The Architecture of Honey
The first sounds I heard when we clambered off the yellow school bus were the wind and the birds. It was dusk in the Illinois farmland, and our voices seemed muffled by the quiet and the green intensity of trees; the fresh grass swept in waves, some of it neatly mowed, but most of it rising up long in the supple fields. After the gritty clutter of the street outside the former Randolph Street Gallery, after an hour or so bumping down the highway on the bus, this transition into grace was sudden and dramatic. It was as if the dislocation established an expectant, peaceful envelope around the audience gathered for Joan Dickinson’s one-night-only The Architecture of Honey.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
After gathering in a garden and eating bread pudding, we followed the Hag single file through a thin band of trees onto a wide, mowed path at the edge of a gentle hill. This section, “The Illuminated Garden of Anna Thomina,” suggested an initiation. We walked past nine beekeepers with brightly colored hives on their heads, adding a foot to their height. Veiled and dressed in white, they watched us file past, turning toward the straggling line when everyone had passed. This first sight invoked ancient myths of bee goddesses and offered a visual notation for the honey of the title. As we passed through the field, the land itself became the architecture.
In many ways it didn’t matter to me what these images meant. Although I was interested in their ritual meaning, and in fact waited for understanding, I never wanted to be told a conventional story. The idea of an “illuminated garden” was enough. That’s why Dickinson’s monologue as the Hag was so disappointing. After we’d gathered on the hill she circled us, leaning on her staff, and blandly told a story about a grandmother’s house (hers? I wasn’t sure), family dogs, and a vision of a rainbow (echoed by the waving heads of the beekeepers across the field). She delivered the story in a cursory, almost sullen way. She got a laugh when she talked about Cindy Beagle and Cindy Boxer, the grandmother’s two “best dogs in the world,” but the monologue as a whole felt like an interruption of the lyrical scene she’d just set.
Once again, I felt the artist’s private world intrude on the visual grace of her work. When Dickinson moved into verbal performance, The Architecture of Honey took on a self-importance that undercut the moving, mysterious experience she’d created. She clearly understood the landscape intimately and dressed it in images that, for the most part, became as evocative for the audience as the Gundestrup Cauldron was for her. But wanting to tell her personal narrative as well created a performance at odds with itself. If she wanted to speak a private performance language and hold herself apart from us, as her sullen, blank manner and cryptic wordplay would seem to indicate, perhaps she shouldn’t have told such a personal story. It was puzzling to me that she set up a sacred space, then dismantled it with crude pop-culture references and language that was either bland or highly poetic and self-conscious.
