Turner and Formwalt's Landscapes Analyzed Through Marxist Theory in ARTMargins Essay

Jaleh Mansoor's 2021 essay examines J.M.W. Turner's 1844 painting Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway alongside Zachary Formwalt's 2013 film Projective Geometry through Marxist theoretical frameworks. Turner's work captured ontological shifts from new extraction modes while transforming perception itself, collapsing subject-landscape dialectics. Formwalt's piece features a reading from Marx's Capital Chapter 25 over footage of colonial railroads built by England, France, and Belgium from Ivory Coast to the Cape. The filmmaker uncovered archival documents describing African labor as disposable within resource extraction enterprises. Both artworks are analyzed through the theoretical matrix of Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Courtauld. The essay positions these works as crossing Modernism, described as the cultural wing of Modernity—itself a euphemism for capitalist production's ontological transformations. Published on April 30, 2021, the content is available through MIT Press as free access material.