wears
conical guns as a brassiere and has bleached blonde hair, mimicking the
iconic style of 1980s Madonna. For post-modern theorist of gender and
identity, Judith Butler, there is great political potential in such
parodic practices. For Butler, the gendered ‘I’ that is identified as
either ‘woman’ or ‘man’ does not possess innate sexuality: “gender is a
performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait […] the illusion of an inner depth.”[11]
A ‘woman’ is not female in essence. Rather, the female ‘I’ is
reconstituted again and again when that individual participates in a
performance of feminine identity. Thus, one’s identity as ‘woman’ is in
no way homogenous, for at every moment the female ‘I’ is constituted
anew and with difference through the performer’s sequential citation of
gender norms.
With
her constant imitation of popular gendered tropes, Lady Gaga’s
performances work to disrupt the myth of an essential femininity.
Consider the music video for “Telephone,” in which Gaga dances in a
jaguar suit in front of her truck in the desert, imitating country-pop
star Shania Twain in her 1997 video “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Here,
Gaga has contorted the conventional sexuality of Twain into something
much more grotesque. Her one-piece cat suit includes boning around the
ribs and pelvis that give Gaga the appearance of having a feline
skeletal structure. In this way, the outfit blurs the line between the
sexual appeal of animal print and the taboo of inter-species relations.
Similarly, Gaga’s ghostly white make-up and dark eyes make her look
like a corpse, producing a thanato-erotic anxiety in her spectators.
Thus, in her imitation of Twain, Gaga has succeeded in making a
familiar feminine image into an altogether uncomfortable one. Though
Gaga’s body conforms to conventional standards of feminine beauty, it
is used as a blank canvas on which a plurality of different identities –
not all of them feminine – can be projected. Because Gaga moves so
rapidly (but not seamlessly) between uncanny parodies, her appearance
draws attention to the fact that gender is always imitatively
constituted. The unending media gossip about the real status of Gaga’s
gender and sexuality is a testament to the anxiety that her
performances of drag have created. Though Gaga appears practically naked
in almost all her music videos, her sexual identity remains ambiguous
and creates uneasiness in her spectators. Insofar as Gaga continuously
parodies the recognizable styles of other artists, she has made an
identity of pastiche. She cites iconic, often gendered identities
without indicating the existence of a ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ self that
these performances can be said to mask.
In
defining pastiche, Jameson refers to the work of Andy Warhol, whose
Campbell’s Soup Can prints index the hyper-commodified culture of Late
Capitalism without ever “completing the hermeneutic gesture.”[12]
By transposing the commodity into the realm of art, removing them from
any larger system or historical context, Warhol’s work highlights the
already fetishistic nature of the commodity. In doing so, Warhol brings
consumer culture into critical light, as the spectator sees the
division between the aesthetic and economic realms disappear. Leedom
makes a similar argument about Gaga’s reflective performances, arguing
that Gaga’s self-commodification and the blatant product placement in
her videos “functions as a mirror for consumer culture and her
audience.”[13]
However, there is a crucial difference between Warhol’s prints and
Gaga’s product placement: Warhol was selling himself and his art, not
Campbell’s soup. Gaga on the other hand, is marketing both herself and
the products in her video. In “Telephone” there are two different types
of product placement. Purchasable goods, such as a Virgin Mobile cell
phone, a Polaroid camera, and Gaga’s own Heartbeat Headphones, appear
in the video. There are also fake product placements, such as the
Double Breasted Drive-Thru soda and sandwich wrappers shown in Beyonce’s
truck, the iconic Pussy Wagon from Quentin Tarrantino’s Kill Bill films.
Here, Gaga makes a Warhol-esque gesture by mocking blatant consumerism
and American excess. However, Gaga simultaneously promotes and
benefits from these same practices. If Warhol’s art gestured towards
the inherent consumerism in art, Gaga’s videos completely obliterate
the difference between art and the economic market: she is selling, she
is being sold, she is unapologetically sold out.
