WE MIGHT be used to hearing tales of paintings being sold at auction for astronomical prices, but the auction sale of three works for a mere £17,000 had the art world aghast last week. While a Warhol failed to reach its reserve price, these paintings went for more than 14 times their estimate. The artist? A chimpanzee called Congo, celebrated for TV appearances on Desmond Morris’s 1950s Zoo Time.
The buyer, Howard Hong, a telecommunications consultant from California, noted how the works reminded him of early Kandinsky. They showed, he said, how the ability to conceive of abstract concepts is not exclusive to humans. His only regret about the three paintings, he added, is that they had not been titled by the chimp.
But what really lay behind this purchase? Times crossword completers might observe that the names Congo and Hong have something in common, possibly encouraging a special identification. Were Congo’s works the ones Hongo aspired to paint?
But there is a serious issue here. Congo’s oeuvre was championed as testimony to the origins of art itself. If the paintings were abstract, then abstraction is not a capacity unique to human beings. Yet this misses the point. There is nothing to suggest that the chimp’s paintings were abstract, just as there is nothing to suggest that he even conceived of them as paintings. It is us human beings who qualify them as paintings, and as abstract. Who knows what Congo thought?
Whatever it might have been, Congo becomes yet another animal example that human beings use to prove their own points. The Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan catalogued some of our wishful thinking here: if you want to justify marriage, point to pair-bonding of gibbons; if you prefer infidelity, look to chimpanzees. If you think humans are sociable, look at baboons; if not, orang-utans. If you want mothers to care for infants, use rhesus monkeys; if you want the father to be the primary caregiver, opt for titi monkeys or, if you prefer surrogate care, lionesses.
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If you think that men should dominate harems, cite elephant seals. But if you want women to have more power, refer to elephants. Nature, as Kagan says, has enough diversity to suit any argument.
So why not enjoy Congo’s oeuvre without having to prove a point? When a reporter asked Picasso his opinion of the chimp’s work, he left the room and then reappeared with his arms swinging like an ape’s, jumped at the reporter and bit him.
To Desmond Morris, it was Picasso’s way of saying: “The chimp and I are in the same business.” But was this the business of abstract painting or of being asked stupid questions?
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Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and author