Animal-Made 'Art' Challenges Human Monopoly on Creativity | Wired Science. Art is usually considered a uniquely human ability, but that may not be true. Given the opportunity, animals like chimpanzees and gorillas and elephants produce abstract designs that arguably rise to artistic level. Arguably is, however, the key word. It's hard enough to agree on an essential definition of human art, much less an animal one. But it's a debate welcomed by Jack Ashby, manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London. "That's the question we're asking people: What is art? " said Ashby, who thinks that human art may well reflect a creativity expressed in animals' natural behavior, even if people don't always appreciate it.Ashby organized the Art by Animals exhibition, on display at the museum through March 9.
Images: 1) A painting by Baka, a Sumatran orangutan at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. Birds Do It, Bees Do It: Taking Animals’ Art Skills Seriously. Last year London’s Grant Museum of Zoology staged what organizers thought was the first inter-species show of paintings by animals. Baka, a Sumatran Orangutan who resides at Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, showed impastoed, calligraphic slashes in the manner of Kline. Samantha, a Western lowland Gorilla who lived at the Erie Zoo in Pennsylvania, had an allover composition of candy-colored strokes evoking late de Kooning. Boon Mee, an elephant in Thailand’s Samutprakarn Zoo, took a more figurative path, with an astounding rendering of a flower pot.
That such primate and elephant art hews so closely to Western art conventions reveals more about our expectations than their talents. Boon Mee, for example, was guided by a keeper who manipulated her ear like a joystick in order to steer her trunk. The result may still be impressive, but it hardly reflects the creature’s natural tendencies—or the latest science. A naked mole rat in an “enrichment” program at the National Zoo. Exhibition Preview: Art by Animals @ the Grant Museum of Zoology. Untitled (2011) by Samantha (Western lowland Gorilla, Erie Zoo, Pennsylvania) Head to the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL from today, and you can see an exhibition of art by animals. Firmly planted in the “London really does have it all” category, this new show is displaying art by elephants and apes from around the world.
One highlight is a painting of a flowerpot by the elephant Boon Me, who we’re told used to be a logging elephant in Thailand. (Presumably before he got his calling to don a beret and spend hours with his head on one side, brush in trunk, staring at blank canvases.) Other pieces have been created by orang-utans, gorillas and chimps. Their handiwork is on show alongside animal specimens and historical documentation. Jack Ashby, Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology, says, “Whether this is actually art is the big question. Indeed, interest in animal art occurred at the same time as the Abstract Expressionist movement in human art in the 1950s. Art by Animals (UCL) Animal art: Exhibition of paintings by apes and elephants. Art by animals exhibition opens in London. Art by Animals comes to London. An exhibition featuring works of art from several species of animal, including paintings by elephants and apes, starts next week at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology in collaboration with a graduate from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art.
A highlight of the exhibition is a painting of a flowerpot by the elephant Boon Mee who was formerly a logging elephant in Thailand. Art by Animals features art by elephants, orang-utans, gorillas and chimps and places their handiwork alongside animal specimens and historical documentation. Since the mid-50s, zoos have used art and painting as a leisure activity for animals, also using the activities to raise funds for conservation or the zoo by selling the works. Co-curator Mike Tuck, a graduate of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, said: “We believe the exhibition at the Grant Museum to be the first to exhibit multiple species’ paintings and to attempt to take a broad view of the phenomenon.”
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