"Humans are the only animals that draw."

The following quoted passage is from a really lovely little book: The Undressed Art: Why we Draw by Peter Steinhart.

36
“Humans are the only animals that draw. While showmen and hucksters have gotten elephants and chimpanzees to drag paintbrushes across paper and canvas, so far as we know the animals are simply manipulating materials and not making representations of things. As rare as the ability is in other species, drawing is almost universal among humans; it is as human a quality as speech and bipedal locomotion. Practically every human being draws at some point in childhood. As adults, we draw maps to direct people to our houses, diagram schemes for seating guests at a dinner party, sketch plans for the bookshelves we intend to build, make graphs of corporate performance.

The qualities that separate the human mind from the minds of other creatures are those that enable us to make images and symbols. Other animals vocalize, but we develop complex languages. That the ability to symbolize with words is built on brain structures that evolved long before humankind did is suggested by the fact that, under laboratory conditions, chimpanzees and gorillas have acquired human sign language. . . . “

Syracuse University physicist Erich Harth theorizes that the human brain developed the ability to formulate mental images and to place them under the control of other brain functions as a way of extending short-term memory of details, sequences and relationships. Humans who elaborated these abilities could thus see more complex patterns in the world around them and could store information that allowed them to compare and contrast things and to understand causes and consequences. Human with such abilities could manipulate these images in such a way as to solve problems.

Harth suggets that other species have limited abilities to do this. A dog that winds its leash sround a tree may not be able to see that it can free itself by backing up. Our closest primate relatives share some of our imaginative abilities. A chimpanzee, for example, can see that by moving a box judiciously, it can reach a bananna placed on a shelf. Dolphins also seem to have some abilties in this regard. . . .” 37

This whole thing fascinates me – I wonder how this relates to the red dot experiment they did on chmips that demonstrated some sense that they can tell that a chimp in the mirror is THEM. How does this relate to their ability to conceive of an image as a REPRESENTATION or symbol of a real thing, and what is it that prevents them from MAKING such representations, or to what extent CAN they generate representations themselves. Can they make representations in a symbolic, or canonical way? Learn that a circle with two triangle ears means cat, but ony when it it is drawn a certain way? Or are they cognitively limited? Can they recognize images of certain complexity (photos, moving video, etc.) but not abstracted or simplified to lines or symbols (bathroom door man?) . . . and is their ability to create representations limited by dexterity and physical skills, mental acuity, cognition, etc? Are they trapped in 2-year old brain where they can only draw a person with a big circle head and 4 stick limbs or draw a teacup with the handle showing out the left side no matter what view of the teacup is actually in front of them? I really want to know who does primate drawing research! This is fascinating stuff.

Also, I bolded a couple of things because it reminds me of this whole attempting to distinguish ourselves from animals . . . and the idea that drawing itself is one of those distinctions (well, art-making in general, I suppose) is interesting.

Two NASA fun-facts

Laurie Anderson was the first, and last, artist in residence at NASA. Hmmm.

NASA used vultures to find the remains of the space shuttle Columbia.

Some thoughts - an artist statement of sorts - in progress

As I try to sort out what on earth I'm going to say on Friday during my public critique, here are some thoughts:

There is a cluster of connected ideas that I have been thinking about over the past several months, centered loosely around our relationship to animals. It started with the interesting notion that we often have to personify animals or imbue them with human characteristics in order to care about them. Like, it's not enough just to say "animals live in the woods so let's leave them alone and stop cutting down the woods", we have to give the animals human virtues. A good example and the animal that started me down this path is the rat -- if there are a whole bunch, they are pests, an infestation, and we exterminate them. On the other hand, these same animals are described as being smart, affectionate, social, capable of learning new things, recognizing their owner and being playful. There is even evidence that they laugh when they play. I'm interested in the way that this rhetoric or framing of animals affects the way we view them, and how problematic it can be if you have 30 rats chewing through your electric cords or want to eat a hamburger.

The second is a throwaway comment someone made that pointed out that at many points in history, whenever someone in power wants to enact a genocide, they repeatedly compare the "lesser" group of people to cockroaches and pests. It's amazing to me that these very simple rhetorical/verbal devices can have such a profound influence on the way we view something.

Therefore, at this moment, I think I am interested in this rhetorical framing of animals and people.

The third idea that I think is somewhat related -- this notion of specialness, wanting to be special, individual or "real" like the velveteen rabbit being personified and unique and special, like Carl Sagan . . .

