At the Academy for Elephants in Thailand, they are teaching elephants to paint. In a video titled Elephant Paints Own Self-Portrait,"" you can see one of the elephants hard at work with a paintbrush in its trunk.
As the shocked spectators in the background attest, the elephant paintings have become a major tourist attraction for Thailand. (Human) art critics have sung their praises. But while some artists are actively trying to cultivate these animals' creative talents, scientists and others are questioning to what extent the elephants actually understand what they're doing.
In the featured painting, a dancing elephant stands with its trunk curled gracefully around a sunflower that, if it existed in nature at the scale depicted, would tower menacingly over the roof of a small house.
It's the kind of self-portrait that kindergardeners produce when instructed to draw something besides geometrically retarded skyscrapers or birthday cakes so oversaturated with color that the page seems to throb with radiation. Although to the elephant's credit, the sense of proportion in its picture is much more developed than what one would expect from the average six-year-old human.
At that age, my own self-portraits suffered from my fixation with dinosaurs, and my decision to express that passion by continually depicting myself with a 17-foot brontosaurus neck, a habit that persisted well into the fourth grade. Finding inspiration in the more recent past, a friend of mine decided to re-imagine herself in the image of the late-period, ""Vegas,"" Elvis Presley.
Imperfect renderings though they were, those crude sketches did demonstrate some sort of creative drive. Without these fantastical distortions, arts-and-crafts time would've been a rote exercise in scrawling clumsy human forms. In other words, anyone with the requisite motor skills can be trained to draw a member of their own species, but it takes real inspiration to dress that figure in a bejeweled white leisure suit and matching platform shoes.
The trouble is figuring out which camp elephant art belongs, as it's difficult to say what extent the animal really knows what it was doing. Thailand's Academy for Elephants has been operating for about a decade, which seems like time enough to train a particularly intelligent animal to coordinate the 20 or so brush strokes that make up the painting featured in the video. It would be another thing entirely, though, if the same elephant could be persuaded to do a similar work with a very different setting, say a regal portrait of Babar.
It would be nice to know just what is guiding the artist's trunk, but the fact that it's hard to tell probably has much less to do with their artistic prowess than the difficulty involved in getting an elephant to explain its work directly.
If the painting in the video is a real self-portrait in the ""Elvis"" sense, and not just a charming trick to impress the English-speaking tourists in the background, then it's good to know that elephants are happy and apparently optimistic about their creative endeavors. Perhaps it's best not to trouble them with the conventions of the human-made art world.
After all, elephant art is still a young medium. In time, one of the animals could chronicle its descent into depression with a series of monochromatic, black canvasses, or trample a Steinway in an act of protest.
In the meantime, it's encouraging that at a time when funding for art education is frequently in jeopardy, there are still people working to make sure everyone gets a chance with a paintbrush - pachyderms included.
Have you been telling people how creative your pet is for the last six years? Why not tell one more by e-mailing Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
