bee flowers - liberation

The duality of the modern world, the disharmony of opposing cultures, gradually pushes one towards a sense of a longtime war that raged in absence of a clearly designated front line. A war, separate battles of which have flared up long before it was understood as a distinct phenomenon. Even today, with the process of crystallization into clarity still incomplete, its rich fruit is nevertheless borne incessantly. A number of well known events at the onset of the new century have rendered comprehension a necessity, and the need for a peaceful resolution of conflicts between two interlinked civilizations, more acute. Yet recent developments have challenged hope of peaceful interpenetration of cultures, and hope of the emergence of a parity based coexistence within existing socio-cultural coordinates.

The events at the Iraqi prison facility Abu Ghraib make for one of those striking circumstances. The photographic evidence of torture, humiliation and other forms of cruelty towards the prisoners, elicited the strongest reactions worldwide, and one feels urged to comprehend the root causes of these events which to this day have not lost in topicality, since so far a simple, universally satisfying perspective to this problematic has not been proposed.

In one of the photos from Abu Ghraib - where female soldier Lynndie England holds a prisoner on a leash - the Dutch artist Bee Flowers saw a projection of the ideas of Julia Kristeva, as put forth in her essay ‘Abject’ - a direct illustration of two components of the Abject: Horror and the Female.

According to Julia Kristeva, Abject first and foremost signifies the border between the Self and the Other, the border that prevents different entities to dissolve into each other. Abject disrupts the identity of the Self, formed within a system and an existing order, provoking signification of duality and heterogeneity. Socially, Abject emerges as the flip side to religion, morality and ideology.

The Abject was since time immemorial, according to Kristeva, linked to the female: women in all cultures were thought of as bearers of the foul, the sinful and unclean. Woman, in such manner, became the object of rigid mechanisms of ideological, moral and religious exclusion.

Gender hierarchy and gender-typical behavior is proscribed by institutions of social control and through cultural traditions. The development of the gendered consciousness on the individual level then perpetuates the existing system of relations within the domination/submission oppostion. Traditionally, a significant means of preserving the gender hierarchy, apart from direct violence, is control over the female sexuality, to which end Eastern as well as Western societies have developed a rich assortment of tools. The stability of binary thinking, within which the woman inevitably finds herself assigned a status of defective ‘otherness’, has been defeated only in the West and only so in the most recent history. The accent has shifted toward a woman’s capabilities to independently affirm herself in professional roles.

Kristeva points to the importance of developing means to legitimize the ‘feminine’ beyond categories of either the elevated or the repulsive. After all, the abjected, the unclean and foul is not an object’s quality as such, but merely denotes a situation of exclusion in relation to a border determined by social structures or by the Subject, either of which react with repulsion and horror at any attempt at rationalization. If we follow Kristeva’s argumentation through, in the photos of Lynndie England with Iraqi prisoners one indeed sees more than the embodiment of existing and obvious fear for the ‘other,’ mutual and unconscious fear of an alien culture. Here, the inversion of the gender hierarchy, the violation of the traditional positions within dominant/submissive (in the case of this specific cultural context), reveals ‘female’ and ‘horror’ as functional and effectual, as a weapon symbolically expressed by Bee Flowers in the combination of a dagger and a vagina.

The narrative of Bee Flowers’ project seems divided into two parts that can be perceived to, in some ways, provide a mirrored image. The first part, the central figure of which becomes Lynndie, is the ground where two cultures collide, saturated with references and guiding citations from the history of the feminist movement which has altered the Western world during the past several decades, as well as cultural features of Islamic societies, standing in contradiction and oppostion to those changes.

The second part – illustrations of Western and Eastern social models, reduced to imaginary, but no longer unthinkable, ‘world inside out’ situations where the traditional gender hierarchy is reversed. Yet in the first part one also finds this reversal – it contains references to events when the Geneva convention is ignored in relation to those people, whose civilizational practice is based on fundamentally different views on human rights. These socio-cultural contradictions were indicated and emphasized when one of the prisoners’ remarked that “beatings don’t hurt us … the worst insult is to feel like a woman.” Flowers points out how this self-exposing, misogynist statement erodes the border of the binary opposition oppressor/oppressed, widens the context and complicates the determination of morality and guilt.

Bee Flowers has created the image of the Lynddiebot, a collage personality, a female warrior representing a fragmented contemporary identity patched together from a variety of influences and role models. The Lynddiebots are joined by female soldiers, equipped with highly pronounced female genitals and breasts. These soldiers are the new American weapon, drawing on the fear of the ‘vagina dentate.’ A weapon to inflict maximum psychological damage to the Muslim world.

Elsewhere, Kristeva has referred to the Abject as the perverse, since it does not fully correspond to either the prohibited, the rule or the law, but instead circumvents these, confusing them in order to utilize them, while still not accepting them. Abject kills in the name of life. The Lynddiebots carry angel wings.

Flowers’ work is ideologically neutral: the artist sets up a line of intersection of cultures. The concept becomes - to paraphrase Kristeva’s words on the Abject - gender hierarchy on the flip side of religion, culture, art and politics.