London Blog

Friday Focus: Animal Art and the Grant Museum

Definitely the most unusual new entry to London’s scientific life this week is the new exhibition at the Grant Museum: Art by Animals. Part of the ongoing series entitled Humanimals, this exhibition features paintings done by a variety of animals including elephants and orang-utans.
 

Untitled by Sumatran orang-utan “Baka”, using poster paint on canvas

The above picture is just one of the samples on display from now until the 9th of March, in one of the first displays to give scientific credibility to animal art. Elephant painting has long been a tourist attraction in Thailand amongst other places, but has been hit by controversy by art so good that it was thought to be faked. 

Flower Pot” by the Asian Elephant “Boon Mee”, a retired logging elephant in Thailand

 Ape art (as shown in the top picture) is thought to be approximately comparable to that of a 2-3 year old child still in the “scribble” stage, but unlike human children, it does not develop beyond that point. The prevailing view of experts appears to be that ape art is the most interesting type; elephants are painting more or less randomly, with paintbrushes in their trunks, their movements guided by keepers stroking their ears(!), but while the results are less impressive the apes have a clearer idea of what they are doing and decide all aspects of their painting, including the end, themselves.

 As always at the Grant Museum, the curators are encouraging visitors to enter the debate about whether this art is real and worthwhile or whether it is simply random and shows nothing interesting about animal brains. To encourage participation with this and a doxen other debates, the museum has attached 10 iPads to specific exhibits, which visitors can use to give their thoughts, or download apps to explore the content further. One of the questions currently being debated by visitors on the iPad asked whether we should be trying to bring back extinct species by cloning. Perhaps oddly for a museum which is part of the University of London and heavily used by university students, at least half the recent responses had ignored the question and used the iPad as a visitors book, but there were still a lot of good comments and an invitation to continue the discussion on Twitter.

Beyond this exhibition, the Grant Museum is a little haven of zoology just off the Euston Road, a relatively tiny room, stacked from floor to ceiling with skeletons, amphibians in jars and other specimens of all imaginable types. Many of the specimens are out of their cases, being sketched or simply sitting on trolleys; the bigger ones stand on the edge of the cabinets while something looking rather like a sloth is actually hanging from a beam on the top gallery. Open to the public as well as interested students, it should not be missed by anyone with even a passing interest in zoology.

Porcupine fish, one of tens of thousands of specimens. Adopted by James Orr, but still plenty left to go.

 The Grant Museum is found at 21 University Street, WC1E 6DE, open Monday – Friday 1-5pm, free entry. There are a wide range of events, including a Valentine’s Day special on the 14th of February, details of which can be found on the website.

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