Library of Babel: READ 1


	The first animal artists recognised by the human art establishment were, not surprisingly, large primates like ourselves. In the early part of the century, there were several chimpanzee artists of moderate renown Joni in Moscow, Alpha at the Yerkes Primate Center in Florida, Baltimore Betsy but the most notorious by far was a talented young female chimp named Congo who painted under the tutelage of the zoologist-impresario Desmond Morris. Congo was one of the most significant abstractionists of the 1950s, although until recently her work has received little serious critical attention outside of Morris's own study, The Biology of Art. Nevertheless, she is destined to go down in history as the first animal artist to actively challenge the species barrier under the harsh glare of the public media. But if our closest cousins, the great apes, managed to achieve a modicum of artistic success by mid-century, non-primate animal artists had a longer road ahead of them. It was not until the early eighties that Siri, a female Asian elephant at the Burnet Park Zoo in Syracuse, New York, found some minor critical recognition for her calligraphic pencil and ink drawings. Siri's career as an artist began when her trainer, David Gucwa, found her doodling on the concrete floor of her enclosure with a pebble held in the tip of her trunk--a behavior commonly observed among captive elephants. Gucwa fostered her innate talent by providing her with art supplies and later by tirelessly promoting her artistic career. Although largely self-taught, Siri garnered praise from a number of established figures in the human art world, most notably from Willem de Kooning who commented, upon seeing a group of her drawings, "That's a damned talented elephant".
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