Julia Elise Hong
Reading Marx: History of a Young Artist in Marxist Terms (2023/2024)
publication, em-dash literary journal, Issue 2: Youth, May 10, 20242510 words
The film is movement, but the film within the film is money, is time. The crystal-image thus receives the principle which is its foundation: endlessly relaunching exchange which is dissymmetrical, unequal and without equivalence, giving image for money, giving time for images, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end. And the film will be finished when there is no more money left…
Deleuze1
Deleuze1
I
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. 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.
Until yesterday, you were only thinking about making and making out of necessity of being a human. I’ve never seen you like this, calculating and coming up with a number of paintings of the same dimensions to make in how many days. How does it feel? Are you concerned at all that you might be handing yourself over to a production of commodities? And what does it mean to you to sell? You used to not care to sell and even refused to sell.
Nothing’s changed really. Except by caring to sell, I intend to be social. I intend to exist in the world and in its consciousness. Those dimensions or not, the image I make on each canvas will be out of necessity as ever. Painting and the image present enough problems for us that will last a lifetime. Once a painting is finished, however, I in fact want it to be a commodity, one which is conveniently stretched or framed and easily sellable so that the painting can have an easier time going out in the world and socializing. And it will still contain enough problems for me, the fellow artist, the critic, the art historian, and the viewer, for scholarship and for seeing. The problems within the image alone are what will determine whether it is a good painting.
What about the price? Is it your goal to make much money through your art? For example, how would you respond to your work being sold later for millions of dollars in auction houses?
Auction houses…. Much money, I don’t know. I just want the works to be reasonably priced, enough to support natural, material development of my art, studio, and home. You know me. I’ve never had much desire for money. Now, this might sound a little contradictory. My response to the art being sold for millions is positive. Positive in two ways: one, why not, I wouldn’t mind such appreciation of the value of my art and my life-activity and human being it embodies; and two, I want to go beyond the habit of frowning upon such million-dollar sales and offer a perspective that would otherwise be unthinkable, that sees such sales simply as another case of social reality. Let’s take a step back from the millions of dollars as quantity. Instead, think about them in terms of quality. The millions of dollars are essentially an expression, a language spoken by a group of people. I want my works to be of such great capacity that they can be multilingual; and the language spoken in an auction house would simply be one of the many languages the works speak. I’m suddenly reminded of Derek Jarman. He spoke much about finding “family within the films” and “the real purpose of filmmaking” being “to create community.”7 His filmmaking would bring people together, actors and financiers alike.8 It is my hope that my works will socialize with everyone, nonprofit galleries and auction houses alike, and bring people together. So, let’s say a million-dollar transaction happens somewhere. Whether that transaction involves me at all would be less my business. I would simply be excited about my work’s multilingualism.
II
The artist, not a scholar of Marxism, began reading Marx, only vaguely interested in the two things she did not understand: money and society. What had always resonated to her experience was rather the mystification of metaphysical reality Marx criticizes in the Hegelian or German idealism. Clearly, something had caused her to extend her thinking and to invest some days in perusing over social reality and Marx’s scientific socialism and materialist conception of history.
She had once expressed her concern about her work suffering in the material and social world because of her character and relation to the world. For her, the world was always a contemplative moment between she and nature, she and the tree, she and the rain, and between she and God – and less an economic one involving production, property, capital, and socialization. Of course, her life, too, was driven to an extent by productive forces that are natural to a human being – to, as Marx would say, “real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.”9 She would spend hours thinking and producing ideas, paintings, and sculptures. But she was never prolific nor cared to be: for example, she would continue painting over a few canvases without ever finishing them. Also, she would feel a bit queasy calling herself an artist and any profession for that matter. It was always other people that called her an artist. But then, she changed and decided to be one.
To this day, it is not clear to me what happened to her, why she changed. Is it simply that the hours of thinking and producing had to be translated somehow into material and that she, too, could not avoid accumulation? Marx points out human need, greed, and passion as reasons for accumulation.10 Was she, too, needy, greedy, and passionate? I could never forget the first sight of her introducing herself as an artist. It was extremely touching to see her grow and be part of the world in that way but at the same time mournful.
The artist breaks into laughter.
“Touching and at the same time mournful,” she repeated and said that, having read Marx, she recalls it as a positive moment in her life. Although unaware of Marx then, in the moment she called herself an artist, she was making a flip in her perspective, very much like Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s theory, and trying to become a full human being by engaging in material intercourse, buying, selling, and accumulating. “Now the question is: How do we buy, sell, and accumulate with grace and without feeling insecure or ashamed?” she said. And then she added that there is something truly revolutionary which has less to do with his inversion, his most rational and scientific critique of capital, and his imagination of communism. What surprised her was to see Marx’s concepts as heavily invested in appearance and expression – or language.
