Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare) is the action with which Joseph Beuys debuted on November 26, 1965, at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. What matters is that, on that occasion, as if for a sacred anointing, his head was covered in honey and gold leaf: “Using honey on my head I am naturally doing something that is concerned with thought. The human capacity is not to give honey, but to think – to give ideas. In this way the deathlike character of thought is made living again. Honey is doubtlessly a living substance”.
Honey, and with it wax, are not ordinary fruits of a mechanical transformation of matter: they are the products of a knowledge that touches upon further, inscrutable spheres; they are an act that is, in itself, other.
The imprinting, as is well known, comes from the Neun Vorträge über das Wesen der Bienen, translated as Nine Lectures on Bees, by Rudolf Steiner. In the first of these lectures, delivered on February 3, 1923, at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, the anthroposophist stated: “When one stands before a hive of bees one should say quite solemnly to oneself: ‘By way of the bee-hive the whole Cosmos enters man and makes him strong and able’”.
Honey is a fundamental knowledge of nature, and bees—individuals and inextricably a collectivity, involved in a cycle of death and rebirth that is the essential measure of time—are the bearers and guardians of such knowledge.
Myth certifies the divinity of bees, their continuous connection with the divine. The nymph Melissa tends to the infant Zeus, whom his mother Rhea hid on Mount Ida in Crete to save him from Kronos's devouring ferocity: she feeds him honey from the Panacrid bee while the goat Amalthea suckles him. Thus, it is she, the nymph-bee, who teaches how to live off the fruits of nature without depleting it and without resorting to killing, showing humanity a higher model of civilization. Aristaeus, a favorite pupil of the nymph-bees told of by Virgil in Book IV of the Georgics, learned from them and taught humans the arts of beekeeping and animal husbandry.
Melissa is also radically linked to the cult of Ephesian Artemis, the polymastos (many-breasted): the melissai were the priestesses of the temple of Ephesus, and the essenes, drones, were the priests—the queen bee being par excellence the goddess herself, direct heir to the atavistic cult of the Mother Goddess.
It is likely that Alan Bee—the nom de plume of an author who chose anonymity for himself—did not know all of this when he fell in love with bees and their lives. Born in Germany and raised in continuous contact with nature, he instinctively and directly learned the deepest secret from this life: placing oneself in harmony with the natural, knowing oneself to be a man precisely because one is immersed to the innermost fibers in its cycles, its laws, and its epiphanies. And when he felt the drive to express himself welling up inside—even through art, techne and artifice by definition—he dug deep and rediscovered the frequencies of an innately natural process.
Alan Bee is, par excellence, an “omo sanza lettere” (unlettered man); thus, he has not contracted the virus of demiurgy, of feeling like a creator and master who imposes rules and forms upon matter, nor has he placed himself in a position to conform to aesthetic models born from and referring to art. In a 1936 book titled, by a sort of destiny, Les abeilles d’Aristée, Wladimir Weidlé reflected on the “destin actuel des lettres et des arts” and concluded: “cherchez l’art seul et vous n’aurez pas d’art”, whereas those who practiced art in ancient times lived in a world where “on devient artiste pour la raison même q’on est un homme”. Thus, one acted within a sphere of natural sociality, not a specialization that over time became self-referential. How, Weidlé asks, can we return to that state? With the awareness that the Bible teaches in the story of Samson (Judges, 14:8,9), where after the death of a lion, from its carcass: “there was a swarm of bees and honey in the body of the lion. He took some of the honey in his hands and went on, eating as he went; and when he came to his father and mother he gave some to them, and they ate it”. Therefore, from the corpse of a discourse on art now reduced to a blague, a new vital swarm can be born, a new fruitful necessity.
Alan Bee started from a direct observation. The community in which art is generated must be united, industrious, and supportive like that of bees; therefore, the artist must identify with the bee itself, and their work must be singular because, to quote Weidlé, it is “une mission à lui seul confiée”. Yet, the nourishment from which it flows and which it produces is shared and intended for all: it is the quintessence of a sociality harmonious with the times and rhythms of nature.
Quite differently from Beuys, who had constructed and put into operation his Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump in the Workplace)—a machine that circulated honey like a continuous flow of energy with symbolic and didactic value inside the Fridericianum in Kassel in 1977—Alan Bee assumed the pictorial process itself to act like and with the bees, in a realm of full naturalness.
He established, in the first instance, the cellular modularity of the honeycomb as a structuring element and a non-preconceived geometry, initially making it the basic constituent element of the image, destined to become a receptacle for different materials. These materials were experienced at first as substances, as deposited and congealed quantity/quality, with a strong degree of natural identification. Then, over the years, color increasingly became the protagonist, yet understood as a bared quality in a relationship with others that was not openly preordained and capable of seemingly blind, unscrutinized, and unscrutinizable behaviors.
These behaviors are, in reality, neither indifferent nor predictable, and above all, they are positioned from a vastly different perspective: what is the world like, what is beauty like, if you are, or think of yourself as, a bee? Not something that can be made explicit or defined, but something intuitive by equivalence and, as Charles Baudelaire would have said, by correspondance: and, à propos, the visual apparatus of bees is also made up of thousands of hexagonal cells. According to Alan Bee, it is a mood fully embodied in color, in its fluencies and cellular multiplications, magnificently impure and alive as nature is, in contrast to the coldness and absoluteness of intentional pictorial acts.
In the sequences of works arising from the process initiated by Alan Bee, the very radiant idea of nature, organism, work, purity, life, and death unfolds—an idea that the author, like the bees, knows beyond all conscious awareness.
His paintings are, therefore, pictorial objects without a shadow of a doubt. But they are the fruits of a doing, and of thinking of oneself in doing, that is extraordinary and deeply motivated; yet, to access it, one cannot use the customary methods of approach. The expectation of reception normally triggered when facing a painting is completely suspended, and the commonly prevailing code of taste is alienated as well.
To be sure, the temptation to refer Alan Bee's paintings to pictorial styles of the recent past and present is suggestive, but it leads nowhere. A most fitting reference to the Essais of Michel de Montaigne (I, XXVI) comes to the rescue once again: “The bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they afterwards make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme or marjoram: so the pieces borrowed from others, he will transform and blend to make a work all his own”.