Much Abuzz About a Honeycomb

CAIRO — Los Angeles artist Lita Albuquerque tends toward the spiritual, so when a project she was constructing at the Pyramids was stalled last month by a bout of anti-Israel hysteria, she viewed it in terms of the coming millennium.

“The closer we get to our hopes, the closer we get to our fears,” she said after her brush with controversy on the plateau overlooking the Great Pyramids of Cheops.

The artist--representing the United States in Egypt’s premier international art festival--was raked over the coals in the Egyptian press after rumors spread that she intended to sketch Jewish Stars of David in the yellow sands in front of the Pyramids. Detractors accused her of being an Israeli spy.

In fact, she says, there was never any Israeli symbolism intended, and contemporary Middle East politics were the furthest thing from her mind in the project, which developed from a vision she had during a 1988 visit here of a golden bee encircled by the planet.

The ephemeral work, etched in sand at one of civilization’s most enduring sites, was meant as a meditation on humanity and the planet within the cosmos. It incorporates the Pyramids, which she considers as “the place that maintains the memory of who we are,” and bee symbols, which in her mind are carrying the essence of the human soul back to the stars.

Her troubles began with a surveyor who said the honeycomb pattern he was charting for Albuquerque near the ancient monuments looked like a Star of David. He raised an alarm that was picked up by a reporter for Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper.

Before long, Albuquerque was asked by the Culture Ministry to suspend work. She was stunned and briefly incensed by the accusations. But Egyptian friends, cultural officials and the U.S. Embassy rallied to her defense. Among her strongest backers was Dr. Zahi Hawass, director of the Giza monuments for Egypt’s Department of Antiquities.

“I was so happy to see an artist who was really looking at the power and the magic of the Pyramids,” he recounted. “I supported her completely.”

Hawass, who himself has been the subject of rumors--for example, that he has been covering up evidence about the true celestial origins of the Pyramids--went to the police to try to scotch the stories. “Rumors are very dangerous, especially rumors directed against the Pyramids,” he says.

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After a weeklong delay, the minister of culture gave Albuquerque the green light to finish her piece, which she was able to accomplish with her team on the very day the festival opened.

Almost simultaneously, she got news that her entry was selected by the international jury as one of the five winners of the premier prize given to foreign artists at the sixth International Cairo Biennale Festival.

Titled “Sol Star,” the project consisted of 99 circles of ultramarine pigment scattered in the sand over an area roughly the size of two football fields, with the Pyramids looming on the horizon less than two miles away. The work’s title, explained Albuquerque, has overlapping meanings: Sol, our sun; sole, an individual’s solitary journey; and the human soul.

She had intended to lay the circles in the desert in a symmetrical honeycomb pattern, recalling the bees of her vision. But after hearing the complaints about Stars of David, Albuquerque reverted to another concept--arranging them to mirror the constellations over the Pyramids.

The accompanying gallery piece in downtown Cairo, including a four-part, six-page poem by Albuquerque, a video, a soundtrack and photo montages, continues her themes of alignment and spiritual connections, with the stars, the Earth, the Pyramids, the individual--in present time and memory--all coming together through words and symbols in a single moment.

“It really is interesting being an artist in these days,” Albuquerque said in a telephone conversation from her home in Santa Monica two weeks after the imbroglio. Only last year, Albuquerque found herself at the center of another controversy, this one in California: She was forced to defend her “Stellar Axis” public art project at the Peninsula Center Library in Palos Verdes.

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That $150,000 sculpture, paid for with public funds and featuring a telescope-like tube, gold-leaf-lined domes and marble discs creating the illusion of a pole running through all four stories of the library, was opposed by some new library board members as a flagrant example of frivolous spending.

Like her Egyptian piece, Albuquerque’s library sculpture eventually was left intact. “I’ve had an extraordinary year--two big fights and two big successes,” Albuquerque mused. On one side of the world, she was attacked as an Israeli spy; on the other, as a “crackpot Aquarian.”

Albuquerque--who was born in Tunisia and lived there until she was 11--has not soured on Egypt or the Middle East.

“I love the Islamic world,” she says. “Certainly I love the art--being raised in that kind of country really affected me. The architecture, hearing the mosques everyday, the movement of life.”

The outdoor segment of Albuquerque’s piece in Cairo was whisked away, as planned, by the desert winds above the Nile, but suspicions about her have lingered, even with the museum director where her gallery installation remains on display through Jan. 15.

“I have reservations about her work and her as a whole,” said the director, Fatma Ismail. “I was surprised that she came first with a particular project which involves drawing hexagons that--taken from a certain angle--would represent the Star of David.” And she noted that Albuquerque’s poem starts, “In the beginning,” which Ismail called an allusion to Genesis.

“What’s most provocative is that she wanted to do this in our country, as if saying, ‘I’m sure you are so ignorant that you won’t get the message,’ ” Ismail said. Nor did Ismail appear enthralled by the work itself. “The decorative aspect . . . is much stronger than the content,” she said.

Still, the piece seemed to be enticing some art-lovers to become art-lifters. Telltale footprints in the powdered pigment showed where visitors to the gallery had stooped to take many of the acrylic-resin bees placed there by the artist.

Albuquerque, who’s been winning accolades for evocative environmental works--many in desert settings--since the 1970s, sounded cheerfully calloused to the occasional jibe, controversy or petty theft. Art is always vulnerable, she said philosophically.

When her work is attacked, she said, “The most important thing for me is to just focus on what I am doing with the piece.”