In May of 2005 three paintings by a very special artist were sold by Bonham’s Auction House in London for approximately $30,000.00 U.S. dollars (de Vries 2005). Not so unusual perhaps, except that this artist was an ape, and the sum was the highest ever paid for a work of art created by a nonhuman animal. This chapter analyzes how the growing global trade in art by elephants, apes, dolphins and other nonhuman animals functions as a contestation of humanism and asks how the culturally specific category of “art” changes when the species producing it changes. What is at stake in the naming of these objects as art, and for whom? Why do these works command such relatively high prices? Who is the target market? How do such products relate to notions of “the primitive”? And, ultimately, what does this challenge to the humans-only category of art making mean for a posthumanist vision of beings in the world? If the artist is an ape, or the ape is an artist, does that designation have potential political implications for the political status of apes—indeed for their representation, literally and figuratively—as political subjects?
Some of the questions that arise are the following: What does it mean (and for whom?) that nonhuman animals perform actions of drawing, painting, or sound making that produce products perceived by humans as visual art or music? Is the realm of the arts just one more in the ever receding panoply of elusive abilities that supposedly defines the ultimate dividing line between human and nonhuman animals? Toolmaking, language, emotions, souls, art? What aspect of “the human” and of “mind” does art stand for in these debates about animal capacities?
Intentionality, aesthetic pleasure, design capability, cultural knowledge of representational conventions … all these are aspects of art making that emerge in discussions and perceptions of animal art. And each references a humanistic value of individual expressivity, intelligence, mind, and aesthetics that have historically been used to separate not only humans from others, but some humans from other humans at specific places and times. Appreciation of the “artistic” has been denoted as a dividing line separating the urbane sophisticate from the rural rube, the upper classes from the lower, the cosmopolitan from the provincial, the socially “advanced” from the “primitive,” and the so-called first world from the so-called third. These oppositional categories depend on a concept of “art” and “art making” as a realm of social practice separated from the production of objects for everyday utility, a realm in which only those truly “gifted” can excel, and a realm, although embedded in market economies, supposedly carrying values that ultimately cannot be commodified: the beautiful, the truthful, and the creative.
I want to be careful here, while still taking the opportunity to broadly sketch the contours of art making, to recognize that this constellation of beliefs has a social and geopolitical history. The generalizations offered here are those that I believe have been operational in European and European settler societies at least since the nineteenth century and still hold sway, explicitly or implicitly, in those sites today. And, given the impact of the U.S. and European art worlds on the global art market, the impact of these concepts extends much more broadly too. However, I want to limit these remarks to the current art market in Europe and the U.S.
Like most aspects of the art market, the animal art market operates on a principle of rarity. Only a few members of a few species have produced “artworks” that sell at high prices. Among the painters are Tillamook Cheddar, a fox terrier in New York City; Gambi and Premja, two Lithuanian dolphins; several elephants in Thailand; Cholla the horse; Koko the gorilla; and Alexander the orangutan. Artworks by these artists are for sale on Koko’s Web site, in Thailand at an elephant sanctuary, in Brooklyn at the store Tillie Ltd., at the Sea Museum Dolphinarium in Klaipeda, Lithuania, and through major art auction houses like Christie’s in New York. The artworks are unique, handmade (sic) objects or live recordings of music “jam sessions,” like Kanzi the bonobo’s sessions with Peter Gabriel, and thus retain a Benjaminian aura of the “original” (Benjamin 1968).1 What they stand for—their contestation of “the human”—is the highest part of their value. This is not the case with all products sold as animal “art.”
In understanding the stakes at play in discussions of primate artists, we must put their artwork and the market for it in a broader context of “artwork” by all sorts of animals. Today, consumers can purchase art by dogs, dolphins, sea lions, and even rats and turtles. The idea of art making by animals varies depending on the species that created the product. This is not an aesthetic judgment, with turtles making “bad” paintings and apes being “good” artists, rather the calibration has to do with the notion of the animal’s intent to make an aesthetic object and to make an object through specific selective aesthetic choices about color, line, shape, and composition. The higher up the presumed evolutionary chain of intelligence (understood in human terms), the greater the value of these works, because they represent not only novelties but also “evidence” of subjectivity.
