After-Images of Personal Trauma: Examining the works of Frida Kahlo and Lady Gaga.
Key Definitions
Matrixial
An alternate structure and approach to the gaze which metaphorically uses the ‘matrix’ (womb) to contradict the phallus (Pollock, 2004: 9).
Trans-subjective
A universal approach to understanding other people’s personal experiences which is achieved by existing in an individual sphere/mode of thinking. (MacLennan, 1901: 630).
After-Affect
The traces/residues of trauma (Pollock, 2013: xxi).
Transformation
The {process} of aesthetical working-through whereby archival memory of trauma turns into an artwork. (After-Affect {>} After-Image) (Pollock, 2013: xxi).
After-Image
A transformation of the ‘after-affects’ into aesthetic practices e.g. An Artwork (Pollock, 2013: xxi).
Encounter-event
The moment in which the viewer experiences the artists ‘after-affects’ through an ‘after- image’ (Ettinger, 2005: 703).
Borderspace
‘A sphere of encounter-events’ in which ‘imprints and ‘memory traces’ are exchanged and experienced’ (Ettinger, 2005: 219).
Introduction
Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital and Lady Gaga’s 911 both reflect provocative and intimate accounts of their personal lives. With Gaga describing her work as ‘poetry of pain’ (Gaga, 2020) and Kahlo literally ‘translat[ing] pain into art’ (Fuentes, 1995: 12), it is apparent that these Women have suffered deep personal traumas, with traces of their pain immobilized in their works in the form of ‘after-affects’ (Pollock, 2013: xxi). It’s because their works contain these personal residues, I am referring to them as ‘after-images’ (Pollock, 2013: xxi).
Frida Kahlo was encouraged to paint Henry Ford Hospital by her husband Diego after suffering a miscarriage in 1932. Materially embodying her experience with oil paint on metal, this painting reveals hidden aspects of Kahlo’s emotional and physical pain (Nochlin, 1971: 4). Gaga’s Short Film 911 is a music video from her most recent album to date, ‘Chromatica’ (2020) which journeys through Gaga’s phenomenological experience of trauma. Generating a deeper ‘poetry of pain’ through both aesthetics and sound (Gaga, 2020), Gaga narrates an abstract representation of her experience taking anti-psychotic medication in order to cope with PTSD and trauma.
You might be asking: Why Kahlo and Gaga? Though their works were made almost a century apart, they share many similarities - one of which is their international success. They are both iconic females who share a similar level of global influence which makes them culturally relevant. I would also argue that their works are ground-breaking because they both use unique approaches to making in their respective times. Both artists also experience gendered pain and chronic pain, which makes them interesting subjects to cross reference.
I’m adopting a matrixial approach to analyse the transmission of trauma before looking at the after-images. Approaching the artworks from this matrixial perspective is important not because the artists are both female (although I will take this into account later), but because the experiences and contexts they explore cannot be universally acknowledged. Through a matrixial lens, I can deconstruct the artists’ approaches, symbolism, and traces of chronic pain, trans-subjectively. This approach will also help determine where the artists place themselves amongst their pain.
Trauma Transmission: A Matrixial Perspective.
Because I aim to break down the complex nature of Matrixial language, I have decided to firstly introduce Art Critic Fuentes’ depiction of Kahlo’s trauma transmission. Fuentes expressed that Kahlo ‘translated pain into art’ (Fuentes, 1995: 12). In Figure 2, I have illustrated Fuentes’ argument in the form of a basic IPO diagram: A model which demonstrates a visual representation of input-process-output (Figure 1).
Figure 1 - Model of a Standard IPO Function (2020)
Figure 2 - IPO Model based on Fuentes' Idea (2020)
I think that Fuentes describes Kahlo’s transmission of trauma at a very basic level, which is a good foundation in understanding the structure of aesthetic trauma transmission. However, his description presents a shortcoming – it’s missing the trans-subjective approach needed to understand not only Kahlo’s, but also Gaga’s work. I think that it is crucial to apply this mode of analysis for the works of Kahlo and Gaga because of their inherent ties with truth, reality, psyche and experience: aspects which can only be accessed universally through this trans-subjective approach. It is in this instance that Fuentes’ idea can be fused with matrixial gaze theory.
