Found this article on the Internet today about the growing debate between young Lady Gaga and feminist Camille Paglia.
Leading feminist author Camille Paglia, 63, has hit out at the singer’s flamboyant, racy image – insisting her over-the-top sexuality is actually ‘stripped of genuine eroticism’.
This is interesting (to me), because Paglia thinks that sex and body are the most important aspects of Lady Gaga’s work. But I think that Gaga is passing through the costume phases of her predecessors and de-emphasizing the role of the body within the dialectal framework established by her Enlightenment models. Instead, she’s concentrating on exactly that which Paglia thinks is so important as to be definitive in the dialectic of the feminist experience. There is no room in her dialectic for anything but more and better and cleverer explorations of the body, which has been the centerpiece of the feminist contribution to art.
Paglia’s Failing Feminism
In my reading of feminism, men were explorers of the mental universe, which by 1950 (or thereabouts) had failed to secure the final promise of human history to end once and for all the questions that pro-modern thinkers (like Cicero and Homer, for instance) had failed to answer. We were told (and some people believed) that modern man finally had the tools that his primitive ancestors had not the wherewithal to have conceived.
Women had a different perspective on the vertical male orientation of the universe (imagine an erect penis if you will). Women’s perspective was more of a circular round opening (imagine…oh, you know what I was going to say). This was the generative idea that the male perspective had gotten away from in order to pursue a
This is like the marital debate between Shelley and his wife (not actually his wife), the author of Frankenstein. Shelley had a vertical orientation towards the truth. He didn’t need women around to conceive. They were merely the vehicles of horizontal (and useless) generation. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mary conceives of the tower pointing up at the sky and drawing down the powers of the heavens to create a life without the nurturing capacity of women to be something of a sin. Shelley’s dream of giving life succeeds, but the creature he conceives turns into a monster that hunts his creator (man, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that household).
Beginning in the 1960s, this idea began to take over the masculine ideal that individuals alone had the capacity to create as God had (see Flaubert on the artist-God connection and Joyce on artists as fingernail parers). Henceforth, and gradually, the idea that it takes a village
I have always maintained that Hilary’s defense of Bill Clinton in the 90s killed classic phase of feminism by driving feminism into a political posture rather than a position taken on principle alone. Even Paglia herself had problems with Hilary’s defense of her husband at the time.
Paglia’s claim to fame is her having written a book entitled Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Twenty Years Later
It’s been twenty years since Paglia published her book, and a lot can change in that amount of time. Paglia, once so on the outs with the in-crowd who jumped ship to support their candidate in the 90s (in this article they declare her to be a “professional anti-feminist” for her disagreements about Hilary’s wisdom in this and other affairs) is now a member of the once-radical-thinking-now-domesticated in-crowd.
Paglia feels that Gaga, unlike Madonna, has gotten away from pushing the boundaries of sex (which in my opinion had been pushed to their limit in art by Madonna’s Sex book and by Larry Flint’s (or was it Bob Guccione?) announcement that women who appeared in his magazine would have to be willing to urinate on camera. Where else is there to go with sex except to put a camera into the body cavity itself? The body has been explored to the full by better artists than Gaga and there is nowhere else to go except to exploit the work that others have done before her.
Part of Paglia’s problem is that she’s old enough to have seen all of Lady Gaga’s costume’s before, and she has a good enough memory to draw the young waifs who have no memory of Marlene Dietrich’s sexualized performance in Blue Angel (a fabulous film, by the way, but one which to a modern young waif also lacks the sexuality of seeing Madonna’s bare boobs in their prime).
History is not a sure guide to future performance (I think I read that on Charles Schwab’s website), and in this case Paglia has missed the mark. Madonna did indeed capture the hearts of the millions and Camille Paglia captured her image for the intelligentsia. But Lady Gaga’s de-emphasizing of sexuality makes her model that much more intriguing to the young and unwise waifs that are more familiar with Gaga’s work than old Camille.
Paglia–and this shocks me as an old guy who knew Madonna in the 80s and Paglia in the 90s–thinks that she can strip off the ‘contrivance’ of her ‘scripted’ performances and show the reader ‘the real’ Gaga (whose name, we are informed by the catty caption writer is not Gaga at all, but Stefani Germanotta). Last I looked, Madonna’s name was Madonna Louise Ciccone. I grant Camille that she only shortened her given name, but if names were all that we needed to secure our knowledge of a person then Madonna would have a claim to relevance. But c’mon. No one thinks that. Especially not the venerable Camille.
Art and Nature in Paglia
This has more to do with Paglia’s latent feeling that somehow art was imitating nature (as in my Frankenstein model). Madonna had been bold enough to have found her ‘natural’ expression in her body, while Lady Gaga’s works was contrived because it didn’t reconnect her to her nature, where mind and object meet. Gaga is, in Camille’s mind, neglecting the source of her power. She is an imitator of her betters and nothing but and imitator.
But I think she has missed the larger point about Gaga’s art. She wishes to work in an artificial environment created by David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane cover, which our too-clever-for-her-own-good caption writer labels in the article as: “Familiar: Lady Gaga’s lightning bolt chic appeared to be borrowed from the cover of David Bowie’s 1973 album Aladdin Sane.” (See here for my experience with Aladdin Sane).
In my opinion, Lady Gaga wishes to detach herself from her sexuality to become a creature of her own making, and not determined by her body. She’s Carolee Schneeemann without the body. All fashion all the time. Even meat is expressed externalized as fashion. There is no body underneath, at least no sexual body. She is supposed to be all construction/constructed. That, I think, is the purpose of her comment to Barbara Walters in this interview, where she declares that she is bisexual, although she admits to only having been in love with men. Apparently, a woman’s body is for pleasure only, and as such can be enjoyed. But (and I truly hope that this is what Lady Gaga is saying, if only because I believe it myself) there is more to life than the pursuit of sex (look what happened to Britney for an object lesson of that lesson).
That, she goes on to say, is what her song Poker Face was about.
A Plug for the Old Guy
This was the point that I was trying in my own way to make about American culture in my book Poker Tales
Not that she needs help from me. As I often ask, Who am I?