Discussion Forum
ccording to artist and lecturer Liz Rideal, “The self-
portrait is the artist’s most personal form of expression. It
is the ultimate means of self-analysis...a bid for eternity.”
But how true is that when the artist is a monkey?
The camera phone has led to a sharp rise in gregarious
narcissism. Social media teeters under the weight of
self-obsession and pouting. Some see this as signalling the end
times and, worryingly, it appears to have leapt the species
divide. Earlier this year, a court dealt with a Celebes crested
macaque called Naruto and her right to be the copyright
holder and beneficiary of her selfies.
The monkey’s selfies revealed a wide-eyed leer that would
freeze the blood of any Tinder user. She took her photos in
2011 when the photographer David Slater left his camera
lying around. The animal rights group PETA felt that this
was a reworking of The Phantom Of The Opera, where
the true artist was left in the lurch while Slater made money
from her work.
The judge ruled in favour of Slater. So was this a defeat for
the burgeoning monkey art community?
Non-human art is not new. Desmond Morris, the
surrealist painter and zoologist, worked with a chimpanzee
called Congo in the 1950s. Congo’s canvases can fetch
around $5,685. Morris believed that he observed control
in Congo’s artistic forays: “It wasn’t just splish splash”.
Elephants, too, have been seen to paint flowers, trees and
possibly self-portraits, though not to the standard that would put
the great wildlife painter David Shepherd to shame. On a trip to
Thailand, Morris and eminent scientist Richard Dawkins took
a closer look at these pachyderm Picassos. It would seem that
elephants are not inspired by an energetic muse as much as tugged
around by a trainer. The elephants seemed to be trained and coaxed
into creating their images, and each individual painted the same
image over and over again. Perhaps the best we may hope for
is a safari version of Andy Warhol’s Factory, eventually creating
screenprint after screenprint of Babar or Snorky.
Whether the art is a failure or a sham, we still find a burgeoning
body of evidence that more species than we thought have some
awareness of their own image. Does this give us any further hints of
where this possible introspection may lead in terms of their art?
In 2014, experiments set up by Neng Gong, director of the Institute
of Neuroscience at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, managed to
teach rhesus monkeys to recognise themselves in a mirror – a behaviour
that hadn’t previously been seen in these animals. Once the monkeys
knew who was in the mirror, their next mission was to concentrate on
looking at their own genitals. Here’s another reason not to encourage
the monkey selfie: the primates will stop embarrassing you whenyou’re at the zoo with your five-year-old, and just sit back and send the
genital pics straight to your Facebook account.
Like hoping that a ‘counting’ horse may eventually hoof its way
to a new breakthrough in algebraic equations, the hope of any other
animals leading us to the next great art revolution is slim. ßA
Robin Ince is a comedian and writer who presents, with Prof Brian Cox, the BBC Radio 4 series
MAIN ILLUSTRATION: JAMIE COE PORTRAIT: KATE COPELAND The Infinite Monkey Cage.
The monkey’s selfies
revealed a leer that
would freeze the blood
of any Tinder user