Paw relations

How many times has OTN said it would not write another post on animal artists (three, although one of them was rather half-hearted) and then simply posted away? Yes, here we go again picking up this time on the commodification of animal art by museums, ok, zoos as they call themselves. 

Animal art has certainly become a big seller for zoos and everyone (animal-wise) has to attend to the pumps. Chimp painters, mole rat painters, cockroach painters (‘Cockroach paintings can go for a high price. They art very popular.’), horses, elephants etc. The zoos may have recently ditched chimp tea parties as demeaning, but they’re jumping at the opportunity to have animals make art and to call the process ‘animal enrichment’. Of course they do. One animal enrichment expert Christine McKnight of the Minnesota Zoo even went so far as to suggest,  ‘The animals enjoy it more if it taps into a natural behavior and if they use a part of the body that mirrors a skill set from the wild.’  

So that’s pretty much that for animal artists. Then we were sent this link (thanks S) that is essentially about animal art (not). So, for the fourth time, that’s it.

Images: top, a leopard gecko, two cockroaches and a blind mole make art to raise money for zoos. Go them.

Animal rights

OTN is delighted to have so many good readers out there, fine people who totally get the painting animal thing, people who have read the fine print and understand that it is the animals who paint or take photographs. But then there are the fringe dwellers out there on the edge of OTN’s readership (in this case a staggering 15) who each independently sent in these images of animals that have been painted on. The good readers (see above) will be relieved to know that despite OTN's wide ranging interest in animals that paint, this blog will not be diverted into promoting animals that have been painted on. Enough.

Metro news

It’s nearly midnight on Friday and all we have for you today is a painting horse sent in by reader G (thanks). Not to be rude (well a little rude) but this horse doesn’t even paint that well and that paintbrush could easily be a cigarette. The thing is Metro Meteor was a talent in the field, fastest turf sprinters at Belmont and Saratoga and won eight races and $380,000 in purse money. So who was it that took time out to get a horse with a name like that up to speed with a brush in its mouth? If you have time on your hands you can find the answer to that here. But given that there are a lot of serious animal artist fans out there (we get all your emails and letters – thanks for that) and it is Saturday (now) so here you go.

Images: left Metro Meteor eating up the track and right either smoking or painting

The a in art is for animal

“From a philosophical perspective, the general issue is whether a non-human animal has moral ownership rights over its artistic works.” So says philosopher Mike LaBossiere on the Philosophers magazine blog. That got OTN’s animal art antennae twitching. According to LaBossiere, “Higher animals like dogs and primates seem to grasp the basics of ownership: they distinguish between what is their property and what is not.” LaBossiere went on to be more specific about the monkey who made a selfie and then was legally denied copyright. “In the case of the monkey the key question is whether or not the monkey understood what it was doing and acted with intent.”

Stay with us animal artist lovers.

He concluded that even if the monkey was in control of the art tools it may not know it was in the process of making art (tell that to all the OTN animal stars). The result? “There could be art but no artist.”  On behalf of animal artist all over the world, stick it where the sun don’t shine LaBossiere.

Being there

Meanwhile outside the Serpentine Gallery in London where Marina Abramović is doing her 512 hour performance .... at last something for art world pug lovers (you know who you are), more here. (Thanks for that important art news heads up M)

Animal crackers

Here’s a great example of the imagination at work. These illustrations are attempts to depict the elephant based on returning travelers' accounts. From the top they are:

An elephant from the Rochester Bestiary, c. 1225-1250
An elephant by Guillaume le Clerc, 13th century
An elephant from Italy, c. 1440
An elephant by Noè Bianco, 1568

You can see more hopeful renditions of animals here on ‘Welcome to the future’ in a piece rather literally titled How Europeans imagined exotic animals centuries ago based on hearsay.

Token sculpture

Probably some of the first sculptures we saw, albeit very, very small ones, were a car with driver, a shoe, a top hat, a thimble, a long cannon, a ship, an iron and a dog. They were of course the tokens used for the game of Monopoly. Being in New Zealand our board was strictly British-based with Bank rather than Wall Street as in the original US version. Over the years the small tokens were changed and once or twice this was done via a public vote. Who was surprised when a bag of money got into the US set for a while? This year on Facebook there was a competition to replace the iron. The winner has just been announced. Let’s hear it for the cat.

More here: 

Insect art: an overview

Out there on the blurred edges of animal art is the little known and rarely discussed field of art created by, but not necessarily for, insects. We are primarily talking here about spiders, flies, butterflies, and of course the master artists of the insect world, cockroaches. 

Having said that, we admit that we have had a bad run with insect art here at OTN. Yes, we did jump the gun on snail art and, as many OTN readers pointed out, our painting fly post left quite a bit to be desired, most particularly that the flies didn’t actually paint anything themselves but were part of a fly-artist combo that mostly relied on the artist for composition etc. 

But with cockroach art we are on much firmer ground. OK someone has to load them up (with paint that is) and set them down on the paper but from there on it is pure cockroach-inspired creativity that you see on the page. So here are a couple of paintings as a taster. You can see more here and read about how one man has dedicated his life to allowing these disliked insects express themselves.

Fur patrol

We saw a rat once when Downstage was in its temporary residence on the waterfront but as a rule our art institutions keep animals at arm's length. Not so the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Its activities makes this not so much an animal artist story as an animal-protecting-art one because the 65 cats on the Hermitage’s staff spend their time patrolling for rats and mice. 

The cats were originally employed by Czar Peter the First in 1774 and served loyally but even they couldn’t survive the Second World War. A new generation had to be introduced in 1945 and it is their offspring supplemented by local strays that do the job now. The cats are well cared for and have their own doors allowing them access so they can patrol the various parts of the building. 

The Hermitage acknowledges the importance of the role of the cats once a year with a holiday known as the Day of the Hermitage Cat. You can see the Hermitage cats in action here. 

Image: a cat door at the State Hermitage Museum 

And that’s the point

In his art school days sculpture Chris Booth astonished his lecturers (and the rest of us) by getting ants to make his work for him. The submission was all about ‘point’ and most of us had gone for minimalist paintings with dots on them. Not Chris. He turned up with a box containing an art farm. He had discovered that if you bathed ants in red light (or something like that, it was a long time ago) they would grab their eggs and make a run for it. You guessed it. The white eggs held aloft by scurrying black ants were the point. And for some DIY, if you go here, you will see a short clip that shows you how to paint ants.

Thanks as always for your tireless work on our behalf P.

Symbolic

A reader has sent in this image of Rio the Sea Lion as another example in the rich cast of sea lion painters. Well thanks M, but no thanks. This animal – if it belongs on the art/sea lion axis at all– is more likely to be a sea lion art critic. Plainly it is looking at, not creating, the strange symbols. Perhaps it is part of a secret sea lion ESP experiment or even a sea lion memory expert at work. Whatever it is, it clearly is not a sea lion art practitioner and we have tagged this post accordingly.