The Origins of Animal Art

ABSTRACT

Do animals other than humans make what some humans call "art"? What might other animals' graphic and aesthetic behaviors reveal about art's "origins"? In this article, I critically examine the multidisciplinary histories of attempts to answer these questions through two cases: one on nonhuman primate painting and drawing studies, and the other on writing about bowerbirds. Rather than weigh in on the questions myself, I assess the ethical and intellectual stakes and risks the questions pose, particularly given the often cursorily defined significance of "art" in the literature, and the anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism that have lurked in its discourses. More than this, I suggest that while these are questions for which humans should not be assured they can find a definitive answer, they are nonetheless revealing about the ontology and epistemology of art.

On June 6, 1942, a letter to the editor by British biologist Julian Huxley was published in Nature.¹ In the letter, Huxley described his observations of an "exceptionally intelligent and docile" gorilla named Meng three years prior, in 1939, at the Zoological Society at Regent's Park in London. Meng's white-tiled cage was illuminated by a strong, singular source of electrical light. When standing in a certain position, Meng cast a shadow of his body onto the surface of the tile. At the age of one and a half, Meng was seen by Huxley tracing the outline of this shadow with his forefinger three times. He was not observed repeating the behavior during the rest of his short life, and when Huxley attempted to manipulate the lighting in the cage in order to elicit additional data, "the gorilla refused to take any interest." Still, Huxley proposed that this tracing behavior be researched "for its bearing on the possible origins of human graphic art." He imagined early humans "tracing the shadows cast by a low sun against a more or less vertical cliff or cave-wall." A man named J. Leonard Bowen wrote back to Huxley with further anecdotal evidence of a proclivity for shadow-tracing in nonhuman primates, sharing that he had seen groups of "large long-tailed monkeys" in Matheran, India, outlining their hands in the dust using twigs and also examining one another's tracings.²

Do animal species other than Homo sapiens engage in the practices of producing what some humans call "art," or could they under certain circumstances? This is not quite yet what Huxley was asking in 1942, but is a line of questioning connected to his interest in "the possible origins of human graphic art." Researchers in the sciences and humanities, as well as artists, have been addressing questions of nonhuman artmaking and nonhuman art origins for at least a century, with many authors citing Huxley's letter as an early contribution to the subject.³ Although a host of species (elephants, dogs, turtles, sea lions, and others) have participated in the collaborative creation of paintings at homes and zoos, two have received the most sustained attention in studies of nonhuman animal artmaking: nonhuman primates, especially chimpanzees, and bowerbirds.⁴ Primatologists since the early twentieth century have been introducing drawing and painting implements to apes and monkeys in order to test their capacities and tendencies.⁵ Ornithologists, along with scholars of media and culture in a variety of fields, have claimed that the assemblages of sticks and other natural, and sometimes manmade, materials that bowerbirds construct as part of their mating behaviors should, or at least could, be considered an art form.⁶ A focus on chimpanzees and bowerbirds already suggests a number of the ideas that construct and constrain the discourse of nonhuman animal art. Fellow primate and bird species are often singled out by humans for their intelligence, perception, skill, sociality, beauty, and other traits that they prize in themselves.

Nonhuman animal art-making, though not without a substantial and growing bibliography, remains a niche topic. Scholars making claims for art-making in other species shoulder a heavy burden of proof, and the titles of a few recent articles illustrate the point: "Do Animals Make Art," "Do bowerbirds exhibit cultures?," "Can animals sing?," "Can George dance?"⁷ Posing as questions what could be offered as statements, these authors imply a presumed, and perhaps shared, basic doubt. To claim that other animals can or do make art is related to, but distinct from, claims concerning how certain species and groups of nonhuman animals play, use tools, and engage in systematic communication. Increasingly in the past two decades, ethologists have made plausible arguments for other animal "cultures," referring to socially learned and regional- or group-specific behaviors, and even other animal "aesthetics," behaviors and physical traits driven, at least in part, by visual and aural preferences.⁸ Yet while human art-making is basically a cultural and aesthetic behavior, the meanings attached to it (e.g., moral, spiritual, political) go so far beyond these terms that there remains something inevitably provocative about studies affirming the existence of "animal art." Scientists refer to nonhuman "artifacts" and "creativity," but "art" is a very particular kind of creative artifact.⁹ Most crucially, and slippery, it is an artifact that someone, not necessarily its creator, has to name and recognize as art.

Though science has much to contribute to its answering, "Do other animals make art?" is equally, and perhaps ultimately, a philosophical question. It contemplatively seeks fundamental knowledge about meaning, being, and practice. It is potentially unanswerable. It is fitting, then, that inquiries into animal art have been so multidisciplinary, though scholars from different disciplines bring divergent approaches. The primatologist working with a chimpanzee in a lab, and the art or media theorist commenting on the results of this work, each draw differently on evolutionary and cultural histories, seeking continuities and breaks. While the primatologist is primarily interested in finding the limits of certain behaviors and capacities in apes, the theorist focuses on how these limits might in turn alter the meaning and being of "art" (or fail to do so). The scientist may seek answers to more granular questions than "Can chimpanzees make art?" but the impetus for giving a chimpanzee a brush, pencil, or touchscreen is, in part, the same history of art that the theorist thinks within.

What follows is an analysis of the tendencies, ironies, and implications of recent contributions to the subject of nonhuman animal art-making across the sciences and humanities. I focus first on the literature surrounding chimpanzee painting and drawing studies, and second on the idea of bowerbirds as artists, historically and epistemologically situating these two literatures through their key texts and arguments. In each case, there are two related, but distinct, questions on the line: 1) Can nonhuman animals make art? and 2) Is the origin of art nonhuman, or more-than-human? Treating both questions as primarily philosophical, I address their reverberations and ramifications while suggesting that although these are inquiries worthy of thought and investigation, humans should be cautious as to whether they can ever definitively answer them.

Regarding the first question: where some have addressed it in a binary manner—focusing on whether or not chimpanzees who paint make art, or whether or not a bower is a kind of art—I focus on what these options, if taken, would imply about the nature of art, and the nature of the differences between species. I explore the ethical and intellectual hazards that lie on either side of an absolute determination of the status of "art" or "not art" to the activities and products of other species, especially when the meaning and purpose of art that these debates orbit are often so sketchily, or so narrowly, defined. In the texts I read, the word "art" often presences as a kind of non- or extra-human agent whose precise meaning authors tend to neither explicitly offer nor even attempt. On this point, I am attentive to not only the anthropocentric but also the Eurocentric biases that have implicitly and explicitly structured the meanings of art at the center of "animal art" discourse and, when unacknowledged, further hamper the viability of its enterprise. In the case of chimpanzee paintings, I argue that those who have sought to dismiss the art status of these images do so through an informal fallacy that defines art in a circular way so as to exclude nonhuman animals from any form of meaningful participation tout court. When it comes to bowerbirds, I treat skeptically the suggestion that claiming bowermaking as a nonhuman art tradition necessarily represents a positive intervention into the politics of anthropocentrism to the extent desired by certain authors.

