Selected Texts  From Naming The Money Catalogue

Letter to Lucy 1

Written on a train from

to

Dear Lucy

When I began this project I was convinced that it was about money. It has certainly cost a great deal of money to make.

It’s true that Naming the Money is about how the moneyed classes all over Europe have spent their loot, flaunted their power and wealth by using Africans as slaves. The installation shows how this was disguised and glamorised; they looked like servants or were dressed in   the clothes of courtiers, they often provided the entertainment just by looking different and were at their most useful as the greatest conspicuous display of wealth imaginable. As I’ve said the original title was Gifts to Kings.

I think about money a great deal, as you will know by reading my e mails to you, especially in the making of an art project. In the 21^st century it is difficult to make work that will be taken seriously unless you throw serious money at it. Artists need space to make the work, or they need to employ technicians to make the stuff in their  workshops. Art is usually made out of something, even if it is a technological piece, materials and people are usually needed as part of a film, video or even sound work. New Technology work is perhaps the most obviously expensive to make especially initial outlay on the best equipment with all the latest capabilities.

 However, plain old fashioned materials tend to expensive if you want the thing to last and be treated with any kind of respect by those dear conservators who hold considerable power in discussions about purchasing for the major collections in Britain.

Transporting finished art or original materials to the studio, to the workshop, to the gallery and back again costs money. Photographing your artwork for publicity purposes, costs money. Travelling to do your research all over the country, or around the world, costs money. Even going to the gallery in which the work is to be shown costs money. Staying in your studio and waiting for the curator to have the time to come to you is pleasurable, but if you do it properly even that costs money. Warm studio, decent tea and good biscuits are the way to the curator’s heart.

Finished, exhibited pieces need to be stored somewhere, so artists either need a large studio or a large house or will need to pay for storage on a monthly basis Or someone needs to buy it all.

I thought this installation was about re iterating the facts and highlighting the immense contribution that Africans have made to the economic foundation of Europe.

Entire cities have been built and maintained with the wealth created by the trade in tobacco, sugar and the slaves themselves. Everyone knows that the trade in people only stopped because the profits were no longer there.

The strange thing is that now that the work is almost finished, its painted, it stands up, is photographed, now that the one hundred texts are written and the music is being added to them, now that the one hundred people are really people whom I seem to have invented, summoned, written into being and made real, I realise that this work is much more about naming than it is about money. It is an attempt to get to the bottom of the dilemma of losing your name, being relieved of your real identity, being saddled with another more convenient or less embarrassing identity and how you then have to invent something else equally real simply to survive, to make sense of being alive.

It is the story of the slave/servant, but also of the leper, of the émigré, of the refugee, of the asylum seeker.

If it is true and people are more real in who they are and therefore more important when their name and family history is written down and they live in the same place for generations, if this is really what makes you worth something then this is what I have tried to do here in this piece, with these people.

Each cut out has a name, a real name, each one is able to say who they really are and what they used to do. Each one lives with their new name and  their new occupation attempting somehow to reconcile the two. Every one of the cut outs in this installation is trying to tell you something, each has a voice that can be heard on the sound track playing in the gallery space or read on an invoice attached to each back.

I thought I was talking to a firm of accountants in order to help them get the books straight,  to get them to record the contribution, in figures, that we from somewhere else make to this place, this wealth, but I was wrong to try to do this.

What happened was that gradually I realised that a hundred people were talking to me as if I was a records clerk, telling me to write a sort of registry of names as proof that they existed as individual named people with real lives and real identities. I did as I was told.

 Perhaps I am a records clerk employed by a firm of accountants.

All Best Wishes

Lubaina

Written on a train from

to Liverpool 2003

Dear Lucy

This is just a short letter to explain to you why I changed my mind and the show is now 100 life sized wooden cut-outs and not the 10 canvas paintings I said that it was going to be.

The whole thing developed from an idea I have been grappling with since 40 painted tin plates formed part of a piece called Study for a Monument (1992) each plate tumbled off a table painting and represented countless Africans who were once makers/creative/active people and whose lives were chucked away as they were thrown overboard, surplus to requirement on their way from their home to a life of slavery.

