With generous permission
from the filmmaker’s estate,
we are honored to share
this extraordinary short
documentary, completed in
2017 by Joseph De
Francesco with Michael
O’Connell. Framed as an
intimate interview with
Marioni, it also contains the
only known footage of him
painting.
In speech and in practice, the term “liquid light” binds together the material and the immaterial; indeed, this binding is at the core of all painting. And it is the dialectical acknowledgment performed by the notion of liquid light that, finally, gives Marioni pride of place at this epochal moment in the history of his art form.
From 1972 until his death on September 6, 2024, Joseph Marioni occupied a studio loft at 545 8th Avenue. These photographs were made during a single visit in late December of that year.
Instead, a race-essentialist understanding of epistemology lies at the heart of both Robinson’s notions of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. In the former, we find racism intrinsic to “European” culture as early as antiquity and reaching maturation in the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, while he presents African medieval societies and black colonial subjects as innately peaceful and less violent. And in this regard, Robinson’s claims are consonant with a longer line of black nationalist thinking in the United States, which inverts the assumptions of white supremacy and holds that white domination is an endemic phenomenon.
Billingham’s desire to make something aesthetically rather than socially or politically moving can be understood not just as a form of complicity with individuals and their families but, in its commitment to structure, as the imagination of an alternative. For example, the question of the frame in the photo of Liz doing her puzzle is not reducible to the ethics of photographing your mother. Rather the photo ignores the questions of family ethics. More important, it doesn’t so much ignore as seek to overcome even the question of working-class identity. Liz’s dress, her tattoos, the couch she’s sitting on can all lend themselves to being read as the markers of such an identity.
Manet’s art is about challenging what we think we know about the world: about what makes a finished picture as well as about what constitutes a politics of class, gender, and race. And doesn’t the moral value of artworks lie in their resistance to our assumptions about the world, not how they reaffirm what we already think we know?
The issue, therefore, is not that we need to stop representation from benefiting elite minorities—that’s just representation in its most indefensible form—but that we need to stop believing that representation, or, more broadly conceived, anti-discrimination, should be our foremost social justice commitment. Without a prior grounding in a politics of economic equality, all anti-discrimination boils down to is the neoliberal promise that people should have an equal opportunity to escape poverty; rather than trying to get rid of it.
At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value.” But this neglects Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, or labor as productive of value and labor as productive of objects of use. Contrary to Kornbluh, value is not “generated” by exchange but rather by the expenditure of labor time and realized through exchange. So long as value—labor time—is the measure of social wealth, workers must expend abstract labor in exchange for a wage, while the capitalist appropriates the products the worker has valorized. This implies that the form of distribution—the propertylessness of the worker—is grounded in the form of production itself.
Trump has no new coalition; he can’t because those “groups” aren’t real as groups, and people identify with them largely around thin identities more like consumer taste “communities” or partisan fans of sports teams. This is not to say that the reified categories couldn’t become constituencies on the same principal as the Heisenberg effect; part of the beauty of interest-group politics is that tossing some resources around will produce constituencies—or at least people who claim to speak for them.
That disaster followed in 1947 when Republicans, who won majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1946 election, passed the Taft-Hartley amendment to the Wagner Act, which placed a raft of restrictions on labor unions, opened the door for right-to-work laws, and required all union officers to sign affidavits confirming that they were not members of the Communist Party. The latter caused the biggest problem for FTA since all its national officers were Communists. This opened the door for more conservative unions in the AFL and the CIO to launch membership raids on FTA locals, often with the support of employers.
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