more here. http://www.justmeans.com/Beehives-as-a-Sustainable-Business-Model/33263.html
"From way up in a corner of Maine down to the energy killing fields of Colombia, these worker bees manage to make sweet work out of harsh reality. If one listens carefully to the beautiful harmonies of the BeeHive Design Collective, if one examines closely the magnificent struggle for compassion and caring in the brutal context of an empire thrashing about in its death throes, one will either weep or have no choice but to not ruefully that "inside this chest beats a heart of stone."
I spoke today with Emma, and, again and again, I gasped at the mastery of mystery that this collaborative articulated through her--she insisted that I understand this notion, that she was not presenting an 'individual point of view,' but a bell-clear expression of long considered group molding of understanding, which itself came not from them as bright and talented artists but from the labor of listening to "the people themselves." This preternaturally youthful--I'm guessing--grouping of artistic genius and political wisdom is but ten years old.
Their origins, "Beehive was born 10 years ago out of anti-globalization work--really came out of 'the battle of Seattle' in 1999." Emma was not present then, but many of her cohorts were and "many of them, founders" of this little Yankee jewel, "noticed a lack of strong political graphics in a lot of the movement, especially of images immersed in content."
Again, to the likes of this humble correspondent, this is exciting, this birth of new forms. They gained this capacity, to 'immerse graphic expression in content,' through "an organic evolution of our arts and ideas through learning new ideas and complex ideation" that many of them didn't grow up knowing or go to school to study. "The jargon wasn't easily understood" to them, so they knew that the people whom they wanted to reach would also wonder, 'What the heck is this?'
"We challenged ourselves to create understandable ideas that made huge complexity easily digestible." She emphasized this dialectic. "Own experience of struggling to get it is part of understanding" how to create images that are understandable."
So, this group, this Beehive Collective, shows some sort of answer. They focus all their artistic, technical, and creative energy towards creating pictorial forms that narrate some of the most glaring structural sociopolitical problems around. One piece is Plan Colombia:
Wasps in incubator mode, wasps flying through the air firing their death-squad munitions at the waiting, verdant South American wilderness below - wasps play out the entire lifecycle of Western colonialism/hegemony, and show how the ravages continue to this day. These are powerful images. A person needs to sit with the poster for a while to take in the great level of detail and attention. I'm happy that when I personally met the Beehive Collective folks for the US Social Forum of 2007, I got to sit with them for a while and purchased this specific poster.
In an attempt to overcome the tendency of images to simply portray "what we are against," this graphic illustrates this story in three "layers" to help the viewer experience the different aspects of an extremely complex, and brutal situation.... The tools produced from this collaboration are being distributed, as anti-copyright material, for use in campaigns in both the South and North of the Americas.
This detail from their 6-foot long poster resonates the most with me. The wasp larvae lay in a complacent state of apathy, fed on TV, BigMacs - all the trappings of comsumerist Western lifestyle, really explicitly rendered when seen up close. The banner drawn on the nest itself reads "Plan Colombia: 500 years of terrorism". The rest of the poster evolves from this starting point - the rest of the images seem to cascade down off the wasp's nest, as if someone has shaken it a bit and had these dreadful things fall out.The indictment is clear. It begins with us. The complacent larvae are us, all of us who choose to ignore social realities and diffuse our power to work, think, and fight for the sake of the trappings of a high-consumption, low-engagement culture. As if this were not clear enough, the wasp's nest itself is shaped like the geographical region otherwise known as the United States.
I find it hard to imagine any sort of lifestyle in this country that would not, at some level, contribute to the 'larva' state here described. True, we watch no TV. We don't own expensive gadgets, we do not shop nor eat at chains of any sort. But, Starbucks is still the de facto meetup place and stopping point when indie alternatives are lacking. We still use tons of gas to toodle up and down the highway at will. We belong to that grid that consumes more electricity than almost any other nation in the world. We own enough computer equipment, appliances, and stuff to definitely mean we're contributing to the 'larvification of America'. How to get around it?
This poster makes me think. And their very lifestyle makes me think, too. I'm sure that just through living in the bosom of Empire, as it were, they contribute more than their share to the larvification of the world. Yet their living model, like their artistic model, is consistent with their message. A collective, entirely zero-profit model of engagement, a set-up that to me sounds like the Catholic Vows of Poverty nuns and others take, whereby there is no private property but all is shared, and a person's life energy does not go towards making or accumulating cash, but towards contributing to the larger mission.
Does art, then, serve a useful social function? In their case, most definitely. Through their approach to art, their choice of narrative/subject matter, and, finally, their lifestyle - a model that, if nothing else shows an intriguing alternative to this grasping, desperate, rapacious existence so many of us find ourselves engaged in.
Posts
