Conclusion

The subtitle of this article refers to Franz Kafka’s short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ (Kafka, 1993, pp. 195–204) in which the protagonist, Red Peter, relates the story of his capture as an ape on the Gold Coast, painful passage to Europe inside a small cage, and subsequent assimilation into ‘the world of men’ (ibid., p. 196). The point at which Red Peter utters his first word is a key moment in his transition to acceptance as an intelligible being by the men around him. But he does not emit the word willingly – it is his only means of escape from the cage. His utterance is a sign of his capitulation as he adapts to the terms of communication of his human captors. Red Peter’s story is punctuated by references to his scars and fleas, and my urge to investigate Alpha’s life and drawing practice manifests itself as an itchy sore. I keep scratching away at it and exposing different bits but it is difficult even to reach a satisfactory answer.

It has been suggested that Kafka’s story prefigures subsequent investigations into language learning in nonhuman primates (Pálsson, 2012), and that it may have been inspired by the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler’s early twentieth-century tests for insight in chimpanzees, which were reported to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. J. M. Coetzee’s fictional character Elizabeth Costello imagines Köhler’s experiments from the perspective of one of his chimpanzees, Sultan, pointing out the limited type of intelligence Sultan is allowed to exhibit within the terms of the experiment (Coetzee, 2003). Köhler’s The Mentality of Apes (originally published in German in 1917), was one of the founding texts of gestalt psychology, and his work was a direct influence on Schiller, who was his student. If Kafka’s writing experiment in ‘A Report to An Academy’ owes a debt to Köhler, or more precisely to Sultan the chimpanzee, so too does Schiller’s drawing experiment. Like Sultan, Alpha’s capacity was judged within limited parameters and found to be wanting – in terms of visual representation her drawing appeared no more than ‘formless scribbling’ (Schiller, 1951, p.111) – nevertheless, also like Sultan, whose demonstration of (limited) insight set off a chain of imaginative responses, Alpha’s propensity to make (limited) drawings set off a ripple of citations and further experiments.

On another level, my title refers to my positioning of myself as an ape, not imaginatively or disruptively but scientifically; homo sapiens sapiens is a species of great ape and I wish to emphasise this ape identity for myself, in preference to the more narrow and constraining category of human. This does not necessitate any regression, merely an acceptance of my existing apeness and animality in general. I see myself as a drawing animal.

Perhaps a further discussion of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming animal’ would be relevant here, particularly where it relates to Kafka (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). However, I am no expert in this area, and others have examined their ideas in the context of contemporary art more thoroughly than I can (for example, Baker, 2002). I do not claim to have become Alpha or somehow channelled her by redrawing her marks. My approach to the visual and textual references that I was able to gather has been interpretative, albeit conducted through acts of drawing, making, and redeploying that required me to enter into the material at a sensory and imaginative level. In doing this, I have tried not to objectify the figure of Alpha but to respect our multiple differences, although there is inevitably some appropriation of her name and her figurative output.

Recent writing has explored the ways in which artists productively think with other species without assimilating them into regulated bodies of knowledge: ‘thinking the Other in this case is possible only if we consider thinking as an activity in the wake of philosophy as a series of experiments and paths toward producing tentative, sometimes fragile, and hybrid meaning’ (Broglio, 2011, p. xviii). Steve Baker also argues for the potential of contemporary art to engage with other animals in a way that leaves space for difference: ‘art has the potential to offer a distinct way of framing or unframing issues, not an approach that’s more radical or open minded or curious or inventive than the thinking found in other disciplines, but one that simply employs different tools for thinking, and one that’s sometimes viewed with suspicion because of their unfamiliarity’ (Baker, 2013). Examples of practice that these writers point to include Olly and Suzi, whose work incorporates nonhuman animals as cocreators, and the rituals and interventions of Marcus Coates. While the practical experiments I have reported here explore alternative ways of thinking about a person of another species, they do so in ways that are distinct from these other artists by relying on historical material and by approaching the subject rather indirectly.

First, in collecting second-hand books I have critically engaged with the claims and practices of comparative psychology in the last century. Although I would not reject all its contents out of hand, I have made my own archive of these outdated objects of knowledge to displace its claims to know other animals’ minds and/or behaviours through laboratory experiments. My repositioning of this material within installations in the residency context allowed it to become the focus of discussion as the context for Alpha’s drawing practice – the primary topic of enquiry.

Second, in tracing the figures of Alpha’s drawings that appeared in Schiller’s report (1951) my intention was not so much to analyse as to reconsider the significance of Alpha’s drawings in the context of discussions of drawing. I found that although I could imagine various readings of the marks, and I could accept them as the figurative outcomes of a drawing process, I was receiving them at so many stages removed that I could not get close to finding Alpha in them. Their significance rested on the repeated acts of reiteration by which I was able to see them. All I could do was to re-imprint them, in Derrida’s terms, or to re-mark them, as a means to draw attention to this evidence of a particular life spent in captivity.

Third, in the residency at MEANTIME I was able to lay out objects and partition spaces to get the measure of Alpha’s story: the dimensions of the cage and the drawing board, the positions of observer and observed, and the colour and size of the test sheets. Use of measurement was in part a comment on the regulatory framework and knowledge practices of the laboratory, but it was also a means to reproduce the proportions of living quarters and drawing surfaces so that these could be understood at a bodily level. This consisted of testing various arrangements of objects in provisional installations, using drawings and diagrams as modes of planning and reflection, performing actions to test different relationships toward text (such as cutting into books and copying/erasing quotations), and documenting outcomes using photography and digital video. The movability of objects, the changeable nature of lighting conditions and projections, and the provisionality of drawing were all deployed within these artistic experiments. Such strategies were set in contrast to scientific methods, which require constant, regulated conditions and are productive of hard facts. The aim of the installations was to investigate the shifting status of Alpha as object of scientific knowledge, as subject of relationships with human carers, as human stand-in for the purposes of psychological experiment, as a body within the regulated framework of the laboratory, and as author of a number of drawings.

My final act of tracing was to write out, again and again, the quotation from Schiller’s report that had set off the whole enquiry, to make it paper the walls of the cell I had created during my residency at MEANTIME. In keeping with Alpha’s treatment of her own drawings, this was ripped up at the end.

Although I have repeated the exercise, I would say it is remarkable that Alpha's speedily produced drawings have received so much attention, and have been cited in disciplinary contexts as diverse as psychology, anthropology, ethology, zoology, and aesthetic theory. Drawings made by nonhuman animals are still met with surprise and conflicting responses. Alpha’s have undergone an enduring cycle of citation and reproduction, and have been employed to support a variety of arguments. This itself indicates their disruptive potential. My position is to insist on their possibility for meaning, although I acknowledge that I do not know how to read them and must therefore leave their meaning open, as I must also leave open the question of Alpha as the subject of drawing. My claim for their significance is as a record of graphically-directed bodily actions, made within a confined space by a sentient creature. I attach significance to the reports that Alpha wanted to draw, and also that she destroyed her drawings. This seems to indicate a desire to make something manifest in the small rectangular field or limited arena of visibility that was presented to her, to leave a trace of gestures, and, equally, to obliterate her traces, but not before they had been noticed. Ultimately, I see it as my responsibility to draw attention to these marks as having been made by a specific living being who, like the fictional Red Peter, had very little room for movement and, without speaking in words that those around her could recognise, no chance for escape.

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