Eating a banana is such a simple thing, although the person who grew it is invisible to us, just as we are to them.
And this is so not only for bananas!
Exchange Values is a social sculpture project not only about bananas, but about everything we buy, use and produce.
We all need money to buy things and so we usually look for the cheapest things, the best value for our money, we say. On the other hand the producers try and earn as much as possible, by looking for ways to maximise their profits. Sometimes this means making things grow bigger and faster, sometimes it means selling things more cheaply to compete with others selling the same things. Now and then the producers are in control of their buying and selling, but in most cases it is big companies who control the workers and the speed of production.
Although we all produce things for each other, we have no contact with each other. Being a producer or a consumer in contemporary society means being part of a very complex global economic process, in which only a small minority profit.
Are we powerless to change this situation?
What is the connection between aesthetic form and social process?
Is art that is concerned with such issues simply a catalyst or is it a vehicle for change?
What is the role of imagination in transforming our lives?
These are some of the questions that this social sculpture project raises.
Shelley Sacks, the artist who developed this project with banana growers and their organisations in the Windward Islands, sees the 'art' in this social sculpture project as much more than the objects in the museum. "We all dream" she says "even if we don't draw or paint. We all make pictures in our minds. This is our greatest power, the power of our imagination. It is the power with which we can picture our situation and then picture how it could be different. This is the work that I was doing with the producers in the Windward Islands. So the 'art' in this work is not simply the things you see in the gallery.
"What is in the gallery is part of a much larger artwork: a social sculpture that includes the new visions and ideas of the producers and their organisations, and the developments that have grown out of this imaginative, re-thinking, social sculpture work. I see the whole project as a kind of 'imaginative space' that would not exist without the sensual, visual, aesthetic form. This form opens our imagination and reconnects us to our experiencing selves. It is not there simply to convey ideas or information. So although the work is about the producers and consumers of things it is also a model for how we might all live and work as artists, making the kind of art that shapes and transforms our lives."