Tracing

As a method of re-evaluation, I set out to trace Alpha’s drawings. I should stress at this point that these drawings have already been examined through drawing processes. Nowadays, scientists investigating the drawings of chimpanzees use touch screens to record the sequence and speed, as well as the configuration, of marks (Tanaka, Tomonaga, & Matsuzawa, 2003). But at the time of Schiller’s experiment, tracing or redrawing to scale was a primary means of analysis. It also served the purpose of creating a simplified black and white image for reproduction and publication, without the necessity for more expensive half-tone printing. Remarkably, Alpha’s drawing have been copied a number of times since their small-scale reproduction in Schiller’s report (1951). Her marks were analysed for formal and calligraphic qualities (Morris, 1962) and then recopied by authors and commentators from other disciplines – for example, to illustrate gestalt principles (Hearst, 1991; Hothersall, 1990) or to question their status as art (Lenain, 1997).

I scaled up the tiny black and white reproductions shown in Schiller’s report (1951) using an overhead projector. The images on the right show this procedure (and the black and white images lower down show the scans I was working with). I am operating at many stages removed, working from a projection of a photocopied acetate of a printed page, reprographically produced from drawings made in ink by someone (not named) at the Yerkes Laboratories, who used dividers and projection equipment to copy the drawings made by Alpha. After so many iterations, what exactly is encountered? Many aspects of the drawings are not reproduced (colour, scale, density, pressure, direction of movement, faint marks, scuffed and blurred edges at the margins of marks), as the scientists’ prime concern was configuration and position. Strictly speaking, I am working from Alpha’s figures, not from her hand made marks. In the reproductions, the coloured squares and circles of the test sheets are marked by dotted black lines, intersected by the more solid black lines representing Alpha’s drawn marks. In each case I encountered a distribution of marks – some dispersed, others a dense thicket – clustered around, inside, across or sometimes mingling with the more regular dotted line denoting the experimenters’ shape. The relationship of these marks to an original drawn artefact is no more stable or certain than Alpha’s subjective status as the author. The report of Alpha’s first year of infancy (Jacobsen et al., 1932) shows her subjective position in relation to human carers and/or experimenters oscillating between that of experimental animal, companion animal, and surrogate child (this is discussed in an unpublished article, MacDonald, 2014). As an infant cared for in the home of two of the scientists, before being moved to an adult enclosure at the age of one year, it was reported she was able to play with toys and household objects and make tactile and visual explorations of the domestic environment – for example, by tracing the patterns on the rug with her index finger. In adulthood, as a caged animal, Schiller states that she begged for drawing equipment (Schiller, 1951, p.111), but her motivation is not discussed in any detail.

Redrawing these figures has been a process of reconsideration rather than a method of research productive of positive or conclusive findings. Schiller’s report described the drawings as ‘formless scribbling’ (1951, p.111). After the reproductive process just listed, the marks that I receive are all of equal materiality and weight, whether they indicate Alpha’s traces or the scientists’ squares and circles. It is my own acts of perception that separate them back into ruled and unruled elements, making distinctions between traces of spontaneous bodily movement on the one hand and measured, plotted forms on the other. In making this separation I am noticing a contrast at the graphic level between Alpha’s wayward or purposeful marks and the governing structures of the laboratory context. If I take a step back, these structures include not only coloured test papers but also the edges of the drawing board, the framing of the cage, and the more generalised frameworks of institutional and disciplinary knowledge within which Alpha came into being.

My first methods of tracing involved scanning from photocopies, printing to acetate, and scaling up using an overhead projector (see the top three images). This analogue form of projection had the effect of diffracting the otherwise hard-edged figures so they became blurry. Borders were no longer black and white but offered a muted spectrum of colours. Drawing an outline around this soft haze with a ballpoint pen in some senses seemed to be a violent act – one of tidying and limiting. The image above shows my hand with index finger and thumb configured towards the point of the pen: I am pointing towards something but the thing I am pointing at is obscured by my hand and by the lines I crudely make around it. In reviewing this image, I come to understand something of theorist Jacques Derrida’s discussions of marks and traces, particularly as they relate to the lines that are drawn between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ in continental philosophy. His most famous discussion of this topic is the lecture entitled ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (Derrida, 2002), in which he attempts to complicate and multiply the lines of difference between species so that a multitude of creatures can no longer be lumped together under a single concept of ‘the animal’. Of significance to this enquiry, is Derrida’s insistence of the capacity of other animals not only to leave tracks but to be aware of their tracks as meaningful to others, and to desire to erase them. In a subsequent lecture in the same series, Derrida develops this argument further, reminding the reader that ‘the structure of the trace presupposes that to trace amounts to erasing a trace as much as to imprinting it’ (Derrida, 2003, p. 137). Every act of copying, whether mechanical, digital, or by hand, would be in Derrida’s terms a substitution, obliterating traces even as it imprints them or re-marks them. In my acts of copying, Alpha as the originator of the marks is always sought but never present, I can only point towards a shadow.

