A Child’s Catechism

performance, 2009

THE LIVE WORK, A Child’s Catechism, follows a text appropriated from the ‘Proletarian Song Book’ of 1919, written by Tom Anderson. The text takes the form of a question and answer session for young people to remember moral lessons by heart, designed to inculcate Anderson’s theory of ‘Freethought’ to pupils at Anderson’s Socialist Sunday School in Glasgow. In 1923, a public petition with over 70,000 signatures opposed ‘the existence and the rapid growth of Proletarian Schools which, by their teaching of sedition and revolution, and their blasphemous treatment of all religion, are fast becoming a menace to the stability of the democratic constitution of this country…’

Commissioned by Maria Fusco for Book Works as part of Volatile Dispersal: A Festival of Art Writing at the Whitechapel Gallery. The work was performed by Jordan Cummins and Mohammadur Rahman.