The implications of the second question—of origins—are more profound. I take Huxley's idea that Meng's shadow-tracing might bear on the "origins" of art seriously, but without concern for locating a singular chronological or evolutionary starting point. I understand "origins" always in reference to origin stories, narratives with a serpentine temporality, told after the fact, and subject to being rewritten. Origin stories of human art-making begin from the existence of some select set of practices and then attempt a speculative move backwards on the basis of partial assumptions about their meaning. Consider Pliny the Elder's origin story for art-making, which suggests that humans first made art when they traced each other's shadows and then filled those forms in with pigment.¹⁰ This origin is circumscribed by an ideology in which human drawing is archetypal, and the desire for permanence and the imitation of nature are primary, with no reference to divine or primordial creation as is found in other such stories. Pliny thus poses contingently held ideas as universal, but it is not only in the realm of mythic narratives that the partialities of retrospective origin-searching pose problems. In archaeology, new discoveries can recast the chronological and geographical beginning of what is now called art-making, but only through additional conceptual constraints as to whether "art" must be figurative rather than abstract, or made by Homo sapiens and not Neanderthals (to reference some recent sticking points).¹¹ Huxley's suggestion about Meng's shadow-tracing implies investment in the ability to look at close evolutionary relatives of humans to find the prototypical source and meaning of human behaviors, an approach that has been subsequently questioned as speciesist and unrigorous.¹² Evolutionary accounts of human artmaking mostly exclude the extension of this ability per se to other species, but these exclusions have not gone uncontested.¹³

Although Pliny's story may not be exactly true, it is still meaningful. It's a good story, and it has the grounding effect that origin stories provide. (It also unwittingly bears some resemblance to the anecdotes shared by Huxley and Bowen in Nature.) Similarly, while the narratives of "animal art" that I examine are revealing, it is less of the temporal and causal implications of the "When?" or "How?" of the origin of art than of more ontological and epistemological matters. Thus I attend to questions such as: What is art if it might be said to originate with a gorilla tracing his shadow, or a human watching a gorilla tracing his shadow? Or a bird carefully selecting and arranging objects from its environment to construct an impressive display? Why do the animals called humans ask these questions and to what ends? In this way I affirm the sense of "origin" offered in Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1950).¹⁴ In that essay he defines "origin" as "that from which and by which something is what it is and as it is," these last words clarifying that by "origin" (Ursprung) he implies an animating and structuring meaning and purpose and not only a point of origin.¹⁵ As should already be clear, the origins of "animal art," as both a subject and a discourse about that subject, are intimately tied to human art in their history and meaning. Some definition of art derived from human practice is the standard by which the efforts of other species are tested, and this provides at once a firm limit to this research and a destabilizing potential. On the one hand, a chimpanzee or a bowerbird will never produce objects and images that accord with all possible meanings and forms of human art practice. On the other is the possibility that what they produce might nevertheless spur a radical shift in how all art practices, all image- and object-making given the name or attributes of art, are understood. As I propose in my conclusion, such a shift would actually represent a return to ancient and enduring ideas of art as a phenomenon that harmonizes between human and nonhuman, artificial and natural, rather than the exemplar of what separates one from the other.

When Given the Chance: The Case of Nonhuman Primate Painting and Drawing

In the decades before and after the publication of Huxley's letter, several other stray observations, as well as more sustained experiments in pursuit of the connections and differences between human and nonhuman mark-making, were undertaken by researchers across disciplines and continents.¹⁶ These experiments emerged from a particular scholarly context of expanded interest in comparative primatology, and a proliferation of primate research centers and zoos.¹⁷ Early studies conducted in the 1910s through the 1950s (as well as much of the research being done in the past several years) are not concerned with "art" per se, or if so largely define it as grounded in a set of motor and perceptual aptitudes, preferences, and behaviors.¹⁸ During what has been termed by Desmond Morris the "golden age" of ape drawing studies that followed throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the entertainment and commercial values of "art" also entered the picture.

Morris is the most prominent name in this period, along with a chimpanzee named Congo. A PhD in ethology, as well as a painter, Morris began his work with Congo as head of the Granada Television and Film Unit at the London Zoo when he was tasked with developing a "mascot" for the zoo's weekly broadcasts. Congo was a 1-year-old male, born (in Morris's description) "as a wild animal in a tropical African forest" in 1955 before being caught and taken into captivity in London. In 1956 Morris wrapped Congo's hand around a pencil and brought the tip to paper. After this initial prompting, Congo produced his first drawing. Morris later switched Congo over to brush painting, and during the course of several collaborative sessions between 1956 and 1959 Congo produced close to 400 paintings. Pencil and chalk drawing, and then finger painting, were apparently chosen by those experimenting with chimpanzees for parity with human childhood development studies, but Morris rejected these techniques and switched Congo to brushes for, he claimed, ease of analysis of the chimpanzee's mark-making. Regardless of whether this is entirely true, or born in some way of a predisposition to equate art-making with brush painting, the switch undoubtedly encouraged Congo's paintings towards their crossover into the art world and art market (where they still have purchase), resulting in now famous photographs of him sitting in a chair with his brush poised over paper.¹⁹ Congo became one of several chimpanzees in this era who shared a tangled status as a confined creature, a research subject, a figure of entertainment and, by some measures, an artist.