The resultant “art by animals” products, 99 percent of which would be termed “abstract” (i.e., nonrepresentational) art, may be complex or simple, smeared or brushed, large or small, made with a lip, a trunk, a brush or a foot, and brightly multicolored or in a limited palette. A painting by a sea lion is not always immediately distinguishable from a painting by an elephant. Both are likely to be composed of sweeping brushstrokes in layers of colors reaching out toward but not completely filling the canvas. The issue becomes whether or not the animal intended to make aesthetic choices or merely produced physical actions that resulted in aesthetic choices passively being made (either by default—a smearing together of yellow and blue making green), or through the intervention of the human keeper or companion, who may determine which colors are used and in what order as well as when the painting is “done.” We will come back to this issue of choice making when we consider primates in particular.
On the “lower” end of the spectrum, we see more tongue-in-cheek examples, like that of the British rat Tony Blair, who produces “sculptures” by gnawing on apple cores, or the works of the Ratistes in the U.S., whose tiny footprints track colorful paint across canvas to produce Scamperart. These paintings actually look like rat footprints, which is part of their appeal—art as the trace of the animal’s body on the canvas. But Koopa the turtle produces turtle art that looks a lot like Jackson Pollock’s canvases rather than like turtle footprints, thus catapulting his turtle products into another dimension of aesthetic appeal.
Evolutionary Stakes and Political Subjectivity: The Question of Aesthetic Intent
For some scientists of human evolution, one question is whether an “aesthetic sense” is a transspecies phenomenon, detectable in birds and apes, for example, but most highly developed among humans. This group cares about art by animals because they see animals as human pre-history. As Frans de Waal (2001) notes, many biologists regard the New Guinea bowerbird’s hutlike nests as evidence of aesthetic expression. Male bowerbirds build elaborate nests, decorating the doorway with colorful objects like berries and flowers which they arrange and rearrange, analyzing the patterns from a distance and then flying in again to move a petal just so until the composition looks right, with an eye to attracting a female mate. For de Waal (pp. 151–152), this may not be art making, but it raises the question of whether human aesthetic urges, or—more accurately—actions and desires that are expressed in the realm that has historically come to be called the artistic, may “go deeper than culture” and relate to basic features of our perceptual systems, like our eyes and ears. As additional evidence he offers the facts that many birds must learn the songs they sing, that they are not born with this knowledge, and that many bird populations have different “dialects” reflecting regional variations, just as landscape paintings of the Rhone and the Rhine vary in style, even during the same historical periods. Some birds are even better singers than others, pioneers in the development of new songs, as de Waal (p. 155) notes.
While these notions of an aesthetic genealogy appear to connect some evolutionary dots, the real stakes lie in debates about art by primates, the group that includes humans too. There are two realms in which debates about art making by animals operate: that of science—including especially the work of comparative psychologists and primatologists working on ape cognition and language capabilities—and that of the lay person.
For comparative psychologists and primatologists, ape paintings have served as data for investigations of eye-hand coordination, tool use, and cognitive studies of symbol making (Beach, Fouts, and Fouts 1984a, 1984b; Boysen, Berntson, and Prentice 1987; de Waal 1999; Tanaka, Tomonaga, and Matsuzawa 2003). For instance Boysen, Berntson, and Prentice, based on a coding of 618 drawings by three chimpanzees, conclude that chimps will engage in drawing activities without training or reinforcement, and “this behavior may reflect their intrinsic interest in exploratory and manipulative play” (1987:82).
Primate specialist Frans de Waal (1999) goes farther: “Apes can deliberately make what looks like art to humans,” he says. While apes do not seem to strive to create enduring works of visual art that will “please, inspire, provoke shock, or produce whatever effect it is that the human painter seeks to achieve,” they do seem to enjoy the visual and kinesthetic act of making the drawing or painting, he asserts (de Waal 1999:B6). And other experiments, like those conducted in the 1950s by ethologist (and painter himself) Desmond Morris, show that apes make considered choices about where to make marks on the paper in relation to what is already there, seeking apparently a sense of balance, not making marks randomly on a page. Anecdotal evidence indicates they also appear to have a sense of when a painting is “finished.” Congo became agitated if Morris tried to remove a painting before Congo wanted him to. Nor could he be implored to paint more on an image once he stopped. While these incidents could certainly be attributed to other factors such as boredom or distraction from the task at hand, the multiplicity of such anecdotes in reports of ape painting indicates they deserve further investigation.