I realize that this collection of notes and thoughts, while directly feeding into and really generating my artistic output, makes less sense when it talks about that artistic output and doesn't show it. But that isn't the point. :) Suffice it to say right now I'm making paintings, and they are of stuffed animals, and I see them as a way to investigate the way we look at animals. With these pieces, I'm particularly interested in the moment where the image slips between being something cuddly and something life-threatening, something alive-looking, dead-looking, and never alive in the first place, between a pile of toys and a pile of slaughtered animals, etc.

More on Carl Sagan - the other side of idols

I think from time to time it's good to remember that these people who we idolize are very much human. :) This idea is especially important to me if I were to, say, write a screen play or something about his life, which I really wish already existed. I'm not sure why I always want to do this, but if the future holds some way for me to accomplish this desire, then the following anecodotes seem important. These quotes are taken from a blog called Neatorama: 10 Neat Facts About Carl Sagan, but some of the facts are decidedly not neat. :)

Especially this one:

In 1994, Apple chose the internal codename "Carl Sagan" for its PowerMac 7100. Though it was meant as an homage to Carl (and an in-joke that the computer would make Apple "billions and billions" of dollars), they also used the codenames "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion" for the Power Mac 6100 and 8100, respectively. When Carl found out that he was being put alongside scientific hoaxes, he sued Apple. Though Apple won the suit, the codename was changed to BHA (Butt Head Astronomer) ... which prompted yet another lawsuit from the p.o.'d astronomer!

and this

Carl's popularity had backfired on him not once but twice. In 1967, he was denied tenure at Harvard because his colleagues bristled at "what they perceived as self-aggrandizement and pandering to the public."

There were some more idol-puncturing thoughts in the reviews of his biographies.
One of them is Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life
The other is A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone

Amazon.com Review
Carl Sagan may have been one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Then again, he may have been a relentless self-promoter who convinced everyone he was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Keay Davidson, science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, aims to explain this complicated man in his biography. One thing is clear: Sagan was an extremely difficult man to love, a scientist whose passion for astronomy and biology was unparalleled, but who had little ability to express basic emotions to his wives and children. Davidson looks for reasons for this emotional distance in Sagan's childhood, when his relationship with his mother was intense and sometimes difficult. She encouraged her bright young son to be an "intellectual omnivore," to be passionate about knowledge, but she didn't give him the tools to relate to humans as individuals.

As his stellar science career developed, Sagan built a reputation as a leftist who believed that "science could serve liberal ideals," and as an arrogant man with an unshakable confidence in his own brain. Davidson writes that Sagan developed his famous skepticism as an undergraduate. Sagan suffered from a "troubling mix of intense emotion and stark rationalism," writes Davidson. He succeeded (mostly) in balancing passion with reason, a balance that made him a perfect popularizer of science, a trustworthy authority who preached that an open mind was the most valuable scientific tool. Davidson was influenced personally by Sagan's writings, and he sometimes works a little too hard at puncturing the myths surrounding Sagan, but this biography is one that deserves to be read by Sagan's fans and detractors alike. It's a compelling, very real assessment of an all-too-human god of science. --Therese Littleton

Another reviewer compares the two books, so I'm going to put that here too:
"John Rummel (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews

Carl Sagan : A Life by Keay Davidson; (see also my review at Carl Sagan : A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone - this review considers both books)
Carl Sagan is easily the second most famous scientist of the 20th century. If you came of age in the period 1970-1990, you were influenced by Sagan - period. Whatever you may think of him as a scientist, you must admit that nobody did more to popularize science in the public eye during this period. The two most obvious examples are his Cosmos television series and his numerous appearances with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.

Poundstone's book reflects Ann Druyan's influence much more than Davidson's. The result is a much more flattering account of Sagan's life, potentially minimizing some of the warts. Davidson, if anything, spends too much effort trying to psychohistorically analyze Sagan's two failed marriages and his fractured relationship with oldest son Dorion.

Davidson also focuses much more attention on Sagan's books, attempting to plot the development of his career as a scientist and maturity as a writer based on each book's unique character. Here again, he attempts to delve below the surface into the hidden motives and influences. For instance, while both Poundstone and Davidson detail Sagan's marijuana use, Davidson goes further and suggests that the Pulitzer-winning Dragon's of Eden was largely a marijuana- induced work.

William Poundstone Focuses more on his scientific achievements, with emphasis on the many conferences he chaired regarding SETI, exobiology, and his work on the Voyager and Mariner probes to Mars and the gas giants. Some of the reviews of the latter actually read like a popular scientific account of these missions, written around Sagan's contribution and perspective.

