Next week, art connoisseurs and collectors will gather at Chistie’s elegant Rockefeller Center headquarters for an auction of some 80 rare paintings and works on paper that, even in this perpetually unfazed burg, may raise eyebrows high.
The works in themselves are not that outre. Abstract Expressionist in concept and execution, deft of brushstroke and playful in the use of line and color, they compare with many of the better representations of contemporary art. But unlike most modern artists, the 10 practitioners featured at the Christie’s auction go about their work on all fours and wield their brushes with their noses that is to say their trunks
They are elephants. And, like many artists, they need the money.
They represent hundreds of unemployed elephants in Asia who are turning to art as useful work, having lost their jobs hauling timber.
“It’s a little unusual for Christie’s,” Jennifer Essen, spokes woman for the March 21 auction.
“I’m not saying it’s as profound as human art,” said Alex Melemid, co-founder of the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project, which is retraining the jobless elephants and will benefit from the auction. “But it’s very nice and it is art, whatever you make of it.”
The idea may rattle the cages of some contemporary art critics, but elephants can be taught to paint and people seem to like the result. Elephant art has received favor table notice in publications as august as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and it sells with prices ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 a pic ture and higher.
Though it referred to the oeuvre as “dumbo art,” the Nation’s Culture in Focus section praised a number of elephant abstracts as “some very good works.”
“They have a strong sense of color and very neat brush strokes,” it said.
And critics should also note that an Asian elephant named Juthanam, whose patron is the Princess Galiyani, sister of Thailand’s King Bhumibol, had work exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year.
“It’s originally a North American thing,” said Melemid, a noted Russian dissident who came to this country in 1978 with fellow artist and collaborator Vitaly Komar, the other founder of the elephant art project. “It started here in zoos.”
American zoo elephants have been making art for some two decades, and about 30 of them are now active in the trade.
The nation’s most notable pachyderm painter–Ruby, of the Phoenix Zoo–produces work for galleries and gift shops that generates more than $100,000 a year in sales.
That ain’t hay, though the elephants may prefer that it were.
Melemid and Komar, known here and in their old country for large, satirical canvases, were immediately impressed with the elephants’ work.
They decided that there was a market for it and that the field offered a promising future for the world’s dwindling and endangered elephant population.
“We want to do for elephant art what [famed New York art dealer and impresario] Leo Castelli did for American artists” in the postwar period, Melemid said. “We want to be as great as Castelli but in a little bit different world. We want to legitimize it. We want to show people that there is nothing wrong with elephant art.”
In the process, they hope to aid some 3,000 elephants in Asia who, along with their mahouts, or trainers, have been put out of the timber-hauling business because of forest conservation and government bans on logging in a number of Southeast Asian countries.
“Elephants are unique,” he said. “They’re a wild beast that has been domesticated by people for thousands of years–always employed by people; never used as pets. Now there is no work left, and thousands of elephants are left without a job. Our mission is to give them new jobs. Otherwise, they may not survive.”
Starting with a Toledo (Ohio) Zoo elephant named Renee in 1995, the two developed a successful method of teaching art to pachyderms that led not long afterward to the establishment of the world’s first elephant art academy in Thailand, where they trained Juthanam, among other star pupils.
“We’re planning on having 1,000 elephants in Asia painting on a regular basis by the end of the year,” Melemid said.
Their teaching method requires the assistance of the mahouts.
“An elephant lives out his or her life with a mahout,” Melemid said. “The elephants’ life span is the same as humans’, so a mahout will take care of only one or two elephants. They’re very intimately connected. But mahouts don’t know much about abstract art, either, so we explain to them what is involved.”
As with human artists, they start the elephants with the basics.
“First you have to train an elephant to hold a brush and comprehend what a brush is all about and how to hold it,” he said.
“Then we’ll touch the brush to a canvas or paper. Then we introduce colors, putting paint on the brush. Some of them grasp it in an hour–or minutes, maybe. For some it takes days and days. Some others just refuse to paint at all.”
The largest elephant painting to date is 18 feet by 11 feet, but the animals are capable of working in miniature as well.
“Like 10 inches, or less,” Melemid said. “The elephant has no problem picking up paint. We have wonderful drawings by elephants that are really small, done with a felt tip pen. They’re really good. They’re really careful. They’re not sloppy at all.”
That’s more than can be said for Jackson Pollack, but the legendary splatter painter has been used to inspire elephant artists.
“A few weeks ago, we made this experiment,” Melemid said. “We went to Thailand with reproductions of Western art–some abstract, some not, such as the Van Gogh self-portrait with the cut-off ear. We’d go to the tribal villages in the north of Thailand and we’d say these are sacred images from the country we come from. It was a total hit.
“We’d show them mostly Pollack, and other great abstract artists. [Richard] Diebenkorn was really hot in this area. [Mark] Rothko too. Unfortunately, American abstract art is really huge in size. Next time we go we want to make smaller-size reproductions, just to give them the idea.”
If masters of the abstract form, have elephants tried representational art?
“Not yet, but, you know, it’s in the eye of the beholder,” Melemid said. “Some say, `I can see the elephant in there; the brushstroke looks like a trunk.’ A lot of the paintings look like landscapes. When you see an elephant standing in front of its painting, it somehow seems it’s painting a landscape.
“Whether it’s accidental or intentional, I have no idea.”
