The Abject in Pop Music

Notes from unpublished talk on Evaporated Music for the exhibition Video Hits, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2004

1. Post-90s = stylists as authors of VCs

2. Stylists as surface fabricators + performers as mannequinns

3. Pop audiovision as clothed mannequinns

4. Art appropriation of such Pop audiovision replicates only the fabric - poorly

5. The so-called Art of VCs is the result of a stylist re-inventing the notion of a 'director' within the supposed novelty of digital technologies - hence Gondry & Cunningham as retarded replays of Georges Milies trickery and spookery

6. Note - all links to advertising and industry supply evidence of 'stylism'

7. Pre-90s = Pop audiovision was a reviled/maligned discourse

8. Performers were their own material - cc. Michael Jackson

9. While Post-90s Pop pretends to don image, Pre-90s pop that survives is less appropriated and more transmogrified - pop as plastic surgery - as internal reconfiguration

10. Evaporated Music = Pop as plastic surgery - the effect is not to drag, mime, portray or mimic the styled-mannequinn of Pop audiovision, but to become it from within via the operations of granular trans-audiovision


Text © Philip Brophy. Image © respective copyright holders.