Ettinger describes that ‘in aesthetical working-through, the artist transforms time and space of an encounter-event into matrixial screen and gaze’ (Ettinger, 2005: 703). In this instance, the ‘pain’ in Fuentes’ description is constructed from the after-affects of a specific trauma encounter. The ‘translation’ is the artist’s process of making their work, considering the time of the encounter, and the position in which they place themselves in that encounter. And the ‘art’ is the after-image – the piece of work in which its remnants can be accessed through the matrixial gaze, by applying a trans-subjective approach to looking. Therefore, we can observe through a matrixial lens that Ettinger’s idea is essentially a matrixial extension of Figure 2. However, through the lens of the matrix, this ‘transformation’ also occupies a matrixial ‘borderspace’. Although the direction of transformation is distinct, this process is no longer contained in a fixed border like Fuentes described. It is occupied in a permeable ‘borderspace’ (shown in Figure 3) in which the viewer can trans-subjectively access the ‘after-affects’ of the ‘after-image’ (Pollock, 2013: xxi). Although this ‘borderspace’ of truth can be accessed by the viewer, the originary pain cannot be. This is an archival experience only known by the artist, hence the impermeable boundary between this and the ‘transformation’.
Because I’m analysing these works as ‘after-images’, this is where I think Breakell’s ideas need to come into play. Whilst Breakell describes our response to archives as a ‘reflection of ourselves’, she also notes that ‘our response to them says more about us than the archive itself’ (Breakell, 2008). From this perspective, the artwork arguably takes precedence over the artists experience: The ‘after-image’ is both the artists interpretation of their truth, and the trans-subjective access point of their truth. The artists’ interpretations will enlighten us about how they dealt with their traumas. But what does this tell us about the artist’s pain?
Figure 3 - IPO Model of Trauma Transmission (2020)
Making Public: Approaches to Gendered Trauma.
Both Kahlo and Gaga’s work tells us that their pain is gendered. Whilst Kahlo’s work explicitly details her traumatic miscarriage, Gaga’s work is implicitly inflicted by patriarchy. Through this chapter, I’m specifically looking at the artists’ approach of publicization as a parallax to their gendered traumas.
According to Judy Chicago, Kahlo was the first artist in history to make public the taboo subject of miscarriage in her iconic painting Henry Ford Hospital (Chicago, 2010: 227). Berger notes that Kahlo’s publicization of pain is an ‘essential precondition’ in ‘refinding dignity and hope’ (Berger, 2015). Kahlo’s radical and honest approach in the context of a post-revolutionary 1930’s Mexico could be interpreted as symptomatic of a new era in wake of the turn of the century. This approach both highlighted gender inequalities and was radical for a number of reasons: Firstly, because she was courageous enough to disclose this information. With patriarchy entrenched in Mexico’s conservative climate, infertile women were frowned upon, and deemed as ‘failed’. This is because from a phallocentric perspective, Women are ‘stereotypically constructed’ based on the worth of their biological functioning, and ‘more particularly [their] reproductive bodies’ (Shildrick, 1997: 25). The topic of miscarriage disconcerted Kahlo’s contemporaries because of this reason. But Kahlo’s painful transparency about her infertility is now a testament for other women living with this experience; it created hope for Women who were alienated by society from their own fertility complications. Secondly, she expressed this subject through art. Social constructions of education meant that most Women artists were untrained and disadvantaged in comparison to the ‘dominant male power elite’ (Nochlin, 1971: 6). Therefore, artists like Kahlo were marginalized from the core of Mexico’s artistry: the ‘great three’ (Mirkin, 2008: 23). These were three male muralists representing the international face of the 1930’s Mexican renaissance, including Kahlo’s husband Diego Rivera. Kahlo attempted to subvert male dominated power structures in the arts by practicing as an artist in her own right, and considering herself ‘potentially, if not actually, an equal subject’ (Nochlin, 1971: 6). Thirdly, the viscerality of Kahlo’s aesthetics reveal the raw honesty of the human condition - which would have been unsavoury to a Mexican audience at the time. This is because the blood- soaked bedsheets illustrated in Figure 4 ‘breaches boundaries of the proper’, generating a gut feeling of repulsion and disgust (Shildrick, 1997: 16-17).
Figure 4 - 'Henry Ford Hospital' (1932) By Frida Kahlo. Close up of Kahlo on her hospital bed.
This bodily leakiness depicts an ambiguity between the interior and exterior of the body – a threatening sense of something ‘other’, which is why it provokes unease (Kristeva, 1980: 9). From a conservative perspective, these soiled sheets could also represent Kahlo’s tainted purity. The foreign matter of blood in a process of what should represent life, now represents death, hence infecting Kahlo with impurity. Depicting the female body in this state of abjection was also unprecedented, and therefore, obscene.
Although from a matrixial perspective, ‘it is in this sphere that the Other is a trauma to the subject’ (Ettinger, 2006: 221). Whilst blood is a signifier of trauma, for Kahlo, this signifier has become ‘other’. To Kahlo, the blood isn’t impure or inappropriate, but instead embodies a painful reminder of the loss of her child. It could be alternatively argued from Kahlo’s perspective that this ‘Other’ is potentially the after-image itself. This is because the after- image (a product of trauma transmission) contains aesthetic memory traces in the form of after-affects; a physical access point to Kahlo’s traumatic dimension.
