Left: A still from Robert Wilson 'making of' film of Lady Gaga's performance-art piece 'Flying', on show at Paris' Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Right: A detail shot, showing Gaga's painful-looking initiation into the art of Japanese rope bondage

Lady Gaga is hanging upside down naked while a rope cuts into her skin, bending her left leg, pinning her arms behind her back and deforming her breasts. This video, by the experimental artist/director - and former Wallpaper* guest editor - Robert Wilson, shows the pop star’s painful-looking initiation into the art of Japanese rope bondage. And it serves as the ’making of’ for a performance-art video called Flying. The video, along with Wilson’s new video portraits of Gaga, is currently on show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, run by Wallpaper* Design Awards 2014 judge Thaddaeus Ropac.



Knowing he had an upcoming stint as guest curator at the Louvre , Wilson chose themes from the museum’s collection, all dealing with death. ’She’s sort of serious,’ he explained, ’not your ordinary pop star.’ They shot the videos in a London studio over three days, Gaga standing for 14 or 15 hours at a time (when she wasn’t trussed like a chicken), blowing away the director with her stamina and emotional intelligence.



One subject he selected was Andrea Solario’s 16th-century ’Head of Saint John the Baptist on a Charger’ . He filmed 11 views of the singer’s bearded face and superimposed them over the painted head of the martyr. ’She would look at the image and after a while she would look at her face in a mirror and something happened, and I would shoot her,’ he said. Each portrait is unique - thanks to the size of the slash at her throat, her lips being parted or closed, her eyelids fluttering or her expression changing.