Friday, September 21, 2012

Googling on: this week, bees


We spotted the two rocks that are part of Kate Newby’s Walters Prize installation sitting up there on the Auckland Art Gallery roof, but what happening up on the roofs of other galleries, that’s the question you’ve gotta ask. Like on the roof of the City Gallery for instance or up top at the DPAG. One thing we can tell you is that on the roofs of Tate (Britain and Modern) in London it’s bees, thousands of them, in and out of hives and swarming around the building. In fact if you head into any Tate you can buy Tate Honey by the jar. It comes via Urban Beekeeper Steve Benbow and is rather blandly branded Honey (order here).

Following up on the bee/art trail reminded us that in 1977 David Mealing (subject of OTN’s very first post back in November 2006) installed three hives at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Complete with live bees that could fly in and out of the gallery via a special tube the installation was titled Sting/stung
And of course all this Anthophila talk brings us to the grand master of bee-art Joseph Beuys. For Documenta  1977 his work Honey Pump For The Workplace pumped two tons of honey through plastic tubing throughout the 100 days of the exhibition.