With all these factors combined, Kahlo’s approach is emblematic of phallocentric disgust, institutionalised prejudice and courageous femininity. Despite being the first artist to publicly tackle the stigmas around infertility, Kahlo’s work only gained international attention in light of the Second Wave feminist movement. Her life and work have impacted the public on a scale that critics have described as ‘Frida-mania’ (Vernon, 2016), which is why she is an artist who is both suitably comparable and relevant to Lady Gaga.
Motivated by patriarchal affliction, Gaga’s approach to trauma both affects and demands change. The immediacy of her narrative resonates on a global scale, intelligently challenging gender inequalities. Gaga’s approach to making differs from Kahlo’s for two main reasons: The first being that the work itself is not explicitly gendered at first glance. The after-image as a whole is rather a by-product of trauma which highlights the subtly imposed notions of gender inequalities.
Conducting research in the field, Psychologists Klonoff, Landrine and Campbell theorise that ‘gender specific stressors’ trigger symptoms which are depressive, somatic and anxious, finding that these symptoms were more prevalent in women than men (Klonoff et al, 2000: 93-99). Gaga’s experience of being repeatedly raped at the age of 19 developed somatic symptoms which have plagued her years after the event, in the form of the chronic condition Fibromyalgia. This debilitating condition has left Gaga’s physical and mental health to deteriorate to the point of collapse, as she revealed in interview with Oprah that she experienced a psychotic break (WW, 2020). Gaga copes with the trauma of her sexual assault by taking medication, in which she specifically refers to as ‘911[s]’, as well as ‘dolls inside diamond boxes’ in her music video. Whilst ‘911[s]’ urgently suggest dependency, the ‘dolls inside diamond boxes’ (Figure 5) depict a glamorisation of pills, underpinned with reference to Susann’s 1966 novel ‘Valley of the Dolls’.
Figure 5 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video Still with subtitles depicting a doll inside a diamond box.
I would argue that Gaga’s work is the first of its kind in the sense that it is not only trying to solve the global mental health crisis, but it also dismantles the sexist Freudian stereotype that Women and madness are inextricably linked. From the viewpoint of the phallocentric gaze, madness is historically associated as a ‘feminine illness’ (Little, 2015). This is due to the age-old misdiagnosis of Women’s trauma under the umbrella category of hysteria: a pejorative term for madness, derived from the Greek translation ‘hystera’ (meaning womb) (Warner, 2008). Hence, Gaga reclaims the metaphor of the ‘womb’ through matrixial pedagogy in order to subvert notions that madness is a ‘feminine’ trait.
The second differentiation between Kahlo and Gaga’s approaches is that Gaga publicizes her work through social media channels such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitter (a development which in Kahlo’s case, did not exist at the time). This approach is what makes Gaga’s glamourisation of her medication politically apt. Pop culture is saturated with drug references, and particularly in music, artists are increasingly touching on the topic of recreational usage of prescription drugs (Rathbone, 2020). Whilst other artists use drug references nonchalantly, Gaga’s use is deliberate in order to deconstruct and challenge the stigma around taking medicine to cope with trauma.
Whilst this method is paradoxical, it could reveal that Gaga’s pain is so great, that she feels dutiful to share her most authentic self with her fans in order to influence world progression. With a platform as immense as Gaga’s, ‘social media both enable and amplify [fans] deep identification with Lady Gaga’, as well as providing an open dialogue between fanbases (Click et al., 2013: 337). Implementing this participatory practice strategy through social media elevates the artwork to another dimension. We can no longer consider the work an art object, but rather an art subject – a political movement for global change.
The ‘reflection of the self’: Symbolism.
Both Frida and Gaga choose to be the central subject in their works in the form of self- portraits. This way, they can gain control of their own personal narrative, so that they can physically and symbolically navigate their individual position in relation to their traumas. It is this web of symbolism that is ‘woven from affective and mental strings’ in which we can decipher why the artist is hurting, and where they position themselves amongst this pain (Ettinger, 2006: 219).
Figure 6 - 'Henry Ford Hospital' (1932) By Frida Kahlo.
