TISCH SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

 

At age 17, Germanotta gained early admission to the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts on August 23, 2003 and lived in a NYU dorm on 11th Street. There she studied music and improved her songwriting skills by composing essays and analytical papers focusing on topics such as art, religion, social issues and politics. Germanotta felt that she was more creative than some of her classmates. "Once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself," she said. By the second semester of her sophomore year, she withdrew from the school to focus on her musical career. Her father agreed to pay her rent for a year, on the condition that she re-enroll for Tisch if she was unsuccessful. "I left my entire family, got the cheapest apartment I could find, and ate shit until somebody would listen," she said.

 

An essay about the human body, written by Stefani Germanotta (aka Lady Gaga) when she was attending Tisch School of the... ›

lovemyselfandimset:

Stefani Germanotta
November 1, 2004
Assignment #4: Reckoning of Evidence

The terms of the human body, some might say, are determined through a theoretical dissection of both the private environments and public atmospheres in which we live. By terms, the rules and evaluations of bodily condition, I mean to establish a division of perception. The first divide is that of the social body, the perception of our bodies in relation to a larger intellectual and sexual community, one that views each other in groups. The second divide is the condition of our nature, a perception of the body without relation or comparison, a singular entity that is independent, formless, and free. This segregation of seeing is general and yet universal because it capitalizes our differences. By examining these seeming generalizations, we break them down. It is through a demolition and reconstruction of these concepts that we can assign specificity and reason to these ways in which we look.

It is in the freeing of both natural and artificial bodies that art is created. For while some artists depend on the predisposition of their subjects to provide the work with it’s primary message and meaning, other artists rely on a temporal and physical freedom; an ability to use objects while also freeing them of their social significance and thus endowing them with endless possibilities of form. Spencer Tunick, an installations artist and photographer, struggled to achieve this freedom as a working artist in New York City. This artist is most famous for his installations, often characterized by masses of naked people arranged together in domestic locations, and in countries from every continent of the world. Removed of sexual implication or intention, the nudes are used primarily and only as intended by the artist, as an exploration of the shape, contour, and texture of the naked body. Spencer is fascinated by the metamorphosis of the human body into a form, and the effect that his chosen locations have on this new shape (and vice versa). In this way, the naked bodies are Spencer’s clay, and he uses them in the same manner that a painter uses oils or a sculptor uses marble.
This way that the artist looks at the body, is a radical contradiction to Western society’s view of the nakedness. In the eyes of some of his critics, Spencer’s work invades social privacy not only through the art, which to them degrades the sacredness of the body by exposing it in mass nudity, but also in the making of his art which requires an abnormal amount of public nudity, indecent exposure. Tunick challenges traditional ideas of intimacy, and asks us to free the body of sexuality and view it aesthetically for the purpose of his art. The social body cannot exist, most specifically in the nude, as anything other then a sexual thing. This is our naked condition.

The analysis of form, while an engaging arc to follow, can also reveal an inverse exploration of the body. An examination of the deformed. This word, Michel de Montaigne addresses in his essay Of a Monstrous Child, suggesting that the existence of a social body is formless, but far from free. He describes the figure of a boy, below the breast he was fastened and stuck to another child, without a head, and with his spinal canal stopped up, the rest of his body being entire (Lopate 57). Montaigne paints for us, a portrait of the boy’s physical form, or rather his de-form. With fastened, stuck, and stopped as his verbal interpretation of a Siamese twin, he illustrates how a human body, or form, can possess a lack of freedom in that it is harnessed to its disabilities in a physical way. For the deformed, there is an ownership of one’s difference, an ownership that is visible and undisputable. Through a scenic description of a deformed child, Montaigne uses the different shapes and contours of the child’s deformed body in order to create a visual contrast between what is ordinary and what is unordinary.

The perceptions of the nude and the deformed both manifest out of a concept of the social body, and the ideological contrast and visible conflict that is created in their presence. In Of a Monstrous Child, Montaigne asks us to consider the way we look at the body, and at each other. Montaigne suggests:
“What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it; and it is for us to believe that this figure that astonishes us is related and linked to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man.” (58)

When we view something contrary to custom we assign them a monstrous quality. We infer based on something’s lack of ordinariness that it is disgusting or somehow linked to something inhumane, in some cases one might say uncivilized. In light of Montaigne’s theory, that we assign the unordinary with a monstrous condition, we can see the viewpoint from which art critics, the government, and the public, condemn Spencer Tunick’s work with naked bodies. Because it is not socially ordinary; it is irregular to see that many nudes amassed at one time„the art possesses a grotesque quality for the viewer.

This assigned foreignness can be designated as a kind of artistic racism, a public perception that handicaps from seeing and experiencing different forms, whether artistic or natural. There is an error in our perception; that our perception of the human body is somehow flawed. We call contrary to nature what we call contrary to custom (Lopate 58). We are trained only to be accepting of the regular, and it is this blindness that prevents us from seeing the prodigy in that which we have never seen before.

It is possible that in our naked form, in our deformed, that we are not only exposing our vulnerability, our skin, our scars, our flaws, and our genitals. But we also are exposing our secrets.

In spite of Montaigne’s great idealism, this perspective that allows us to choose the way in which we view the body, there is still an unavoidable clause that needs analyses. Sexuality manifests most physically…

I honestly didn’t understand any of this, but I think that what Ms. Germanotta (LOL) is trying to say in this essay is that the human body in its naked form is art, even if it is deformed in some way, and that what we see as disgusting is beautiful to God. This essay should be in some kind of museum or something, because my mind is blown…

(via karawarhol)


“When she says in interviews, ‘I live and breathe fashion’ – she may be fooling other people, but she’s not fooling me,” said Jon Sheldrick who knew Gaga when she attended New York University.

“I don’t mean to sound demeaning, but she was really normal. She wasn’t super-outspoken or into really edgy clothes. She was wearing T-shirts and sweatpants and sh*t. She was not a misfit.”

“I’m a friend of hers on Facebook still; she still has her original profile up. She only has, like, four hundred friends,” said Seth Kallen, fellow musician at NYU.

“At first it was like, half her Lady Gaga pictures and half normal pictures. I remember having a sort of revelation – ‘Wait a minute, she’s getting extremely famous.’ And I checked her Facebook profile, and the normal pictures disappeared.”
time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart came to an end, her mother encouraged her to apply for the Collaborative Arts Project 21 (CAP21), a musical theatre training conservatory at New york Universitys Tisch School of the Arts. After gaining early admission at 17, she eventually lived in an NYU dorm on 11th Street.