Bee Flowers presents us with the first cycle of works from his project Jetztzeit. The characters that inhabit this new series of paintings are emphatically virtualized - they represent a humanity from which death has been purged, which amounts to much the same thing as a humanity without life. Apparently, this is the only mode of existence in the condition that is Jetztzeit - outside of time.
Jetztzeit, as intuited by Walter Benjamin, becomes the conceptual basis for the project, and an intellectual basis for the 3D visual concept developed by the artist in the course of the past several years. The art of Bee Flowers has swiftly evolved from collage, through medialization, to the complete virtualization of the image.
The current phase in his work started with the project Liberation, where the artist used the war in Iraq to open up the problematic of the explosive intermingling of civilizations and the fierce gender challenge this has involved. Gender has been understood by Barbara Kruger as a social construct, while Bee Flowers has ironically engineered sexual attributes into weaponry, and transformed gender conventions into sadistic manipulations. Simultaneously, both the underlying theory and the aesthetics become conductors of political meanings, as well as forms of their critique. In the sexual assault on the Abu Ghraib prisoners, strands of the political story converge into revelation.
His next 3D project, Maybe it's True, conveys a medialization of reality itself by folding both terrorism as a non-discussable challenge to reality and the internal workings of the media process into a joint space. The project discloses a remarkable commonality of the languages of terror and the media - in both cases, we are dealing with terrorist communication, that is to say with messages that do not presuppose a reply. Unanswerability means the elimination of critique and the change-over to a passive mode of reception.
Bee Flowers' current project Jetztzeit presents the viewer with an internal reflection of history, which in his project comes to look deceptively like medialization, that is, like a total rejection of history itself. Time's work, in fact, does not cease, but is carried out differently. It establishes itself as a non-linear and simultaneous projection of different eras and their differing imagery - not in the manner of time passing, but rather like time in a state of singularity.
The post-modern condition is probably best understood as a situation of greatly accelerated modernism. The acceleration of history is possibly the central aspect of our current times, which accounts for the production of images and their quick filling of the gaps between reality and the awareness thereof. With Bee Flowers, history is lived in the present, and the present is assembled like a temporal puzzle of events and images, bound together by the internal logic of culture. The project presents modernity as a time-producing mechanism, and the time that is created is more neurotic than historic. It is devoid of the memory needed to impart distance to events. Memory - cultural memory - allows for the existence of history. Amnesia, however, is now central to everything occurring within the modernity-producing mechanism that we know as 'mass culture.'
Bee Flowers' works clearly refer to pre-existing images, though these images are not manifest. An experienced eye, however, reads sections of the works as references to classical images and subjects, including cultural models of masculinity and femininity, and simultaneously perceives the overall context of cultural reception which is unable to digest them. The project points at amnesia as a fundamental symptom of our times. In Benjamin's topos, history feels like hollow importunity. The artist becomes a conductor and a researcher of this contemporary obsession.
Art history serves as the main repository of the subjects that are lost and now re-invented by modernity. This repository of images is alienated from Bee Flowers' person, and from today's Everyman, and hence remains untainted as a narrative mechanism and iconic archive. Within the project, we observe the present as a kaleidoscope, as a place where modernity is randomly assembled from fragments of traditional culture, faded hierarchies and interconnections, and broken meta-narratives whose continuity was only ever possible within temporal linearity. Bee Flowers's subjects seem like a computerized version of something familiar, yet escaping definite recall. This is the key aspect of the Jetztzeit iconography. It comes about through the partial quotation of classical subjects and models, a process which refers to our fragmented cultural memory, and is part of the activities of the artist as a diagnostician of contemporaneity.
Historic logic is a logic of replaying and reproducing historic trauma, a neurotic logic. While an event is still subject to current, ongoing analysis and reflection, it recurs and perpetuates but does not separate itself from the present to become the past. Gradually, however, distance grows, and events accumulate meanings, while taking root in the space of culture. In Bee Flowers' works, we see this complex analytic reflection - contemporaneity's workings within the space of culture and history.