Madonna’s videoclips as audio-visual performances. Forty years of popular culture

In recent years, the concept of “performance” has taken on an increasingly specific value in reference to the issues of education, evaluation and perception. It is a word recalling not only the performances we make when necessary, but the entertainment world, where music and vision combine to generate sensational events and the magic of fiction. In “The Society of the Spectacle”, written by Guy Debord in 1967, the author claimed that the spectacle has become an “integral part of our very existence”: this fact was true at the time and it’s still today. However, in the contemporary Visual Era we are hyper-andradically-connected and transformed into “sounding images” projected on our screens, missing our human-relational parts. Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone’s career began in the Early 80s of the Twentieth Century and has never ended. During these forty years, Madonna has built an innovative “poetics of performance” studied by many sociologists at an international level. Madonna’s videoclips are not only commercial products, but visualn performances where the music works as a soundtrack and the main object is the body of Madonna, which takes the non-form of “liquidity” analyzed by Zygmunt Bauman from 2000 onwards. The goal of this communication is to analyze the videoclips of some of the popstar’s most successful songs, such as “Material Girl” (1984), “Frozen” (1998) and “God Control” (2019), in which it is possible to see how Madonna can be considered the most influential pop icon/influencer of the postmodern age, or the first who marked the passage from “performativity” as a way of being to a way of doing.