Lady Gaga
The preview of the shooting by the photographers Inez and Vinoodh
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L'Uomo Vogue January 2012 - Throughout the feature. Jacket Yves Saint Laurent; pants Chanel; hat Philip Treacy; sunglasses Lady Gaga's own; metal armor Millennium Fx. make up artist Val Garland; hair stylist Frederic Aspiras; manicure Marian Newman. Fashion director Nicola Formichetti.
L'Uomo Vogue January 2012 -
L'Uomo Vogue January 2012 -
L'Uomo Vogue January 2012 -
L'Uomo Vogue January 2012 -
L'Uomo Vogue January 2012 -
Do you remember that swan dress designed by Macedonian designer Marjan Pejoski, that Björk wore at the Academy Awards ceremony in 2001? Well, if Björk reminded of a spoiled Walt Disney cartoon, the new metamorphoses in Lady Gaga’s wardrobe reminded of Terminator. The Swan Lake turned into a cemetery of cars. From nature to mechanics. Lady Gaga has always followed contemporary art closely, even if with some years’ delay. The famous meat dress designed by Franc Fernandez and created by Nicola Formichetti was a reference to Vanitas, a 1987 work by Canadian artist Jana Sterbak (when baby Gaga was only 1 year old).
Also the new “hard couture” by Miss Germanotta springs from the deep world of contemporary art. Sometimes the singer almost looks like one of John Chamberlain’s crumpled wrecks, sometimes, instead, she reminds of the visionary craziness of a great performer who became an architect, Vito Acconci. Or again she recalls the recent sculptures of another veteran, Frank Stella. Lady Gaga is a sculpture-singer. Her metamorphoses are proper performances or aesthetic mutations, more than genetic. In her style there’s something “sci-barbaric” – i.e. barbaric sci-fiction – like in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner, or Conan the Destroyer starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Grace Jones.
Strangely enough, these are all films that recall Sterbak’s works of the mid 80s, which seem to be the mine from which the singer extracts the richness of her identity. Lady Gaga apocalyptically moves up and down the history of art, cinema and performance. The Dadaists of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire come back to life with her, those that with their extreme shows pre-announced the absurdities of WWI. But you can also smell the blood of Viennese Actionism: one of its protagonists, Otto Muehl, stated in 1967 that material action was promising direct pleasure and that it satisfied more than a piece of bread. Don’t be surprised, therefore, if at next Grammy Awards Lady Gaga will arrive dressed like a “Baguette au fromage et jambon”. Great actionist of the Actionists was also Rudolf Schwarzkogler: his performances consisted of dressing like a dead fish, or a rotten chicken, or covering himself in lighted light-bulbs or in colorful unidentifiable liquids, or again being wrapped in bandages like a mummy in order to mutilate himself later on.
But from Lady Gaga we are expecting something more metallic and less organic. The butcher’s season seems to be over and seems not ready for a comeback. Gaga must definitely have Ron Athey in mind, the super-tattooed and super-pierced American performer. But she could also steal some ideas from Yang Zhichao, a Chinese performance artist that had grass planted on his back or objects implanted in his legs or on his stomach. However, we have the feeling that Lady Gaga does not want anything implanted in her body (anything of permanent, of course), not even as a joke. Her body is not a territory to conquer, it’s rather a stage on which you can set up a new scenography each time, like another video-artist, Cao Fei, who had a zoological-futuristic imagination.
However, can we forget the electric dresses with many light bulbs of different shapes and colors created by Atsuko Tanaka, Japanese artist of the mid 50s? No, we can’t forget them because one day we might find them – once changed and stylistically improved – on our Lady G. And how not to mention Matthew Barney’s cycle of films Cremaster, the most influential American artist of the late 20th century, a Lady Gaga of the world of art in his own way: with the costumes of his films you could dress an army of Gagas.
Are Gaga’s mutations only a summary of the most recent history of performance art, then? Some think so, but they’re wrong. Nowadays artists, from Cattelan to our Lady GG, don’t feel any longer the urgency of reinventing themselves from scratch in order to exist. They know that they are medium and message at the same time. They are connectors which offer images that were confined to the darkness or that were considered too élite to a wider public, at times a huge one. Few people talked about or remembered Jana Serbak before Lady Gaga appeared wearing an “evening steak”. Performance, even the derived one, sometimes helps discover things that would otherwise get lost in the collective indifference. Lady Gaga belongs to a generation of mutatis mutandis, that is to say those who build their own identity by changing things that already existed but that needed to be changed in order to continue to exist. That does not mean copying: it means putting on stage.
Francesco Bonami, L'Uomo Vogue, January 2012 (n. 427), p. 266
Jacket Yves Saint Laurent; pants Chanel; hat Philip Treacy; sunglasses Lady Gaga's own; metal armour, Millennium Fx. Make up artist Val Garland; hair stylist Frederic Aspiras; manicure Marian Newman. Fashion editor Nicola Formichetti.