In considering the status of Alpha’s figures I found it useful to refer to Michael Newman’s discussion of signification in drawing in ‘The Marks, Traces, and Gestures of Drawing’, in which he conducts a ‘microanalysis of drawing at the level of the mark’ (2003, p. 102). Newman refers to Derrida’s discussions of ‘the animal’, albeit only in a footnote, and his discussion unsettles definitions of drawing that would position it as something definitively or exclusively human; but at the same time he positions it as an activity that takes place in specific historical circumstances, with particular motivations, having different meanings depending on the conditions in which it is performed and received. Newman also slows the requirement for meaning at the level of the mark: ‘Of all the arts, drawing has the potential to reduce to its smallest the gap between meaning and non-meaning’ (2003, p. 100). He refers to the state of potential signification in which a mark might hover before being recognised as part of a configuration or before becoming line or writing. This allows the mark to be ‘pre-sign’ or almost sign, not yet fixed in a defined meaning, whether verbal or pictorial. This was useful in reconsidering the reception of Alpha’s marks; although dismissed by the experimenters as lacking any pictorial meaning, they might at least be seen as having the potential for meaning.

Newman's examination is art historical in the sense that it relates to the output of artists, and the way in which the artistic subject is constituted, however there is a possible comparison to be made once the rationalising frameworks of modernity are identified as a context for both artistic and laboratory practice. In his discussion of gesture in drawing, Newman looks back over a period of more than two hundred years of Western art history and charts an increasing focus on the manual gestures made evident through drawing. The gesture made manifest was understood as ‘an expression of the inner being of the subjectivity of the artist’ causing drawing to ‘function something like handwriting to a graphologist, with the proviso that the point is not how we read it, but that we see it as an epiphenomenon of the inner life and destiny of the subject’ (Newman, 2003, p.103). If gestural marks are understood as referring to an interiority, their meaning can only be reached through an effort of interpretation or empathetic involvement. Insofar as I attempted such an act of empathy I was frustrated not only by my lack of access to the hand drawn artefacts, which would have shown signs of the force, direction, and velocity of Alpha’s gestures, but also by the feeling that neither her authorship, nor indeed her subjectivity, could be so securely tracked down. Born out of this frustration, some of my acts of tracing were of a more fluid and gestural nature than the ballpoint pen drawings. These took place during the residency at MEANTIME (see ‘Experimenting’). Schiller’s report specified that ‘Indian ink’ and proportional dividers had been used to copy Alpha’s drawings. I imagined this to be a measured, controlled, and precise process, and in contrast to it, I splashed black ink across the wall.

Returning to Newman’s charting of the gesture in art, he argues that an alternative and destabilising understanding of the gesture developed in the twentieth century, as the unity of the subject was thrown into question. Emptied of its essential origin the gesture in drawing became for some artists almost a performance of emptiness, of meaninglessness, or of an inability to speak. Newman cites ‘automatic’ or ‘compulsive’ modes of drawing and the production of ‘illegible writing’ (a phrase that he borrows from Roland Barthes) as examples of actions by artists in which gestural marks seem to register an alien inhabitation of the artist’s body. If Newman is here thinking of the automatism of surrealist artists, the cryptic alphabets of Henri Michaux, or the action painting of Jackson Pollock, such references point back to the period in which Alpha’s story is set, the early to mid-twentieth century, and artists’ reactions to rationality, regulation, mechanisation, routinisation, and the destructive and devastating effects of warfare. Such practices have sometimes been described in terms of the involuntary and the machinic – the body taken over by external forces. Seen in this light, the drawn marks of Alpha, set against the geometric outlines of the experimental test papers, might have the status of a ‘graphic trace’, as Margaret Iversen calls it: ‘a kind of involuntary, bodily language of drawing. […] While the ruled lines allude […] to the way that lives are regulated or pre-programmed by an external matrix, the bumps point to the body’s insistent presence and the subject’s desire to deviate from the straight line’ (Iversen, 2012). Alpha's movements with the crayon become a graphic register of the scientific machine that she inhabits and that inhabits her. Treated as little more than an animal-machine inside a complex enclosure of regularised procedures and routine probings, she marks her subjugation to them. Her drawing habit could be understood as a kind of bodily resistance, a mute manifestation of her powerless status.

Nevertheless, this description has problems as it implies either an involuntary action in which Alpha loses all authorship or a self-conscious performance of powerlessness. An interpretation of Alpha’s marks in terms of gesture might proceed in another direction. Recent scientific research in the field of cognition has focussed on gesture as a flexible means of communication used by great apes of different species, involving semantic structures, conventions, and references to absent objects, the subtleties of which have yet to be decoded. The focus on gesture does seem productive for further enquiry of either a scientific or an artistic nature, as Gucwa and Ehmann discovered in their sensitive consideration of drawings that the elephant Siri made using her trunk (1985). Gestures enact meaning through such values as magnitude, intensity, velocity, and direction. If gesture prevails as the primary mode of sharing understandings within a specific community of conspecifics, then the visible residue of such gesture can be understood as inscription, albeit illegible to you and me. ‘And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 9).

My third approach to tracing Alpha’s figures was aimed at recreating, at actual size, something of the effect and colour of Alpha’s drawings, by following the written specifications in Schiller’s report and using card, paper, and sharpened pencils as directed. These are shown at the bottom. Two are based on Alpha’s responses to plain paper and the other two are her responses to geometric designs on the test sheets. When I produced these during the MEANTIME residency, they provided my first opportunity to imagine the effect of the bold shapes that were presented to Alpha and the colours she was given to mark with. I could see the attraction of filling these spaces with coloured marks. It allowed me to understand the visual stimulation and satisfaction that might be gained from the activity of drawing in an otherwise restricted environment.