In Marx, things often ‘appear’ as, in the form of, or to be. They are always in ‘an expression of’ what they really are. For example, Marx defines communism as “the positive expression of annulled private property.”11 Exchange-value is “the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.”12 He also defines a commodity as one that “appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood” but “is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”13 Lastly, value is what makes every product “a social product as language”;14 and “both [£110 and £100] are but limited expressions for exchange-value.”15 These are only the few of many occurrences of appearance, expression, form, and language. That the thing is invested in them might imply a few things. Let’s say a thing is given a price of $100. One, the thing is social: it exists in the language of $100 in order to have material intercourse with other things of the world which understand what $100 means. Whether language is required by the thing because the thing is social to begin with or language forces the thing to be social is beside the point. Two, the thing exists, or at least we can believe or feel that the thing exists: the language of $100 exists to embody the thing; and if the thing did not exist at all, the language of $100 would not exist, either. Three, because $100 is mere appearance, expression, and language, there is no need to get overly excited nor lament over the number which only dresses the thing and is not the thing. Appearance is refracted, expression limited, and language living, so there is always a possibility that the thing is really less than or more than the price it is given.
Where the artist found grace in material intercourse was in Marx’s descriptions of the thing as one which is invested in appearance and is distinguishable from that appearance: that the thing in completion is one which exists in metaphysical reality and at the same time social reality. This began to mean a number of things for her studio practice: one, thinking about money and trying to sell works or find other means to at least stay afloat financially would be her way of being social and thus a full human being; two, trying to maintain an appearance of a life of an artist would be her way of being an artist; and three, through the ups and downs in sales and representations in the art world, she would always remember that her life-activity or human being – what the thing really is – is in the studio. She said something happened to her art, too, once she started thinking about appearance and language for the interest of becoming a full human being: aiming to create images of a full human being or the thing which is complete gave her painting enough problems; and all other concerns regarding dimensions, the thing as a commodity, etc. mattered less, hence the simplified plan for 25 paintings in the same dimensions.
This is the most paradoxical part about Marx. In his highly scientific analysis, a commodity becomes “a mysterious thing.”16
I:
At this point, I want to ask: Would you consider yourself a Marxist? And what do you think about communism?
I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist. What intrigues me about Marx is that his work gives rise to the thought of appearance, expression, and language; and I don’t think that’s what people have in mind when they call one another a Marxist. Plus, if I ever call myself one, it would be to say that the Marxist theory, method, and language have entered my consciousness; and that means I would have to call myself a Hegelian at the same time. As for thinking about communism, I’m staying strictly in the text; and there is an aspect of it that I question which has to do with its existence in language. When Marx says, “the dictatorship of the proletariat… itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society,”17 ‘dictatorship’ reads to me as language: what is dictated, said aloud. Going from capitalism to communism is then going from language to language; and we would continue to exist in mystery. So, I ask: Is communism which Marx pictures revolution enough?
1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 78.
2 Robert Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Norton, 1978).
3 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology: Part I,” 1845-46, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Norton, 1978), 154.
4 Marx, “German Ideology,” 158.
5 Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864), Jeune Homme nu assis au bord de la mer, figure d’étude (Young Male Nude Seated Besides the Sea, study), 1837, oil on canvas, 98 x 124 cm (38.5 x 49 inches)
6 Marx, “Capital, Volume One,” 1867, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 329. Description of the yet-to-be-sold artworks as ‘potentially capital’ is inspired by Marx’s description of the money which circulates in the manner of M-C-M (money-commodity-money; “buying in order to sell”) as capital and “potentially capital.”
7 Interview by producer and critic Simon Field in 1989.
8 Derek Jarman: Life as Art (Andy Kimpton-Nye, 2004, U.K.).
9 Marx, “German Ideology,” 154.
10 Tucker, introduction to The Marx-Engels Reader, xxv.
11 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 1844, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 82; underline mine.
12 Marx, “Capital,” 304; underline mine.
13 Marx, “Capital,” 319; underline mine.
14 Marx, “Capital,” 322; underline mine.
15 Marx, “Capital,” 333; underline mine.
16 Marx, “Capital,” 320-321.
17 Marx, “Class Struggle and Mode of Production,” 1852, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 220; shortened by me.
Bibliography
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].