https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wVRClZhYxA

http://preservationbook.com/

Preservation Foreword

Preservation has many meanings, from the physical to the spiritual. At the
most basic - and perhaps the most important - level it can denote survival.
Hence the idea of protection, inherent in the term. But while the word
often implies a kind of stability, or even stasis, preservation also comes
about through transformation: wild animal preserves come to exist only by
being separated from hunting grounds; fruit preserves are made from hours
and hours of boiling, creating a sweet, lasting essence.

There are many means to preservation, some deliberate, others haphazard.
Archaeologists usually encounter the latter, for what has survived from the
distant past almost inevitably comes to us through chance: thrown into a
trash heap, lost at sea, or buried by volcanic ash - only to be
rediscovered by accident.

Since its invention in the 1800s, photography has been employed as a key
tool of archaeology, capturing images of not only finds, but also the very
processes of recovery. Its capacity to record the details of perishable
objects - to preserve them - is evident in historical photographs of now
degraded artifacts and of excavation sites , many substantially transformed
by the very act of digging them and scarcely recognizable today. But today
we are also well aware that photography can be far from objective; that it
can be manipulated; that it can create something entirely new, original,
and surprising.

Blake Little's series of photographs presented here combine the old and the
new in a bold way. His vivid images startle the viewer. They freeze the
human form, preserving it not in proverbial amber, but rather - and
unexpectedly - in honey, another natural substance millions of years old.
(For honey bees date back some 25-50 million years, preserved in the fossil
record of the Eocene-Oligocene boundary.) Just when and where humans first
braved the sharp sting of bees to steal their honey we do not know. Cave
paintings in Spain depict human honey-gatherers, and from the time of the
Egyptian pyramids, about 2575-2150 BC, what scientists now call the
"honey-bearing" bee (*Apis mellifera*) appears to have been domesticated.

As there was no cane sugar in the Old World, honey was highly valued for
its sweetness, but for other qualities as well. It can function as a
medicine as well as a preservative, for under the right conditions does not
spoil. Honey sealed in ancient tombs can remain safe to eat to this day. In
Egypt and other early cultures around the world it was offered to the gods
both in its semi-liquid state and in the form of honey-cakes. Greek and
Roman poets wrote of pouring libations of honey mixed with milk or wine,
and it plays a significant role in several ancient myths. It was honey's
viscosity, as well as its color, transparency, and luminosity that
compelled Blake to experiment with the material. Innovatively, he applied
the substance to the human body, first in drips, then in sheets, creating
gleaming, vibrant forms, which, though far from imitative, recall, in
different ways those made by Auguste Rodin, Francis Bacon, and Jeff Koons.

Blake saw - and was intrigued by - the juxtaposition of the timeless, pure
substance and human flesh, so prone to decay. He was amazed by honey's
transformations when dripped, dribbled, and poured over the human body, and
how it can distort and amplify forms, highlight physical perfection,
engender repulsion, and suggest both immortality and death. For Blake,
gleaming, golden honey has a way of diffusing the personal qualities of his
subjects, often making them unrecognizable, democratizing their individual
traits into something altogether different and universal. Sometimes
terrifying, it can seem to encase his subjects, almost larvae-like in a
primordial ooze, as in *Ouriel, front, 2012*. At other times it is dynamic,
its lively motion captured and frozen, in a very different sense, through
stop-action imaging, its tendrils - almost electric - spinning forth (*Clayton,
2013*). Powerfully muscular bodies, like *Devion, back 2012*, and
gracefully balanced poses, such as *Tala, standing up, 2013*, evoke works
of classical art, such as the famous Discus-thrower of the ancient Greek
sculptor Myron. Other images recall sober portraits of the Renaissance (*Dylan,
2012*; *Brad, 2012* and *Zayden, 2013*), or the dainty ballerinas of Degas
in *Lindsay, 2013*.

Whether thick or thin, the substantiality of the honey is ever present, and
because the experience of being covered in it is far from natural - indeed,
can be suffocating - many of the subjects seem to struggle, while others
surrender themselves to it. In this, and in other ways, the images in these
pages recall those (made familiar by photographers of a very different era)
of the plaster casts of the victims of Vesuvius, whose bodies have
disappeared, but whose evocative forms remained in hollows in the ash that
buried them during the disaster that destroyed the ancient cities of
Pompeii and Herculaneum during the eruption of A.D. 79, which,
paradoxically, simultaneously destroyed and preserved them and have become
something of a byword for the fleetingness and unpredictability of human
life.

Howsoever intense, grueling, and frightening it may be to be covered by
cascading sheets of honey, all of Blake's subjects fortunately remain very
much alive - thanks both to the marvelous properties of this age-old
material and the evocative power of his evolving art.

Kenneth Lapatin
Associate Curator of Antiquities, J. Paul Getty Museum

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