The ten paintings once planned would have retained the original title of Gifts to Kings and have simply replicated the 3 works I saw in the early 1980’s in La Rochelle in western France . These were beautifully painted portraits of black people who were given as presents from the king of Spain to the king of France.

The fragments of fabric from your collection would have featured more prominently and been painted into their waistcoats, jackets and dresses. It would have been neat and tidy, rather beautiful but rather distant; another country, another time. It just wasn’t enough.

The hundred cut outs have been much more interesting to do. As I made the painted and collaged paper- works I became really excited by the endless possibilities for colour, texture, collage, drawing and text but by the time I’d made a few dozen actual cut outs and each decision about the clothes, objects, expression on the face of each person I had made was different, the process opened up more opportunities for dialogue between the cut outs themselves, between now and then, between art and politics. The dog trainer, the ceramicist, the painter, the herbalist, the shoe-maker, the map-maker, the dancing master and the viol da gamba player the drummer and the toy-maker are multiplied by ten. They cluster together they can stand apart they think talk and remember. They plan ahead and dream of change.

Its true it was daunting to have 100 blank cut outs all around the studio and filling the hall, but  they have  gradually come to life over the past ten months. I have had to deal with solving the problem of how to get them to stand up, then the challenge of naming them and writing each ones story. The size of the project and the worry of it went backwards and forwards from being about cash flow and budgets to reputation and skills and finally was resolved by  being able to listen; to my many technical advisers and to the cut outs themselves.

We are in the middle of making the soundtrack, the texts/stories and 80 minutes of music interplay and interweave . It will be playing in the gallery and hopefully add another layer to the experience. Its taken hours of discussion, recording, more discussion and then some technical wizardry, it was like writing and recording a small opera. The voices speaking, the urgency of writing what they said on paper, the way some simply waited their turn knowing I would get there eventually.

Many people have worked on the project so far, apart from the sound advisers there have been people cutting out, making and designing the stands, delivering them to the workshop and back to the studio. As the autumn came I had to hand over the whole management of the project so that I could concentrate on the making all the time. Our budget didn’t really allow for this so as usual my wage packet is stretched to its limit. Naming the Money indeed.

All the research into the textile fragments appears as such a tiny visual now but the presence in your collection of that partial yet tangible history will be very important to the final installation perhaps because they will be hard to see.

Tin plates multiplied by French paintings added to Hatton textile fragments multiplied by a history of cut outs, interspersed with slave narratives, overlaid with favourite music equals Naming the Money.

The placing and grouping of the cut outs is both clear and vague at the moment. There are groupings I always had in mind like the drummers, dancers, and viol da gamba players being all together in a huge boisterous, space taking, loud, gathering. I can see the dog trainers dotted about throughout the whole installation communicating with their animals. The ceramicists and painters have a great deal to say to each other and the herbalists and ceramicists do too, the ceramicists talk a lot. The shoe- makers stand alone looking at other people, the map makers stand alone ruminating about their lives, how hard they work, what might have been. The toy-makers are interested in children but I cannot place them as there aren’t any children. It will have to wait  until the dummy run next week.

All best wishes

Lubaina

Sheet 6A

My name is Walukaga

They call me Sam

I used to chase wild boar

My name is Nnamdi

They call me Dan

I used to have six drums

Now I borrow these

My name is Asiza

They call me Sally

I loved to work the clay

Now I sweep the yard

My name is Nakati

They call me John

I used to make masks

Now my shoes are worn by kings

My name is Gone

They call me George

I used to dance at ceremonies

 Now I teach the children

Sheet 6 B

My name is Zella

They call me Sissie

I used to make bow stands

Now I make toy animals

My name is Atwan

They call me Henry

I used to play my own music

Now I play Marais

My name is Bodua

They call me Jack

I used to find water

Now I clear ditches

My name is Zody

They call me Jenny

I used to grind dried herbs into powder

Now I blend fine teas for the ladies

My name is Thembekeli

They call me Polly

I used to own some land

And now I paint their hills