The form of Frida’s trauma transmission occupies an illustrative mind map but contains abstracted features of a body map. Used in art therapy practices, body mapping is an illustrative technique which allows patients to create a symbolic form of representation in order to narrate emotions about why they are hurting and where (University of Cape Town, 2020). However, Kahlo’s body map shows that the metaphorical symbols are not explicitly attached to distinct body parts. Instead, they are loosely tied by umbilical-like ribbons in an open palm of her hand, placed on top of her abdomen. This could suggest that the source of the pain stems from the womb: the container of the miscarried child. Symbolically archaic of the feminine, this source of pain is also the corporeal borderspace in which I am approaching the ‘structure of severality/encounter’ (Pollock, 2004: 9). Whilst the pain figuratively aches from the womb, the after-affects of pain appear to act globally. This body map follows similar structural conventions to that of a mind-map: Kahlo is the only subject and her body parts are not distinguished. This global pain is emphasised further by the exaggerated tear falling from Kahlo’s face.
Though the pain originates from the womb, ‘trans-subjective figure[s]’ of the feminine are ‘interlaced’ through the six illustrations that form the stems of the body map (Ettinger, 2006: 218). These are Kahlo’s fragmented archival memories: after-affects of the womb in the form of symbolic after-images. The top left symbol in Figure 6 depicts a clinical model of a female abdomen – an ideology of a functioning, healthy reproductive system. The ribbon that ties this abdomen to Kahlo’s body appears to have the longest length, creating the furthest distance between subject and affect by comparison to the five other symbols. This distance might suggest the disassociation Kahlo feels from her body due to her flawed reproductive system, as well as representing the intangible grasp of having a healthy pregnancy. In contrast, the autoclave below (an instrument used for the sterilization of medical utensils) is symbolic of Kahlo’s permanent sterility. Compositionally, this underlies the perfect model of a female torso, paradoxically revealing Kahlo’s lurking fertility problems. This symbolically reinforces the idea that Kahlo was infinitely ‘plagued by her inadequacy’ (Lowe, 1995: 26) in the demands of 1930’s Mexican society. This clinical tool also reinforces the impersonal setting of the trauma in which the title of the painting references. The male foetus which floats prominently above Kahlo’s bed is symbolic of both life and death. Ejected from Kahlo’s body (Chicago, 2010: 228), it is bloodied and in a transitory state. Kahlo chooses to illustrate the separation of the foetus from her body as a means to identify with her child, as this identification is a ‘necessary condition without which grief cannot end and a new identity be developed’ (Parkes, 1998). Determining this relationship must have been of importance to Kahlo in order for her to understand her pain: Is this trauma based on loss or based on longing? As traditional psychoanalysis argues that trauma is a structurally traumatic affliction based on separation and loss (Pollock, 2013: xxiii), the foetus illustrated with the backdrop of a sky could represent Kahlo’s loss, passed onto heaven. However, feminist psychoanalysis argues that this pain is a structural trauma which ‘discloses parallel strings of yearning for connectivity’ (Pollock, 2013: xxiii). From a matrixial perspective, the foetus could be a representation of hope for the ‘Dieguito’ she’d always longed for, and attempted to have several times (Espinoza, 2007). The symbol of the foetus is particularly poignant because it reveals Kahlo’s attempts to conform to societal expectations of Women at the time (becoming a mother). Ironically, Kahlo’s multiple miscarriages meant that she could not conform no matter how hard she tried. She sealed this fate by documenting and publicizing her experience, alienating herself further away from the traditional norms of a 1930’s Mexican Woman.
Another trans-subjective figure is the Orchid. Whilst Orchids are traditionally a symbol of fertility, sexuality and virility, (Alma, 2013) its wiltedness in Kahlo’s painting suggests a decay of these qualities, emblematic of a flawed uterus. Shrivelled in its entirety, this could further suggest Kahlo’s painful sensitivity around her infertility issues. Alternatively, the limp- like petals might also depict phallocentric imposed notions of Kahlo’s supposed flawed femininity. Kahlo’s ‘broken’ body consequently affects her sense of ‘self-perception’; the loss of a functioning reproductive system ‘affects not simply corporeal integrity, but also the sense of who [Kahlo is]’ (Shildrick, 1997: 13-14). Kahlo’s archival emotions of sensitivity and ethereality constitute the ‘formulation’ of this motif of decay (Lowe, 1995: 26). This is also reinforced through the symbolism of the snail, encompassing Kahlo’s emotional frailty and her painful scars towards the miscarriage operation’s longevity. (The pelvic bone depicted in the bottom right corner of Figure 6 is a symbol I will detail further in the next chapter - ‘A Haunted Pathology: Chronic Pain’.)