The
question remains as to whether Gaga’s postmodernism only gestures
towards a more radical feminist or capitalism critique before settling
into a less subversive position. For both Jameson and Butler, what
practices of aesthetic or identity pastiche imply is “a new kind of
flatness or depthlessness” that corresponds to the post-modern distrust
of the discreet modern subject.[14] For Butler, the practice of gender citation serves to “dispute the psyche as inner depth,”[15]
contesting the notion that “I” am autonomous and whole before my
encounter with (gendered) others. The paradox of Gaga’s performance, as
Leedom points out, is that she is “extremely unique and yet reminiscent
of many various people.”[16]
We see the simulacra of Gaga working in full effect, producing such a
high volume of convincing images that we find ourselves buying the
reality of her intentionally artificial performances. Ironically, it is
because of her overt mimicry and allusive style that Gaga is being
presented and celebrated as a highly individualized artist-genius who
has changed the face of popular culture.
Online culture critics such as Leedom celebrate Gaga for her deconstructionist approach to pop music.[17]
They do so assuming that Gaga intends to subvert the genres and
systems in which she is so deeply entrenched. I am not entirely
convinced by Gaga’s self-proclaimed dedication to “love and art.”[18]
However, this analysis is not concerned with whether or not Lady Gaga
has “genuine” artistic merit. What matters for our purposes is that
there is no sound way to resolve this debate. The tension between Gaga
as commodity fetish and Gaga as deconstructive subject-less art object
cannot be resolved. In her work A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Linda
Hutcheon explains that postmodern art and theory incarnate such
paradoxes, “not by choosing sides, but by living out the contradiction
of giving in to both urges.”[19]
In Gaga, there are a number of unresolved tensions: between
titillation and the grotesque, between the pure pleasure of pop culture
and the ideologies being showcased, and between her absolute
complicity and subversion of dominant discourses and capitalist forces.
What these paradoxes demand is critical attention: through investigation
and discussion, we cannot determined who or what Gaga ‘is’. Rather, we
are able to trace the various discourses – of gender, of capital, and
of popular culture – to create a fluid and temporary sketch of what Lady
Gaga presents as a phenomenon of late capitalist post-modernity.
[1] 2009. Web. <http://ladygaga.wikia.com/wiki/Lady_Gaga>.
[2]
"Kylie Minogue On Lady Gaga: ‘She’s An Absolute Force To Be Reckoned
With’." Access Hollywood 3 June 2010:Web. 9 Jun 2010.
<http://www.accesshollywood.com/kylie-minogue-on-lady-gaga-shes-an-absolute-force-to-be-reckoned-with_article_33133>.
[3] 2009. Web. <http://ladygaga.wikia.com/wiki/Gagapedia>.
[4] Gaga, Lady. Web. 9 Jun 2010. <http://twitter.com/ladygaga>.
[5]
Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Simulations." Selected Writings. 2nd
ed. Rev. and Expanded ed. Stanford, California: Standford University
Press, 2001. Pg169.
[6] 2009. Web. <http://ladygaga.wikia.com/wiki/Gagapedia>.
[7]
"Lady Gaga Attends Her Sister's Graduation." Styleite. Web. 11 Jun
2010. <http://www.styleite.com/media/lady-gaga-graduation-photo/>.
[8] "Lady Gaga FULL Interview On Larry King Live." 1 June 2010. Web. 10 Jun 2010. <www.youtube.com>
[9] "20/20 Lady Gaga Interview with Barbara Walters." January 22 2010. Web. 10 Jun 2010. <www.youtube.com>
[10]
Frederic, Jameson. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." Modern
Criticism and Theory: A Reader. 3rd Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood.
Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2008. 542.
[11]
Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge,
1991. p. 134.
[12]
Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism." Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed.
K.M Newton. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 279.
[13]
Leedom, Kathryn. "'Grab Your Old Tricks':Lady Gaga and Reflective
Performance." Gaga Stigmata (2010):Web. 10 Jun 2010.
<http://gagajournal.blogspot.com >.
[14] Jameson, “Logic of Late Capitalism,” 272.
[15] Butler, “Insubordination”, 1498.
[16]
Leedom, Kathryn. "'Grab Your Old Tricks':Lady Gaga and Reflective
Performance." Gaga Stigmata (2010):Web. 10 Jun 2010.
<http://gagajournal.blogspot.com >.
[17] Gaga Stigmata n. pag. Web. 11 Jun 2010. <http://gagajournal.blogspot.com >.
[18] "20/20 Lady Gaga Interview with Barbara Walters." January 22 2010. Web. 10 Jun 2010. <www.youtube.com>
___
Author Bio:
Ella
Bedard is a student of contemporary history, culture, and criticism in
Halifax, Nova Scotia. This year she will be moving to Toronto where
she hopes to pursue her interests in performance, gender ambiguity, and
Gaga.
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