Short description
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One Hour In Cotton

The hour, as we know it, developed out of the textile industry's need for a unit to measure a particular quantity of labour. Marx famously uses the example of the production of cotton to illustrate how an hour of labour is embodied in a commodity. With a textile producer in Haslach, Austria, Urban Subjects produced a textile work that marks, in the cloth itself, an hour of industrialized labour. The textile design is based on the repetition of Marx's sentence, “At the end of one hour's spinning, that act is represented by a definitive quantity of yarn; in other words, a definitive quantity of labour, namely that of one hour has become embodied in the cotton”, in English and the original German. This textile work itself embodies the actual labour time of its production while simultaneously making visible the temporality of the labour process. Gaining use value, this 50-metre long work will be used as a cover for the seating in the exhibition If Time Is Still Alive at Camera Austria.