It is intriguing to ask the question: Why did Kahlo choose to respond to her pain through this symbolic entanglement of affective strings? Initially it seems Kahlo intended to make this work as an illustrative record of her trauma and a form of translating her pain, as Fuentes suggested (Fuentes,1995: 12). But I wonder if she also had an ulterior motive to understand why she was infertile. Perhaps she hoped that by dissecting her problems and emotions into fragments, the painting would reveal a cure for her infertility. This would also explain why she decided to make her work public – in the hope that a medical practitioner would give her a formal diagnosis. In 2012, Dr Fernando Antelo claimed that through research into Kahlo’s paintings and medical history, he could diagnose Kahlo’s problems as Asherman’s syndrome (intrauterine scarring). This is due to Henry Ford Hospital calling ‘attention to the pelvic bones and uterus’, revealing that Kahlo’s previous streetcar accident may have inflicted scarring to her inner uterus (Antelo, 2012). By Antelo making this diagnosis through the lens of Kahlo’s painting, this could suggest that the body mapping work of Henry Ford Hospital is ‘no longer a method, but rather a methodology’ (Gastaldo et al., 2018). I would argue that Kahlo places herself as a subject of that methodology, and that by matrixial processes of ‘trans-scription and cross-imprinting’, ‘the imprints of the world and the cosmos on the artist’ reveal that the source of Kahlo’s pain symbolically originates from the womb (Ettinger, 2006: 221).
The form of Gaga’s trauma transmission is a short film which transgresses between hallucination and reality. Directed by Tarsem Singh, the film is heavily influenced by Parajanov’s 1969 Soviet film ‘The colour of Pomegranates’, therefore holds symbolic references from Armenian culture (Munzenrieder, 2020). Journeying through a vignette of her psychotic episode, the opening scene depicts Gaga lying alone in the middle of the desert. Staged to mirror the site of an accident, a crumpled bike lies strewn beside her, and pomegranates are scattered by her feet. Throughout literature, pomegranates ‘often symbolized fundamental dyads: life and death, mortality and immortality, fertility and barenness, growth and decay, inside and out’ (Ruis, 2015: 22). This symbolic dualism is a motif which is also reflected in the construction of the video’s ‘push’ and ‘pull’ between the ‘real’ and the ‘non-real’, as we learn at the end of the film that Gaga was involved in a road accident inflicted by herself and the misuse of her anti-psychotic medication.
Figure 7 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video still of the opening scene (the non-real) (0:28).
Figure 8 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video still of the end scene (the real) (4:12).
Whilst Kahlo’s painting expresses an explicit figuration of blood, in Gaga’s hallucination, the depiction of blood is beautified in the form of an anklet (Figure 9). This is symbolically allegorical for one of Gaga’s injuries in the accident. Although glamourized, this piece of jewellery could signify restraint and restriction, indicating that Gaga’s pain is weighted. This weight is exemplified by the placement of the injury, depicting notions of a poeticized ‘ball and chain’. Alternatively, this anklet could symbolically depict corruption: also referred to by Kristeva as the ‘socialised appearance’ of the perversely abject (Kristeva, 1980: 15). It is at this crux of mortality that Gaga places herself at the ‘behest of death’ (Kristeva, 1980: 15). Being one of the first symbols the viewer sees, this ‘corruption’ remains present throughout the video just as the anklet is fixed on Gaga’s ankle throughout several costume changes.
Figure 9 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video still of Gaga being pulled back down to reality, with the Red Anklet (the non-real) (2:07).
Gaga’s ascension into heaven draws a figurative similarity between Kahlo’s work, as both artists use the symbol of a decaying flower. However, whilst Kahlo uses an Orchid to represent her fertility problems, Gaga uses a white rose to personify paradise (Seward, 1995: 515). As Gaga holds the white rose, her body elevates towards the direction of heaven. As Ahmed suggests that objects can ‘take us in a certain direction’ (Ahmed, 2006: 545), this rose symbolically pulls Gaga towards her death. However, this ascension is interrupted, as Gaga is halted by the paramedic throwing a rope around her ankle (Figure 9). Thrown onto the placement of the anklet, the sense of ‘corruption’ returns as the white rose wilts (Figure 10), pulling Gaga back down to her psychotic episode. Both symbols of the white rose and the red anklet mirror the antagonistic parallels between life/death and real/non-real.
Figure 10 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video still of Gaga Ascending to heaven with the wilted White Rose (the non-real) (2:10).
Gaga’s use of symbolism slightly differs to that of Kahlo’s, because some of Gaga’s after- affects of pain form ‘participants that are transformed and transforming one another in a sharable eventing’ (Ettinger, 2006: 219). Inscribed traces of the accident can be linked through the relationships between the heroes (emergency staff), the archaic subject (Gaga) and subjects (other victims) in their ‘inescapable potential for hospitality and compassion’ (Pollock, 2013: xxiii). Following an anticipated crescendo, the beat of the track kicks in, synchronised with a man who repeatedly slams his head against a tasselled pillow (Figure 11).
