Biography

The biographical data on the figure of Alan Bee are elusive and full of gaps. When his work was first presented to the public in the exhibition Where the unmeasurable meets the measurable in the ABC-Arte gallery in Genoa in 2019, the known facts were few and far between. This shadowy figure was a German businessman and collector, a painter in his own right, well connected, who did not authorise the fruits of his private passion to be shown until after his death. Within the category of Where the unmeasurable meets the measurable, Bee had little in common with the other artists present on this occasion: the structure of the exhibition meant that each of the four - Paolo Iachetti, Thomas Rajlich, Nanni Valentini and Alan Bee - occupied his own space. Yet for this very reason, Bee fully demonstrated the strength of his work, difficult as it was to place within the already familiar codes of modernity, but evident and clear-cut enough to make it accessible in the individual works. Both in key works such as the various versions of Genesis or Anima Mundi, and in the more mature works such as Free Women and Flying Sex, one thing was clear: Bee was a talented and lively artist who tackled every work with a kind of non-negotiable energy; and the work was there, presenting itself each time in a plenitude established by itself, without other nameable factors conditioning its raison d'être and reception. In other words, Bee paid scant heed to the air du temps, to the game of worldly or critical conventions, to the very rule of being an artist. The dilettante aspect of his work - and in this case the term carries all its weight without negative connotations: dilettante, artist of delight, uninterested in the profession of the artist because he asks neither support nor recognition from that quarter - gives it a privileged position. It means doing only following one's internal dictates, listening to the expressive stimulus that generates the works without any other concern except to make them exist in the world. It means working in a condition of theoretical non-alignment, if possible eroding the mechanisms of expectation to the point of limiting them to what concerns the artist and whoever views the work, without the mediations, however noble, concerning the artist's culture.

If the personality of the artist is removed from the artistic process, what is left? The operation seems anomalous to the point of foolishness, given the critical paradigms that we normally apply. If Heinrich Wölfflin's 'history of art without names' had its limits, that of André Chastel was more firmly rooted and practised. He acutely referred to the 'social deification of the artist', the result of the Renaissance, which assigns works to an individual, irrepressible genius - in fact, a sort of divinisation, a pagan sanctification perfectly adaptable to the lower demands of a modernity that needs the artist as a brand to explain all its related products. Taken to extremes, it results in making a Banksy, in spite of his claim to anonymity, a major figure in the art world.

When we descend from the 'classic' deification to the ordinary, everyday business of art management, the name is everything. Yet in the end it is only a name or label, rigorously linked to a professional artist. This enables art management and managers to dispense with qualitative judgements on individual works.

So among the many anomalies, the dilettante Bee is most anomalous because, in deliberate and open contradiction with the entire art system, the creative focus is concentrated on the singular work, conferring on it the role of medium of its by no means banal qualitative aspects. In the end, we can peacefully continue to ignore all that we do not know about him, because his works tell us what they want to tell us.

This publication, therefore, adopts an anomalous approach out of necessity: linking works and operational cycles in a sequence, extracting their anima right down to the essence, and making of this approach an indication that, in exceptional cases like that of Bee, the anima is by itself the 'entirety' of his personality.

 

1. Genesis and Anima Mundi

 

Right from the start, in adopting this nom de plume, Bee indicates a precise choice of artistic territory. The decision to observe bees and their world is a profound one with its own various levels of complexity. It is the foundation of his artistic practice. The order of the social structure of bees, the prefect division of roles, are already - as Konrad Lorenz has shown - precious examples of comparative behavioural research. At a different level, we are struck by a more profound and subtle affinity: 'The human capacity is not to give honey, but to think - to give ideas', wrote Joseph Beuys in 1965: in other words, to effect a non-mechanical, non-foreseeable transformation of matter. Honey and wax are the ordinary fruits of a pure transmutation of matter: they are products of an ability that touches further, inscrutable spheres, entailing making something different in oneself. Bee is captivated by the intuition, finding traces of it in Rudolf Steiner's Nine Lectures on Bees. Steiner: 'By way of the bee-hive the whole Cosmos enters man and makes him strong and able'. A possible Cosmos, and an idea of nature that generates and regenerates without consuming - and without killing - in accordance with the harmonious rhythms and tempi of which the bees are the bearers and guardians.