Also in the late 1950s, and also in the context of an urban zoo's television programming, a female chimpanzee named Baltimore Betsy began producing finger paintings under the supervision of Arthur Watson for the program "This is Your Zoo."²⁰ Paintings by Betsy and Congo were exhibited together in September 1957 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London under the unembellished title Paintings by Chimpanzees. Julian Huxley spoke at the opening. In his catalogue essay, Morris lays out what would continue to be his central arguments about nonhuman primate painting: that it is a voluntary and pleasurable experience for the chimpanzee, which confirms certain human ideals of creativity and expression. He writes, emphasizing the reciprocal enthusiasm of scientist and subject, "Recent research has shown that some chimpanzees are surprisingly ready to avail themselves of an opportunity to paint."²¹ Of Congo's time painting, he notes, "The activity was clearly a reward in itself. Apart from the interest of handling a new set of objects, drawing held a special fascination for Congo which can only be described as the joy of producing something out of nothing: the joy, if you wish, of creation." Morris's writing contains both an affirmation of Congo as an artist and the suggestion of an essential meaning of art that this affirmation supports: art is an activity that is a reward in itself; art is pursued for the joy of creation. The fact that Congo manifested this joy is posed as evidence of its universal validation. The catalogue includes a photograph of Congo reaching out to dip a brush into a pot of paint being extended to him by a human hand, as well as a spare biography that emphasizes Congo's television career. The one painting reproduced in the catalogue is typical of the Congo oeuvre: explosive and vegetal, it consists of layers of thick, variegated, diagonal brushstrokes, some straight, some curved, some distinct, others forming a washy base layer. In Betsy's catalogue portrait, she is sitting in a chair and, with concentration, pressing her fingertips to paper. She wears a smock, and a large television camera is poised near her head. Betsy's finger paintings consist of whorls and raked patterns in muted pinks and purples extending out from the center of the composition.

The phenomenon of researchers giving apes brushes and paint was increasingly conspicuous across the United States and Europe in the late 1950s.²² With so many practitioners, further assessments of nonhuman or, as it was sometimes called at the time, infra-human painting could be made by both scientists and critics. Many researchers working with nonhuman primates, in the 1950s and into the present, repeatedly affirm Morris's insistence on the interest and pleasure some apes and monkeys show in the acts of drawing and painting, including in both scribbling and more controlled and collaborative acts of image-making in the absence of external rewards.²³ Scientists working with drawing and painting nonhuman primates also generally agree that the marks these primates make are not random, and develop and change over time.²⁴ The presence of distinct styles and preferred motifs in individuals, as well as species, has also been consistently observed.²⁵

The tendency towards individual styles affirms the connections to human art practice that Morris seems so eager to emphasize, but the literature also includes references to striking deviations from the norms of human painting that have formed the basis for dismissal of nonhuman primate painting as art. Thus, at the same time that this "golden age" ushered paintings by Congo and Betsy into the institutions of art through the imprimatur of the ICA London (and bolstered by Morris's narrative about the joy of creation), it was also when the thorny matter of defining art began to protrude, menacing those attempting to put forward a definitive claim for or against the cultural and scientific value of nonhuman primate painting. By an "institutional" definition of art, Congo's and Betsy's paintings had already become art by the co-signatories of gallery, market, and discourse, which can act in concert to trump the necessity of artistic intent on the part of the creator of an object.²⁶ This "art" by default of institutional appropriation approach, however, inevitably fails to satisfy all the concepts and expectations some feel the institution of art ought to uphold.

It has been nearly uniformly observed by researchers that nonhuman primates never approach mimetic or figurative image-making; instead their images are abstract, like the ones described above.²⁷ Given debates in the 1950s about the artistic legitimacy of abstract, gestural painting by humans, the fact that chimpanzees produced similar-looking works was sometimes mockingly wielded as grounds to dismiss both practices.²⁸ Art historian H. W. Janson was thus prompted to comment on the topic in a short essay from 1959 titled, "After Betsy, What?" For Janson, abstract painting—like the objet trouvé and other avant-garde and modernist tactics that had challenged expectations about artistic appearance and skill to the extent of being questioned as art—was indeed art. Baltimore Betsy paintings could be legitimated in this way, but as "man-made." To Janson, Betsy was "merely a source of random patterns," initiated and controlled by her human "keeper."²⁹ He acknowledges the difficulty of making a call on whether Betsy's finger paintings are art since art—like life—has "no uncontested generic definition." Just as quickly he attempts to foreclose the possibilities he has already laid open: "We must, I believe, insist that the making of works of art is an exclusively human activity."³⁰

It has also been observed that nonhuman primates seem indifferent towards their finished drawings and paintings. For Thierry Lenain this fact is central to his rejection of other-than-human primate art, claiming it proves that "to the ape, the pictorial forms exist only insofar as they are the opportunity for an active visual intervention."³¹ Lenain's name is firmly associated with the literature on animal art because of his oft-cited book Monkey Painting (1997). In the book, while he does not deny that the findings of Morris and other researchers are significant and that the images produced by Congo and other primates hold visual interest, he nevertheless takes every opportunity in his book to strip the chimpanzees, gorillas, and monkeys he writes about of agency. He writes that "chimpanzee-painting" is a "fundamentally non-establishing practice" in which chimpanzees do not create their own exterior pictorial boundary, nor interior pictorial (read: illusionistic) space, but rather react to the one provided to them by human researchers.³² He characterizes this as "echoes of the painting equipment intelligently articulated by the subject" and "the products of the device itself made via the painting subjects."³³ In Lenain's telling, considerable agency adheres to the equipment itself, which has been shaped by prior human honings. Although in human painting Lenain still grants the equipment itself a constitutive agency, he adds that human intentional will and knowledge of the equipment's plastic, significatory potential actively and mutually shape the practice. Whereas the ape responds in a "passive or, so to speak, purely reactive way to the pictorial field," this is actually impossible in human beings, for whom "there is always a priori something different in painting than the pure and simply present alteration of the state of the field. For human eyes, the pictorial form always exists in itself and, thus, it exists as a bearer of meanings (not necessarily explicit or definite ones)."³⁴

Lenain here has uttered une bêtise, in the sense offered by Jacques Derrida, as Janson had decades earlier. Une bêtise is, generally speaking, a stupid remark, but Derrida turned the word to refer to speciesist logics structural to much philosophy and theology, playing upon the animality of the word that carries from the part of la bête's meaning that can be translated as "beast" or "animal."³⁵ One (it could be you, me, Derrida, or one of his many interlocutors on the subject of "the animal"—Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, etc.) utters une bêtise every time one characterizes "animals" or "the animal" as an undifferentiated mass utterly distinct from humans, thus denying human animality and collapsing the multitudinous differences between nonhuman animal species. One relatedly utters une bêtise every time one, without any knowing intimation of doubt, claims an absolute separation between humans and other animals on the basis of certain "propers" thought uniquely possessed by "man": speech, reason, and access to knowledge of self, life, and death. Bêtises are "stupid," in part, because their certainty is always of concepts that one can never be certain about, "beginning with the concept of a concept."³⁶ Derrida's path to thinking the problem of species philosophically is at this point well-trodden, but Lenain's commentary so markedly resembles the operations Derrida exposes that it is productive to place them together in order to understand what one risks saying when one denies other animals even the potential for art-making. My aim is not to call out Lenain or Janson for their "stupidity," but rather to indicate how the bêtise, or stupid remark regarding the animal, has been structurally produced within the philosophy of animal art. Their bêtises are but two examples of many automatic denials.³⁷ Although Lenain's and Janson's questioning as to the ultimate significance of research into nonhuman primate drawing and painting is sound, the means by which they articulate it betray indefensible, but nevertheless paradigmatic, prejudices.