This man is a secondary subject of Gaga’s trauma – the driver of the car who she swerved in front of. Gaga’s ‘ineffable memories’ immediately appear to be abstracted, as she plays back the event repeatedly (Goarzin, 2011: 11-22). This repetition is a compulsive behaviour - a modality which mirrors the inevitability of Gaga’s mental and physical self-destruction caused by the absence of her medication. The victim’s perspective is disorientating, as the camera angle shifts from horizontal to vertical repeatedly whilst Gaga resides still and fixated. The angle of this repeated ‘habitual action’ shapes a psychotic entity which is chaotic and queer (Ahmed, 2006: 544). This further implies that Gaga’s trauma is overwhelming and haunting, or in other words, a cyclic form of suffering.
Figure 11 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video still of a man repeatedly banging his head against a pillow (the non-real) (0:52).
Gaga’s ‘mood’s shifting to manic places’ (Gaga, 2020), whilst a woman holds a mummified body (Figure 12)– a secondary affect which has resulted in the unfortunate death of a subject. Life is literally cradling death. It is at this dichotomy where the viewer ‘extricates [themselves], as being alive, from that border’ (Kristeva, 1980: 3). This symbolism revitalises the severity of Gaga’s pain, as her ‘manifestation of mental [and] physical disruption’ creates a life or death situation (Goarzin, 2011: 11-22). It could be argued that this binary opposition reinforces the ‘real’ and ‘non-real’ parallels of the accident. However, as another subject stirs the pot, it could be suggested that this ‘matrixial borderspace is a mutating copoietic net’ (Ettinger, 2006: 219). This notion of ‘stirring’ is also a provocative action, perhaps foreshadowing that a bad situation is occurring. This is exemplified by Gaga’s hand gesture, a reoccurring motif in which she places her hand over her mouth to pop her pills. As the video progresses, the viewer can create borderlinks between subjects as they symbolically evolve into a greater signifier of pain: Gaga’s self-destructive behaviour. By choreographing a situation which effects other people, Gaga is suggesting that her pain is detrimental to secondary subjects as well as herself. Therefore, this elevates the importance of working together in creating a strong support system in order to manage this type of psychological trauma.
Figure 12 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video still of Woman cradling her son, man stirring a pot, and Gaga popping her pills. (the non-real) (1:10).
Another aesthetic trace of the ‘real’ is denoted towards the end of the hallucination in the form of a tapestry (Figure 13). This tapestry forms a similar painting style to that of Kahlo’s work (Figure 6) in the way it forms the site of the traumatic event. The video flashes close ups of the accident in an epileptic fashion, instilling another symptom of trauma’s repetitive compulsion (Goarzin, 2011: 11-22). I think that Gaga chooses to include this aesthetic illustration in order to reinforce the bonds between the ‘real’ and ‘non-real’, and further underpin notions of the repetition of trauma. However, I don’t think that this tapestry was a necessary part of the video, as I think the parallels made between the affective subjects in opposing realms was successful enough without this addition. It is this clash of ‘reality and dreams’ which ‘interconnect to form heroes within us and all around us’ that makes Gaga’s message so fundamental (Gaga, 2020).
Figure 13 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga.Video still of tapestry. (the non-real) (2:45).
A Haunted Pathology: Chronic Pain.
Both artists have experienced severe chronic pain in their lives. Whilst Frida has suffered from a haunted pathology of neuropathic pain from her streetcar accident, Lady Gaga suffers from Fibromyalgia. These types of chronic pain are debilitating and isolating, and residues of this immobilized pain are present in their works.
I am returning to a symbol in Kahlo’s painting Henry Ford Hospital (Figure 6) which I refrained from talking about in the previous chapter: The pelvic bone. This carries a chronic hauntology (Derrida, 1993), which is allegorical of Kahlo’s horrific streetcar accident. This occurred when Kahlo was 17 years old, and she sustained multiple injuries, including being perforated by railings through her abdomen and fracturing her pelvis (Courtney et al., 2017) This symbol reveals Kahlo’s endurance of chronic pain, inextricably tying the pelvis and womb together as means to link the streetcar accident with Kahlo’s infertility issues. This structural frame which serves to protect and contain the process of fertility is now forever impaired. Wolfrey argues that ‘to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns’.(Wolfrey, 2002). It is because Kahlo narrates her trauma through aesthetics that these ‘ghosts’ are symbolically corporeal and occupy an affective borderspace.
This ghostly invocation is a recurrent motif through Kahlo’s works, with traces of the ‘other’ returning numerous times. After-affects of Kahlo’s streetcar accident are particularly prevalent in her painting The Broken Column (Figure 14). This return of ghosts through an after-image over 10 years after Henry Ford Hospital suggests that Kahlo’s pain was lifelong as well as a constant subconscious preoccupation. This also supports Fuentes’ statement that Kahlo was ‘eternally metamorphosed by both sickness and art’ (Fuentes, 1995: 24).
