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A day in the life of Bombus

8 July - 25th August 2007

Adrian Barron, a printmaking artist who has also worked installationally and sculpturally, is acutely aware of the interplay between process and idea.

There are many areas where ‘print’ and ‘concept’ collide fruitfully as cultural signifiers and form. Think only of the ubiquitous carrier bag and its brazen taunt of ‘thanks for shopping at…come back again’, referenced brilliantly by the likes of Barbara Kruger. Think too of the T shirts of Katherine Hamnett and Gonzales Torres – acid to the core – and the scale and further public consciousness of the billboard utilised by many contemporary artists. Overlap inevitably occurs. This is printed matter after all and the matter of the print seeps into our everyday lives, through both written and visual languages. For Barron, all these creative frissons provide absolutely workable tensions.

The two main works within this exhibition on the face of it may seem to have little to do with each other, though they have both been devised and made contemporaneously in the artist’s studio. Both utilize the medium of print. Conceptually, both sets explore notions of destruction or the portents of that destruction.

The series of large black and white etchings of tanks called Landings are motifs of these destructive forces. So common is their image and occurrence on our news media, we as viewers are in part desensitised to their shocking design. We sigh in recognition of our own cultural amnesia. They become a visual decoy and we as consumers become prisoners of our own inertia. This is our tragedy, humanity circa 2007. Further examination of these spectres reveals something quite different. Closer inspection of the individual vehicles exposes them as implausible studies of camouflage. The very nature of camouflage, I would have thought, is to turn an object or place into something other than its original form. In the case of these three-dimensional monsters, these tanks, now camouflaged, seem to return to an earlier time. If these ghastly icons weren’t so damn terrible they could almost be comical. Etching was first used in Europe to decorate the suits of armour worn by medieval knights. Contemporary armies camouflage their vehicles perhaps as a comforter for the nervous occupants inside as much as a tactical operational manoeuvre. But from the spectator’s standpoint, to the child in Iraq or Afghanistan, or the Janet and John characters in Barron’s picture-books, Landings 2, for example, 50 tonnes of growling steel covered in stripes and spots evoke a similar feeling of fear and awe to that of more ancient times when wild, unpredictable nature terrified our ancestors. To push this home further, many have been given animals’ names, such as Panther and now, Leopard 2, which is today’s most ‘successful’ main battle tank – a best seller. Such names allude also to the impression of the exotic and savage, something which we can’t quite clearly perceive and therefore are unable to comprehend. So we either run or look away.

Camouflage in battle, that particularly human preoccupation, leads us on to Barron’s preoccupation with camouflage in nature, particularly in the world of insects.

Offensive mimicry designed to surprise the prey, defensive mimicry designed either to escape the sight of the aggressor (mimicry of dissimulation) or to frighten it away by a deceptive appearance (mimicry of terrification ); …direct mimicry when it is in the immediate interests of the imitating animal to take on the disguise, indirect mimicry when animals belonging to different species, following a common adaptation, a convergence, in some way show professional resemblances…Since the mimetic rivalry that develops from the struggle of the possession of the objects is contagious it leads to threats of violence.

The second major series in the exhibition A day in the life of Bombus, comprises imprints of insects culled from Barron’s own garden in Northampton. The insect world has been ransacked and recorded. Each body has been pressed into cold metal and warm wax making an impression with their bones (chitin) and viscera. Acid has been poured into the wax cast to etch the otherwise bare metal surface recording this information in the steel. Ink is added leaving inky trails on the surface paper. There are no good and bad guys. The slugs, snails and spiders have an equal position with the bumble bees and butterflies and ladybirds. All are equal in Barron’s garden world. Each little death is numbered, suggesting the possibility that there are more to come. This is calculated killing which seems to hold itself out for analysis. It is like a pseudo scientific experiment from the Victorian era which is totally out of control. A word from the same era denoting neurotic obsession, ‘psychasthenia’ sums it up. But the mould of traditional etching is tested. The convention of an edition is skewed. These are one-offs, like the insects themselves. And this is their moment.

