Archive of the Everyday
James Putnam
A young tree whose blossoms, leaves and branches are hindered from further growth by a metal fence has been a recurrent image in Betty Bee’s paintings. The subject itself offers a significant insight into the mind of an artist whose work is attached to her psyche. This wire mesh symbolically both confines and protects her and she even sleeps with a fence-like construction next to her bed, which is raised high above the floor. With its sectional meshing and hanging objects it reminded the art critic Angelo Calabrese of a bee’s nest when he came to visit her at home and he started calling her Betty Bee. She was further inspired to adopt the name because her two daughters used to watch a Japanese cartoon on television called Maya Bee. In this cartoon there were all these little bees looking for their mother, which she related to the loss of her own mother who died when she was very young. Betty also liked the fact that "Bee" sounded the same as the verb to be in English and so she equated it with the whole notion of living and being.
She archives her life as part of her art practice with letters and poems from former lovers, photographs and keepsakes meticulously gathered and preserved in her personal "museum," an open ongoing collection. Her work also draws from memories of an unhappy childhood, the cruelty and neglect of her father combined with sexual abuse by her brother. This forced her to leave home and live on the streets of Naples as a teenager. She mixes fantasies and desires with images of innocence, sexuality and voyeurism. Betty’s artistic resource is herself and her tragic/comic narrative is told using both traditional and non-traditional media-–paintings both figurative and text-based, photographs, videoworks, performances and installations. She loves color and often uses phosphorescent paints that glow in the dark but the pretty flowers, trees and vegetation she depicts are "imprisoned" by threatening barbed wire fences and chains rendered in relief using metallic paints. She also creates paintings from texts such as pages from her diary, poems and letters from friends, which she copies on to canvas in her expressive handwriting. There is a striking contrast between the serenity and naivety of her pretty and colorful paintings of nature and mermaids with her more provocative and attention seeking photographs, video and performance works.
It’s tempting to compare Betty Bee with other female artists of her generation like Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle and there are indeed striking similarities in the way they all interweave their personality, sexuality, memories and daily lives with their art. There are also parallels with Cindy Sherman who acts out fantasies by adopting all sorts of convincing disguises or even Sarah Lucas in her series of arresting self-portraits. But what is more intriguing is to view her work as part of a universal tendency at this point in art history. Nothing happens in isolation, everything is interconnected and we should bear in mind that the reason such a phenomenon emerges is not through artistic output alone. There needs to be an appreciation of its value and meaning in the collective consciousness. What is more unusual, and refreshing about Betty is her apparent disinterest in other artist’s work. She shamelessly admits she is only interested what she creates and draws no inspiration from art history, which she has little knowledge of. But this does not mean she is totally self-obsessed since she seems genuinely fascinated and caring about other peoples’ lives. One of her works painted on two panels is merely a list of typical Neapolitan boys and girls names painted in different colors. They are the names of her friends and she has carefully chosen a color to represent each individual’s personality.
Betty has always enjoyed dressing up and imitating people and likes doing daring things that can involve shocking and interacting with strangers on the street. Whilst staying in Vienna, in 1985 her friend suggested they go to a lesbian club and she decided to dress up as a man. She was so convincing that they refused to let her in until she removed her clothes to reveal her true gender. Betty went on to develop a penchant for posing as a transvestite, which goes back to her days of living on the street at the age of 15. She was sleeping in a park where there were transvestites who fascinated her since they combined in one person aspects of her ever-absent mother and father. Betty eventually befriended them and they looked after her. She was inspired by their exaggerated femininity and became very good at mimicking their clothing, makeup and gestures when hanging out at the bars they frequented. Taking on the role of a transvestite in a machismo dominated culture like Naples takes guts and a certain amount of death wish. Betty did this as a game rather than prostitution and when people tried to grab her, she would only just manage to escape. Her actions invited danger and there would sometimes be fights but she thrived on the excitement gained from the element of risk and recorded such events using a secret video camera. She went on to produce a series of photoworks exploring variations on the stereotypical Naples transvestite prostitute. Arguably the most striking and celebrated image of Betty in this guise is the portrait L. D. A. B.