The seduction of Lenain's idea of human participation in picture-making "in itself" and "as a bearer of meanings'' is perhaps undeniable, but one that for so many reasons ought to be rejected. It conforms to an incoherent definition of art based on access to mythified human privileges of total self-consciousness and control. Scrutiny of Lenain's own sources pokes further holes in his arguments. He theorizes human art practice as "establishing" and nonhuman pseudo-practice as "non-establishing" through reference to Meyer Schapiro's writing on the semiotics of the ground and frame, where Schapiro actually describes "ground" as contingent rather than a priori.³⁸ Furthermore, Lenain's notion that chimpanzee paintings are merely the intelligent echoes of the equipment they are given actually accords with some, specifically poststructuralist, ideas about human creativity, as when Roland Barthes writes, "The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original" and "The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."³⁹ Although there are many overall differences between human and chimpanzee relationships to painting, any given individual of these species today paints within a socially acquired tradition with more or less skill or inventiveness.

It may seem odd that a man who wrote the book Monkey Painting did so to convince others that "monkeys" cannot paint, but this is consistent with the motivations of many multispecies comparative discussions of art: not a desire for and openness to a more expansive definition of art, but rather a clarification of the borders of the human through an understanding of where and when art-making, held by some as a distinctly human property, begins and ends. The authors of a recent study comparing the genes of humans, Neanderthals, and chimpanzees in search of the "evolution of genetic networks for human creativity" claim that "the best documentation of the modern creative imagination is narrative figural art" and identify a cluster of non-protein-coding genes associated with self-awareness, creativity, and prosocial behavior that might account for "the explosive emergence of creativity in modern humans."⁴⁰ The question "What makes humans so exceptional?" persists, and figurative image-making is persistently treated as a decisive index in attempts to answer it.⁴¹ Abstract markings in caves and on bone and shell predate the first known figurative image (the "Sulawesi pig," dated circa 45,500 years ago) by tens of thousands of years, with some made by Neanderthals or perhaps other hominins and primates.⁴² Whether these marks should be classed as the origin of art (in the sense of the first known instance of what we now call art), which would be another path for the recognition of nonhuman primate graphics in at least a history of art, is a subject of dispute whose resolution will involve value judgments as much as facts.

When it comes to the question of how Congo's work might illuminate the "origins of art," even Morris, who comes across as earnestly committed to Congo and the experiments they did together, paradoxically claims that it does so in a superior fashion to other sources that have been looked to—prehistoric art, children's art, folk art—because of how rudimentary it is. In his 1962 book The Biology of Art, he writes:

It is obvious enough that any new source of really simple aesthetic material must be invaluable to art theory. This is exactly what the ape picture-makers provide. They show composition control, but a minimum of it; they show calligraphic development, but a minimum of it; they show aesthetic variation, but again at a minimal level. Here, more vividly than anywhere else, it is possible to come face to face with the basic fundamentals of aesthetic creativity.⁴³

In this quotation, the implicit definition of the fundaments of art—composition control, calligraphic development, and aesthetic variation—are exclusively technical and formal. Furthermore, in this definition, nonhuman primate engagement with even these minimal factors is presented as limited and directed towards human understanding. If Congo's paintings are for Morris a glimmering emanation of the potential beginnings of something (graphic art and painting), they also exist on the borders of a tradition that restricts Congo's ability to enter fully into it.

Morris's descriptions of the methods and conditions by which Congo produced his drawings and paintings are the most telling demonstration of the sometimes humorous aberrance between human painting and drawing and that of a young chimpanzee, as well as the high level of human intervention in their production. The following description, drawn from The Biology of Art, makes clear how carefully staged the photographs of Congo that circulated in the media were to give the impression of his self-motivation and interest in painting.⁴⁴ While painting and drawing, Congo was sat in an infant's high chair. Paper, pencils, and paints were handed to him by a human experimenter-collaborator who sat directly in front of him and changed out implements and papers. The provision of novelty and the maintenance of Congo's attention were key to keeping the sessions going and determining their length and frequency—and thus also influenced the appearance of the paintings. A drawing was complete when Congo handed back a pencil, put it down, or started to play with it. While painting, Congo was handed brushes loaded with different colors presented one at a time in a random order; when the paint on one brush dried Congo would be handed another. When initially given control over color choice, Congo tended to mix paints together into a uniform brown. Sessions lasted 15 to 30 minutes and were held a couple of times a week; if sessions were attempted more frequently, Congo would throw tantrums or lose motivation. In early sessions, Congo's desire to bite, chew on, or break pencils and to suck on paintbrushes had to be overcome by "mild threats." Later, as he grew stronger and more physically active, sessions would be disrupted by Congo thumping and banging on the table in the pauses between drawings. These outbursts were overcome by the offer of raisins, with care taken that the raisins were rewards for settling down rather than for painting. Congo once urinated on a painting and then blended the urine and paint together.

This more complicated picture of Morris's methods and conclusions constitutes legitimate basis for questioning the meaning and purpose of his scholarly and creative endeavors. Regardless of what one ultimately concludes, Morris and Congo undeniably contributed to both the history of science and the history of art. The question then becomes: In what ways did they contribute? What does this story mean today, particularly for the present questions of the existence of nonhuman art? One way of posing the definition of art that correlates well to the particularities of nonhuman primate painting comes from Alfred Gell's work on "art and agency." Although Gell calls this an "anthropological" theory of art, it acknowledges multiple forms of nonhuman agency, and allows for a more generative understanding of Congo's images than that granted by Lenain or even by Morris. At one point he calls art "a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it."⁴⁵ Artworks, which are also social agents in his theory, are material indexes (indexing, among other things, the presence of their makers) that invite abductive reasoning, which Gell defines for his purposes as a kind of cautious and hazardous search for meaning that, starting from true premises, results in conclusions that are not necessarily true. The potential benefit of Gell's theory is that it centers a definition of art liberated from any particular expectations about form, content, or the identity of a creator. Theorizing art with his theory involves attention to the social relations that the art indexes mediate—in other words, what they are and what they do. The Congo images are indeed material indexes of systems of action intended for change: painting and research. The paintings archive Congo's presence and participation, as well as that of Morris or whoever sat and painted with him on a particular day. According to this paradigm, rather than deviations from art-making, Congo's mixing colors into brown, his tantrums, attention span, desire for novelty, and urination are all indexes of social relations mediated by the act of painting, the idea of art, and the idea of art as the act of painting. The visually stimulating indexes, and knowledge of the details of their production, stir abductive reasoning about the significance of this practice rather than certain conclusions.