Myths about the foundation of the world recount that the infant Zeus was fed on honey by the bee Panacride at the instigation of Melissa, the nurse-nymph par excellence. Nature gives, and its nutriments are constantly renewed: this is the inviolable order of the world. To live in harmony with the bees, from the harmony of the bees, is the secret to salvation.

At yet another level, the bee community is paradigmatic of the necessity and possible role of the artist, who is an artist not because society assigns him this role as a specialist, but because he radically lives the Terentian motto homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto [I am a man, and consider nothing human foreign to me]on which the essential reason of humanitas is based. The theme had a specific fortune in the twentieth century. In 1936 Wladimir Weidlé discussed the 'current destiny of literature and the arts' in his Les abeilles d'Aristée [The bees of Aristaeus, the shepherd and 'very knowledgeable honey-maker' of Virgil's Fourth Georgic]. He concluded: 'Seek art alone and you will not have art', while those who practised as artists in antiquity lived in a world in which 'one becomes an artist for the same reason that one is a human being', operating in a setting of natural sociability, not a specialisation that was eventually to become self-referential. It was an early warning from the world of the arts, victim of the discourse on art that makes it a separate field, strengthened by that separation from humanitas, but for this reason destined to become sterile.

Bee too operates from a similar consideration. The community in which art is generated must be united, industrious, supportive like that of the bees. So the artist must identify with the bee and his work should be singular because, with Weidlé, it is 'a mission entrusted to him alone, but the nutriment on which he draws and which he produces is shared and destined for all, the quintessence of a sociability at one with the tempi and rhythms of nature'.

The measure of the artist's singularity is safe, but so is the broadly political value of the operation, acting according to codes that concern the widest and most cohesive collectivity of which both artist and observer form a part. It is as in Michel de Montaigne's famous aperçu in  the Essais: 'The bees visit the flowers here and there, but they make honey of them that is all their own; it is no longer thyme or marjoram: so he will transform the pieces borrowed from others and blend them to make a work of his own'.

Evidently, that has nothing to do with proclamations and theoretical statements. Bee has assumed the painterly process itself to act like and with the bees, in a sphere of being completely at one with nature.

In the first instance, he established the cellular structure of the honeycomb, which is in itself a structuring element, a non-preconceived geometry, making it from the start the formative element on which the image is based, called upon to receive various materials. The materials are initially experienced as substances, as quantity/quality deposited and thickened, with a strong degree of natural identification, in an operational condition that goes far beyond the limits of specialised techne. The honeycomb is elementary geometry, it expands regularly ad infinitum, and in Bee's works assumes a physical dimension of its own: the modality is never that of representation, of painterly artifice, but always that of unmediated presence, with the precise function to evoke a regular geometrical structure that is theoretically infinite, and thus to confer an order to which the mixture of materials that inhabit it - they too presences, never representations - adapts.

With these choices, Bee seems to place himself in a different dimension of beauty, in which the sense of the natural prevails over every hypothesis and prior aesthetic programme. The value of the physical truth of nature is crucial: that truth can also be beautiful, but not necessarily, and above all not in the ways traditionally appropriate for beauty in art.

 

 2. Freedom

 

At this point, between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, Bee's linguistic spectrum begins to broaden. In terms of content, he adopts a more openly political approach: in other words, humanitas is rooted even more explicitly as a primary catalyst of his choices, and there are more open and precise appeals to the value system of the human community. Humanitas is fullness and pride of human dignity, a cosmos of thoughts interwoven as a homogeneous and integrated system from which nothing can be expelled.

From this point of view, the bees are the bearers of their knowledge, of the fullness that is manifested in the orderly articulation of their social life, of their ability to transcend the more physical aspects of nature: it is not what they make that is important, but how they make it. Bee's attention increasingly shifts from the different physiology of the materials and structure to the handling of material as colour, and the modular hexagonal architecture as a more broadly graphic grid able to sustain a discourse that is now fully painterly.

