The project "Liberation!" of the Dutch artist Bee Flowers was inspired by a specific event - the release of photographs of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib. The artist has described these 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 digital works firmly rooted in the history of postmodern art, with a multi-layered structure of cultural and historical codes.

One immediately notices the kinship of these collages with the art of Richard Hamilton. However, with half a century gone by, the aesthetic of consumerist abundance that permeated Pop Art has made place for an ethical sparring of violence / 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 for the artist himself. Kristeva's term "Abject" introduces the concept of the repulsive, which corresponds to either the incompletely embodied (unformed fetus) or the over-incarnate (decaying corpse.) Which is to say an intermediary state between Subject and Object. And Bee 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.

In earlier projects Bee Flowers has used photography to register the social contamination of images; a contemporary metabolism that takes place between art and society; a rhizomic connection rather than one that occurs in a cause and effect manner. This ubiquitous information infection has become a means of communication in its own right. With great intensity, through states of ‘connect/disconnect,’ a multiplicity of image-variants are pushed through what Barbara Kruger has called the 'ironing media.' This relates especially to images for 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. Bee Flowers 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. One recalls Camilla Paglia's famous conclusion about the end-direction of the vectors of gender preferences in democratic Western societies: 'gay' for men and 'butch' for women. The construction of a vulva and a soldier's knife into a single object underscores psychoanalytical theories regarding masculin properties in the female - the vagina, that 'unhealing wound' in which death is always present, assumes the characteristics of a weapon. Bee Flowers turns to a demonstrative 'serving up' of bodies in his work, while seeking to avoid the projection of the male gaze upon passive women. Through a conscious withdrawal from any one of the geopolitical camps that are party to this debate, the artist means to avoid a determinable gender position.

 

The artist operates with images that fall within the Lacanian category of the 'obscene' - those that testify of an interest in Horror as a means of preparation for the unimaginable or unthinkable. At the mundane level, the fear of injury, and the forestallment thereof, happens for example during piercing or tattooing procedures, which though painful and partly irreversible, are in fact completely controlled procedures. Like vaccinations, such decorative modifications yield a sense of protection from more significant injury. The viewer, when watching violent news reports, substitutes the possibility of experiencing actual tragedy with mere representations. Art that employs images of Horror becomes one of the tools of initiation of the Western consciousness, alongside the daily dissemination of violent news through the mass media. Like "abjection" has enabled the alienation of the infant from the mother's body, the images (re-) presented by Bee Flowers are inseparable from the growing phases of the infantile civilized society.


To work with found imagery, the artist has chosen collage as his medium. Or, more precisely, a form of digital polyphonic (or cacophonic) montage. The usage of space brings Roland Barthes to mind, saying 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 the theater." Today, fragmented space emerges by montage in graphic editing programs with the capacity to synchronously virtualize and to 'iron out' images. Through art, a socialization of the viewer takes place, which makes art a tool in the cultural evolution of personality. Bee Flowers distances himself here from that area of contemporary art which Borovsky has termed 'mainstreamtainment.' The author’s aim to counteract a unified point of view and to obscure affiliations to one or another side, 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?