The work by Boysen et al. (1987), de Waal (1999), Tanaka et al. (2003) (who is using touch screens in Japan to trace scribbling patterns by young chimps), and Morris (2005), suggest the possibility of what might be called a protoaesthetic, components of manual and visual choice making that are necessary to but not sufficient for the development of something humans call art making. This interpretation would be important for those concerned with evolutionary issues and human development.
This search for or desire for a protoaesthetic impulse or ability also underlies, I believe, both the public’s passion for paintings by apes, and the use of painting as an enrichment activity by primate keepers in zoos and sanctuaries, which is quite widespread. The broad contours about the arts sketched earlier are operative in both the scientific and popular discourse realms, although the scientific realm may parse these concepts more complexly and with greater precision. In both realms there is a huge “WOW” factor—the sense of a frontier being crossed, a limit being broken. If an ape can make art, then … what? What is the passion to know what follows that ellipsis?
Although some early isolated case studies of primates showed that some of them like to draw or paint, chimp art really broke through to the popular consciousness in the 1950s. It is not merely coincidental that this postwar period coincided with a widening acceptance of abstract art as “legitimate” artistry. That shift in art history prepared the ground for lay people to see ape art—primarily based on gestural marks, not representational strategies—as Art. This is when ethologist Desmond Morris, trained at Oxford and a surrealist painter himself, began to feature a young chimpanzee named Congo on his popular London television show Zoo Time. It was Congo’s abstract paintings that were so recently put up for auction at Bonham’s in London alongside works by Warhol and Renoir. Although the Warhol and the Renoir failed to sell, Congo’s art did, and for far more than the anticipated equivalent of $1,000 to $1,500 U.S. dollars each.
As CBS news reported, American Howard Hong, a self-described contemporary painting enthusiast, paid $26,352 for three brightly colored abstract tempera paintings by Congo (de Vries 2005). This marketability took the Bonham’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Howard Rutkowski, by surprise. “We had no idea what these things were worth,” he said. “We just put them (on sale) for our own amusement” (de Vries 2005). The surprising sale was reported in both mainstream and arts-specific media, including National Public Radio, CBS News, the London-based Guardian, and Science magazine online, demonstrating the artworks’ status as entertainment news, science, art, and oddity (“Chimp’s Art Fetches £14,000” 2005; “No Chump Change for Chimp Art” 2005). Perhaps, like the oeuvre of so many artists, Congo’s price climbed because the artist was dead, having succumbed in 1964 to tuberculosis at the age of ten (de Vries 2005). At his most prolific in his youth, Congo produced about four hundred drawings and paintings between the ages of two and four (de Vries 2005). For Desmond Morris, works like these, and not the art of early humans, “represent the birth of art” (see Dodds 2006; Morris 2005).
Reports of the sale lent additional newsworthiness to a recent retrospective of Congo’s work titled Ape Artists of the 1950s at the Mayor Gallery in London in July of 2005. The art critic of the Sunday Times in London, Waldemar Januszczak (2005a), also writing about the show in the Australian (Januszczak 2005b), found his beliefs that only humans can truly paint with intentional rather than accidental aesthetics challenged by the exhibit. He admits that “I like Congo’s paintings. A couple of them I love.” Calling the London show at the Mayor Gallery “fascinating and slightly worrying,” he describes Congo as a “talented” painter who made active color and compositional choices, who threw a tantrum if a human tried to take a picture away from him before he was finished, and who refused to add to any painting he regarded as completed, despite entreaties to do so. Each of these actions serves as evidence of intentional aesthetic production. Qualities of unmuddied color, symmetrical balance, and, at his best, a “mood [that is] pure Kandinsky,” makes Congo’s works demonstrations of profound achievement, in Januszczak’s words.
