Alan Bee
Alan Bee is the pseudonym of an important artistic personality who over the years has constructed his own fully-fledged personage with passion and brilliance, giving him a name and a series of plausible biographical suggestions completely compatible with the physical corpus of his works: from the fascination with German art, above all Beuys and Schumacher, to his specific passion for the natural world, of which the bees are one of the universal symbols.
The body of his outstanding works of the highest quality has made Alan Bee a major figure in the panorama of European art in the last couple of decades.
The biographical information about him is not obtained at first hand, but is all derived from his work itself: Bee has forged his own personality in an almost narrative way, enabling him to extend an impenetrable veil of mystery over his real identity.
What is certain, very certain, is the world of his works. On the basis of that oeuvre, there can be no doubt that he was a primary European artist able to insert himself within the circle of those from the post-informal stage who have advanced along a primary path of contemporary painting.
His passion for painting was always shared with his passion for bees and their world. He loved the natural surroundings of Bavaria and was influenced as a young man by the experiences with honey of Joseph Beuys. He has connected them with the profound sense of materials and the insertion of objects as advocated by painters like Carl Buchheister, the fundamental figure of Emil Schumacher, with whom Bee engaged in fruitful conversations in Karlsruhe, and Bernard Schulze. The results are quite surprising
Alan Bee, Melissa and other considerations
Flaminio Gualdoni
Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt [How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare], was the performance with which Joseph Beuys made his début at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf on 26 November 1965. What matters is that, on that occasion, he smeared his head with honey and gold leaf as though for a sacred unction: ‘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 wax are not the ordinary fruits of a mechanical transformation of matter: they are products of a knowledge that touches further, inscrutable spheres, they are a production of difference in sameness.
Imprinting, we know, comes from Neun Vorträge über das Wesen der Bienen, translated as Nine Lectures on Bees,by Rudolf Steiner. In the first of these, given at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, on 3 February 1923, the anthroposophist declares: ’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 – both individually and as an inseparable collectivity, caught up in a cycle of death/life that is an essential measure of time – are the bearers and custodians of that knowledge.
Myth attests to the divinity of bees, their continuous commerce with the divine. The nymph Melissa cares for the infant Zeus whom his mother Rhea has concealed on Mount Ida to save him from the devouring ferocity of Cronus: she feeds him on the honey of the bee Panacris while the goat Amaltheia gives him milk. So it is she, the bee-nymph, who teaches to live on the fruits of nature without impoverishing her and without resorting to killing, to show mankind a superior model of civilisation. Aristaeus, the favourite pupil of the bee-nymphs whose story is told by Virgil in Book IV of the Georgics, will learn from them and will teach men the arts of apiculture and pastoralism.
Melissa is also radically linked with the cult of Ephesian Artemis, the polymastós (many-breasted): the melissai were the priestesses of the temple of Ephesus, where the essenes (drones) were the priests: the queen bee being the goddess herself par excellence, the direct heiress of the ancient cult of the Mother Goddess.
It is probable that Alan did not know all this when he fell in love with bees and their life. Born in Germany and grown up in continuous contact with nature, from this life he has instinctively and directly learnt the most profound secret: to live in harmony with nature, to know oneself a man by sinking to the innermost fibres of her cycles, her laws, her epiphanies. And when he felt welling up in himself the urge to express, including art, techné and artifice by definition, he dug and discovered the frequencies of a natural way to create authentically.
Alan Bee is quintessentially a ‘man without letters’, he has not contracted the virus of demiurgy, of feeling himself to be the creator and arranger who imposes norms and forms on matter, nor has he put himself in the position of responding to aesthetic models derived from and referring to art. In a book from 1936 entitled, by a sort of destiny, Les abeilles d’Aristée [The Bees of Aristaeus], Wladimir Weidlé reflected on ‘the present destiny of literature and art’ and pronounced: ‘seek art alone and you will not have art’, while those who practised art in the past lived in a world in which ‘one becomes an artist for the very reason that one is a man’, acting in an environment of natural sociability, not of a specialisation eventually become self-referential. How, Weidlé wondered, can one return to that state? With the lesson to be drawn from the biblical episode of Samson (Judges, 14:8-9): after he had turned aside to see the cadaver of a dead lion
Behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion.
And he took thereof in his bare hands, and went on eating, and he came to his father and his mother, and he gave them, and they did eat.
So from the cadaver of an artistic discourse degenerated by now into claptrap, a new vital swarm, a new fruitful necessity can emerge.
Alan Bee started out from a simple fact. The community in which art is produced must be united, hard-working, supportive like that of the bees, and so the artist must identify himself with the bee and his work must be singular at the same time, because, following Weidlé, it is ‘a mission entrusted to him alone’, but the source of nourishment from which it springs and which it produces is common to and destined for all, it is the quintessence of a sociability at one with the times and rhythms of nature.
The Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz [Honey Pump in the Workplace] that Beuys constructed and set working in the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel in 1977 was a machine to make honey flow as a continuous circulation of energy, with a symbolic and explanatory value. Alan Bee, on the other hand, has taken the process of painting itself in order to act like and with the bees in a completely natural setting. In the first instance he established the modular cells of the honeycomb, which is in itself a structuring element, a geometry that is not preconceived, initially making it the constituent element on which the image is based, destined to receive diverse contents. At this stage those contents are experienced as substances, as quantities/qualities set down and combined, with a strong degree of natural identification. Later, over the years, colour has increasingly become the protagonist, but understood as a quality laid bare in a relation that is not openly preordained with the others and capable of apparently blind, random and inscrutable tendencies.
In reality they are not indifferent but unforeseeable, and above all they are situated in a very unusual point of view: What are the world and beauty like if you are and think like a bee? Not something that can be explained and defined, but intuited through equivalence and – as Charles Baudelaire would have said – by correspondence: and in fact, the visual organ of the bee is also made of thousands of hexagonal cells. According to Alan Bee, it is a mood fully embodied in colour, in its accumulation of flows and its cellular multiplications, splendidly impure and alive as in nature, the opposite of the iciness and absoluteness of intentional painterly actions.
In the sequences of works generated by the process implemented by Alan Bee the very same radiant idea of nature, organism, work, purity, life and death unfolds that the artist, like the bees, knows beyond all awareness.
Thus his paintings belong to the genre of painting without a shadow of doubt. But they are the fruits of an extraordinary, profoundly motivated way of thinking and acting which cannot be accessed with the usual instruments. For example, it completely deactivates the waiting for a signal that is usually activated in front of a painting and confounds the generally accepted code of taste.
Certainly, it is tempting to refer Alan Bee’s paintings to ways of painting of the recent past and present, but that leads nowhere. In this respect more is to be gained from a reference to the Essais of Michel de Montaigne (I, XXVI):
Bees cull their several sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them, but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he borrows from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely his own.