Of course, the use of coloured material is not a response to a reasoned and controlled less is more, and the graphic grid is there because it is posited and contradicted at the same time. Never, not even in this stage of Bee's return to the confines of a more appropriate painterly practice, might we expect the educated exercise of painting, some kind of preoccupation with giving an account of the intentions of a univocal stylistic choice. The substance of the colour is impure, lavish, physically aware: never a representation of something else, but always a physical formulation of a presence whose value lies in itself, splendidly impervious to any bon ton of execution.

In the series Swarm, Bee goes so far as to use the gilded waste material of metal constructions to give the surface a luminous - and fully material - tone to the surface, without entailing anything but chromatic use. The operational practice aims to achieve a plenitude taken to the extreme of redundancy, with those taches that pick out the grid and mortify it at the same time, with those layers of paint that permeate one another. This is also the moment it comes closest to a similar artistic approach, and not by chance the least definable, the most open to a plurality of avenues, informal art, or rather, following Jean  José Marchand, lyrical abstraction. The artist transfers an irregular quantity of colour to the surface, proceeding in an arbitrary direction, of unequal thickness, to create an unformed, plastically unstable image - a response to an obscure formal intuition that he chooses not to prearrange but to discover in the course of the process of painting. The creative act counts for more than the form; so do the energy, automatism and irrationality. The same is true of the autonomous capacity of the coloured material to transmit sensations, rendering superfluous any attempt to organise the form. Bee becomes the convinced interpreter of the informal context, of the autonomous capacity of the tache to produce meaning. This permits him margins of total creative liberty close to what Michel Tapié called 'a state of ecstasy or dementia', because one after another, all the traditional criteria of painting are questioned. As Leoncilio has put it, the artist attains a reality that is not 'described and attributable to a style, but form, colour, material, to directly produce emotion, the feeling of nature'.

Bee deploys this linguistic arsenal, taking it back to the effective conditions of existence of the community to which he gives utopian voice. His work is not a paean to abstract Freedom. He speaks of the specific freedom of each of the single persons of which the community is composed: the women and their sexuality - from Free Women to Flying Sex, and like a waterfall parity of gender and race, religion, economic conditions.

The single terms are interwoven and exchanged, because they are nothing but the diverse facets of the integral humanitas of which the artist is the herald.

 

3. The Wall

 

The Wall. No more wars no more walls. A united world represents a further teasing out of the political implications of Bee's discourse.

Setting out from the old example from nature that is Bee's starting point, the community of bees, he tends to privilege everything that is absent in the animal world and strongly connotative of human life, limiting the very idea of humanitas.

Specifically, he deploys very different, equally compatible practices of painting. He often chooses a dry organisation of the taches within the geometric grid, but dispenses with them in other areas of the grid, resulting in all-overs of painted material lacking orientation towards one another, able to restore the plenitude of the surface of the painting: it goes without saying that they are adventures that do not anticipate a form, but release the obscure energy within them.

Urgency is the theme, the aspect of humanity that concerns him most and that he sets above all other considerations: the emotional temperature of the painting counts for more than anything else, and the abolition of the residues of an aesthetic in certain cases seems deliberate, to rule out any possible misunderstanding. The wall is the jumble of situations that are opposed to the necessary harmony, to the possibility of building a world authentically at peace.

One of his rare written notes indicates precisely the mood of the work:

In the world of bees

There is no apartheid

There are no wars

There are no different races

There is no hunger

There is no thirst

There is no sexual religious economic etc. etc. inequality

None of all this exists.

 

4. Infinity

 

The political content of Bee's system of values should not be misunderstood: the single case or aspect are limited examples, bound to an insignificant temporal dimension even if one that can be communicated more easily and directly. They are only of importance if linked to a larger dimension, to human existence in the world - it is evident that Bee's human community is universal - and the links of humanity with a total perspective which implies such questions as life and nature, the superior harmony of the cosmos and its sacred implications, even at the risk of plunging definitively into a utopian dimension (it should be stressed that the empire that characterises his choices leads Bee to touch on the chord not only of sacrality, but specifically also that of religion).