A very rough generalization would be that Davidson looks more closely at Sagan's personal life while Poundstone looks more closely at his scientific achievemnts, though both books do cover the whole picture. Poundstone's book left me with more of a positive regard for Sagan though, and struck me as the better book of the two. Poundstone's account strikes me as first and foremost a work of scientific biography, with more detail of Sagan's scientific achievements.

And finally, one more review, about the Poundstone book.

It is impossible to be neutral about Carl Sagan (1934-1996). Though supporters and detractors agree that he was one of the most brilliant and influential scientists of the 20th century, they argue about the ways he handled his gifts, fame and prominence. Poundstone (Prisoner's Dilemma; Big Secrets) does nothing to reconcile these disparities. Instead, he lays out the details of Sagan's life and work, revealing why some people idolized him and others disdained him. Sagan's overwhelming need for love and attention destroyed his first marriage to Lynn Margulis, Poundstone explains. Decades later, Margulis remains ambivalent, admiring Sagan the public figure but not the man. Second wife Linda Salzman could neither forgive Sagan nor understand his betrayal when he and their friend Ann Druyan announced that they were profoundly in love and planned to marry. Salzman is conspicuously missing from Poundstone's list of acknowledgments, just as Sagan's alienated best friend, Lester Grinspoon, was conspicuously absentAso reports PoundstoneAfrom Sagan's deathbed. Sagan's scientific and public life is best known for its central quest and mission: searching for extraterrestrial life and sharing his love of science with the world. The so-far fruitless quest for ET continues, but Sagan's mission succeeded beyond all expectations. Because his greatest allegiance was to truth, Sagan would probably like this book. It tells readers why he chose to warn the world about "nuclear winter" despite weaknesses in the theory, and it includes the influence of marijuana highs on his work. Poundstone does not draw conclusions, but presents the evidence of Sagan's life and allows readers to develop their own theories of what that life might mean to their own. 16 b&w photos. Agent, John Brockman. (Oct.)

Some thoughts of self-awareness

You can run yourself ragged with self-awareness. It seems lke self-awareness is the necessary condition, an obligation, for all cultural prodcution now. and its exhuasting, to try and anticipate all criticisms, reactions, and thoughts and them off by demonstrating your thoughtful awareness of yourself. This is why deeply sincere things, cultural products of earlier times, seem so attractive to me, I think. There are those who are blissfully un-self-aware. Often, we make fun of those people, laughing at their ideas and feeling alright for doing so because they surely won't even be aware of themselves enough to notice we are laughing at them. Like this man on the Little Grey Book lecture series who owns a presidential museum in Ohio and who claims that George Washington was not the first president, among other things, with illogical, self-aggrandizing committment. The audience laughes at all his direct quotes - they are indeed, laughable, implausible or impossible arguments, far-fetched and amazing propositions, all filtered through a supremely un-self-aware personality. It's easy to LIKE this man, for all his obviously misguided notions, in fact, they make him endearing, but only in so far as he is unaware of how ridiculous they sound. He is piteous more than respectable. But we really only like him because he is funny to us, the audience. There are those who deeply and earnestly beleive in something, who have no patience or maybe even lack the sense of humor to make fun of themselves, and do not elicit laughter, like (here is comes. . . .) Carl Sagan. His "cosmos" seem to be a product of an earlier time when you could be serious without the need to acknowledge the irony of what you were doing. I love traveling to his place, via pixellated youtube clips, because, as soon as I got over the slightly cheesy graphics, the outdated and therefore kind o fhumorous musical scores and the occassional bad joke, i realized he had won me over with his overwhelming sincerity. I couldn't laugh at him walking among models of planets anymore once I saw the earnestness with which he was sharing his beleifs to us. I admire this. It is refreshing and endearing and deserving of respect in a very different way than the cold, removed, distant irony of so many cultural products today. I think it is because these videos could so easily fall into ironic appreciation that I love them even more, because they defy you to like them that way. You can try, and get your joke tshirt with carl sagan's head on it, but that just betrays your superficial rleatiosnhip to it all. If you allow yourself to put aside the obligation of hyper-self-awareness, you can see something very lovely and true unfolding, or at least that's how I see it. And that's the place where I'd like to be.

On Sandy Skoglund - some notes from some books

Back to Sandy Skoglund, this time with more information.

