In Bee Flowers’ latest project one does not find the urgent topicality or external acuity that have marked some of his earlier projects with a socio-political emphasis. There is no linkage to a singular phenomenon or event. The project examines something at once general and profound, and is focused on the workings of social life itself. It speaks of universal values and their neglect within contemporary society, where a cold mechanistic mass culture constructed around a hollow core has triumphed.
Within the mosaic-like scattering of associations - in a space that is at once personal, public and hyperbolic - the central hero here is the social myth itself. And also, by extension, the formation of people’s individual self, and that of social roles in the age of mass culture, consumerism, information networks and virtual identities. The project takes our times under review in terms of the existential problems of an uprooted humanity and its search for wholeness, spiritual touchstones and moral yardsticks.
The project’s toy-like figures form a befitting embodiment of current mass culture’s ideals for mankind: forever young, firm-bodied, sexually uninhibited, cool and rational. These physically ideal men and women in their standardized states of inexpressiveness and depersonalization are differentiated in our times of unisex attire and behavior only by their primary sexual characteristics. Despite their physical activity and energy, spiritually and emotionally they are almost lifeless. Nevertheless, the artist uses the language of his cyborg characters and cloned twins to speak of eternal human themes: of social window dressing, of loneliness within the crowd and the vacuity of a celluloid existence.
In the Spectacle of Life, as performed by these characters, some odd and yet emblematic dissonances come to the fore. The total nihilism of society in the age of global consumerism is contrasted against the performance of scenes reminiscent of religious Mystery Plays. A veritable parade of iconographic subjects of the classical arts is opened up in front of the viewer: here is a Crucifixion, there a Deposition from the Cross, a Madonna Misericordia and a Lamentation.
As clearly as these subjects are designated in the construction of the scenes, for the most part, however, the traditional models are not followed closely: instead, the artist creates his personal, individual mythology. In one instance we find the Marlboro Man in the role of the crucified, at once representing the actor who died of lung cancer, the death of the myth of the pioneering self made frontier man, as well as the now vilified, suffering tobacco industry itself. In another work we find a fresh-faced Madonna with a seductive semi-nude body, seated with her ankles elegantly crossed. Innocent, but cold and self-contained in her own beauty, she is oblivious of the chocolate-brown babies at her feet.
Through the means of such puzzle-motifs, the artist shapes societies, social groups and couples, engaged in a torrent of activity. At times clumsy and assiduous, indifferent and reverent, soulless and spiritual, they can slip out of their roles but can also merge with their acting parts into a seamless whole. Some protagonists are singled out from the crowd. These heroes - victims who may simultaneously be others’ executioners - are often lonely and lost. This theme of the interchangeability of victim and perpetrator also comes forward lucidly and convincingly in the depicted interrelations between the sexes.
The works are marked by restraint, intellectual distance and programmatic rationality, while the detailed constructions and attentive compositions that are familiar features of Bee Flowers’ art manage to combine seemingly contradictory properties into a harmonious unity. For example, on the one hand there is the hyper-modern concept of space as overlapping virtual information fields - specifically that of visual culture in the digital age, with its dispersive fragmentation and kaleidoscopic vision. While on the other hand there is the author’s obvious art-historical erudition, with his classical tastes showing in the clarity and balance of the compositions and in the subdued drama of the color palette.
Using his familiarity with the history of European painting and his tendency to improvise on historical themes, Bee Flowers provides the viewer the opportunity to believe in the possibility of the preservation of genuine humanity underneath the glossy surface of the biorobot-consumerist. In that respect he shows himself to be an authentic humanist continuing the cultural tradition that is fundamental and foundational to the whole of European civilization.