But even in this article we see the smirk, the long-time trace of the artist as monkey, as fop, and self-important boor traced by scholar Thierry Lenain in his 1997 book on aesthetics called Monkey Painting. The title given to Januszak’s article is “Monkey Master” and the resounding accent of the missing question mark is impossible to miss. Even the cavalier rhyming m’s of monkey master depend on a disregard for the particularity of the painter—for Congo is a chimpanzee, not a monkey. But the word monkey, aside from its alliterative use, also conjures up images of an organ grinder’s monkey, a trickster, and a miniature and comic humanoid. The fear that we might be monkeys after all erupts through the tongue-in-cheek titling.
But there is another side to this coin: Morris is concerned with tracing the origins of human abilities to their nonhuman primate past (thus assuming, of course, that apes do not have cultural history but rather live in the present as mere exemplars of our long-distant evolutionary cousins). But these discussions rarely recognize what sociologists and theorists of art know—that representational systems are not inherent results of human eye-hand coordination and perceptual abilities, but are historically distinctive symbolic systems and are learned both actively and passively by members of specific human communities. Just think of the difference between the visually flat medieval paintings of saints and the lush three-dimensional images of Michelangelo, just to draw one example from well-known Western European traditions. When some lay persons and even some scientists refer to ape drawings as a mode of protoaesthetics, or representational art, they ignore the fact that “art” is a category of social activity that has a specific history and a different history in specific times and places among various communities.
To better understand these practices and their linkages to what human primates do, we must frame art making as a cultural activity, and this doesn’t necessarily mean that apes don’t paint, but that maybe some do. This is especially resonant when we consider the cases of individual apes like Washoe, Koko, Michael, Kanzi, and Panbanisha, all stars in long-term communication research who have been trained to “speak” with humans through sign language or the use of lexigrams. After all, Koko and her now deceased companion Michael, for example, have been raised as members of a bispecies community that is full of symbolic, visual images (they look through store catalogues, look at books, and watch videos). And they have learned to perceive and to name at least some objects, and perhaps even concepts, which is a culturally specific representational act in itself. Perhaps this juncture is the origin of their art making if, in fact, we are to accept that characterization. At the very least they complicate the question of meaning and suggest the need to consider seriously what might be happening when the artist is an ape.
But there are other reasons why a documentable artistic ability among nonhuman primates, and even among other animals, might be discomfiting. If animals do produce works of art, might they not be more like us—expressive, self-aware, reflective—than we would like to admit? And, if so, might their already contested status—as property, as commodity, as “animal,” and hence without rights, and with few legal protections—be harder and harder to maintain?
How Do You Teach an Ape to Paint?
For this part of the discussion, I want to leave aside painting by Washoe, Kanzi, and Koko. Washoe, for example, was involved in studies on representation and schemata. My understanding from a report on that research by the Fouts is that Washoe was not “taught” to paint in any formal way (see Beach, Fout, and Fout 1984a, 1984b). Most of the paintings I will describe here, by contrast, are produced through operant conditioning and target training, by apes who do not have access to sign or symbolic language.
In the sessions I observed at the Oklahoma City Zoo, painting is usually taught through operant conditioning, just as any other activity might be. For example, the training to facilitate medical procedures such that the primate will present her chest to the bars of the cage so her heartbeat can be checked by a stethoscope. I had the opportunity of watching primate keeper Jennifer Davis on two different days as she painted with Toba, a forty-year-old orangutan, and with Gracie, an eight-year-old female gorilla, and her father Tatu, a silverback. Toba, a self-taught painter, is unusual, while Gracie and Tatu are more typical, learning to paint through specific instructional techniques.
Toba, the orangutan, sports a reddish gold comb-over look on her head and long tangles of fur. She has been painting for a couple of years. Although Jennifer was not the one to introduce her to painting, it appears that upon being presented with the materials she took to it right away without formal instruction. The first day I spend with her, she is not in the mood to paint, despite Jennifer and my painting on the opposite side of Toba’s bars, hoping to entice her to join us. But on the second day she is ready to go. She loads the brush with paint herself, choosing from among several colors, and then paints on the paper we’ve put inside her cage. She does two things while painting that she’s never done before. First, she shakes the brush when loaded with paint, getting dribs and drabs to spray on the paper instead of just strokes; second, she holds the paper upright in one hand while making strokes with the paintbrush in the other. This variety indicates that she is actively problem solving and making choices in how to conduct this activity on this particular day. As a reward at the end of the ten-minute session, I get to feed her some yummy Yoplait yogurt, a treat for both of us.
