#1
Lady Gaga - an Avatar for Our Times?
Madonna modelled herself on a sexually unrestrained, powerful and de-sanitised version of Marilyn Monroe and rebelled against patriarchal Catholic constraints of the feminine, using the notion of wanton sexuality as her arsenal.
Michael Jackson refused to be categorised according to race and gender and mixed these up in both theatrics and surgery, to much public speculation and psychoanalysis. Freddy Mercury was openly sexually promiscuous and gay and celebrated his choices with an engaging and charismatic physical vitality.
These are just some of the groundbreaking pop icons that Lady Gaga has modelled herself upon. She has said in interviews that her influences are rooted in the past and include singers (David Bowie), actors (Marlene Dietrich), artists (Picasso) and filmmakers (Hitchcock/Fellini).
The result is a hodgepodge that many outside of her fan base find difficult to attribute sense and meaning to.
But perhaps Gaga is an icon that is not meant to be understood or defined. Certainly she has done more to engage the world in a speculative debate about what she is than any of her predecessors who, though complex, were much easier to pigeonhole. Gaga, it seems, is indefinable.
Reading Gaga through the postmodern literary lens, as if engaging with an open-ended text, is perhaps one way to grasp the slippery Gaga phenomenon. Like a postmodern writer, she has borrowed from thestable that preceded her and has plagiarized, layered herself, and constructed a bricolage into the sculptural persona she has become and upon whom it is difficult to attach a singular interpretation.
Gaga is a metanarrative. There is an element of reflexive self-consciousness in all her spectacular public appearances. She has openly declared that she went back and looked at who was original, quirky, offbeat, different and then used all these influences to write herself. This has resulted in a multilayered, mosaiced and exploded spectacle that cannot be categorized or contained in a definite critique.
While some attribute deep meaning to her persona others decry it as meaningless.
Drawing from theorist Roland Barthes's text, The death of an Author, Lady Gaga reads like a text, which does not rely on deep meaning or lucidity. She becomes a "multi- dimensional space in which a variety of influences, none of them original, blend and clash". She has set herself up as an "eternal copyist", at once sublime and over the top and whose profound ridiculous dimensions of the spectacular indicates precisely the truth of any art form. The contemporary artist "can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original."
#2
URL: http://www.avclub.com/articles/homer-goes-to-college,88668/
#3 http://www.haaretz.com/culture/arts-leisure/aghast-at-the-monsters-of-the-tel-aviv-skyline.premium-1.482242
#4Http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/the_death_of_postmodernism_and_beyond
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