Both series would appear to come from opposing viewpoints. Barron describes this paradoxical phenomenon as ‘cognitive dissonance’, a term he borrows from Eon Festinger.

Barron says: ‘Today there are many variations on the meaning of cognitive dissonance. It is generally described as two conflicting thoughts on the same notion; these occur simultaneously and can in some cases lead to a state of sheer madness. Most people at this stage are compelled to form a new set of beliefs or concepts. In this case the new idea negotiates the sense of mental shock given by the initial thought or thoughts.’

Barron admits cognitive dissonance caused by imbalances created by the making of these works, derived from his garden. A garden which up to a few years ago was nothing but grass. Now it is planted with passion and care, and slowly matures with various flora. A pond is at its centre. A vegetable patch is sited at its furthest end. Within it are many places to lurk, hide and observe. In this reconstructed ‘garden’ Barron has given back its nature. His family can again bathe in its perfumes and textures and gather and eat from its banquet.

In The Experience of Landscape Jay Appleton explains that these feelings are generally essential in the garden because they are like promptings felt even though the need for them has vanished. Appleton claims that we see and feel landscape parks, gardens, paintings – in terms of a territorial sense of the hunter gatherers that came before us. Thus, he says, in a desirable landscape, one that we admire as sublime, picturesque, or beautiful, we need somehow to sense that we ourselves are located where we can see without being seen. At base we like a terrain in which we can easily locate and stalk prey. Appleton sees this new landscape as a prospect full of sublime potential involving horizons, refuges, vistas, magnets, offsets and what he refers to as a sky dado, an arching form such as a branch coming out of a tree which from a viewer’s perspective is just above the horizon. All these notions have been correlated for a perfect lifestyle in our unconscious brains.

Barron describes the situation in his own garden thus: ‘Within my garden battles are played out within the grass and the herbaceous border, as with our own age and since time immemorial.’

Throughout western history philosophers and writers have searched for our own reflection within the garden, and their gaze falls on the humble honey bee. Aristotle looks to the honey bee as a metaphor for Greek society and views the workers as expendable slaves carrying out duties until graceless death. The queen and her entourage are the leisurely owners. Communist analysis depicts a sisterhood of bee workers all equal with the queen as the state, as opposed to the capitalist US where the queen is portrayed as the corporate chairman, and workers as bustling stock brokers. In a short story Kipling describes the internal destruction of a hive by the predatory wax moth who dresses herself in the attire of a worker bee to bring the colony crashing down.

Barron’s book Bees under the magnifying glass is his negotiation of the cognitive dissonance he feels. It draws together in simplified terms the honey bee’s everyday life, but it is given a new sense of balance between external and internal influences, such as the bee keeper and the wax moth. They are found in balance at either end of the book.

Barron offers his audience a means of reading the actions of diminutive nature as metaphors, even lessons, to recognise the tragic circumstance of contemporary politics. The law of our jungle, it would seem, deliberately obfuscates our understanding of the nature of things. Through our confusion and ignorance we are dumb to respond and collude through our silence.

Tim Davies 2007

Notes

R. Caillois, 1935, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ Minotoure 7

E. Festinger, 1957, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Stanford, Stanford University Press

Conversation with the artist, May, 2007

J. Appleton, 1975, The Experience of Landscape Chichester, John Wiley & Sons

Conversation with the artist, May 2007

J, Khalifman, 1951, Bees (Stalin Prize winner) Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing House

R. Kipling, 1987, ‘The Mother Hive’ in Selected Short Stories Harmondsworth, Penguin Books Ltd.

R. Caillois, 1935, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ Minotoure 7
E. Festinger, 1957, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Stanford, Stanford University Press
Sgwrs gyda'r artist, Mai, 2007
J. Appleton, 1975, The Experience of Landscape Chichester, John Wiley & Sons
Sgwrs â'r artist, Mai 2007
J, Khalifman, 1951, Bees (enillydd gwobr Stalin) Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing House
R. Kipling, 1987, ‘The Mother Hive’ yn Selected Short Stories Harmondsworth, Penguin Books Ltd.

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