WORK

Two animations, Capital 1 & Capital 2 first shown as part of the film and installation exhibition WORK by Capital Drawing Club at St Chad's Project Space, London (May 2025).

Capital Drawing Club (Andrew Cooper, Dean Kenning, John Russell) are a Marxist animation art group.


WORK: Part. 1

 

WORK: Part. 2

 

 

WORK Capital Drawing club St Chads Marx Capital

PRESS RELEASE

The animations act out a ceaseless movement of bodies, machines and the market abstractions of labour-derived value (money and prices) as described in Marx’s Capital. Choreographed to a dance music soundtrack, WORK connects the rhythms of industrialised oppression (the repetitive beat of factory machinery) and the commercial standardization of music to an embodied force of revolution and transformation in D.I.S.C.O music, building to a crescendo in the first beats of ‘Club Tropicano' - a (workers) paradise first heralded in the 1970s hit Car Wash. The format draws upon the tradition of industrially produced animations such as Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in Fantasia, or early Felix the Cat cartoons, where inanimate objects are brought to life, ‘animated’ with convulsive, syncopated force; also ecstatic, communal visions allegorised as threatened woodland animal utopias (Bambi etc.). This imagery is mirrored in Marx’s depictions of vampires, monsters and talking commodities to make visible operations such as surplus value extraction, the domination of machines over workers and commodity fetishism.

Capital Drawing club exhibition WORK at St Chads Dean Kenning

Installation shot

 

Initial animations by Capital Drawing Club first presented at 'Stayin' Alive: The Many Afterlives of Disco', International Disco Conference, University of Exeter (5 - 6 July 2024)

See Also CAPITAL