Reading Marx

THE PROVOCATION OF FLESH AS CAPITALISM

Studio A, NYC, 1996.

In this series, flesh becomes the battlefield on which capitalism is exposed.

A woman reads Das Kapital while her body, historically commodified, aestheticised, and traded like any other luxury good-refuses to serve as a passive ornament. Her nudity is not seduction; it is indictment. She studies the very system that turned bodies into assets, desire into currency, intimacy into spectacle. The book does not civilise the scene, it detonates it.

The confrontation is deliberate.
The viewer arrives expecting to consume an image; instead, the photograph consumes the viewer. Her gaze interrupts the familiar exchange of power and exposes the machinery behind it. The camera becomes the capitalist apparatus, extracting value; the viewer becomes the unconscious participant; the subject becomes the theorist who knows exactly how the structure works and lets you see yourself inside it.

This is not eroticism.
This is critique, staged in the language capitalism understands best: the marketplace of the body.

The provocation lies in the collision:
the rawness of flesh with the cold architecture of economic theory; the vulnerability of the nude with the violence of commodification; the intimate interior with the global forces that shape desire. The work does not ask for agreement—it demands recognition. It reveals how deeply capital infiltrates vision itself, how easily the gaze becomes a transaction.

Here, the body stops being a product.
It becomes the manifesto.

And the viewer is no longer innocent.