There is a great deal of latitude in how one defines art in the context of a discussion of "animal art," not because human animals are exactly in control of these discussions (in fact, they do not appear to be), but because of the protean nature of the concept itself. Nevertheless, to choose to categorically deny the possibility of nonhuman primate graphics being art is not only prejudicial, but also dissatisfying. The sentiment, "We don't know what art is, exactly, but we know only humans do it," does not promise much novelty, interest, or accuracy. What art could be, or could mean, when at least the potential for nonhuman art is acknowledged is far richer. Lison Martinet and Marie Pelé, two ethologists involved in contemporary research into nonhuman primate drawing, have concluded that in future research "it is necessary to go beyond a simple interest in the finished product and explore the very dynamic of the mark-making process."⁴⁶ This is a callout, away from a binary interest in whether chimpanzee paintings and drawings are art, to the question of whether what chimpanzees do might cause new narratives about art to emerge. In the story of chimpanzee painting relayed in this section, several senses of art-making competed for truth in various discursive and scholarly contexts: joy of creation, motor and graphic control, intervention into pictorial form in itself, an activity that is exclusively human, and an activity that humans and chimpanzees can learn to share, among others. Each sense is sufficient as a way of thinking about art, but also incomplete. It is perhaps the competition, the drive to argue over the meaning of art and proliferate potential meanings, that is most salient here, given that many of the ideas in play are not exactly new—though the ways that chimpanzees were called to participate in these debates were. The next section, on the literature on bowerbirds, offers different, and some have argued superior, possibilities for a fundamental, more-than-human history and meaning of art. The questions remain, however, of whether these possibilities are definitive, and why they should be pursued.

Avian Aesthetics: The Case of Bowerbirds

"On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have," wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).⁴⁷ I start this section with The Descent of Man because it is the functional urtext of what I call "avian aesthetics" to refer to the objects and activities in bird culture that are focused on sensory (often for my purposes visual) appeal and evaluation.⁴⁸ The ornamentation, displays, and fights of many bird species provided for Darwin compelling evidence of his theory of sexual selection, which posits that competition between potential mates and traits and behaviors that drive mate choice affect the evolution of species in addition to, and in tandem with, natural selection. It is in part an accounting of the many animal traits that appear in excess of function and survival. Ornamental traits of sexual attractiveness, for example, may hinder the mobility of the individual, but also may assure the survival of that individual's genes when it is chosen as a breeding partner. Evidence for certain birds' "taste for the beautiful" was furnished by Darwin in their songs, "curious love-gestures," "combs, wattles, protuberances, horns, air-distended sacs, topknots, naked shafts, plumes and lengthened feathers gracefully springing from all parts of the body" in "splendid," harmonious color.⁴⁹ Beautiful to humans, elaborately ornamented birds like the Great Argus with its rows of illusionistic ocelli, are in fact "beautiful" for each other, for the benefit of being attractive to potential mates. Darwin singled out one particular group of bird species as "the most curious case" of all: the "famous" bowerbirds, whose creations "must cost the birds much labour."⁵⁰

Bowerbirds are endemic to parts of Australia and New Guinea. "Bowers" are constructed by male birds to serve as stages for courtship displays and copulation. Bowerbirds are polygynous, meaning that males mate with multiple females in a season. Females are then the sole care providers for offspring, making the bower the main site of interaction between a mating female and male. Natural and sexual selection have laid off the males of this species from paternal duties, and shifted the site of sexual attraction from the bird's body (as is seen with the Argus) to an external structure. Bower construction varies among species, as well as geographically distinct populations of the same species, though some main types have been identified: "avenues," which consist of parallel rows of sticks forming an archway, like the constructions of the Great and Satin bowerbirds; "maypoles," or central, spire-like constructions, like those built by the MacGregor's bowerbird; and hut-like structures, like those built by the Vogelkop bowerbird. In addition to assembling and maintaining the primary structure of the bower, male bowerbirds collect, arrange, and make daily adjustments to replenish items around it, such as fruits, leaves, flowers, and insect parts, selected and sorted by color.⁵¹ Birds that live in proximity to human habitation will incorporate manmade items, as well. For example, a bower found near a school in Australia contained 310 objects, 143 of which were blue plastic straws evidently used and discarded nearby.⁵² If all this discerning curation were not already "artistic" enough, some bowerbirds actually "paint" their bowers. Satin bowerbirds combine masticated plant matter or charcoal and saliva and apply it to the walls of their bowers with a bit of bark held in their beaks.⁵³ Great bowerbirds have also been found to construct "forced perspective" illusions that seem to impact the likelihood that a female will mate with the male bowermaker.⁵⁴

While the majority of the research on bowers has not concerned their status as art, several scientists have proposed that bowers and bowerbirds, males as constructors and females as evaluators, constitute an avian art world. Jared Diamond fore-titled his 1986 article on bowerbirds of the Bird's Head peninsula of Indonesian New Guinea, "Animal Art."⁵⁵ Although prominent in the title, "art" is minimally defined by Diamond as a "culturally transmitted trait" and appears again only in the article's abstract, ultimately backing down into little more than a hook for readers. Mike H. Hansell, emeritus professor of animal architecture at the University of Glasgow, makes a more substantial argument in his 2007 book Built by Animals that he called the "art school hypothesis."⁵⁶ Working through existing research as evidence, he constructs an analogy between bowerbird culture and human, academic art world culture and training. He discusses, for example, how males spend years learning how to construct bowers by practicing simpler techniques alone and in groups, and examining the bowers of mature males. Even when artificially induced to physical maturation through testosterone, male bowerbirds do not become better at constructing bowers that will be chosen by females as sites for copulation, implying that it is a skill that can only be learned over time. Females for their part have been observed by researchers to exert particular tastes and preferences in bowers, representing the art critics or viewing public to the bowerbird artist. What she chooses when selecting a particular bower over another is an unsettled debate within interpretations of sexual selection: Is it an arbitrary, aesthetic appeal (that nevertheless leads to successful reproduction), or does it reveal something about the quality of her mate? Regardless, a female bowerbird demonstrates considerable, predictable discernment of bowers. Prior to mating, females visit multiple bowers, return again to only some and watch the courtship displays of the males, make a nest, and then return again to a selection of bowers, finally choosing one. Bowers that are more highly decorated, symmetrical, and vertical have been found to result in more copulations. Groups of mature and younger females have been observed visiting bowers together, leading some scholars to conclude that there may be an education in this "taste" passed on between generations.⁵⁷ Ornithologist Richard Prum has suggested using the term "biotic artworlds" to refer to the coevolutionary aesthetic and cultural phenomena of avian ornament and display, including bowers.⁵⁸ He clarifies that in his definition, "An artworld is any population … of coevolving aesthetic entities, producers, and evaluators," which could also include flowers and their pollinators.⁵⁹