Anima mundi indicates the intuition of a superior raison d'être of the cosmos, Infinity indicates that the unrestrictive, universal rule is the nutriment able to demonstrate time and time again an infinite totality. The wisdom of the artist lies in seizing upon the ways in which art, a limited human fact, speaks of its own transcendental ambition: the infinite sum that bears witness that, not only on the conceptual level, all contributes to the measure that is transferred from human life with all its accidents to the contemplation of the superior, authentically universal whole.

In his work, Bee proceeds in an anything but linear fashion. He opens up new themes and explores their potential until the initial energy is exhausted, while in the meantime other avenues are opened up that reverberate on the developments of the previous ones.

It is therefore impossible, even on those rare occasions when he dates his works, to establish a single precise sequence of before and after for them. Add to this the adventurous dimension of the individual works, their continuous questioning without every offering clear explanations. Jean Dubuffet wrote appositely: 'I feel the need for a work of art to pretend surprise, to assume an aspect never seen before, to cause major disorientation and to lead to an absolutely unforeseen domain. For me, once art has lost this strange character, it loses all efficacy, it is no longer good for anything'.

 

5. At the end of the day

 

At the end of the day, the sublime dilettante Bee achieves fantastic results by acting lucidly as an artist in our time, dropped into the heart of unavoidable intellectual instances, but claiming and maintaining unchanged above all the value of his own uncompromising operational freedom.

The bees are an organised, orderly, efficient society, but we see much more in them: a knowledge that is all-embracing because it means above all else freedom, a freedom that will speak to us if we want to listen.

I do not believe in every coincidence, or rather, we can call them that, but should give them their correct significance. After spending a morning viewing the works of Alan Bee exhibited in the ABC-ARTE gallery in Genoa, I left for Romagna for a very different reason. On the way, I stopped at the farm of an enlightened farmer, who will remain anonymous here for reasons of delicacy and appropriateness. We shall call him simply Tiziano. Anyway, after rapidly going through the business at hand, he asked me for a few minutes more to show me his project for the design and fittings for public and private gardens to make them more bee-friendly. It is a serious project, based on marvellous successful pilots, with elegant ceramic architectural features by skilful artists and craftsmen for the construction industry - a bonus for the hardworking insects in well-tended and renovated gardens. He tells me, in fact, that there is nothing more ecological, regenerative, sustainable and vital than to encourage the spread of bees in our parks. To back up his argument, he quotes impressive data: 70% of the food we eat (more than two out of three meals a day) exists only by virtue of the bee's work of pollination. I look at Tiziano and the leaflet he hands me and, without saying anything, think of Alan Bee.

Coincidences do not exist., Alan Bee has never been more present and alive.

 

Let us begin with a preliminary reflection of method. Studying the work of Alan Bee today may give rise to certain errors that, once scrutinised with attention, reveal contradictions and even paradoxes. And since highlighting contradictions and paradoxes (of contemporary society and of the more restricted subsystem of art) is, or at least should be, one of the prerogatives of intellectual activity, including art and criticism, I think it is work starting at this very point: from the social contradictions that a phenomenon like Alan Bee inevitably provokes.

In his reflection, Flaminio Gualdoni tackles the problem with an apparently simple question: 'If the personality of the artist is removed from the artistic process, what is left?'. As in every philosophical question, there are various possible answers. One of these could be that Alan Bee, the presumed maker of these paintings, does not exist. If we turned to the familiar search engines for information, Alan Bee turns out to be a marvellous isolated island, excised from the maps of the digital metaverse. This is the first contradiction: is there anything or anybody today that cannot be traced by the radar of the web? A sojourn on this earth that leaves no traces and clues and therefore cannot be traced? In this case, we transcend even the problem of anonymity and of ambiguous and multiple identity, of which Banksy can be taken as an emblematic synecdoche. Alan Bee is far more mysterious than the elusive Bristol artist and a plethora of similar cases that could be mentioned, starting with Blu. The almost total absence of information and documents on the web that might help to define in some respects the personality of Bee and the genealogy of his works leaves room open to speculation, suggesting that this artist really does not exist. Still, there can be no doubt that his work exists: with a powerful and physical presence, as Gualdoni rightly notes in his essay in this volume. The first contradiction, the first paradox of Bee, could therefore be: if no traces of an artist are found on the web, then this artist does not exist, therefore Alan Bee does not exist, while his works demonstrate the opposite.

