So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?33
Can a monkey shudder, I wonder?
Untitled (Human Mask) has a soundtrack, but it's relatively inconspicuous. Apart from the initial plangent buzz of the drone, the woman's voice on the disaster tannoy, and later the sounds of the monkey's rapid footsteps and rain leaking through the roof, nothing much registers. The tannoy voice recurs once we are inside with the monkey, and it pierces the mundanity of the other sounds. It's portentous – in fact, more than portentous. As John Ashbery writes (about poems by Gertrude Stein), it's like ‘a piece of music by Webern in which a single note on the celesta suddenly irrigates a whole desert of dry, scratchy sounds in the strings’.34 There is, of course, sync sound for the monkey's movements, but much of it appears to be what film-makers call ‘atmos’, or background noise; often gathered after shooting but edited in ‘as if’. Atmos is often composition. Here it is the sound of almost nothing – what the world might be like when everything has been quieted.
Of course, we have no idea if what we are hearing is actual sync sound – the drone, the tannoy voice, the tip-tap of rain drops. I can imagine that tannoy voice reaching out into the darkest future, year by year, quieter, less pronounced, eventually starting to stutter, occasional missing words, the woman's voice dropping an octave or two and slowing transforming into an elongated, barely audible, almost libidinous, moan and then … silence. Forever. As I watch the film, there are other sounds, inside my head, where it's super noisy. So many voices pulling me one way, only to be knocked out by more anxious others. There is much to think about and much work to be done to enable at least one of those voices to become a sustained, interesting thought. I have to read another book, I say to myself, and re-read another, and also something I saw online. And so it goes. I kick myself for being such a lazy reader, never reading enough. I should be able to read a book a day; that seems reasonable on paper. Each day around four thousand books are published. Assuming that's accurate, if were to read one book a day, as Gabriel Zaid observes, I ‘would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day and [my] ignorance would grow four thousand times faster than [my] knowledge’.35
Singerie
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.
The exam is the history of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away –
but when it's clear I don't know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
– Wisława Szymborska36
In the 1960s, Desmond Morris, of The Naked Ape fame,37 had a primetime TV show called Zoo Time. Here he introduced to the world a chimp named Congo, described in the press at the time as an ‘abstract expressionist’ (fig.4). Congo enjoyed brief celebrity and even had a ‘one-monkey show’ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. People say that Picasso bought some of Congo's work, but this strikes me as apocryphal. Salvador Dalí apparently referenced the chimp as a painter once: ‘The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!’ Although this sounds like one of Dalí's typical provocations, I can find no recorded source for this quote, so it's likely apocryphal too. But this anecdotal storytelling, the citation of real and imagined historical encounters with monkey art, suggests that many people were in on the joke. The joke circles around the idea that if a monkey can do it, anyone can, and yet it took art of the modern era almost four hundred years to get to the exacting and deep intensity of abstraction. If Congo the monkey could achieve this in a few minutes, the fact that artists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Alma Thomas, Lee Krasner, Jack Whitten, Piet Mondrian, Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning came to abstraction through an understanding of the entire history of painting quite simply evidenced wasted time.
Around the time Congo died, another monkey, known as Pierre Brassau, was busy painting different kinds of ‘abstract’ works, in a hoax perpetuated by Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson, who staged a public exhibition of Brassau's paintings at Gallery Christinae in Göteborg, claiming that they were by a forgotten French artist recently rediscovered. The exhibition was a mischievous trap for clients and critics: Would they be able to tell the difference between a chimp's abstract painting and the ‘real thing’? It all gets a bit tedious from here, and only mildly amusing (although one of the first serious art reviews of ‘Brassau's’ work opened with the observation that the paintings were so bad, it looked as though they had been painted by an ape). What is amusing, however, is that Morris's, and even more so Axelsson's, provocations feel themselves like contemporary art of some kind. It is not the kind that draws much of my attention, but its agonistic character is certainly familiar. Actually, if you think about it more carefully, presenting monkey painters as legitimate abstract painters was somewhat like internet art, avant la lettre.
The history of art features a fair number of monkeys, some as leading characters, others more as extras. Singerie, meaning ‘monkey trick’, describes a genre of painting showing monkeys mimicking human behaviours. The genre became popular in the sixteenth century (although its theme was once common in ancient Egypt). Practitioners include Pieter van der Borcht, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Titian, David Teniers the Younger and his brother Abraham. And later, Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, George Stubbs, Frida Kahlo and others. By the eighteenth century, singerie had generally evolved into singe peintre, depictions of monkeys performing as artists, perhaps satirising the art world (‘even a monkey can do this’) or making fun of polite society at large, its airs and pomposity. A product of European orientalism, singerie paintings certainly catered to the market's colonial predilections.
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's Le Singe peintre (1740) is my favourite work of singerie (fig.5). It is an unusual painting for the genre. And ironic. Chardin is making fun of academic painting, I think, but he spares the monkey its typical humiliation. The monkey, to all intents and purposes, is painting a still life with classical form. So as she paints, she should be looking at the small statue and other small objects spread out compositionally in front of her, the traditional forms of an academic art education. But in fact, not only is she not copying the figurine (no sign on the canvas), she's actually looking at you. She has found you and will paint you. Or will you set her free?
Chardin's Le Singe peintre was one of the first works I thought about when I started looking at Huyghe's film. Maybe it was something about the way the sleeve sits on the monkey's arm? Or maybe the prehensile foot on the easel support? But most of all, I think it was because of the monkey's look: it condenses sorrow, pain, curiosity, confidence and plea. It's all of those things and none of them, proving that what she thinks and really knows is something, but something we will never know. With Untitled (Human Mask), we attempt to understand the monkey's performance by projecting onto its body what we know of human emotional body language, and the mask is central to this mechanism. It's a paradoxical prosthetic: designed to make humans appear more generic, here the mask facilitates our attribution of specific traits to the monkey – human kinds of purpose and style, in spite of its impossible-to-know consciousness.