But Toba is unusual, and most primates have to be taught to paint; this is done through operant conditioning. In operant conditioning a stimulus, like a verbal command, is paired with a reward when the proper response is performed by the primate. “Targeting” or touching a specific area is a commonly taught response. Painting involves a set of multiple steps—holding a brush, touching the brush to paper or canvas, and returning the brush to the keeper. Commands like “take” and “give” can prepare the animal to take a brush loaded with paint and then to give the brush back to the keeper. The animal is trained to touch the brush to the paper when the keeper holds the canvas up to the bars of the cage and asks the animal to “target” the brush onto the spot—in this case, to hit the paper.
“Targeting” is the stage at which Jennifer is with Gracie, who has been training for approximately a couple of months. Gracie received both verbal praise and a few tasty grapes as reinforcement for touching the paint brush to the canvas. As for her father, on his very first painting lesson, the goal was to get him to hand back a loaded paint brush to the keeper through the bars of his cage, so that the keeper could interrupt this action by sticking the paper in the way, so that the brush left a mark. The question of creativity is not being explored here, although keepers I’ve talked to often try to give the animal a choice so that part of the enrichment activity is the opportunity to exert control over one’s environment by choice making. Which brush? Which color? Nevertheless, keepers intervene in all sorts of ways to heighten the odds that a painting will be salable—aesthetically pleasing—so that the colors won’t be muddy and the paint will cover more than one spot on the paper. They turn the paper, remove it at a certain point, offer a limited pallet of colors that “go together,” and so on.
But, for our purposes here, my concern is with this process as an enrichment exercise. One of the primary aspects of the enrichment is the one-on-one activity that gives the ape attention from the keeper, most often undivided attention. Erica Thiele, chimp enrichment coordinator at the M. D. Anderson Research Center in Texas, calls this shared activity “an intimate behavior” (interview by author in Bastrop, Texas, February 7, 2008). Thiele makes painting available to her captive charge Joey the chimpanzee as an enrichment activity. Joey, she says, apparently loves painting, as evidenced by his vocalizations “uh uh uh,” in response to praise at the end of a session. And while the painting exercise itself is a positive experience for him in her estimation, he also likes the tasty treats he receives afterward. Joey gets a coke at the end of his painting sessions, says his keeper Thiele. Apes also like to paint other things, including their cages, so the act of mark making can be enriching/ engaging/entertaining in itself.
But while these products may be sold as “paintings” and may engage to some degree with the issues of “expressivity” and aesthetic choice making, the emphasis here is on “enrichment” for the animals. The development of money-making items is merely a byproduct that can help support the primate program. (Joey’s canvases, for example, sell for $250 for a 5" by 7" minimasterpiece, and twice that for an 8" by 11" canvas.) A different level of intent seems to emerge among those few apes who are “bicultural” in that they have been raised in human-generated visual worlds replete with conventions of human aesthetic design. Let me turn now to the small but crucial category of those apes who are “language enabled.”
Koko the gorilla, Panbanisha and Kanzi the bonobos, and Chantek the orangutan each participates on a regular basis in art making (see figure 6.1). Koko has her own Web site with paintings on sale (www.Koko.org), and many of her pieces are self-titled, like the poetic Pink Pink Stink Nice Drink—an acrylic of sweeping blues, greens, and pinks all rushing upward from the bottom right to upper left part of the canvas. Hovering on the brink of representation, this piece, according to the Web site of the sponsoring organization, the Gorilla Foundation, is “inspired by a nearby flowering meadow with a stream running through it.” The title is explained thus: “Koko’s word for flower is ‘stink’ even though she admits that she loves their smell” (“Koko’s World” n.d.). So the title references a very pink flowering area by a stream that is nice to drink from—a representation that translates a sense of the vision, smell, and taste of the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional canvas.