In an interview with Robert Rosenblum

Notes about her life: She went to University of Iowa and was interested in "Hollywood narrative structure"

She talks about how it has to do with prejudices in the culture - against snakes and scaly, hard surfaces "reptilian" "as well as Jungian or Freudian yearnings for things soft and cuddly." Her "Walking on Eggshells" has snakes and bunnies in it. AHHHH.

But then there is this shift "for example, the purpose [with Radioactive Cats] there was to undermine the stereotype in our culture of the cute, domesticated pet. The cats are meant to dominate the scene as survivors in a postnuclear situation because they've adapted by turning green."

This is really interesting to me for a few reasons, One is a little dumb, I'm fascinated by this convention that bright lime green is automatically this science-fictiony, radioactive, creepy.

This idea of things taking over, crawling, something inocuous becoming a real problem, is something I love, and she has one called "Atomic Love" where RAISINS are covering everything. And that is so great. Because a raisin is so cute and small and actually kind of funny to me, and then there are thousands of them and they totally make me want to scream and run away. The interviewer in this book describes it as "the kind of horrific conversion of infinitely small things suddenly blotting out humanity . . . it's such a fascinating mix of supermarket abundance and the extinction of us poor individuals . . . " (emphasis mine). This is so fascinating to me that abundance, which I have previously talked about as being safe and secure in it's plentitude, actually becomes horrific at a certain point. I love when it becomes threatening.

She said something about drawing a line between an art installation and a fun house. I LOVE THE FUN HOUSE. So creepy. :) I kind of secretly wish I could create things like that, a room full of the balloons, mirrors, floating up to the sky. Loosing your balloon, or being overwhelmed by other balloons. This also has the do with a stalker thing - "YOU ARE SO SPECIAL." So much so that i bought you 900 balloons. CREEP.

She did one called "Sock Situation." I think this is FANTASTIC. She talks about how the objects in the photos break up the space, almost crawl across the surface, which I can totally see in this one. The best part is the guy trying to vacuum one up. :) She did this for a display window in Barney's Dept. Store, by the way.

Her choice of color, she says, was about rejecting the black and white photography of the 70's and "just wanting to be bad, in poor taste, and make something that was aggressive on the wall."

They talk about how her work has to do with horror, science fiction, and Suburbia (!)
"Science fiction presented a landscape that reflected the depth of my experience of suburban life in America because it's a landscape of openness, of empty space, and a lot of anxiety going on in that open space."

"To me, terror is more terrifying if it relates closely to ordinary life. If it's more plausible, its more terrifying."

-------
Carol Squiers:
"Throughout her work Skoglund sets up a series of disquieting oppositions, among them visuality versus content, celebration versus critique, whimsy versus horror, the banal versus the extraordinary, the dream versus the nightmare." I LOVE THIS.

This author also talks a lot about what the photograph means as it is displayed next to the installation. Which makes me think about what a painting might do next to a thing, or how one might not have to abandon painting things in order to utilize other media. Because the relationship between the two (even trying to figure out what is different -- in her case the presence or absence of actual humans is pretty huge-- is really interesting.) The photograph is the lens through which she composes the whole installation, though, which is really cool. She makes sure none of the animals overlap or obscure eachother from the camera's viewpoint.

She did an early performance piece where she kicked "colored candies" (jellybeans and gumdrops) around the floor and swept them up in a "parody of abstract expressionism" which the author calls her first experiment in what she calls "the inappropriate use of food." I like that phrase too. Candy is an untapped area here. To me anyway, because the kid fantasy, and even an adult fantasy, is to have just TONS of candy, so much more than you could ever eat -- the whole thing with saving Easter bunnies a whole year just so there is another one to replace it. So . . .

She said she was "trying to make something that my relatives could understand."

They mention how "orderly repetetivness" can give a "nightmarish quality." Like marching bands? :) [ much of my previous work is about marching bands ]

On why she sculpts the animals herself: "I didn't want to critique 'catness' as seen by our culture, which is what would happen if I went out and got a found-object cat to photograph; using found objects is inevitably very toungue-in-cheek, coy, kitsch. So I decided to make a cat." I like this too.

They talk a lot about her flattening visual space with the colors or the pattern.

Revenge of the Goldfish is so great because they are floating. How aresome is this??

And now, here are just a deluge of images of her and her work:

Also, I am constantly amazed that people don't bring her up more often, either to me because I'm really into repetition, animals, weirdness, etc, but in general. People don't see to know who she is, yet I find all of this to be fantastic and great and overflowing with content. 

How do you make an un-ironic portrait of Carl Sagan?

The world may never know.