The project "Liberation!" of the Dutch artist Bee Flowers was inspired by a specific informational impulse - the photographs from the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. Flowers came to regard these, in his own words, as 'the perfect conflation of two constituents of Julia Kristeva's 'Abject': Horror and the Female.' The result of the artist's efforts is a series of computer generated collages, firmly rooted in the history of postmodern art, with a structure of multi-layered cultural-historical codes.

At first glance one notices a kinship of these collages with the plastic arts practice of Richard Hamilton. However, with half a century having passed, the aesthetic of consumerist abundance that marked pop art, has made place for an ethical sparring of violence and humiliation. The announced connection to Kristeva is clearly more than incidental, for it provides not only the philosophical grounding for the work, but also a positioning of the artist. Kristeva's term "Abject" introduces the concept of the repulsive, which corresponds to the incompletely embodied (unformed fetus) or the over-incarnate (decaying corpse), that is to say an intermediary state between Subject and Object. And so Flowers too aims to keep to a neutral space between the common notions of the subjectivity of the artist and the objectivity of the philosopher. He cites the words of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib "beatings don't hurt us … the worst insult [is] to feel like a woman." The deepening rift between the Western and Islamic worlds regarding gender roles becomes the central theme of the project. At one end of the spectrum, one recalls Camilla Paglia's famous conclusion about the direction of the vectors of gender preferences in democratic Western societies - the image of 'gay' for men and 'butch' for women.

In earlier projects Bee Flowers has used photography to register social contamination of images; a metabolism that takes place between art and society, and that occurs not in a cause and effect manner but through a rhizomic connection. This ubiquitous information infection has become a means of communication in its own right, while through states of ‘connect/disconnect’, a multiplicity of variants of images are through-put with great intensity via what Barbara Kruger once called the 'ironing media.' This relates first and foremost to images for the screen, display and monitor, where the tail wags the dog and, through forced gender mutations, GI Jane finally attains those masculine traits which feminists call phallologocentrist.

The inevitable redirection of the discourse towards Cindy Sherman lays bare a substantial distinction between these artists: she used aesthetics to create an ethical situation. Flowers turns to a demonstrative 'serving up' of bodies in his collages, while seeking to avoid the projection of the male gaze upon women. Through a conscious withdrawal from one or the other geopolitical camp, the artist, as author of the message, means to avoid a determinable gender position. The construction of a single image from a vagina and a soldier's knife results in a simulation that underscores psychoanalytical theories concerning masculin properties in the female - the vagina assumes the characteristics of a weapon - the 'unhealing wound' in which the presence of death is always evident.

The artist operates with those images of the Lacanian category of the 'obscene' that testify of an interest in Horror as a means of preparation for the unimaginable or unthinkable. The fear of the possibility of injury and wounding, and its forestallment, happens for example (at the mundane level) by submitting to piercing or tattooing procedures, which are in part irreversible and yet completely controlled processes. Like vaccinations, such 'decorative' losses yield a sense of protection from more significant injury and damage. The viewer, when looking at news reportages with scenes of violence, substitutes the possible witnessing, or experiencing, of actual tragedy with their virtual presence and representation. Art, exploiting images of Horror, becomes one of the tools of initiation of the Western consciousness, alongside with the daily practice of (violent) news dissemination through the mass media. "Abjection" enabled the alienation of the infant from the mother's body; the images presented by Flowers are inseparable from the process of simulation of the growing phases of the infantile civilized society.

To work in the field of found imagery, the artist has chosen collage as his technique. Or, to be more precise, a form of digital polyphonic (or cacophonic) montage. Looking at the usage of space in the works, one is reminded of the strategically perfect saying of Roland Barthes (in 1970): "in our time visual means are coming to a fundamental collapse, making way for a kind of multiple space, the model for which is not painting ('the canvas') but rather the theater." Today, fragmented space emerges by montage in graphic editing programs with the capacity to synchronously virtualize and to 'iron out' artistic imagery.

Within the field of art a socialization of the viewer takes place, which makes art a tool in the cultural evolution of personality. Here, the artists distances himself from that area of 'contemporary art' which has come to be termed 'mainstreamtainment' (A. Borovsky). The author’s aim to counteract a unified point of view and to obscure affiliations to one or another side, significantly connects with the self-identification of the project Liberation: how is one to tell original from parody, when the presented form leaves no traces of montage between artistic and documentary images?

Anton Uspenski,
The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
(publication: Art Journal DI)