Fate of the Guilty

“Nemser worried that in treating their [endurance artists] as ‘materials or instruments’ & in taking a ‘clinical attitude towards pain’ body artists might come closer to treating their bodies as pure objects.’ – Lara Shalson

But isn’t this what all art does? The worker becomes the most wretched commodity, and that’s all art is, commodity production. On a different scale to industrialisation, but not a world apart. To create anything, to embed a canvas with your labour time is as much a commodity process as is the creation of a coat from 10 yards of linen. This is where performance comes in, while I have no intention to treat pain in a ‘clinical’ manner, I do want to show that process. The process of becoming. Becoming a commodity, how we fight it at every turn. But it can’t be stopped, the process starts from the day we are born.