Published: 02 February 2012
by TOM FOOT

IT is a common complaint in the abstract art galleries up and down the country: “A monkey could have painted that,”.

Well, now they have – apes, orangutans, gorillas and chimps, to be precise – and an elephant called Boon Mee from Thailand.

In a world first, an exhibition featuring abstract paintings by a range of species has opened in University College London’s Grant Museum of Zoology in Bloomsbury.

Visitors are being invited to question whether elephants “can be creative” and whether the paintings can be “dismissed as meaningless”.

Jack Ashby, manager of the museum, said: “Whether this is actually art is the big question.

While individual elephants are trained to always paint the same thing, art produced by apes is a lot more creative and is almost indistinguishable from abstract art by humans who use similar techniques.”

Co-curator Mike Tuck added: “It starts to raise very interesting questions about the nature of human art.”

Salvador Dali famously once said: “The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!”

And since the mid-1950s, zoos have used art and painting as a “leisure activity” for animals.

It was first popularised by Granada TV’s Zoo Time, which started in 1956.

Critics have raised concerns over animal cruelty.

Images on the internet show how Boon Mee had paint brushes stuck up his trunk and was being guided by a zoo keeper.

Mr Ashby said: “When the co-curators came to the museum it was one of the first questions we asked.

It’s not cruel though, because the animals are enjoying it.

It is fun for them, an artistic enrichment exercise.”

He said Boon Mee was guided by subtle up and down strokes on its ear.

He added: “The elephant painting is not art because it is not deliberately doing anything. Apes, on the other hand, are much freer and their work is much more arguable to be expressive art.”

Co-curators Will and Mike Tuck, graduates of the Royal Academy of Art and UCL Slade School of Fine Art, are exhibiting works they have brought from zoos around the world.

Will added: “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.”
• The exhibition, Art by Animals, is on until March 9.