Resting her head on the table, the artist looks at the damaged sculpture. Her silent heart is furious.

For the work found some feet away from its place and broken in half, the gallery offered to compensate for the cost of the clay that had been used to make it. When she reminded them of what had caused the damage and asked to consider at least the labour that had been put into making the piece and would be required for restoration or reproduction, they did not care to find out how much the labour might be and responded with an unchanged offer to pay for the raw material only. She was then a lonely witness of a great loss: it was as if they were saying, ‘Your sculpture is a thing without a subjective essence to be embodied, like air that is provided by nature and assumes at the most use-value with consumption as its end and not any value with capital and mystery as its end.’

Her head, still on the table, is as muted as a still life can be, as it slowly turns toward the other side of the studio. Then there is Marx in red.²

The book had been sitting there for months, but it was really that afternoon that she saw in it a strange mixture of languid and bright. Lines she had marked finally began to illuminate: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life”;³ and “Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.”⁴ What the gallery was hurting was consciousness of the life-activity, the human being, and the value of an artwork which are their own and the world’s as much as the artist’s.

She grabbed a pen and began to write down numbers. She imagined that she was a full-time artist whose income from artwork sales alone would suffice for both the means of production in the studio and the means of subsistence at home. The economic and aesthetic decisions she was setting out to make then would be directly related to the kind of consciousness – hers and the world’s – in which she hoped to exist. The list in USD included studio rent, tools and materials, general artwork prices, gallery commission, collectors discount, apartment rent, car maintenance, insurances, food, clothes, et cetera; and for a simplified plan for a fiscal year, she decided to focus on making a body of paintings in 38.5 x 49 inches, dimensions of her choice after a favorite painting.⁵ Based on the calculations, her conclusions were: for the studio income to suffice, she would have to produce 25 paintings in the said dimensions; supposing that she takes six weeks off for holiday, travel, and research and is left with 46 weeks in the year to produce the 25 paintings, she would have to produce at least one painting every twelve days; and along the way, she would hope for some work days that are highly productive (for relative surplus-value) or prolonged (for absolute surplus-value) where additional works in other dimensions and mediums could be produced. Now, the works would not get sold immediately and some maybe never. However, what mattered to the artist was that those in her possession would be potentially capital.⁶

She then promised herself that, until it is no longer necessary, she would keep a job elsewhere to make money with which she would play the full-time artist and pay for the very minimal means of production and of subsistence. This way, her life would appear in certain refraction as that of a full-time artist; and this appearance, this expression of a life, would in the end be the true state of her life.

That hour before sunset, the young artist herself became capital.

Read full essay on em-dash.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Geleta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1985]

Interview by producer and critic Simon Field. 1989.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHGBCco9uE&t=1s

Kimpton-Nye, Andy, director. Derek Jarman: Life as Art. 2004. 60 min.

Tucker, Robert, editor. Introduction to The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, xix-xxxviii. New York: Norton, 1978.

Marx, Karl. “Capital, Volume One.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Robert Tucker, 294-438. New York: Norton, 1978 [1867].

Marx, Karl. “Class Struggle and Mode of Production.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Robert Tucker, 220. New York: Norton, 1978 [1852].

Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Robert Tucker, 66-125. New York: Norton, 1978 [1844].

Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology: Part I.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Robert Tucker, 146-200. New York: Norton, 1978 [1845-46].