There is something very of this moment about the idea of regarding bowers as art. Momentum around interest in other-than-human animal culture, intelligence, emotion and more has swelled into a wave of both scientific research and popular books and films on these subjects.⁶⁰ However, there are precedents to today's discussions on considering the activity of bowerbirds as artistic or aesthetic, beyond Darwin's, that imply it is a subject around which momentum has ebbed and flowed between 1871 and today, at least. In 1979, Thomas A. Sebeok, one of the founders of biosemiotics, published a wide-ranging article, "Prefigurements of Art" that covers inquiries into many different forms of nonhuman aesthetic and creative agency, including chimpanzee drawing and painting studies, and research into bird music and dance.⁶¹ Sebeok's article implies that certain ideas and attitudes must be in the air for there to be a viable academic discourse of "animal art" and that these attitudes have been alive, even if quiet or fringe, for many decades in science. He begins with a statement on pluralism that is an indication of the kind of attitude necessary to such endeavors: while human language is undeniably unique, "the communication system of every other species stamps it with a unique hallmark."⁶² Another necessary attitude to this endeavor that Sebeok points out is an absence of the hand-wringing about anthropomorphism that comes when one begins with the basic premise of the biological-evolutionary continuities that might explain the similarities between many human and nonhuman practices. He quotes ornithologist Edward Allworthy Armstrong nicely on this subject: "Let us not be scared by the bogey of anthropomorphism into the arms of the spectre of Cartesian mechanism."⁶³ In other words, watch for when one's caution or skepticism about potential anthropomorphism slips into a wholesale denial of the possibility of a similar capacity or tendency in another species, becoming une bêtise. Regarding bowerbirds, in particular, Sebeok cites geneticist and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky asserting, "it is impossible to deny that a well-adorned bower may give the bird a pleasure that can only be called aesthetic," and juxtaposes this quotation with ones from artist Nicolas Poussin and art historian Erwin Panofksy to the effect that art always involves pleasure and aesthetic significance.⁶⁴

In making their arguments, Hansell and Prum intentionally dance on an edge of what will be reasonably accepted by both fellow scientists and art theorists, anticipating accusations of anthropomorphism or absurdity. Nevertheless, the kinds of resonances they point to between bower construction and human art-making have been appreciated by those in the human art world, as well. In 2017 and 2018, artist Andy Holden and his ornithologist father, Peter Holden, mounted the exhibition Natural Selection at venues in the UK. The exhibition included an enlarged recreation of an avenue-type bower. In a review, Laura Cumming writes of this homage, "An enormous assembly of reeds with a central eye-like hole, it's so suggestive of art as to strike the mind first as some sort of sculpture. Which is both true and exactly the point."⁶⁵ In 2021, bowerbirds entered Art History in an article by Nina Amstutz in the discipline's eponymous publication. She handles the question of bowers as an art form per se with a graceful agnosticism, writing, "I take the bowerbird seriously as a creative subject, not to analyse its artistic works … but rather as a means of thinking about art from a multispecies perspective."⁶⁶ By "multispecies perspective" she refers not only to the possibility of art as something made by multiple species, but also to the limits of judgment between species: "regardless of whether their practice of collecting and arranging ornamental displays can be understood as an art form, their bowers cannot be measured according to any human artistic standard."⁶⁷ Amstutz assembles sources on the topic of "animal art" in both a longue durée of European thought on the subject before and after Darwin, and from Indigenous perspectives, citing in particular Kalam naturalist and ethnographer Ian Saem Majnep's Birds of My Kalam Country (1977).⁶⁸ The latter focuses on the names for and ideas about various local birds of the Kalam people of Papua New Guinea, and in Amstutz's recounting makes clear that Kalam people are attentive to the displays of bowerbirds, considering them to be in clear continuity and relation with their culture.⁶⁹ Amstutz's attention to Indigenous knowledge is a rare and welcome shift in the context of Western, academic writing on the subject of bowerbirds and animal art.⁷⁰

The arguments for other-than-human art-making based around avian aesthetics and bowerbirds have quite a different flavor from those that surround chimpanzee and other nonhuman primate painting and drawing. As covered in the last section, the latter is born of speculation on the limits of primate evolutionary continuity and centers on a definition of "art" based around both a set of fundamental motor, cognitive, and perceptual capacities, and the history of human drawing and painting. The case of bowerbirds, as already evidenced in Darwin's comments, is spurred in part by human observation and admiration of how elaborately constructed and singularly purposed the displays are. Humans are generally quite impressed and charmed by bowerbird constructions, and one can find many short, popular articles introducing readers to bowerbirds through playful monikers like "the Bird World's Kleptomaniac Love Architects."⁷¹ The definition of "art" animating this case amounts basically to impressively constructed arrangements of objects and forms, designed to be visually appealing for the purpose of mediating a particular kind of social (as well as sexual and genetic) interaction.

As with chimpanzee paintings, the "bower as art" hypothesis has detractors. Philosopher Stephen Davies points to the idea that "the male's repertoire of behaviors is severely circumscribed and comparatively inflexible."⁷² A Derridean response might be to counter whether one can be so assured that human art is not also "severely circumscribed," thus questioning the strength of validity in the privileging of human capacities and cognition implied by Davies. Derrida, in fact, favored this move over what he deemed the "extension" to certain nonhuman animals the "propers of man," such as speech. As I mentioned in the introduction, I want to intervene skeptically both into the doubts about whether to call nonhuman primate painting "art" and into the considerations of bowermaking as an art form. Although in the case of primate painting I detected an underlying and nullifying prejudice against nonhuman animal capacities in the arguments of Lenain and Janson, there are reasons to question whether claiming bowers as art represents a positive intervention into a presumed human-nonhuman hierarchy of species.

