The working condition, 2019

Working overalls
Book: The Conquest of Bread. P. Kropotkin, Biblioteca Estudios, n.d. (1930s), 19 x 12,5 cm.

The Soviet propaganda posters of the 1930s and the Spanish propaganda posters of the Popular Front called for strong, virile and muscular bodies, scorning weakness, vice and laziness. The thinker Simone Weil, after working for a time in a factory, questioned this working-class mystique, pointing out that the proletariat, even after appropriating the means of production, was nothing more than a subjugated and exploited body that lives to work and works to live (1). In this double condition of overcoming and subjugation, workerism became very much like a religion, replacing faith in providence with faith in history and progress as an unappealable process that would lead to its liberation in the paradise of the proletariat.

This work, which has taken its title from Simone Weil’s book The Working Condition, attempts to summarise the nature of this condition by means of an oversized overalls (for a tall, strong body), a text embroidered with the verse 17:1 of Genesis: “Walk in my presence and be perfect”, and a book by Kropotkin entitled The Conquest of Bread, published in Valencia in the 1930s, whose cover illustrated by Josep Renau, an artist of communist ideology, shows the idealised figure of a worker. This stereotype of the athletic worker was taken to the extreme in the Stalinist USSR through the figure of the Bogatyr or “Hercules”, an exemplary worker who, through stakhanovism, raised his level of productivity to superhuman limits, even to the point of death.

 

(1) “Going to the work count, getting dressed, leaving the factory with the body empty of all vital energy, the spirit empty of ideas, the heart disgusted, full of silent rage, and on top of that with a feeling of impotence and submission”. Simone Weil. La condición obrera, Buenos Aires: El cuenco de plata, 2010, p.116.

 

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Exhibition:
Theoretics of bread
Rosa Santos Gallery. Valencia. From 20 September to 22 November 2019.