I don't know if anyone is familiar with this already, but it made some important appearances in galleries across the U.S. since it's first publication:--
http://www.artandwork.us/2010/01/art-workers-wont-kiss-ass/
-----
Never heard of it. Thanks for posting. Flipping through the page and an article on what working life is like in art and teaching---not much has changed in forty years. My one and only teaching job was for night classes at the de Young Museum. I lasted one semester and got tossed for swearing in class---some little old lady patron ratted me out. I was going to quit anyway because the pay was too low and time so long I couldn't live on it with a day orderly job, let alone support a wife who was going to grad school.
I am following a free online course by David Harvey which is great. It starts here:
He goes through Marx's, Kapital piece by piece and explains the conceptual framework. Not much has changed in 150 years at the conceptual level. Marx's talk of shillings, spindles, and yards of cloth strike you as quaint until you remember Lewis Hine:
Okay, so what? Art and work. Guess where your cotton duck canvas comes from?
Let's mull this over as a conceptual art piece. How about going through Harvey, pick up a concept or two and build a work around it. There are plenty of ideas to choose from and most are concrete enough to be made intelligible. Most depend on a process-concept system that should be highly familiar to the process-concept crowd. Marx has just the right combination of philosophy and reality to appeal to the more intellectual branch of the art crowd.
Take an idea like this. (This one occurs in Lecture 5, on Chapter VII, The Labor-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value---which I am mostly finished with today.)
Labor power in effect preserves and transfers prior commodity use value by its labor. If the labor power is withdrawn, the prior capitalist use value as well as the current potential exchange value and surplus value for capital are lost. This is the basic conceptual frame work of a strike or any form of blockage which stops the flow. This concept of a flow goes to Harvey's interpretation of systems and processes that act like a thermodynamic system.
If you click on the Hine photo, you'll see a giant spinning machine. The thread represents the prior use value composed of cotton, prior thread making machines and the labor power to produce this commodity. This is the use value preserved and transferred by the girl who represents the current labor power consumed (with machines and materials) by the capitalist owner of the mill. I think the next stage is taking the finished spindles over to something that looks like a bobbin-type machine to whined the thread tighter and these finished bobbins go to weaving machines where they are mounted in rows to weave the cloth. Here is a wiki that outlines the process with photos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacturing#Spinning-_yarn_manufacture
You can have a lot of fun typing in `textile machines' in google and then click images.
Let's take another part of this chapter. The value of labor power purchased by the capitalist, who Marx sometimes refers to as Mr. Moneybags, is sold by the worker at a rate which will keep him or her alive at a given standard of living to work another day. Now consider the girl as a metabolic system. She needs less wage to physically sustain her than any one older and bigger. You can see she still doesn't quite get enough to eat because she is too short and skinny to pay for her food even within a family where most probably worked.
I wish I could find a height/weight ratio chart I once saw. It was from England. It showed this number which was a population average dropped from 1750 to about 1850-60 and then slowly recovered back to 1750 levels between 1890-1910. It didn't start to increase until the 1920s. It was an illustration of the effects of industrial capitalism on the English working class body.
I was made aware of the incrediable shrinking English worker through my mother-in-law who was a coal miner's daughter (technically Welsh). She was 4'10'' and weighed maybe 90 pounds. While she escaped by going to college, she didn't escape her `roots'. She died early from chronic respiratory aliments.
Ah, that entrepreneurial spirit killing little girls.
CG
