Figures of Capital: Music-video as Immanent Critique

Speaker: Anneke Kampman

Using my own artistic practice as a departure point, the talk will focus on how the performing body of an artist is produced and disseminated through the audio-visual form of the music-video. The talk will animate some of the ways in which contemporary digital capitalism subordinates ‘personality’ to financial appraisal – rendering it ‘operational’ in the words of Emily Rosamond – whilst providing a set of tangible artistic strategies through which such an appraisal might be reconfigured as “immanent critique”. I will show recent artworks where I make use of music-video’s contradictory status as artwork, advert and commodity through disjunctive uses of image, text and sound. The talk will stage a series of interventions into music-video’s modes of production, audio-visuality and structures-of-feeling.

All welcome - no registration required, just join us on the day. This event is not being live-streamed or recorded.

Image caption: Anneke Kampman feat. Amy Lally, Sleeping Lions, 2019

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both ‘Marxism’ and ‘culture’ are conceived here in a broad sense. We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. ‘Culture’ is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music and fashion.