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| Hell in Paradise | |
This was a state of mind and a way of being that my friend Sarah Gavlak and I adapted for our ten-day stay on the island of Martinique in September 2004. We were invited here by Frederic Guilbaud, a passionate art collector who offers artists a productive vacation, creating the best possible conditions for us to see a lot, relax, play, talk and absorb, with the hope we will bring his native island into our art and further out to the world.
Being my first ever visit to the Caribbean, I initially held my suspicions about this ‘Paradise’. What else could it offer a holidaymaker with little serious intent or time than a blueprint of my own fantasies about it? What relief, if not a harsh spotlight on the daily grind we were in fact leaving back home? And, if it was to be as fantastic as promised, a true ‘Paradise on Earth’, well, then, I assumed, we must already be dead on arrival and I decided we had to go as angels. 
Starting at the Fort de France airport, where Fred met us with his big tropical smile and rainbow-colored flip-flops, we wore our angel wings continuously that week, as we set out to investigate the island. Sarah pragmatically explained our mortal state: since the airhostess on the flight over had been hostile to her American accent and offered lousy service, we had in fact died of thirst on Air France. Fred readily accepted the fact that his guests would be dead for ten days and took us around to beaches, supermarkets, funerals, restaurants, everywhere we wanted to go and let us do whatever we wanted to do. Everywhere we went, people smiled, seemed to get the point and yelled ‘les Anges, les Anges!’ after us. Right away, we went swimming in the glorious sea with our angel wings. Sarah who wore her new white and matching Bond babe bikini reluctantly asked, ‘But can the feathers take the water?’ Stupid question, I thought. ‘Of course, they’re duck!’ So the angel-ducks flew-swam into the ocean to find out. Turned out the feathers stayed water repellent all right, but the cardboard they were attached to soon crumbled into mush and had to be dried and strengthened with chicken wire and crazyglue. Slowly we mastered the art. 
Our stay in Martinique coincided with the Republican Convention descending on my own hometown, New York City. The bombastic broadcasts from it on CNN that we checked in on daily rang particularly absurd on this tiny island and in between our frolicking adventures, but they also never let us snap out of reality. After a few fresh cracked coconuts and dips in the ocean, we sensed we were indeed in Paradise, but also knew that we had arrived here from hell. Midway through our stay, the angels got homesick. So we asked Fred to make us a big fire on his lawn which he heroically staged, pulling together a huge heap of wood and branches from the mangrove on his land. That night we went bananas and filmed Hell in Paradise, a yet to be edited and released narration of the effects of global right-wing politics, colonialism in all its forms and variations, pain, torture, alcoholism, despair and the escape from it all—a simply blissful death like ours. The next day I wasn’t that amused anymore. The exposure to harsh sun, insects, a bad rash all over my hands and a local history lesson—in the form of a bleeding, decapitated statue of Napoleon’s Josephine, who had supported the re-establishment of slavery on her native Martinique—already convinced me that our bliss was all but elusive and that we soon needed to get back to where we came from, or hell would catch up with us for real. The local news had already announced that Ivan, the fifth largest hurricane in modern times, the size of Texas, was forming in the Atlantic Ocean and heading straight for us. It was hard to believe, the weather was calm and sunny, the perfect calm before the perfect storm. We kept swimming in the bay and laughing our heads off with storm jokes. But when even the ants disappeared and nature went quiet we started packing the contents of our bungalow and moving all loose objects into the main house. ‘This may be the night when I will loose everything I own’, Fred stoically announced. By then, we were so impressed by his island cool and so pathetically helpless that we just let the time pass and wait for whatever was to be. Miraculously, the eye of the storm missed us and went on to wreak havoc and cost plenty of human lives in Haiti instead. 
When time came to leave, we installed all our angel props—the wings, golden shoes and bijoux—in Fred’s garden tool shed. We asked him to please keep our things safe in case we ever come back to Paradise and need them again. * * * Pool I also invented a new drink on Martinique. Pool is a new drink in a recycled plastic water bottle. It contains pure tap water and a touch of mint (very faint turquoise) for pool-simulated color. The drink is slowly warmed in a car on road trips and drank as welcome relief in uninhabitable areas where no other drinks can be bought. Never EVER serve Pool chilled or with ice. Keep out of fridge on all accounts. Enjoy Pool. 
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No Smoking Following the first presentation of this work at the Whitney Biennial and a second installment on the bottom of Andy Stillpass’s pool, I decided to claim all the world’s seas as NO SMOKING territories. During my stay on Martinique I staged two public ceremonies and respectively claimed the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea to be non-smoking. The Speeches: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen! For my friends, lovers and soul mates. I hereby declare the Atlantic Ocean a non-smoking territory.’
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* * * The Big Umbrella (Martinique) The initial objective of the trip was to shoot the final installment of this project, under tropical rain. But with fantastic weather all throughout the promised rainy season (Ivan had swooped up all the clouds), this soon to proved to be a fiasco, with only a few images shot in rain, and the umbrella mostly serving us as a sun parasol. The last day, I smashed the umbrella in the tropical winds of the passing storm.  |
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See more photos of The Big Umbrella. |
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