Figure 14 - 'The Broken Column' (1944) By Frida Kahlo.
In Henry Ford Hospital, residues of chronic pain are not just present through the symbolism of the pelvic bone, but also through the symbolic construction and composition of the setting. Kahlo has ‘underlined her loneliness by painting an unanchored bed adrift in an alien landscape’ (Borzello, 2010: 229). Illustrating herself in the foreground of the painting, she is displaced in the middle of the desert on her hospital bed (Figure 6). The distant landscape of Detroit is in the background - the place in which she miscarried. The composition of the foreground and background encapsulates a confliction between the presence and absence of Kahlo in the hospital room, as she occupies the borderspace of the real and surreal. This barren area withholds a certain quietness, suggesting that Kahlo needs space in order to process her situation. Alternatively, this desert could represent complete desolation, mirroring Kahlo’s hopelessness. An ‘aura of strangeness’ is created by the ‘dislocation of scener[y]’ (Fuentes, 1995: 14), as Kahlo is completely alienated from her reality. Kahlo might feel the same sort of abandonment by her husband as well as her child, as the Detroit landscape could be symptomatic of Diego.
Taking all of this into consideration, it is not just Kahlo’s loneliness that’s underlying in the after-image (as Borzello suggests), but it’s also a host of other painful after-affects, including isolation, hopelessness, abandonment, and longing. Her Chronic pain is presented through corporeal and structural symbolism, depicting a physical detriment which subsequently creates emotional harm.
Since the event of Gaga’s sexual assault (which I mentioned in ‘Making Public: Approaches to Gendered Trauma’) Gaga has suffered from chronic condition Fibromyalgia. She describes the effects of this trauma as ‘a cyclone of anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, and panic disorder’ (Meter, 2018) which in turn, leads to chronic nerve pain. Although Gaga describes this pain as ‘global’ in her documentary Five Foot Two (2017), she links her pain back to two traumatic experiences, her assault in 2009 and a hip injury she sustained on tour back in 2012 (Roschke, 2017). This would suggest that elements of both Kahlo and Gaga’s chronic pain anatomically derive from the same place: the hip. Whilst Kahlo directly refers to this corporeality through the pelvis illustration in her after-image, Gaga’s hip pain isn’t directly referred to in her after-image. Although, it does seem that there are residual after-affects of this pain hidden in the composition of 911’s opening scene.
Figure 15 - '911' (Short Film) (2020) By Lady Gaga. Video still of opening scene, Lady Gaga lying in the desert. (the non-real) (0:20).
Figure 16 - Lady Gaga in pain in documentary 'Five Foot Two' (2017)
Like Kahlo, Gaga’s corresponding choice of setting also depicts the isolating aspects of her chronic pain. Whilst Kahlo has been displaced in the middle of the desert in her hospital bed, the opening scene of 911 also depicts an unconscious Gaga stranded in the desert (Figure 15). Introducing the video with an elevated shot, the camera projects over what appears to be boundless mounds of sand. This extensively vast landscape separates Gaga from the rest of the world in what appears to be a dystopian or post-apocalyptic entity. This might suggest that Gaga has undergone immense levels of suffering and distress. However, in an interview with Zane Lowe, Gaga describes that ‘this is not dystopian and it’s not utopian’ but that Chromatica is ‘just how I make sense of things’ (Gaga, 2020). Perhaps the after-affects of Gaga’s chronic pain have been aesthetically transformed in an abstract way, which mirrors similar notions to that of Kahlo’s isolation, hopelessness, abandonment and longing.
I would argue that the abstraction in both Kahlo and Gaga’s after-images is a feature of surrealism. By definition, Breton described surrealism as a ‘dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation’ (Breton, 1924). The desert is not a landscape which is ‘exercised by reason’ in either accounts of Kahlo’s miscarriage or Gaga’s accident: It is a signifier of both where they place themselves amongst this pain and the after-affects of the pain. Kahlo and Gaga (as subjects) encompass their chronic pain, and this makes them feel isolated and separate from other non-experiencing individuals.
After-affects of Gaga’s fibromyalgia are also present in her disadvantaged position, where she is lying flat on her back unconscious in Figure 15. This is a similar body gesture pictured in Figure 16, where Gaga is filmed in excruciating pain in Five Foot Two (2017). Gaga’s experience of body spasms have debilitating effects both physically and mentally, to the point in which she needs professional help in order to function. This immobilization of Gaga’s fibromyalgia is ‘emitted, trans-mitted and redistributed’ (Ettinger, 2006: 222) in an abstraction of the self through the subject’s posture in the after-image (Figure 15). This trans-subjective transformation of after-affects also applies to Kahlo’s after-image, where she Is depicted (like Gaga) lying on her back, but haemorrhaging blood on her bed (Figure 6).