I am not alone in wanting to hold space for a non-anthropocentric, non-inclusion of bowers into the category of "art," particularly in light of the connotations that this term implicitly and explicitly operates through in the texts on this subject. In Carol Gigliotti's recent book, The Creative Lives of Animals, she emphasizes the potentiality of the evidence for nonhuman animal creativity over that of arguments for nonhuman animal art.⁷³ Her book evidences multiple, species-specific forms of intelligence, communication, play, construction, and other elements of creativity. For Gigliotti, to ask whether nonhumans make art is to shut down this multiplicity by imposing a standard that conflates creativity solely with certain forms of creation legible and valuable to certain humans, like paintings and symphonies. She maintains this even in the case of bowerbirds.⁷⁴

The discourse of animal art is a cross-cultural one, thinking between human and other animal cultures. It also implicates colonialist drives and histories on multiple fronts. Elite, white, Western institutions and ideologies have historically been privileged in discussions of the philosophy and ontology of "art" to the exclusion of the productions of many humans. This same privileging has affected how art-making by other species is considered—for example, in the choice to train Congo on the model of an easel painter. Carolyn Dean's decolonial hesitancy about the implications of using the term "art" to name the productions of human societies without a concept of art per se can thus help to complicate the discussion of nonhuman animal productions as art. She is sensitive to questions of mutual benefit, and the transformative, and sometimes pernicious, effects of language on objects.

In Dean's article "The Trouble with (The Term) Art," she notes, "Much of what is today called art was not made as art."⁷⁵ Her point of concern is specifically applying this term, with its Latinate etymology and accompanying European associations and history, to the productions of groups of people in the cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas that do not, or did not, necessarily have an analogous term or cultural concept. Crucially, Dean's argument is not calling for a reinscription of the art/artifact and art/craft distinctions that had relegated the productions of almost anyone practicing outside white, male academic traditions as lesser, but rather to pause before the presumption of "art" as a universal, or universally beneficial, designation when it has not been explicitly chosen by a creator. She describes, for example, the nuances and untranslatability of terms like masengo, used by the Lega people of Democratic Republic of Congo. Masengo translates into English as "heavy things" and refers to "objects that exist apart from mundane activities and are endowed with spiritual powers" in the context of Bwami religious and social structures such as small ivory or bone carvings of faces that are held and exchanged between men in certain ceremonies.⁷⁶ In Spanish colonial dictionaries, the Incan Quechua word quillca was referred to as a cognate for "painting, drawing, ornamental work, engraving and sculpting," but Dean points out that it also referred to texts and surfaces with writing on them, implying a meaning related more broadly to practices of marking or signification.⁷⁷ Dean, herself a scholar of Inca visual culture, suggests that when certain scholars subsume masengo or quillca into "art" in their descriptions, this can be a flattening and colonizing gesture that recenters Western aesthetics and categories as the primary standard of what is legible and worthy of attention. She poses that often (as is possibly the case for bowers), the application of the term "art" for something not made as such amounts to a personal claim of "I find this beautiful; this impresses me," which reveals more about the attitude of the beholder than the object itself.

There is a lot of unexamined or underexamined anthropocentric and Eurocentric thinking in the discourse of "avian aesthetics"—specifically, a tendency to frame humans as the sole beneficiaries of a multispecies definition of "art" and to rely on definitions and examples of "art" from a fairly narrow selection of Western European and North American sources. Amstutz's article stands as the exception, though the first comparisons she draws between bowers and human creativity are to cabinets of curiosity and Flemish seventeenth-century still life painting. Sebeok's discussion of the aesthetic and artistic quality of bowers relies on references to Poussin and Panofsky, core figures of the Western canon of art history. These tendencies do not necessarily invalidate the arguments or work taking place, but are notable and deserving of scrutiny. Amstutz and Sebeok seem to rely on the Western canon as ballast in the storm of a potentially controversial argument, since most readers would not deny the work of Poussin, for example, the status of art. The history and philosophy of Western art archive endless possibility, imagination, and expansion of what can be, including what art can be. They also archive constriction and exclusion on the basis of faulty, changeable hierarchies of skill, intelligence, class, race, gender, and species. The arguments of Lenain are proof of this. These two facts, which have a tempering effect on each other, must be kept in balance in any discussion of the definition or "origin" of art relying on these criteria, especially one seeking to expand this definition for ethical and moral reasons.

In Amstutz's article, she briefly mentions Morris's Congo studies, suggesting that they are viewed "largely as failures," and then adding that "these studies were inherently flawed, in that they tried to teach animals to create art in terms of human cultural practices and standards of skill and beauty."⁷⁸ However, to draw bowermaking into "art" and its history at all may imply, if to a different degree, similar inherent flaws. In her writing on the subject of "animal art," anthropologist Jane Desmond pushes the stakes of the discourse to the question of whether apes or other animals being considered artists would have implications for them as political subjects.⁷⁹ While this may seem like a long shot, she eyes a worthy target: Shouldn't this kind of research or argument, particularly when framed as part of a posthumanist, ethical agenda, involve a benefit of some kind to the nonhuman animals under consideration?⁸⁰

As in the chimpanzee case study above, the question of the implications for the "origins" of art of the bowermaking case proves more salutary. Hansell goes so far as to say that bowers provide a better origin story for human art culture than fellow primates do, given how little evidence there is of art-like behavior in apes when left to their own devices. He also clarifies, "I am not looking to demonstrate that bowerbirds are or are not artists, but rather to look for evidence that will help us understand how we became artists."⁸¹ The avian aesthetic theory version of the "origin of art" is guided strongly by Darwin's theory of sexual selection and language in The Descent of Man to suggest that the conditions of possibility for art are the existence of beauty, pleasure, emotion, taste, and excess across many species. That last term, excess, particularly in reference to behaviors and traits in excess of the basic, logical requirements of survival, is key, for it is another shaky ground that some have staked claims of human exception on. What could be more excessive, though, than the evolution of life?

