If you were walking around the Art Gallery of Ontario shortly before 10 pm on Monday night, you may have noticed a steady stream of gay men sauntering through the shadows. Sadly, it wasn’t an unusually cruise-y Monday night in Grange Park. They were Madonna fans braving the autumn chill to attend an outdoor movie screening the pop superstar had been hyping on Instagram all weekend.
To launch secretprojectrevolution, a short film she co-directed with fashion photographer Steven Klein, Madge and her management organized impromptu screenings in cities such as New York, Paris, Berlin and Toronto the day before making it available to download via BitTorrent.
The film is part of Art For Freedom, an online public art project promoting freedom of expression the 55-year-old is launching this week in partnership with Vice. Fans are encouraged to create video, music, poetry and photography and submit the work for inclusion.
The public-screening strategy is in line with recent hype-building campaigns by acts such as Cut Copy, Arcade Fire and self-anointed marketing visionary Kanye West – who premiered his New Slaves music video at a series of outdoor spaces around the world a month before his Yeezus album came out in June.
About 100 fans attended the Monday night screening at the AGO, a modest turnout that belies her sizeable audience. Her 2012 MDNA tour grossed more than US $305 million and clocks in at number 10 on the list of history’s biggest concert tours, according to Billboard Boxscore. (Her Sticky & Sweet tour in 2008-2009 is third biggest, with $408 million.) Earlier that year, 114 million people tuned in to watch her half-time show during Super Bowl XLVI, the most-watched television program in U.S. history.
The 17-minute, black-and-white short comprises a series of highly stylized tableaus about private prisons, movie violence and fascism. Madonna is portrayed as both victim and perpetrator she is tossed in jail, guns down her dancers in an S&M boudoir, and sheds tears while a bloodied man is tortured and a barefoot dancer twirls on his tip-toes near a burning baby carriage.
This being a Madonna-Steven Klein collaboration, the choreography and cinematography are top-notch, but the glossy aesthetic is essentially a high-definition re-hash of the bondage look French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier helped develop for Madonna in the mid-90s.
The narration is stitched together with trite platitudes book-ended by oft-repeated quotes by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Sartre. “I know what you’re thinking. If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen,” her vocal-fry croaks. “But it’s too late. I am in the kitchen and the burners are on full blast.”
This kind of easily digestible sound bite might work in a pop song, but comes off as woefully – to use her word – reductive here. As with many Madonna endeavours, secretprojectrevolution tells you everything while showing you nothing.
Moreover, for a film designed to inspire others – presumably living in places where blunt feats of artistic expression are discouraged and punished – to act in revolutionary ways, there is no sense that Madonna herself has anything tangible at stake. It might be risque, but it is hardly risky.
It’s too bad that this short film isn’t as incendiary as, say, the Nazi imagery she used in association with France’s far-right National Front party in her MDNA tour visuals, or the gay rights speech she delivered onstage in Saint Petersburg in defiance of a local law banning “homosexual propaganda.” (The law later inspired a similar law enacted nationally by Russian president Vladimir Putin.)
When she likened National Front leader Marine Le Pen to a Nazi and defied the law in Saint Petersburg, she risked legal and financial repercussions and, in the latter case, her ability to perform in the country again. At least it felt like she was going out on a limb.
It would have been even riskier to wade into the U.S. presidential campaign, which was in full swing during MDNA’s summer run. But, she seems hesitant to risk alienating conservative ticket buyers in the U.S.
So what, really, is the point of secretprojectrevolution? Will a fashion film really inspire a closeted gay teen living in Russia’s Ural region to risk life and livelihood by submitting an anti-Putin short film to the Art For Freedom project? Or a Russian woman to don a balaclava and go underground with feminist punk group Pussy Riot?
Secretprojectrevolution’s tired fetish metaphors and broad scope do no service to those realities. It suggests outspoken stars like Madonna bear the brunt of cultural chauvinism but obscures its intentions with self-aggrandizing cliche.
It’s curious that Madonna has chosen to mimic Kanye West’s guerilla-style premiere strategy to roll out secretprojectrevolution. Although both artists take aim at public apathy and groupthink, Yeezus is an angry, messy, confrontational, self-excoriating and abrasive anti-pop album that likens corporations to modern-day slave masters and has produced no hit singles. Love or hate Yeezus, West is intent on alienating listeners.
Secretprojectrevolution, on the other hand, is very much in line with the stark softcore aesthetic Madonna established with Justify My Love, her photo book Sex, and the Girlie Show tour. The representations of violence are artful, its cast flawlessly beautiful and proportioned. It should read as familiar to die-hard and casual fans alike.
There are well-known recent examples of artists risking arrest in the name of art. Soul singer Erykah Badu strolled naked through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza to comment on groupthink in her Window Seat video in 2010. As Borat and Bruno, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen drew attention to apathy and bigotry.
Two decades ago, when Sinead O’Connor tore up Pope John Paul II’s photo on Saturday Night Live to protest of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual abuse, Madonna joined the backlash that destroyed the Irish singer’s commercial viability in the United States by parodying the SNL performance and mocking O’Connor’s baldness.
In 2013, Madonna is the most famous pop star in the world. She has transcended the patriarchal major-label system to seemingly enjoy creative and financial freedom, but is reluctant to take big risks. Thus, secretprojectrevolution gets one thing right: Madonna remains in a prison of her own making.