Conclusion
I think that using a matrixial approach was a necessary methodology in order to scrutinize both Frida Kahlo and Lady Gaga’s works. By exploring their after-images with a trans- subjective perspective, I have been able to empathise with their traumas by gaining access to their after-affects. Without this viewpoint, I would have only been able to surface-analyse, and therefore sympathise with their works.
Fusing the ideas of Ettinger, Fuentes and Breakell in the form of an IPO model helped me to understand how the transmission of trauma operates, however I don’t think the model itself was completely relevant when analysing the works of Kahlo and Gaga. Whilst I think the model’s strengths lie in its clear construction (explaining direction flow/passage of trauma), I think it can be improved by indicating a clearer difference between both mental (affects) and physical (artwork) aspects of trauma and the relationship in which this transmission occurs.
At first glance, Kahlo and Gaga’s after-images of chronic pain are illustrated similarly. However, through the lens of the matrix, I can see that they both utilize composition so that their after-affects are encountered through the posture of the subject and the desolation of the landscape. Overall, the symbolism used in both works depict the after-affects of the artists feeling towards their traumas. Whilst Kahlo literally paints a metaphorical extension of the actual traumatic event, Gaga figurates an ‘abstraction of [her] perception of the world’ (Gaga, 2020): a fabricated situation which symbolically aids the translation of Gaga’s after- affects of pain. So whilst Kahlo’s pain originates from the womb (as I concluded on page 12), it is clear that Gaga’s pain originates in the psyche: its conflicting state of ‘real’ and ‘non- real’, forming compulsive behaviours which are self-harming. They both place themselves at the centre of the after-affects of their traumas, encompassing a sense of global pain.
In terms of approaches; Whilst I would describe Frida’s approach to making as ‘radical’, I would rather describe Gaga’s as ‘pioneering’. This is because whilst Frida’s approach disobeyed all cultural conventions of 1930’s Mexico, Gaga’s approach strives for future change by publicly activating discussion through her audience. However, I believe that in both cases, the artists used the most successful tools they had available to them in order to narrate their personal experiences of gendered trauma.
Illustrations
Figure 1: Hodgson, C. (2020) Model of a Standard IPO Function.
Figure 2: Hodgson, C. (2020) IPO Model based on Fuentes’ Idea.
Figure 3: Hodgson, C. (2020) IPO Model of Trauma Transmission.
Figure 4: Kahlo, F. (1932) Henry Ford Hospital (Close up of Kahlo on her Hospital bed) [oil on metal] Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico.
https://www.fridakahlo.org/henry-ford-hospital.jsp#prettyPhoto [Accessed 26 October 2020]
Figure 5: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Still with subtitles depicting a doll inside a diamond box (the non-real)(1:43)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 6: Kahlo, F. (1932) Henry Ford Hospital [oil on metal] w385 x h310 mm (without Museo
https://www.fridakahlo.org/henry-ford-hospital.jsp#prettyPhoto [Accessed 26 October 2020]
Figure 7: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video still of the opening scene (the non-real)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 8: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video still of the end scene (the real) (4:12)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 9: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video still of Gaga being pulled down to reality, with the red anklet (the non-real)(2:07) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 10: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video Still of Gaga’s ascension into heaven with wilted rose (the non-real) (2:10)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 11: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video still of man repeatedly banging his head against a pillow (the non-real)) (0:52)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 12: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video Still of Woman cradling her son, man stirring a pot, and Gaga popping her pills) (the non-real)(1:10)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 13: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video Still of Tapestry (the non-real)) (2:45)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 14: Khalo, F. (1944) The Broken Column [oil on maisonite] w30.6 x 39.8 cm. Museo Dolores Olmedi, Mexico. Image Available at: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the- broken-column/EgGMbMFBQrAe3Q?hl=en- GB&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A8.98059198039198%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A2.9202447453918605%2C%22height%22 %3A1.2375000000000014%7D%7D [Accessed 4 January 20201]
Figure 15: Gaga, L. (2020) ‘911’ Short Film (Video still of opening scene, Lady Gaga lying in the desert (the non-real) (0:20)) [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58hoktsqk_Q [Accessed 28 September 2020]
Figure 16: Gaga, L. (2017) Lady Gaga in pain in documentary ‘Five Foot Two’. Image Available at: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-lady-gaga- documentary-five-foot-two-20170920-story.html [Accessed 8 January 2021]
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