The Things We Worship

The Things We Worship

Installation

Aug 9

Written By Annalee Davis

Year:
1992

Medium:
Acrylic on Wooden Altar

Dimensions:
60"(H) x 45"(W) [closed]
or 60"(H) x 90"(W) [open]

Credits:
Len Corsby (video)
Daniel Christaldi (photo)

Collector:
Embassy of the USA, Barbados office

In the early nineties, I was responding to heated national debates questioning the future of a landscape caught between a sugar industry with its weighty associations with slavery, sugar production costs that were among the highest in the world and the development of tropical islands as exoticised playgrounds for foreigners, catered to through the development of golf courses, ever grander hotels and possibly casinos. The Things We Worship exposed contradictions that, if left to prevailing market trends, would go unchallenged.

It consists of an altarpiece activated during a 1992 performance at the dilapidated Vaucluse sugar factory as part of a one day ‘happening’ called Art Over Sugar. When closed, the altar displays a central image of a rural Barbadian landscape flanked on one side by a fish out of water and sugar cane at sea. On the reverse side is a line-drawing of a rural landscape tapering off to a ‘cut along the dotted line’ – eagerly followed by scissors – a reference to unscrupulous permissions granted for subdividing prime agricultural land for housing lots and golf courses, requiring the use of pesticides and copious quantities of water in an already water-scarce country.

In front of an audience of about 500 Barbadians, I collaborated with the late Colin Hudson – agriculturalist, inventor, singer and field naturalist whom I draped in a sheet of white cotton, wrapping him from head to foot in long strips of white gauze. He sang the Barbados National Anthem, interjecting provocative questions and statements. Playing on words in the Anthem, he noted “only this morning the papers said another 2,000 acres were no longer our very own”. Hudson provocatively challenged our role as active citizens who, in the Anthem, are “strict guardians of our heritage, firm craftsmen of our fate” by suggesting alternatively that we were strict guardians of our heritage and firm craftsmen of our fate. He ended like a broken gramophone player.