Figures of Capital: Music-video as Immanent Critique
31 May 2024, 5:30 pm–7:30 pm
For this session of Marxism in Culture, Anneke Kampman's talk will centre on the form and function of ‘personality’ within contemporary commercial music-video.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
IAS ForumG17, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BT
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.
About the Speaker
Anneke Kampman
Lecturer in Popular Music at Goldsmiths, University of London
Anneke Kampman is an artist working at the intersections of writing, music, and the moving image. She completed a practice-led PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2023. Operating through a range of theoretical, fictional, and artistic frames, her works draw from her experiences as a musician, alongside the methods and arguments of critical theory and institutional critique, re-staging the techniques of the cultural industries in an “immanent critique” of pop. Key to this is an interest in the commodification, standardisation, and reproduction of the artistic ‘personality’ (broadly understood). Recent work examines the politics and histories of popular music’s global circulation via visual media such as the music-video.