Sites of Vital Materiality: Art History’s Apiaries and Ecologies of Everyday Life

Taking the current crisis of the British honeybee’s survival as a point of departure, this paper considers the coded implications, organic materiality, and medium-specificity of honey by firstly looking to a number of historical works that have treated it metonymically or allegorically, and then to selected modern and contemporary works that indicate a shift towards its own ontology and ‘sculptural’ qualities with regards to everyday ethics and ‘green aesthetics’. From Piero di Cosimo’s The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus (1462-1561) to Joseph Beuys’s Honey Pump at the Workplace (1977) and beyond, art historical humanism will be juxtaposed with current theories pertaining to ‘ecology without Nature’; that is, by considering philosophical post-humanism alongside additional visual and literary works, the aim is to bring the fields of art history and ecology into closer proximity so as to conceptualize the act of cross-pollination.