A second contradiction challenges a dominant system in the current art system: the value of the name of the artist. From museum institutions to the system of art fairs and commercial galleries, scrupulous and pervasive attention is paid to intimate details of the identity of the artists: gender, social and geographical origin, sexual orientation, genetic map, personal and family history, etc., etc. Within this tendency, the work of art becomes charged with further values that that have their origin and validation in external factors such as the personality and identity of the artist. For this reason, to tackle the case of Alan Bee today is even more paradoxical. According to the only current biography, Bee is or was a Western white male from the elevated social class of industrialists and bankers … perhaps, it is said, we do not have proof at the moment; so can we trust details like these to understand and confront his artistic work? Certainly not. The contradiction grows: even if such information were confirmed, would there be any point in using it to form a value judgement on the works? Perhaps yes, only in part, but the point is that due to the orthodoxy of anonymity, deliberately chosen by the person who made the paintings that concern us here, the methodological system tied to the name of the artist collapses immediately. We are invited to engage in the subversive and radical act of seeing, seeing without knowing.

So here lies the second paradox of Alan Bee: in a society based on data, immersed in a hypertrophic and often paroxysmal flood of information, we find ourselves in the situation of having to deduce, adduce, think and judge aesthetic entities based on different cognitive and sensorial instruments from the elaboration of pre-existing, pre-digested and pre-packaged information. Essentially, it is as though the works of Bee triggered a reset in the relation with the viewer, barring access to their content or message by way of the well-trodden shortcut of personal and contextual arguments that leads thought back to the comfort zone of the artist's biography and the stories of which that biography is an emanation.

Instead, we find ourselves alone, in the island of the intellect that, as Kant expounded in his Critique of Pure Reason, is surrounded by an ocean of doubts and deceptive phenomena. Unlike the island of Kant and of Wittgenstein, which is a circumscribed space within which language finds its jurisdiction and ethical significance, the island of Bee's paintings is an existential zone in which language is silent, non-verbal, and not written and recorded in thousands of words and hours of recordings available in the archives and memories of the artists' biographies.

 

So it seems logical to deduce that Alan Bee's (successful) operation - whoever lies behind that pseudonym - was to orchestrate a liberating exit from the circuit that links artistic process to the personality of the artist. It is not by chance that Freedom is the title of a series of paintings to which the artist returned in various decades. In the artist's place, Bee generates a collective, lofty concept: bees. If we want to refer to an artist, then it is formed from the idea of a hardworking community of insects that guarantees life on earth as we know it. In its apparent simplicity, it is a perfectly conceptual operation.

The process of defining the anonymous identity of Alan Bee is based on two distinct phases: first the move to link the publication of the paintings to a moment after the death of the artist, at a later stage the move to never reveal the real identity of the artist. Cases, including some well-known ones, of works conceived and kept by their own creators to be read or enjoyed after their death are not so rare, in fact they have recently attracted attention. However, if we take such examples as Hilma af Klint and Luigi Pericle, the biographies of the artists were well known and it is thanks to their study that the body of criticism of their works has been considerably enriched. The case of Bee, on the other hand, is determined by the desire to sever any connection between the personality of the artist and the paintings, first by postponing the publication of the works, and afterwards subjecting the real identity of the artist to strict censorship. All this produces a precise philosophical as well as social and cultural intention: the paintings' existence depends exclusively on the relation that they create with the viewer, being able to count only on their particular phenomenology, the language expressed in their visual and material dimensions, connected with a mythopoeia based on their animal symbolism; and the preferred animal is the one that more than any other expresses the higher connection with the ecosystem, a generative connection between the insect and the world whose result is at the very least exponential.

