Wolfgang Buttress is not the first contemporary artist to look to bees for inspiration: Mario Merz’s favourite material for his Arte Povera sculptures was beeswax, intended to represent the natural in contrast to the human-made; in Joseph Beuys’s Honey Pump at the Workplace at documenta in 1977, liquid honey flowing in rubber tubes around a gallery space evoked the shared bloodstream of social organisation; more recently, in 2016, Terence Koh created a Bee Chapel, in which the visitor could meditate to the buzz of bees kept in a hive above their head.
In all these cases, artists employed bees and their products as metaphors for some aspect of human society, politics or religion. Buttress’s apian artworks, on the other hand, push humans aside and focus on the ingenuity of bees in their own right. Over the last decade, he has conceived several installations that aim to bring us closer to the life and environment of bees, to inspire wonder and, in turn, a desire to stop the rapid decline of their populations. The first and most famous of these installations is The Hive, a 17-metre-high abstracted honeycomb made in 2015 for the UK pavilion at Milan’s World Expo (and then transferred to Kew Gardens). Visitors entered the enormous hexagonal lattice-work structure to be immersed in a light- and soundscape created in real time in response to the vibrations of a nearby beehive. Buttress organised a similar multi-sensory experience in a wooden dome-like structure for the Glastonbury Festival in 2019 and, in 2021, produced Iridescence, an installation comprising a wall of almost a thousand crystal cubes laser-etched with images of the wildflower varieties favoured by bees and lit with UV light to reproduce their visual spectrum.
Installation view of ‘Bees: A Story of Survival’ by Wolfgang Buttress as the World Museum, Liverpool. Photo: © Robin Clewley
Now, in ‘Bees: A Story of Survival’ at Liverpool’s World Museum, Buttress explores his favourite theme in a full-blown exhibition. Across eight low-lit spaces he evokes various bee behaviours and moments in their lives – nesting, pollinating, communicating, swarming – by means of visual, auditory, tactile and even olfactory stimuli. In one of these artworks, titled Be, he has lined a twisting passageway with a metal framework made up of hexagonal modules over which thin vinyl is stretched taut to create a projection screen for footage of bees in their hives. For Meadow, Buttress has worked again with crystal cubes etched with images of plants, this time arranging them as if on stems and mounting a mirror on the walls behind, creating the impression of an infinite wildflower field, a pollinator’s paradise. Accompanying the visitor through each of these artworks is a newly commissioned soundscape – low plaintive music made by cello, autoharp and voice – transmitted through speakers embedded in the floor and walls of the galleries.
As in The Hive, the piece was created to harmonise with vibrations from a local hive, picked up by sensors and converted into sound, although the live ‘tooting’ and ‘purring’ of these bees has little in common with the ambient chanting of the human-made soundscape.
There are some beautiful new moments, as well as the rehashing of previous good ideas. In Vanishing, a gallery has been converted into an anechoic chamber – an acoustic vacuum – to simulate the eerie quietness of a world in which bees have become extinct (as they plausibly might within a century, if we continue our indiscriminate use of pesticides and rabid urban development), with timelapse videos of decomposing flowers playing across its walls. Striking a note of hope, however, is Portal, in which a hologram of a solitary bee flits across a brightly lit glass dome in the centre of a pitch-dark room – though it appears only if the viewer steps back and stays still. Undisturbed, the bee goes on to pollinate a holographic flower. This clever use of motion sensors teaches us to suppress human instinct, to witness and appreciate nature rather than attempting to dominate or interfere.
Installation view of ‘Bees: A Story of Survival’ by Wolfgang Buttress as the World Museum, Liverpool. Photo: © Mark Hadden Photography
The didactic dimension of ‘Bees’, implicit in some of Buttress’s interactive artworks, takes more explicit form elsewhere in the exhibition. The first room is entirely devoted to teaching visitors about the evolution, anatomy and behaviour of different bee species. There are moments which, however engaging, seem directly transposed from a science exhibit. At one point the visitor is invited to put their head inside a bee-keeping basket to smell the propolis (beeswax and tree sap) and place their chin on a metal plate to feel bee vibrations through bone conductors. For the most part, though, Buttress is able to play more subtly with the art-science divide, borrowing from and reinterpreting conventional forms of entomological display, while respecting the venue’s role as a natural history museum.
In 2007, Buttress made A Spire for Mansfield, an enormous stainless-steel feather intended as a public memorial to the canaries of the local coal mines, whose deaths were a warning of dangerous conditions. Buttress sees bees as sentinels on a larger scale, as ‘barometers for the health of the Earth’. The exhibition doesn’t claim that art holds solutions to the environmental crisis, but its sensual, sensitive and genuinely beautiful exploration of its theme strikes a powerful warning bell.
‘Bees: A Story of Survival’ is at the World Museum, Liverpool, until 5 May.