Illegal Alien's Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value

Work on Paper

DePaul Art Museum

Name/Title

Entry/Object ID

2010.05

Description

Accordion book with a collage of images and text.

Artwork Details

Medium

Color lithograph on Amate paper

Acquisition

Notes

Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment

Made/Created

Artist

Chagoya, Enrique

Date made

2009

Ethnography

Notes

North America Mexico born, United States American Mexico born North America, United States

Lexicon

Getty AAT

Concept

identity, metaphysical concepts, philosophical concepts, multiculturalism, culture-related concepts, colonialism, political concepts, social science concepts, slavery, social issues, sociological concepts, popular culture

Hierarchy Name

Associated Concepts (hierarchy name)

Facet

Associated Concepts Facet

LOC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials

Marxism, Capitalism

Dimensions

Dimension Description

sheet

Width

80 in

Length

15 in

Dimension Description

frame

Width

83-1/2 in

Depth

3-1/2 in

Length

19-1/2 in

Exhibitions

Fires Will Burn: Politically Engaged Art from the Permanent Collection

Highlights from the Permanent Collection 2012

Nexo/Nexus: Latino Artists in the Midwest

LATINXAMERICAN

Interpretative Labels

Label Type

Cultural/Historical Context

Label

Enrique Chagoya’s Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value explicitly engages the violent history of capitalism and imperialism by depicting a counter-history of the contemporary world on traditional amate paper — an ancient paper made from the bark of fig trees — in the style of a codex, a pre-Columbian, Mayan civilization folding book. Imagery taken from a vast range of global visual traditions coexists with figures from popular culture — a process Chagoya calls “reverse anthropology”— while the perpetrators are depicted as various birds and hybrid monsters with cartoon-like speech bubbles quoting from Karl Marx’s 1867 magnum opus Capital. In this work, Marx introduced the concept of surplus value to theorize the distinctive way in which capitalism exploits the unpaid labor of workers. Yet, as Marx showed, capitalism is only historically possible if there is first a period of “primitive accumulation,” the use of violence, war, enslavement and colonialism to dispossess native peoples from their land and resources, which Chagoya depicts in vivid detail across this work.