What art movement or art genre, type, style or sub-culture has influenced or changed the way you view a culture other than you own? How and why?
Following my theme and reinforcing the concepts introduced this week today the subject similarly brings bees and sculpture together but perhaps in a more thoughtful way than to shape a bottle of scotch out of beeswax for an advertisement.
Thomas Libertiny is a Slovakian artist that regards beeswax as a "material that counters the slickness and chilliness” of modernist design (Jeffries 2012). He is rejecting the industrial mass produced Fordist design by utilising nature rather than man made processes.
Using beeswax and live bees his 2009 work Unbearable Lightness used the frame of a standing figure of christ and involved dying the food of the 40,000 contributing bees red resulting in a red honey filled figure of a martyred christ. The work winning him the Art Basel Designer of the Future award.
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| Libertiny's piece "Unbearable Lightness" Source: The Guardian |
Libertiny is acting against modernist industrial design by reflecting a human element through dying the bees food source red. The bees don't notice though as they cannot perceive the colour difference. Such an imperceptible change to the micro level material involved in the bees technological process of manufacturing honey results in a dramatic change overall.
The delicate balance of the process and product he creates could be seen as a reflection of the fragility and reconfiguration involved with globalisation. According to Nederveen Pieterse "globalisation is a macro-economic phenomenon driven by micro-economic forces,"(Nederveen Pieterse 2004) Although he is describing economic factors, here the demonstration is of a model where there is a micro level forces re-configuring the technology of the bee to scale up to a huge macro level shift.
In his work Libertiny is attempting to also raise awareness of the decline of the honeybee due to colony collapse disorder a mysterious problem worldwide where bees simply disappear due to a possible mixture of poisonous pesticides, verroa mite, habitat loss and poor nutrition as well as changing patterns in bee migratory behaviour.
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| "The Honeycomb Vase" Source: Crafts magazine |
“It comes from flowers and, in the form of a vase, ends up serving flowers on their last journey.” Says Libertiny referencing his work above.(Jeffries 2012) This compression and intensification by human hands of an other wise natural process chills me strangely. I think because it almost mocks the beauty of the process.
This was a really insightful piece on how artists are always evolving, using new techniques and products to get us to perceive something differently from how we usually do.
ReplyDeleteI would have like to have read how this influenced you more though, how it changed your views on a different culture.
The disappearance of bees world wide is sparking a lot of controversy with bees being vital to our survival, the the longevity of many cultures and the profits of global markets.
This piece of art can say a lot more and mean quite a lot to many different people depending on what circumstance they're in, both physically, economically, financially and spiritually.
Hi Rossco
ReplyDeleteThis Blog post was a very interesting topic on the ever growing use of art culture. I found it fascinating that the use of bees can have in art and found the new techniques artist are using intriguing. You supported your argument with many references which made the blog seem much more professional and evident based. However the grammar & abrupt font sizes disrupt the flow of your post and I personally would have liked it if you stated how this has changed your views on the art culture.
Still this was a terrific read, good job!