If I Pick Your Fruit, Will You Put Mine Back? Response

‘Right, have you got everything?’

‘Just about.’

‘Did you get that miso in the end?’

‘Nah, it didn’t smell quite right. I know it’s fine but —’

‘It’s hot this morning. You just don’t know.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it was meant for a friend. Not sure if she’s into that.’

‘Right.’

‘Coffee then?’

‘Ooh, what’s that over there?’

‘Where?’

‘This over here.’

‘Oh. Didn’t see this before.’

‘Yeah, we came in the other way.’

‘Are these for free, you think?’

‘Oh don’t. It’s not —’

‘Well there’s no one here, they’re all just sitting here —’

‘They must have gone for a minute?’

‘It doesn’t look like part of the market —’

‘Surely.’

‘No look, there’s a flyer. It’s probably part of the art festival.’

‘Do you think they’re organic?’

‘Surely. Have a look at the sticker.’

‘17.70 — gee, that’s a bit much for an orange!’

‘Maximum visa 7 months limit 17.70 per hour…’

‘Right.’

‘Land of Plenty — This Could Be You – and that —’

‘Underneath, that’s Maori.’

‘Yeah.’

Oranges, with their navy blue stickers turned up to inquiring faces sit in two cardboard boxes flanking a portable marquee. These fruits of labour are positioned ready for taking, reading and eating. It would be easy to encounter this faux-market stall front and feel at a loss for how to act. A visitor could sense a missing component of exchange, or perhaps feeling devious taking an orange. John Vea, the artist behind this scene lingers nearby. Carefully he observes his audience and waits, ready for a chat.  

A mutual exchange is offered in the title of this interactive work — ‘If I Pick Your Fruit, Will You Put Mine Back?’ Because of this, I anticipated an overt intervention by Vea and his stall, a critical seed sown right in amongst the trestle tables and coffee carts of Carriageworks’ Farmers Market. Vea’s set-up is instead situated alone, slightly away from the crowd, a gleefully undercover imitation waiting to be noticed.

The statistics on each orange sticker — ‘Maximum visa 7 months limit / 17.70 per hour’ — reflect visa and wage conditions of seasonal workers programs in New Zealand and Australia. New Zealand’s ‘Recognised Seasonal Employer’ (RSE) scheme implemented in 2007, and Australia’s ‘Pacific Seasonal Worker Scheme’ introduced in 2012, rely on migrant workers from Pacific countries and Timor-Leste to undertake fruit picking and agricultural work during labour shortages. Reports of wage theft, trafficking, unsafe working conditions and exploitation are common from workers employed under these schemes. These are the labour realities John Vea amplifies through his practice. Vea encourages participants to question the hidden routes of labour, production and exploitation hugely present in these industries.

Vea employs the Navel Orange — Australia’s most picked fruit — as a gestural invitation to share food together, to socialise, and begin to unpack the injustices behind its production. Activities of eating and conversation are recognised by Vea as universally sustaining forces, and he intentionally sets a familiar stage ripe for exchanging ethical ideas and values.

This familiarity becomes subverted through the stand-in cut out, a traditionally humorous optical technology employed here to an unsettling effect. Life-sized corflute photographs of Pacific workers holding crates of fruit with their faces cut away and open for the public to step into. Market-goers approach this feature gladly, seizing the opportunity to put their heads on new shoulders, rarely standing back to evaluate whose bodies these are and what this could mean. The saturated slogans ‘LAND OF PLENTY’ and ‘THIS COULD BE YOU’ don’t appear contrived enough to prevent visitors from jumping straight into the activity.

‘Do you think we can put our heads in?’

‘Sure, it’s like at the fair!’

‘Oh, we can take a photo!’

‘Go on.’

‘I haven’t seen one of these in years!’

‘Did you take one?’

‘Not yet, I’m just getting the camera up —’

‘Jeez, hurry up! I can’t stay in here too long!’

‘Alright, smile! One more! Great.’

‘Let’s have a look – oh no, I don’t like that one’

‘No, you look fine!’

‘Oh well, am I taking one of you then?’

‘Nah, better not.’

‘Come on!’

In the context of increasing production and proliferation of images online, interactive exhibits such as this one are prone to becoming a social media spectacle. Vea’s work was created with an awareness of the likely reduction and further exploitation of its novelty, adding a layer of painful irony to this particular work. What are the ways that one can responsibly engage with Vea’s stand-ins? Such questions mirror perfectly the dilemma of ethical consumption — from which no artwork or piece of fruit is exempt. As a viable stand-in for true empathy or understanding, the work is, as Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung puts it ‘a grand illusion…neutered from the actual possibilities of danger and shame the position…entails.’¹ Open dialogue around the thoughts and assumptions Vea’s artwork might generate may give way to epistemic exchange and discovery around this suppressed issue.

Surprisingly, what makes this artwork even more successful in engaging participants is its enduring humour and playfulness. The enticing, exoticising language of the tourism industry, and the family-friendly sideshow stand-in, are twisted to darkly ironic effect. However, Vea’s patience and openness allows for both genuine connection and the means to ‘bait’ his audience using what performance artist Adrian Stimson, a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, refers to as ‘a tickle and then a slap.’² Stimson’s exaggeratedly performative alter ego Buffalo Boy references his two-spirit Blackfoot heritage, he explains that ‘for Indigenous people, we use humour a lot – not only as a survival mechanism, but it’s built within our culture.’³

Emerging here could be emic perspective, a characteristic of Vea’s research and participatory practice, which relates to a gaze coming from within a group, as opposed to etic being from the outside looking in.⁴ Visitors to Vea’s stand may initially encounter it from an etic position, and then engage in an emic way through discussing and unpacking the work with the artist.

Vea’s mischievous inhabitation of the Carriageworks Farmers Market, where the conversation around organic food production is already common, is a unique leveraging of site to provoke questioning of the human (bio)politics of dangerous, precarious and unseen labour. It invites participants to slow down and consider the conditions of labour and food production, to make the time necessary for engagement through conversation and investigation of the stall and communal eating.

Vea tells me about the concept of talanoa as an important emic way of critiquing and changing the exploitation and view of migrant workers by Australian employers, government and publics. Talanoa is a relational framework fundamental in some Pacific cultures, a form of deeply empathetic, inclusive and respectful communication. It centers around oral storytelling, two-way exchange and personal experience, as opposed to depersonalized or extractive interview and data collection processes. Talanoa, as applied here through Vea’s direct conversation, demonstrates its conducive potential across a range of settings.⁵

During my time viewing ‘If I Pick Your Fruit, Will you Put Mine Back?’ I didn’t see anyone eat an orange at the stand. Many viewers politely abscond with a piece of fruit to be eaten in private, perhaps leading to quiet reflection. I take three oranges with me and give them to the friends I’m staying with. We talk about the project. The morning I leave, the oranges are in a fruit bowl, stickers to the sun, ready to be noticed and questioned anew, the seed of further conversation.

‘Here, take some of these, there’s plenty here!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, of course!’
‘Oh thanks so much! So is this your stall?’
‘That’s right’
‘Do you mind explaining what it’s all about?’
‘Well —‘⁶