Koko and Michael have also produced images of other beings, often from memory. These portraits of animals, like that of Michael’s dog Apple, or Koko’s picture of her pet fledgling blue jay, while rarely unambiguously representational, do give a new meaning to the category of portraiture. For example, Michael’s painting Apple Chase consists of whites and grays sweeping across the paper. Although he had a large selection of colors to choose from, Michael used the black and whites that match the colors of Apple’s coat. His title, Apple Chase, seems to combine a memory of a being with that of an event, recalling his favorite game of chase with Apple. (See www.kokomart.org for images of paintings by Koko and by Michael for sale.)
In addition, upon request, both gorillas have produced paintings expressing their interpretations of specific emotions—the meanings of which they have come to understand through sign language—including love, hate, and anger. This level of interspecies communication was unavailable with the 1950s ape artists represented in the recent retrospective of Congo’s work. None possessed the linguistic knowledge to communicate in a way that humans could understand, and so they could not be asked to paint certain things or ideas or emotions. Granted, in the case of Koko and Michael, the paintings and their titles, and the interpretations of the titles and their referential meanings, are all products of bispecies collaboration. Gorilla knowing is filtered through the medium of human concept-based communication, in the English language, as transposed into American Sign Language. In other words, the gorillas speak and understand a form of English, but the humans don’t speak Gorilla.
The whole concept of artwork and art making is always already, in this instance, constructed through human categories of meaning. But even allowing for that, these paintings come perilously close to the status of “artwork” as that which is a visual representation produced for the pleasure of looking at it or of making it, but not for a utilitarian reason. These works seem to combine a sense of mark making with imagination resulting in a product, which is then perceived as “art” by someone else, thus completing the hermeneutic circle uniting perception with interpretation.
If apes are artists, what does that imply about humans’ obligations to them? Already there are moves afoot in the European Union to grant special status to great apes—a sort of in-between animal and human status garnering legal protections (Glendinning 2008). And even dogs and cats will soon have legally mandated “freedoms” in some European counties—freedom from hunger, from the elements, from isolation. If more studies and more popular reports describe animals, and especially apes, as artists, it becomes harder and harder to deny their sentient and intelligent status.
In a liberal humanist social orientation, where individual rights, the rule of law, and a belief in the importance of individual expressivity are crucial underpinnings of social formations, the line between human and nonhuman primate becomes ever more indistinct. Especially in a poststructuralist, posthumanist vision, with decentered subjectivity and an emphasis on a socially constructed “I” as a position to be occupied, not an essence to be expressed, the social construction of the category “animal” as that which is not human is increasingly exposed as an epistemology with a specific history, not as a “fact” naming an already extant reality. In either case, animal artists subvert the presumed privilege of the human. And this, perhaps, is the utopian ideal (or fantasy?) that people purchase when they buy a painting by Koko to put on their wall.
References
Beach, K., R. Fouts, and D. Fouts. 1984a. “Representational Art in Chimpanzees.” Friends of Washoe Newsletter 3, no. 4: 2–4.
——. 1984b. “Representational Art in Chimpanzees, part 2.” Friends of Washoe Newsletter 4, no. 1: 1–4.
Benjamin, W. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, pp. 217–252. New York: Schocken.
Boysen, S. T., G. G. Berntson, and J. Prentice. 1987. “Simian Scribbles: A Reappraisal of Drawing in the Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).” Journal of Comparative Psychology 101:82–89.
de Waal, F. B. M. 1999. “Apes with an Oeuvre.” Chronicle for Higher Education, November 19, B6.
——. 2001. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist. New York: Basic Books.
Januszczak, W. 2005a. “Even Picasso Was a Fan: What Makes the Paintings of Congo the Chimpanzee So Beguiling, Asks Waldemar Januszczak.” Sunday Times, September 25. Retrieved from entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_ entertainment/article569970.ece.
Lenain, T. 1997. Monkey Painting. London: Reaktion.
Tanaka, M., M. Tomonaga, and T. Matsuzawa. 2003. “Finger Drawing by Infant Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).” Animal Cognition 6:245–251.