Cross-dressing is not unusual for either sex but a woman posing as a transvestite, complete with false penis, is certainly bizarre. Although, one should bear in mind that in "the profession" in Naples women sometimes pretend to be transvestites to grab a higher fee. Betty claims that in retrospect all she really wanted to do was to change her identity and for her this seemed the easiest way to do it. Her behavior would no doubt intrigue any psychiatrist who would probably explore its maternal and paternal origins. We each carry the ghosts of our sexual personae from childhood to the grave and this is supposed to determine how we love and hate. Her antics may well illustrate Dr. Freud’s theory of female penis envy so perhaps in her fantasies she is a man. But gender is always double-edged and the mystique of her refined female narcissism is probably the product of a connection between mother and child. The alternating female and male element is just one of the interesting dualities that run through her work and it is this very tension between two opposing dynamics a sort of yin and yang energy make her work come alive.
Her attention-seeking personality must be a way of counteracting the rejection she suffered as an unwanted child. She exudes a raw, provocative energy and just being around her is constant theatre. Although she might be accused of narcissism she doesn’t consider herself at all beautiful and hates her face, which she thinks resembles her father. She has an enormous complex about her appearance and decided to have her breasts enlarged as a way of being considered beautiful in the eyes of Neapolitan men. The need to appear attractive goes back to her days of living on the street when it was crucial to attract attention and get food and money as a means of survival. Even when she was really young she put on makeup and her life was always a kind impromptu performance even though she didn’t realize it could be regarded as art until her friends encouraged her.
Psychological processes are associated with the states of creativity and artists are drawn towards art and need to make words or pictures as others need to breath. Betty’s route to becoming an artist has been a combination of sheer necessity and imaginative resource. When she started out she was living among unemployed and homeless people and like some of them she would sell drawings and paintings on the street as a means of survival. Her former occupations have included being a manicurist in a barbershop, a nude model for an art school and even a waitress. But she has always felt a natural impulse towards making art and with her restless energy and problems sleeping at night it soon became an ideal form of therapy. Her works reveal a delight in art’s handmade processes and her use of fluorescent and metallic paints and glitter express a kind of naïve joy like a young girl discovering cosmetics.
Since her school days writing has been an equally important means of expression and her text-based works are her connecting link between thought and feeling, body and mind. Art is Betty’s vehicle for grounding and dissolving emotion, which is in turn a passion, a continuum of eroticism and aggression. Her performances and video works become the medium for her extreme thoughts and actions. Betty’s long time estranged father who once took a bath at her house was covertly videotaped for her work entitled Lionetti Luigi Classe ’20 (1997). Now transformed into a helpless, near-senile old man, through this act of humiliation, the monster in her memory becomes exorcised and reconciled.
When it comes to creating installations, Betty has an instinctive response to given spaces. The room at Maschio Angioino suggested an ideal site for a stage-set fantasy inspired by a strange dream she once had. The illusion of a vast stagnant pond made from blue/green plastic sheeting predominates the space and her image is projected in a circular frame above the lake just like the moon. With her exaggerated facial expressions and heavy pale makeup she appears like an actress in an old silent movie and the effect is further enhanced by simulating the white scratch marks on the film. Betty intends the pond, which covers most of the floor area to suggest a barrier that makes the public hesitant to enter the room at first. There is probably some psychological link here between this expression of confinement and the recurrent theme of the wire fence in her paintings. She regards this artificial pond as an ironic contrast to the real sea that has no boundaries and is visible from the battlements of Maschio Angionino. Her two most loved and evocative images of nature, the infinity of the sea and the romance of the moon are thus reduced to the confined and synthetic and it is as if she is teasing the public with this artificial construction of nature, which she calls "lunar enchantment."
Betty wears her heart upon her sleeve, her private life and emotion is displayed for all to see and she manages to communicate the universal through the personal. She is respected by many ordinary people because she has needed to sell her sufferance through her art just to stay afloat. Even now she feels apprehensive about taking money for her work because it is as if she’s selling part of herself but has come to accept it as a means of giving something back to society. But society is, after all, merely an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power and only in society can one be an individual. Betty possesses a fluent emotional intelligence, an unabashed confidence in making significance out of real events and successfully blurs the boundary between tragedy and wry humor. She has even made a work where her life is represented in comic strip with each frame documenting the various adventures and misadventures in the evolution of her psyche. But identity is conflict and she is and has been both the artist and the model. Betty’s work is the coalescence of contradictory sets of traits from foolhardy to protective and from childlike to streetwise. The happy lives of ordinary people are symbolized by her paintings of pretty blossoming trees that belong to them rather than to her, that is why they are enclosed by a wire net. But this also acts as big seductive web, which she uses to capture her prey for critical acclaim, admiration and the occasional proverbial ‘pound of flesh.’
Betty Bee, first New York solo exhibition organized by Agró/Glickman STEP (1), Private loft, 181 Chrystie St., For more information please contact info@step1art.com
