Kampman, Anneke;
(2023)
POP CONTROL: Figures of Capital. Music-video as Immanent Critique.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This PhD is a practical and historical exploration of music-video as an artistic form. From the introduction of MTV, the music-video has destabilised hierarchies between music, image, and text, and constituted a unique form of living-advertising. The result of collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, contemporary music-video is as much the product of social media – and an internet-enabled celebrity culture – as it ever was of television. Confronting distinctions between ‘high’ and so-called ‘low’ moving-image productions, music-video is both a music industry product and an institutionalised artistic entertainment present in galleries/biennales. This PhD assesses how the objects privileged within these spaces (of art and mass entertainment) reflects shifts in the infrastructural conditions underlying contemporary artistic production today. Poised between artwork, advert and commodity, music-video has been both instrumentalised for profit, and deployed by musicians and artists – including Prince, Dara Birnbaum, Hype Williams, Mohamed Bourouissa and Rosalía – often as a form of immanent critique. This PhD explores how music-videos formal contradictions might reflect changing relationships between art, commerce, and popular music from 1981 - 2021. Theoretical questions are approached as practical ones and by making connections to music-videos of the past, I foreground the inherited conditions (the grammar) of my own practice. Through video, text, performance and installation, I interrogate how music-videos produce multiple notions of personality whilst stabilising the artist as brand. Here, popular music is understood not simply as personal expression, but as a form of commodified subjectivity: an affective witness to the ideologies and ‘emotions’ of the market economy, both symptomatic and productive of lived experience. Through textual, musical and choreographic means I connect discussions of value and subjectivity to questions of desire, pleasure, and alienation, alongside the production of racialised and gendered subjects. Focusing on music-video's audio-visuality and ‘structures-of-feeling’ my work encourages audiences to re-examine socio-political narratives and their experience of pop and its history.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | POP CONTROL: Figures of Capital. Music-video as Immanent Critique |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > The Slade School of Fine Art |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10183267 |
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