Lady Gaga explained her shocking SXSW performance in her keynote speech Friday, March 14, saying that the vomit painting was simply a new piece of performance art.
Gaga shed some light on her Thursday night performance, during which performance artist Millie Brown appeared onstage, chugged green and black paint and then threw it up on the pop star.
Brown is a vomit performance artist, who drinks colored milk and then regurgitates it onto a blank canvas. Each painting session is improvised and Brown reportedly fasts for two days prior to every performance to ensure that the milk does not mix with anything else in her system. She has collaborated with Gaga before, appearing in a video interlude that was screened during Gaga’s Monsters Ball tour.
“I’m so deeply passionate about any person that has an artistic spirit – any person that has a talent that they believe in no matter how crazy the idea; you never know where that crazy idea might lead you. Martin Luther King thought he could start a revolution without violence and Andy Warhol thought that he could make a soup can into art. Sometimes things that are really, really strange and feel really wrong can really change the world. I’m not saying vomit’s going to change the world…it’s truly just what he wanted to create and do and us respecting each other as artists,” Gaga said during her keynote.
As for what Lady Gaga hopes to accomplish with the performance, the singer says her mission is to defy expectations placed on her by the music industry, and society in general.
“Really, what it’s about is freeing yourself of the expectations of the music industry and the expectations of the status quo,” Gaga reasoned.
Gaga also confronted her critics who accused her of being a hypocrite for performing on the Doritos’ Bold Stage at SXSW. Gaga insisted that sponsorships are a necessary evil, especially considering the state of record labels.
“Without sponsorships, without these companies coming together to help us, we won’t have any more artists in Austin. We won’t have any festivals because record labels don’t have any f—king money,” Gaga said bluntly.
During her speech, Gaga spoke about the importance of giving new and upcoming artists a platform to perform, such as SXSW, and advised struggling artists to stay true to themselves and not conform to what record labels want them to be. Gaga also revealed that she is releasing a new music video next Saturday that will be in keeping with the “deeply creative rebellious spirit in Artpop.”
– Olivia Truffaut-Wong
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