‘Marx’s designation of the single artifact as a “body” is at some moments based on the concept of use value (the woven cloth refers to the human body because it has “use to” the living body…) and is at other moments based on its being the materialized objectification of bodily labor (the woven clothe a material memorialization of the embodied work of spinning, for it endures long after the physical activity has itself ceased: “the worker has spun and the product is a spinning”) …Thus the activity of “making” comes to be the activity of “animating the external world”, either described as a willed projection of aliveness (“Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is cotton wasted. Living labor must seize on these things, awake them from the dead”)…’
from ‘The Body in Pain – The Making and Unmaking of the World’ by Elaine Scarry
I have never read Marx so I was bowled over by this; my work as the
“making of bodies” or in the case of my new print series
“the memorialization of the making of bodies”. I disagree with the concept that the World (raw material) exists purely to be animated by the labour of mankind; since the Earth is continually re-making itself without our interference! But, my work – which relies on the natural, innate processes inherent in materials, is a ‘making’ by me with the Earth, as a farmer ‘produces’ crops with/from the soil? My work is specifically a "rusting", an "oxidisation" or a "splattering"...
That feels good!
