For my family & in loving memory of my father,Paul Andre Tindall.

We proceed from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity —and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces —labour’s product— confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts, (1844), p.28-29 →

Part 1

Landscape with Figures — George Tooker, (1965-66)

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 29, (1844)

The Automatic Subject

Learning to be Machine

In works like Subway (1950), Government Bureau (1956), Lunch (1964), and Landscape with Figures (1965-66), George Tooker renders the terrain of capitalist alienation as solemn liturgy —a world where subjectivity is flattened, agency nullified, every gesture reduced to uniform compliance. Whether enc