Quick Compare| The Carnal Art of Lady Gaga and Orlan

Lady Gaga's most recent "body implants" are reminiscent of the body modification performances of the controversial French artist Orlan.

The representation of female beauty and the idealized nude body constitute two of the most potent and persistent themes of the visual arts. As a result, female artists, especially those who make themselves the subject of their art works or performances, often struggle with how best to situate and represent their own physical appearance into their practice.  Looking to the history of performance art, we can find a legacy of female artists (Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Adrian Piper, and Marina Abramovic come to mind immediately) who have had to contend with this key issue as they made themselves both the subject and object of their art practice.

These are some of the ideas that I raised in an earlier blog post when Lady Gaga first donned her infamous meat dress on the cover of Vogues Hommes Japan last year. Many people misread the act as something merely spectacular, when in fact she was carefully referencing a long tradition of female performance art that sought to transgress and reconfigure carefully established boundaries around flesh, gender, and social ritual. In her most recent iteration of this theme, Gaga’s “Born This Way” aesthetic has tapped into another legendary female performance art icon—that of the French artist Orlan.

Orlan's performance "Accouche d'elle m'aime" (Orlan gives birth to her beloved self) is very similar to Lady Gaga's visual motifs in her recent "Born This Way" video and stage performances.

Orlan rose to prominence in the art world during the mid 1960’s as an artist who used her own body to explore and measure the spaces around her. Through a long series of performances, installations, and photo works, Orlan consistently examined her own female form and persona in comparison and contrast to the traditions within art history that sought to isolate and represent women’s experience. In the 1990’s, Orlan took this examination to a more radical level by undergoing a series of plastic surgeries to further explore the standards of beauty established by centuries of male artists. As she explains in an interview with the Guardian in 2009: “my goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it."

In her final series of surgeries, Orlan resurfaced with the now infamous “horns” (normally used to enhance cheek bones) that are pictured in the image of Orlan at the beginning of this post.  These implants are not entirely unlike the “shocking” implants that appeared on Lady Gaga’s face (and on other parts of her body) in her most recent series of performances accompanying the “Born This Way” album release. Once again, I believe that Gaga is taking her goal of raising awareness of difference and unique beauty to a very conceptual level with this move, and it is clear that the notion of carnal art—described by Orlan as the “not against cosmetic surgery, but rather against the conventions carried by it and their subsequent inscription”—is also at the core of her recent efforts.

See the following clips concerning Orlan's notion of "carnal art" (warning: some may find content disturbing) and compare to the visual world created by Lady Gaga in her dramatic "Born This Way" video:





Further Reading:

Clarke, Julie. "The Sacrificial Body of Orlan." Body and Society 5.2 (1999): 185-207.

Knafo, Danielle. "Castration and Medusa: Orlan's Art and the Cutting Edge." Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10.3 (2009): 142-158.

How To Make A Living As A Filmmaker: Insights From the Experts

Image courtesy Film Industry Network

This time of year is harrowing for many fine and performing arts students as they weigh their career options and plans for the future. An uncertain economic future and shifting tide in how the arts are delivered to audiences poses many challenges, but also potential opportunities to a new generation of artists.  In particular, I am very fortunate to work with many talented film students and artists utilizing motion pictures and filmic elements in their practice. Their challenges are unique in that they are navigating a field of artistic practice that is fast changing and facing technological transformation and incursion from related fields (animation, digital design, and social media platforms) at an unprecedented rate.  In this sense it is clear how important innovation and the exchange of ideas are to the contemporary filmmaker.

With these thoughts in mind, I sat down a few weeks ago to watch a panel that was posted on the New School’s YouTube Channel (an absolutely fantastic resource that I have already blogged about here) and sponsored by the Tribeca Film Institute. Provocatively titled “How to Make a Living as a Filmmaker or How to Make a Living and Still Be a Filmmaker”, the panel explores the career options, challenges, and opportunities available to film students and artists involved with producing new media projects in a very pragmatic Q&A format.

Moderated by Sharon Badal, the head short film programmer for the Tribeca Film Festival and author of  Swimming Upstream: A Lifesaving Guide to Short Film Distribution, the panel includes: Sandi DuBowski, Director/Producer of Trembling Before G-d and Producer of A Jihad for Love;  Moon Molson, an M.F.A. graduate from Columbia University, where he won the New Line Cinema Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking Award for his thesis film Pop Foul; and Buboo Kakati, a three-time Emmy winning writer, director, and producer (her work has aired on NBC and SHOWTIME) with over 13 years of experience developing and producing documentaries, television series and films. Keeping in mind that many art school programs neglect to discuss the realities of the job market and arts industry with their graduates, this kind of panel is both eye-opening and inspiring.

Weekly Twitter Round Up

A week chock full of events-- film screenings, artist talks, student crits, student meetings, exhibition openings, end of year evaluations etc.. etc.. I have also been enjoying all of the amazing plans that students have been sharing with me about summer travel and employment. So much energy in the air! After all of the activity, I was finally able to enjoy some R&R this weekend, breathing in the calm of a walk along the ocean and then home to an afternoon of personal projects. I am glimpsing the end of term and the freedom it will soon bring! 

