Making This Video Portrait Required Lady Gaga to Pose for 6 Hours

Now this is fascinating: Lady Gaga worked with photographer Robert Wilson to produce a stunning video portrait. The portrait was one of a set of others that were on display in the Lourve last year, but are only released to American audiences last Saturday at the Watermill Center in New York. Likely as a marketing initiative, two minutes of those 6 hours have been uploaded to YouTube. I'm continually surprised by Gaga who besides being quite lyrically talented (even if you don't like her you should at least recognize that she is good at what she does), is capable in quite a few other artisitc mediums including, apparently, being a human painting. 

In an article in Vogue, writer Mark Guiducci explains what's happening:

One, in particular, sees Gaga embody Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière, who was in her early teens when Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted her portrait in 1806. With the costume and setting of Ingres’ original exactingly imitated, Wilson and Gaga then go off script in a nearly ten-minute video, a portion of which is seen here, that breathes life into its Neoclassical antecedent—quite literally, in fact, as one barely perceives the slow rise and fall of Gaga’s chest as she respires. Steadily falling teardrops, a swan in slow-motion flight, and a violin-based score further differentiate Wilson’s work from Ingres’ painted original, which was clearly just a starting point for his work with Gaga. Perhaps most remarkable here is the global pop star’s ability to completely disappear into a character other than herself. And actually, after witnessing Wilson’s Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière, it won’t sound so surprising to hear that Gaga will appear alongside Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba next month in the sequel to Frank Miller’s Sin City.  

Not sure how I feel about the video portrait on YouTube, but I imagine seeing it in a gallary would be quite the experience.

[Via Lady Gaga on Facebook and Vogue]