 

At this point in the argument, it is only natural to cite the title of the famous essay by John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Without going into an analysis of the psychological and neurological mechanisms that the act of seeing Bee's paintings manages to trigger in the viewer, some aesthetic considerations are called for. Bee's works have an undeniably material value, not only in terms of the surface of the canvas and the material applied to it by the artist, but rather to the objective and object-like structure that these paintings take on in their three-dimensional corporeality. Bee's paintings are characterised by a horror vacui, probably due to the synaesthesia that the artist activates between the painting and the economy of the working space utilised to perfection by the bees in the hive. The structure in the hive is optimised to subordinate empty space to the strictly necessary movements of the bees: all the rest is utilised, constructed and filled in. Bee too constructs the painting by means of complementary interventions of various materials (metallic mesh, powders, resins, paint, scorching, etc.,). The resulting compactness and materiality make of the painting an object and an architecture even more and before its existence as a protective layer. Certainly, this turning the painting into an object, reinforced by the use of artificial, compact and impermeable colour, already points to a post-pop aesthetic that places these paintings beyond the revolutionary curtain of language and design of the 1960s. Not by chance, from the processual point of view, the immediately prior references can be found in the object works of Piero Manzoni and Alberto Burri rather than in the explorations of the surface to which Manzoni certainly made an important contribution. The constructed and painted space of Bee's paintings continues beyond the frontal surface of the canvas to include the frame on the sides, making the whole object a painting, an aesthetic and physical phenomenon. This by no means unimportant detail immediately establishes a connection with the space and experience of life, giving analogic credit to the artist's non-figurative exploration.

It would not be an exaggeration to detect affinities with German and US painting from the 1980s on, such as the abstract-informal, hyper-coloured work of Gerhard Richter or, more recently, certain material solutions by Cecily Brown, not to mention the analytical revival of post-impressionist pointillism, anticipated by Bee as a conceptual and processual reflection on painting, well in advance and with far greater depth than the empty repetitions of the idea (though initially poetic) in Damien Hirst's recent paintings.

A final significant aspect, among the many awaiting exploration, is the use of highly symbolic geometric forms in the contours of the canvas, evocative of pan-religious architectural features such as the ogive, spire, arch, dome and portal. Such abstract and pure hieratic forms combine with the impenetrability of the chromatic surfaces, blocking any opening to the exterior and closed in on themselves to sustain the constructivist scheme of the painting. The solemnity and spiritual sense of the work is thus conveyed linguistically and phenomenologically in an absolute autonomy of superimposition between support, form, colour, surface and body.

With the arrival of the 1990s and 2000s (the last decades in Bee's career) his painting takes on a sort of animation, coherent also in this sense with the quest for alternatives to the system based on the virtualisation of processes and relational art. The darting of the brush, the sharp chromatic contrasts of timbre, and a decidedly expressive composition make their appearance. The surface and the body of the painting seem to be activated in space and time, generating a visual movement thanks o the use of animated surface textures, reliefs, grids and modules. The constant is the hexagonal network that supports and protects a matter oscillating between colourful spring and organic, geological earthiness, but aspiring more to lunar and astral soils and dust than to the terrains of Arte Povera or Informal Art (Baj, Dubuffet, later Kiefer).

 

In conclusion, Bee's work can definitely be read in a spiritual light with its intrinsic mystery, but on the other hand Bee is also a political artist. His decision to view the bees as a supportive, specialised community, organised around work and an economy based on utility and social cooperation, is a political one. If we can believe his biography - a German expert operating on the financial market - it would be easy to see in his artistic choice a 'judgement on the world' (as the art critic and historian Enrico Crispolti would call it) inevitably orientated towards pointing symbolically to the eras separated by the fall of the Berlin Wall; a successful interpretation, perhaps, of society without ever resorting to narrative, fiction or figure. Geometric forms, architectural and three-dimensional volumes, heterogeneous materials and painterly substance: these are the essential instruments of an abstract, political and spiritual symbolism that accompanies and perhaps condemns post-industrial society, brandishing (with a colourful poetic desperation) the banner of the humble and heroic worker bees.