Honey Bees in H-Town: On Apidaeic Art
Detail from "Lessons From the Hive" by Rebecca Benitez. Photo: Author.
Honey bees make their world through a multiple resonance system that takes into account ultra violet radiation, the position of the sun, and a twofold process of dancing. Bees move in circling dervish runs, clockwise or counterclockwise—depending on the orientation of hive to helios. This tells other bees the exact angle by which to triangulate the position of a pollen source in relation to the sun. Then they swoop back and waggle their tails down the central axis of the funky protractor they’ve produced through the first step in their choreography. It’s through the abdomen shaking of step two that the bee indicates the distance her fellow bees should travel down the path along the vector she’s just mapped out. If you’re a bee, the longer you shake your abdomen, further away the honey’s at.
Allison Hunter, Untitled (Butterfly #2, 2007).
Houston, Texas may seem an unlikely place to be thinking about bees. But two recent art shows are thinking through what bees have to teach us about technology, urban planning, genetic modification, and climate change to name only a few of many issues. Allison Hunter’s Honey Bee is an installation running at the University of Houston’s TLC2 Artist in Residence Program: a program designed to bring art and technology together. Rebecca Benitez’s Lessons From the Hive is installed along with the work of five other artists at Project Row Houses in Third Ward. Both say striking and fascinating things about the dancing honey gatherer.
Benitez has been making connections between bees and communities since she was a high school student. For Benitez, the hive is a social collectivity that has “survive[d] everything from continent breakups to drastic climate changes.” When you walk through the row-house where her bee sculptures are installed, you find paper drones circling above, perhaps on their way back to some cyborg nest to recover and shake it to a beat that lets their brood know where the honey’s at. Then you see the hive itself, clusters of mixed-media honeycomb which, as you approach, offers a selection of hexagons and honey yellow. Some of these open, suggesting a living ecology frozen static; others feature old fragments of third ward maps hovering around the theme of urban renewal.
[Maybe urban space is not so much under question: watch Houstonians dancing at the opening of Project Row House's Summer Sessions]
Hunter’s piece inhabits a divergent but proximate urban ecology. Not so far away, on the UH campus, you find yourself looking for a movie theatre along hallways that have the distinct feel of a technologies lab—because TLC2 is a bit of both. Curator and TLC2 Visualization Specialist Michael Brims wants to bring new technologies like 3D cinema and motion detection gaming hardware into the hands of artists like Hunter and her co-exhibitor Chuck Ivy. After you pass from the hallway and enter the cinema, you slip on a pair of 3D glasses and the film rolls. The phenomenological dimensions of this site placement are unnerving in the best way.
Hunter’s piece runs at two conceptual and articulatory velocities that meet between sound and vision. The soundscape careens along a non-linear tour through the technological vicissitudes of the green revolution. It moves between audio resonances: from 1920s agricultural aviation through to climate change and the politics of genetic modification to, finally, U.S. military imperialism. The film warns us that there’s certainly something worrying in our nomenclature around this incredible insect. We call one of the bee brethren a drone, the same word we use. for unmanned aircraft that assassinate dissidents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The soundscape alone offers a parodic commentary, both subtle and wry, on the intersecting political dimensions of human management of geopolitical and biopolitical terrains. It draws out the unsettling semantics of so much disturbing noise about which we remain complacent. Yet, it’s the cross-articulation of sound and vision that expands the piece’s contribution.
Where Hunter’s soundscape samples, fragments, and critiques the twentieth century geopolitical and biopolitical milieu which its audience inhabits, the 3D video that it accompanies is more invested in the shifting phenomenological dimensions of dwelling in that milieu. The video opens with a Lynchian mid shot of a lavender bush in bloom, with bees wending their way through the flowers. I mention Lynch because one is reminded of the extreme close up of the beetles that opens Blue Velvet. But where, for Lynch, the beetles troped decay, fear, audio surveillance, Hunter offers us something more enticing, if just as sublimely posthuman. Hunter’s shot is like the anthropomorphic gaze of an onlooker homo sapien. And it is the anthropocentrism of this gaze that Hunter will confront, transform, and morph into apidae as the piece runs on. Hunter’s Honey Bee apidaecizes the scopophilic drive of the human spectator. We are forced to remain calm as bees whizz by in 3D, flashing so close to our eyes that we blink and recoil, almost crawling across the cornea. Then, we follow a slow zoom into the honey comb as video game snipers mark a target. From there, one enters Hunter’s imaginary of the worlding of a bee. From this perspective, geopolitics is no longer human.
Rebecca Benitez’s Lessons from the Hive is showing as part of the 2011 Summer Sessions at Project Row Houses along with work by Logan Beck, Catherine Cartwright, Brittney Connelly, Matthew Gorgol, Lynissa Hayes, and Tony McMillian until September 11th. 2521 Holman St
Allison Hunter’s Honey Bee held an open day on August 23rd as part of the exhibition of the TLC2′s A-I-R program. Further screenings at TLC2 Visualization Theater (University of Houston PGH 216) can be scheduled through Michael Brims. michael@tlc2.uh.edu
We recommend you contact Michael and see the piece properly installed. However, there is a link to a 2D version of Honey Bee is available on vimeo at http://www.vimeo.com/28255518
Chuck Ivy’s installation was called Infrared Musical Activity and showed in the Courtyard of UH.
Visitors observe "Lessons from the Hive." Photo: Author.
