Virgin by Lorde is a layered work of performance art – her smartest references explained

With her latest album, Virgin, Lorde is stretching the concept of the virgin beyond the common definition. Some may consider the album’s title and its cover art – an X-ray of Lorde’s pelvis showing an IUD – to be contradictory.

But while Lorde could still be using contraception for purposes beyond birth control, its presence shows that the album doesn’t shy away from discussions of sexual activities and the risk of pregnancy (two themes that are clearly discussed in the track Clearblue).

As she also shows with her approach to gender in the album’s opening song, Hammer (“Some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man”), Lorde is testing and muddying common dualisms.

The scientific perspective offered by the album art forces the viewer to look through Lorde’s body, but we are also looking beyond her reproductive organs. Certainly, Lorde sometimes conceptualises virginity as something that can only be given once, as she explains on David.

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In Hammer, her quip “don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation” is a comedic musing on whether an experience is profoundly transcendental or just the product of hormones. But what strikes me is the fact that her concepts and themes are not static or singular.

This album is exploring the idea of being made, or even remade, through experience. In If She Could See Me Now, Lorde recounts how painful moments “made me a woman”.

Like French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, Lorde is exploring how her body is being changed by what she has been through. As she sings in What Was That?: “I try to let whatever has to pass through me pass through.”

Again, while she on the one hand describes something moving through her body, she’s also describing an attempt to move through something that has happened to her – turning a passive experience into one of acceptance and action. Here we might think of another notion of virginity: a substance before it is processed. Virginity is part of the experience of being changed, or reborn, into something else.

This is not to say that Virgin is uninterested in the body. Lorde’s discussion of her eating disorder in Broken Glass is a case in point.

Lorde as performance artist

The visuals accompanying Virgin emphasise Lorde’s status as a performance artist. The crescendo of the What Was That video is a spontaneous public performance of Virgin’s first single.

When Lorde released the second single, Man of the Year, she posted on her website:

TRYING TO MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A FONTANA, LIKE PAINTING BITTEN BY A MAN, LIKE THE NEW YORK EARTH ROOM. THE SOUND OF MY REBIRTH.

The simile here, or the idea of making music sound “like” visual art, emphasises the tactility of Lorde’s work. Each artistic piece referenced here is concerned with physically intervening into the conventional art gallery set-up.

Italian artist Lucio Fontana’s Spacial Concept series (1960) included slashed canvases a disruption of the body of the artwork with yonic - in other words, vulva-like - imagery (indeed, it challenges how “damaged” artworks are usually hidden from audiences, waiting to be restored).

Similarly, American artist Jasper Johns’ Painting Bitten by a Man (1961) is an encaustic painting (derived from the Greek word for “burned in”), which shows off the markings of someone who has bitten into the canvas.

The music video for Man of the Year is filmed in a room that is filled with dirt. This is a clear nod to American sculptor Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977). The piece also fills a white room in New York with this unexpected material: earth inside a building, where mushrooms can grow.

The video for Man of the Year may also be referencing another artwork. Lorde is shown using duct tape to bind her breasts. While this points to Lorde’s exploration of her body and gender identity, the material also recalls Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana artwork, Comedian.

Offering phallic imagery to Fontana’s yonic imagery, Cattelan’s piece mirrors Lorde’s concern with ontology, or definition. What makes something art?

Prometheus (Un)bound?

But just as Lorde is binding herself in new ways, she is unbinding herself in others. In If She Could See Me Now, Lorde declares: “I’m going back to the clay.”

Here that the album recalls the Prometheus myth: the ancient Greek story that Prometheus fashioned humans out of mud (or clay) and gave his creations fire.

The closing track, David, offers another ancient allusion, this time about David and Goliath. David – who, as a harpist, is a musician like Lorde – kills the giant man with stones. This reference furthers the song’s discussion of the problem of treating a man, a lover, like a god.

This subtle reference to the killing of Goliath adds another layer to the euphemism for male testicles explored in Shapeshifter: “Do you have the stones?”. Perhaps Virgin is doing what Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) did with the Prometheus tale: both exploring what happens when a man tries to create and determine the fate of another being, whether nature or nurture make a person, and how a new body can be refashioned from old ones.

After listening to the entire album, I was struck by how Lorde is exploring different facets of another question: who, exactly, is Lorde? Especially now that she is embracing who she is beyond the yoke of other people – or the demons – that have shaped her? Virgin shows that Lorde now wants to return “to the clay”, or to remake who she is, now that she is unbound by Prometheus.

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Lillian Hingley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.