I know many of you are still in the thick of writing-- so take pause, grab a coffee, and enjoy a few of my favourite tweets from around the Twitterverse:

Lady Gaga Googles Herself

Loving Liz 18 ways: Elizabeth Taylor in artnet auctions

Wrote about democracy & contemporary art in the Middle East

Why the Google Books setback is an opportunity to reassert academic values

OMG! in new Oxford English Dictionary

Almost certainly the most fascinating book I'll read this year, will especially make art lovers consider new contexts

I've donated IMAGINE by John Lennon to #SongsForJapan iTunes album Download NOW Proceeds → JapaneseRedCross

At What Price Celebrity? Warhol's Portrait of Elizabeth Taylor Up For Sale

An image capturing the sale of a Warhol Elizabeth Taylor portrait in 2007-- Actor Hugh Grant famously sold this copy for an $18.5 million dollar profit.

How soon can someone profit from a deceased celebrity’s image?  This question appears to have been answered this week with the passing of movie legend Elizabeth Taylor and the announcement some 24 hours following her death of the auction of one of the most iconic Warhol portraits bearing her famous face and more infamous “violet eyes.” Currently owned by New York hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen, the 1963 silkscreen (Liz #5) will be sold May 12th as the Wall Street Journal reported today at the auction house of Phillips de Pury and is estimated to fetch in excess of $20 million dollars.

Warhol's Men in Her Life (1962) sold this past November for a staggering $71.7 million dollars at auction

Just this past November, another of Warhol’s works featuring Elizabeth Taylor sold for a staggering $63.4 million dollars through the same firm, becoming the second highest price paid at auction for a Warhol (the record of $71.7 million for Green Car Crash was paid in 2007). Men in Her Life is a seven-foot tall black and white painting based on a Life Magazine photograph of Taylor with third husband Mike Todd and future husband Eddie Fisher. Fisher, like Taylor, had only recently passed away (in September 2010), when the painting went to auction.

Representing the personal drama of a public celebrity played out in Warhol’s famous mode of repetition, the painting and its high valuation has as much to expose about our own perverse focus on celebrity culture and the price we are all willing to pay for glimpses behind the carefully constructed representations of their “perfect” lives. No doubt, the Taylor-Todd-Fisher scandal has its resonance with today’s Jolie-Pitt-Aniston spectacle and the endless repetition of images accompanying their “real-life” story.

The public's desire for images and stories of celebrity's "imperfect" lives continues as Warhol predicted

Seen in another light, the high profile auction of this category of art works reminds us once again of the often taboo subject of the art market and those commercial interests that persistently intersect with the production and circulation of art. It is also a reminder of the “umbilical cord of gold” connecting elites and art producers that art critic Clement Greenberg spoke about in his famous 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, written against the backdrop of escalating interest and valuation in works of modern art during the inter-war period of the twentieth century. In this sense, the upcoming sale of Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylor portrait exposes the reality of art as commodity connected to the public’s insatiable desire for celebrity in its most stark, opportunistic, and highly profitable light. 

Further Reading:

Alexander, Jeffrey C. "The Celebrity Icon." Cultural Sociology 4 (2010): 323-336.

Barry, Elizabeth. "Celebrity, Cultural Production, and Public Life." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (2008): 251-258.

Focus on Research| Paraphrasing and the Art of Putting Ideas Into Your Own Words

Plagiarism is a serious academic offence that has become an increasing problem in the digitally mediated “cut and paste” world that students inhabit. The temptation to take another person’s ideas and insert them directly into your own essays is literally a click away, even while most overt plagiarism leaps off the page like a red flag to professors (trust me on this—most cut and pastes are easy to detect!). Still, what many students do not realize is how often their own unintended actions read as deliberate plagiarism. Consulting the "Actions That Might Be Seen as Plagiarism" chart, it is important to see just how wide ranging the act of plagiarism is.

The grey area of “building on someone’s ideas without citation” is the most common problem I see with student research papers, and I routinely encourage students to risk over-citing in their papers versus passing off ideas without proper recognition. Here is where the skill of paraphrasing comes in. 

Paraphrasing is the act of re-stating ideas from a text or passage into your own words with proper acknowledgment. 

At minimum, a failing grade on a paper is the most common action taken against plagiarism, intended or not. 

It is a skill that will help you avoid the dreaded mistake of writing a research paper where you simply string together a series of quotes without proper introduction, analysis or citation (see Mistakes 2 and 3 in Top 10 Common Student Mistakes When Preparing Research Essays).  Importantly, paraphrasing provides you with the opportunity to demonstrate your comprehension and analytical skills through the act of re-phrasing ideas that you come across in your research. There is of course a thin line between paraphrasing and plagiarism, but generally speaking, you can prevent this concern by reviewing examples of effective paraphrasing and ALWAYS citing the source of your paraphrase clearly and transparently.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab "Write It In Your Own Words" is an excellent source to check out to help you practice this skill. I also encourage you to avoid the perils of unintended plagiarism through a few common sense practices outlined beneath the chart linked above: 1) Avoid procrastinating when it comes to the actual writing of your papers—leaving this part of the process to the last minute leads to desperate acts of “cut and paste”; 2) give yourself ample time to revise and edit your paper to catch unintended plagiarism in sections of your writing; 3) proof-read, proof-read, proof-read and then buy a friend a coffee to do the same. Remember that even unintended plagiarism can be grounds for a failing grade and possible disciplinary action at your university. Academic integrity stands at the foundation of the university endeavour and most professors are on high-alert to identify and expose plagiarism when marking. Learn to guard yourself through improving your writing and citing skills.