Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
—David Bowie1
Sitting as still as I could, carefully avoiding eye contact, I was sketching. They were clearly aware of me, and occasionally grunted and paced back and forth, watching. But, the longer I sat, the less attention they paid me. Maybe it’s the repetitive motion of the sketching, I thought. It was sort of like grooming.
They were intimidating, and they seemed to be so in control. They communicated with each other, owning the space, and at that moment, sweating with anxiety in my lab coat and face shield, I felt very much out of place. When the Paul Frank™ iPod player in the corner switched from Beethoven to the single note piano intro, I felt the hairs on my arms begin to stand up.
I used to play mellophone in a marching band, and on occasion, the peculiar effect of acoustics and space in a stadium would cause one half of the band to separate temporally from the other; each half playing the same tempo, at a slightly different place in the score.
As I sat there, listening to Life on Mars?, the most uncanny feeling washed over me. The same phasing seemed to be happening. I finished my sketch and left the room.
Outside, the techs asked me how it went. My legs felt like rubber as I pulled off my second set of booties. I showed them my sketches and they seemed to like them.
“Who has the boyish face?” I asked, pointing to a sketch.
“Oh,” laughed the tech, “That’s Kayla, I guess she does look a bit like a boy. It’s really cool that you are drawing them. Hey! You should teach them to draw!”
At the time it seemed like a silly suggestion. Sure, I had seen videos with painting chimpanzees and even elephants. But it was a novelty, meant for human entertainment, and not for the benefit of the animal. Back in art school, I embarrassed myself on Day One trying to define art as a semi-religious experience that extended to those television stars of the animal kingdom.
“You just talked yourself out of a job,” the professor had said. “Why do you want to go to school for something a monkey can do?”
It took over a year for me to revisit the tech’s suggestion to teach the monkeys to draw. In some ways, it seems like a natural exploration for an artist—so natural that it was proposed to me again and again. But that sensational image, the monkey artist, was so out of keeping with my goals that I dismissed it. It wasn’t until I began working with a different set of tools that the notion of primate aesthetics really started to make sense.
What do monkeys find visually appealing? What is their motivation when creating images? What are the implications for art and for science? In this thesis, I intend to bring together what information we do have on primate aesthetics, as well as my own research into the matter. I have prepared a series of vignettes which I hope will provide an overall impression of the cultural, historical, and scientific implications of this complex field.
1 David Bowie. “Life on Mars?” Hunky Dory. RCA Records, 1971. MP3.