An example of this kind of theorizing is feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz's Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art (2011). Grosz uses The Descent of Man and the theory of sexual selection as the basis for a sweeping theory of the origins of art as the drive in nature towards enhancement, intensification, and excess. She writes, "Sexual selection, as an alternative principle to natural selection, expands the world of the living into the nonfunctional, the redundant, the artistic. It enables matter to become more than it is, it enables the body to extend beyond itself into objects that entice, appeal, and function as sexual prostheses."⁸² Carrie Rohman builds on Grosz's thinking toward a bioaesthetic theory by which she intends to remind "us that the world of art includes hordes of other creatural actors and living assemblages—and that these beings always have been artistic … all this makes the artistic, in every permutation, even more extraordinary."⁸³

If Hansell, Grosz, and Rohman's instincts are correct, then the human claiming or incorporation of this or that nonhuman practice as art would be irrelevant, since their point is that some kernel of the drive toward beautiful, creative expansion and mutation is essentially animal. At this point, I say, why stop with the animal? How far back can the kernel be traced, and to what ends? Theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri has put forward an argument for all biological life as "artifact-making," and even life itself as "art," on the basis that genes and proteins are "manufactured" by "molecular machines."⁸⁴ Adrian Bejan suggests that the "images" one finds in nature, such as the analogous branching patterns seen in lungs, river systems, and lightning, can all be explained by laws of physics that unite biotic and abiotic phenomena in similar designs for flow.⁸⁵ The scalar shifts and varying registers of will and function implied by a sexual selection or bioaesthetic theory and those just mentioned bear acknowledgement, but if the goal is a good, grounding, more-than-human origin story for art, such discrepancies are tolerable. These more far-reaching suggestions about the meaning and being of creativity and artifact- or art-making break the dead-end cycle of searching for artistic intent that has held up the conclusion of the debate as to whether nonhuman animals create art. Although they would represent only additional, rather than conclusive, ideas, they would also be intriguing and inspiring, as philosophical thinking should be. Moreover, these biological and physical theories, if applied comparatively as models for theories about art-making, creativity, and form, would actually just be new scientifically derived versions of very old ideas from philosophy.

In the ever-expanding, never-resolving philosophy of art, anthropocentrism has never been the only guiding principle. Ultimately, proceeding oppositionally through dialectics of "art" or "not art," "human" and "nonhuman" (or "animal"), "Western" and "non-Western" (or "Indigenous," "decolonial"), proves too blunt a strategy for addressing anything with precision and care. In the contemporary life sciences and philosophy of art, the conditions for an active discourse of animal art have been produced by the theory of evolution and common descent, and a multidisciplinary, posthumanist, and eco-conscious ethos that seeks to reorder humankind's position in the world to challenge the notion of humanity's proprietary or exceptional hold on intelligence, technicity, language, and nature—with all of this arriving at a time of mass imperilment and extinction of species. However, there are multiple ways these conditions can be met, and they have been archived as arising at multiple points in human history. Many ways of thinking about art from across geographic and chronological boundaries do not pose art-making as an exceptional thing only humans do, but rather as a way humans humbly navigate their position relative to the creative powers of natural and divine forces.

Zhuangzi, a Chinese Taoist philosopher who lived circa 369 to 286 BCE, has been associated with the claim, similar to Darwin's, that "every living thing has its own taste of beauty."⁸⁶ Various Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies are based on the common ancestry and connectivity of all living things, including notions of shared breath and nonhuman personhood. These ideas usher belief in the continuities of knowledge and practice between nonhuman and human beings, as already demonstrated by the example of the Kalam people's ways of thinking and speaking about bowerbirds. An example from the North American context is connection between spiders and weaving, among Navajo and Hopi people, epitomized in the figure of Spider Woman (Navajo: Na'ashjé'ii Asdzáá) and Spider Grandmother (Hopi: Kokyangwuti). Western thought has also at different points shared aspects of these beliefs. Plutarch quotes Democritus to the effect that humans have been the pupils of other species in music and architecture; and Venetian author Giovanni Bonifacio in 1628 wrote a text that found precedents to all human endeavors in those of other species, and even suggests an inferiority of human art, insofar as humankind's fallen nature contrasted to the original, God-given knowledge of nonhuman animals.⁸⁷

I'll conclude by looping back briefly to Meng's shadow-tracing. A parsimonious explanation of the entire anecdote is that the gorilla's action was more or less a form of play, but since it happened to resemble the human act of painting or drawing on a wall, a scientist conditioned by a particular historical moment let his mind run into comparative speculation. Huxley's speculations draw Meng's gesture into the philosophy of art, a discipline not beholden to imperatives of parsimony. Meng's gesture resonates with many rich, historically conventional ideas about what art is. The institutional theory of art mentioned above is suited for a mid-twentieth-century context in which the possibility of what kinds of objects and gestures can be accepted as artworks has become entirely flexible. This definition indeed accords to a fairly anthro-specific tendency towards rapidly increasing levels of institutional and cognitive complexity, abstraction, and mutation of verbal and physical concepts. However, it should be clear now that many other theories of art involve a more metaphysical attempt to understand the role of human action in the context of the cosmos. For example, in Zhu Zhirong's synthetic account of the ancient Chinese philosophy of art, he emphasizes the role of the Taoist belief that all art (qua painting, calligraphy, and poetry) derives from and echoes the commingling of vital energies (yin and yang) that were also the source of the creation of the universe.⁸⁸ Within this system, artistic success was measured by the balancing of other dual properties: stillness and motion, likeness and unlikeness, subject and object—to create vital images. An artistic anecdote that Zhirong shares suggests that the highest achievement of the artist was thought to be total attunement with nature that could actually transcend the necessity of artmaking altogether: The Tang dynasty artist Bi Hong, watching the artist Zhang Zao, was amazed that he used worn-out brushes and even his hands to paint. Bi Hong asked him whom he had learned from, and Zhang Zao responded, "Learning from nature and with enlightenment of the mind."⁸⁹ After hearing this, Bi Hong never painted again.

A shadow is a kind of natural image, an acheiropoieton, not made by human hands. While there exist infinite aesthetically pleasing scenes and objects in nature, and many that have been represented as images, the shadow is itself already an abstract sign produced by an event of interaction. Like analogue photographs, shadows are both icons and indexes: resembling a thing, they are also a material phenomenon that need not resemble, but does always point to, the presence of a referent. Tracing a shadow is thus a copying, re-making or re-marking of something that is already itself a mark, a form, an illusion made by blocking light. As an origin story, tracing a shadow is an action that—as in the ideals of the Chinese philosophy of art, and in Pliny's story—subtly harmonizes nature and culture, found and constructed, nonhuman and human. This is not a tale of the joy of "something out of nothing," but rather of turning one thing into something else, even subtly, fleetingly, or invisibly. It is safe to suppose that, regardless of the timing of Huxley's or Pliny's stories, this is a kind of harmony that primates, human and not, have been striking for a long time, and is closely related to many abundant notions and histories of art.⁹⁰