"Walter Benjamin used the term Jetztzeit ('now-time') when referring to a moment without history, a moment outside of time: a sort of secularized version of the Scholastic nunc stans ('everlasting now.') The present is disengaged from history's causality, and from history's diktats: today's actions are no longer predetermined by earlier events. However, when allowing the historical continuum to collapse onto itself, signs and symbols are separated from their meaning, familiar iconography is gutted from its original content and the historically accumulated ideals of society are voided." - wrote Bee Flowers in the text accompanying the exhibition of digital paintings at Contemporary Art Center MARS - 18 huge paintings, one per wall.
The idea of the unraveling of the world into a crowd of countless clones continues to stir up strong emotions, forcing one to draw an almost moral distinction between the concept and the structure, the super-idea and the packaging. This makes it all the more interesting to follow the works of Bee Flowers. Especially if this artist, a Dutchman, senses to an almost religious degree of subtlety three components of being: structure, texture and color.
Having settled in post-Soviet Russia, he has at some point even created his own Sots-Art, which differs from our own by sheer force of elegance. And now, in the current phase of his work - a time of sacrality. Looming from a restrained, gray-violet palette are the ritual prayers of Brueghel, the cinematic phantasmagorias of Magritte and the small-scale absurdity of Pivovarov.
It seems Bee Flowers and Walter Benjamin have more in common than suggested in the earlier quotation. The thinker and critic was one of those brave men who rejected art as mere illustration. He opened the bottle releasing the media-genie, and died as a result of Nazism - that cowardly and selfish cult exploiting the new media magic. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Benjamin bequeathed the semiotic gene, which floated in the air like an atomic bomb, to worthy heirs. And, as if fulfilling the wish of a companion, Bee accompanies his exhibition text with a meaningful epigraph from Joyce's Ulysses: "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken."
The process of awakening and emergence from the swamp of reality into the realm of "pure language" (for "no poem is intended for the reader, no image for the beholder, no symphony for the listener." - Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator") - is not an easy one. Especially so, as it turns out, when touching upon mythology, both Ancient and Christian. In recent memory, three strong efforts in art come to mind: AES + F inserted the plasticity of the ancients into teenage computer games, Vrubel and Timofeeva filtered the Gospel through a syndicated newsfeed in works featuring lowlifes and Chechen fighters, and Konstantin Khudyakov created, as if through an incubator, the ideal martyr. I omit the numerous earlier artistic exercises within the computer industry's ironic thrillers, or, at the other end of the continuum, the meditative immersion into the depths of Eastern and Western religious traditions by means of modern technology. Still, all these things focus on the distancing from, or connecting with, the myth and its own authenticity, or aura, about which Benjamin himself first wrote in regret, but which he then rejected in the name of a new, independent contemplation.
"Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when in the course of its survival a work has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore, to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the work as owe their existence to it." - Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator."
Perhaps full immersion into the digital version of the puppet-populated, infernal world helped Flowers to attain his revelatory, Bosch-like goals. A few years ago, he fired at the screen with two sharp-edged projects - 'Liberation' and 'Maybe it's True' - and stepped out of the earth's aura, into the rarefied atmosphere of signs.
The project Jetztzeit - a moment beyond time - is an attempt to dive into the nirvana of pure language. The audience suddenly ceases to distinguish the archway from a door, heroic capture from violence, the defeated from layabouts, a silk cover from a plastic bag. Everything here is divine and beyond doubt - from the elegant lamb to the knife softly piercing the flesh, from the narcotized gaze to celebrity proxemics.
These charismatic mannequins - funny in a store window and full of dignity in a gallery - are a cross between Hercules and an office manager, or the Madonna and a Barbie doll. Instead of Jesus, it is now the Marlboro Man to be gently removed from the cross - tactfully and tactilely, as in the paintings of the European Renaissance. Not too much, not too personal. No regrets, no nostalgia. Someone inserts an invisible MasterCard into a slot in our brain, with the "priceless" soundtrack from Tarkovsky's Solaris - Bach's prelude 639. And it makes us enjoy - it forces us to enjoy - the "penetration into the depths of language and thought by drilling rather than digging," as Hannah Arendt wrote in an essay on Walter Benjamin.
"Work was for him to extract fragments from their original context and re-build the way they illustrated each other and were able to defend their right to exist in that freely floating form. In the end, it was something like a surrealistic montage. Benjamin's ideal for a work, which would be for it to consist entirely of quotations, arranged so skillfully that it might do without any accompanying text, could strike someone as bizarre in its extremity and, moreover, as self-destructive." - writes Arendt.
"The authentic image may be old, but an authentic idea - only new. It belongs to the present. That present itself may be poor and beaten, but whatever it may be, it must be firmly taken by the horns to elicit a response from the past. This bull's blood is to fill the vessel till beyond its rim, for the shadows of the dead to emerge." - says Benjamin.
"Quotations in Benjamin - despite the huge differences - are comparable in weight only to Biblical quotations in medieval texts, where time and again they displace the internal consistency of an argument," - adds Arendt.
"Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction." - confirms Benjamin.
Much time has gone by, and the talking movies that shocked Benjamin have been replaced by computer games, tearing reality to shreds. And not by accident does the double-edged way of seeing, discovered by him and his contemporaries, now become wholly transparent in Bee Flowers' Icons, where, instead of living matter, we see polypropylene organics, and where the covenants of painting are melted into design and ancient proportions sponge-polished to a gloss. The heroes of the new "surreal collages" are blissfully perfect. As if Bee "rules," he pulls his humans ashore and elevates them above their magic predecessors: Magritte's sea people, the mystical animations of the Soviet Surrealists - disposing thus not only of reality but also of the "authentic curvature" and the fragmentation of the mystery. Mystery is no more. Hands, feet, head, posture - it's all there. Bee grows plastic mystery flowers in full vacuum. And he smiles as La Gioconda, not bearing teeth.
"In the way that fashion evokes costumes of the past, the now searches the past for its roots, and models itself on past archetypal events and personalities. These works explore our vestigial cultural memory by conflating the iconography of contemporary entertainment with the archetypal images that are grafted in our consciousness. Thus, a visual and conceptual framework is created that serves as a compression chamber of cultural tendencies.
Models of being and of behavior from past and present are seamlessly joined. The world of mediated, simulated reality becomes that of the everlasting now, and the media moment becomes a moment of religious exaltation. Contemporaneity is represented as existing in a space divorced from history, where tradition is transformed into re-enactment, where historical images and personalities become prefigurations of contemporary media events, and where fixed meaning is challenged through the fusion of value systems." - Bee wrote in an accompanying text.
"Benjamin's method is something like a modern version of ritual incantations. The spirit they evoke today is the spiritual essence of the past, which has undergone Shakespeare's "sea-change," such that the father's living eyes have turned into pearl, and his living bones into corals. To quote, for Benjamin meant to name, and for him the truth is brought to the light of day by name rather than speech, and by word rather than by sentence." - Arendt.
In Bee Flowers' Icons we see flat planes competing with 3D-volume, reinforced-concrete compositions with wandering perspective, steely eyes with gentle folds. For Benjamin, as for Flowers, the essence is seemingly to avoid anything in any way even resembling empathy. Bee's Icons are somehow reminiscent of von Trier's films. Only without that Danish "yes" or "no." But with the same task - to feel, or highlight - by healer's hand, or x-ray beam, the gene of mythology that is pulsating in time (or perhaps frozen in space.) It is as if Flowers draws yet another final line under the world.