The self-portrait of the Ape

The Self-portrait of the Ape

In 1993, African-American visual artist Glenn Ligon asked a series of friends to describe him as one would describe a sketch. He collected practical information about height, physical complexion, skin color, hair color, eye color, and characteristic features. Using the information provided by his acquaintances as descriptive material, he created a series of lithograph posters entitled “Runaways” (English for Runaway or Fugitivo). These posters reproduce the content collected by the artist, resembling the posters that owners of enslaved people in the 18th century used in the USA when searching for their “properties,” as described by the museum itself, which exhibits Ligon’s work in its collection. This series of 10 pieces exhibited at MoMA (Museum of Modern Arts in New York) is presented by the artist as a kind of self-portrait that exposes how a description considered “objective” or “neutral” about a person is circumscribed by the context and culture in a way that merges with the identity of the person(s) it portrays. Ligon identified elements in the description of his friends that resembled the description of fugitive slaves and saw this as an opportunity to artistically address historical crossings of his own identity and issues dear to American society to this day.

An exercise in portraying general elements starting from oneself, from the human artist who feels and expresses himself. The self-portrait is essentially a biographical expression. It is a way for the artist to express and cultivate his technique while expressing views of himself, his world, and his time. It was a technique widely explored by Frida Kahlo, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and a multitude of other renowned creators. One can only imagine the psychological issues that could arise in the minds of these artists when portraying themselves.

As we are very accustomed to photos taken from higher angles with poorly framed postures and duckbills in selfies on social media, portraying oneself in a perpetual work (such as a painting on canvas or a printed photograph) is an exercise that can prove quite challenging. A physical work, unlike a digital photo, has dimensions (length, weight, size) in the real world. This tends to make it costly, difficult to hide, and accessible to people nearby who move around the home space. Not everyone immediately feels comfortable keeping a painting of themselves displayed on the wall of their bedroom or in the center of the room, especially when it’s a photograph or painting created by themselves. It’s a direct expression of our capabilities, difficulties, and limitations.

Anyone who has tried to delve into the world of photography in a more or less amateur way must have encountered an infinity of bad shots, issues with lighting and posture, or simply a recurring dissatisfaction with what they managed to capture through their own individual efforts. Looking at the blank screen, like the blank page, is looking at something that has the potential for eternity. And I would wager that almost no one wants to leave a bad photo, drawing, painting, or text as an eternal mark.

When we portray ourselves in a self-portrait of any kind, we seek something recognizable. It is not uncommon for us to start from a place of unfamiliarity with our own figure in photos. We examine critical points of our own silhouette and invest time in identifying features that we recognize as our own, individual, and distinctive. Spots, lines, smiles, marks — these unique and unusual attributes serve more as an identity than, obviously, recognizing common features (arms, legs, torso, etc.).

Self-recognition is a process defined by an individual’s ability to identify themselves as an entity distinct from others and their environment. In comparative research, it is usually measured through the Mirror paradigm. Self-recognition was once considered a central process in defining the self as identity and consciousness. However, more recently, scientists have demonstrated that entirely different neural systems are involved in the processes of self-recognition, consciousness, and self-awareness. On one hand, self-recognition is based on perceptual neural pathways and the salience network. Neural circuits connecting brain regions such as the visual cortex, parietal cortex, insula, and prefrontal cortex define the experience and performance of self-recognition (Asakage & Nakano, 2022; Tisserand et al., 2023). Consciousness, on the other hand, is a much more complex process to define, measure, and recognize in nonhuman animals. If we take into account the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, the evidence of consciousness as a convergent process of the evolution of cognition seems to be a common fact for neuroscientists, comparative psychologists, and evolutionists. It establishes that, among mammals, there are homologous functional neuro-anatomical and neural pathways, shared as a common biological basis of conscious processes. Furthermore, in birds, there are analogous neural bases that, despite the absence of some higher cortical structures, appear to possess the same functional properties that partially support the presence of conscious experiences among this taxon. This type of evidence is corroborated by the fact that humans without neo-cortices can also experience deep emotional, affective, and conscious experiences through, for example, deep brain stimulation.

It is well known that among different animal species, there is recognition of behavioral syndromes that mark each individual in a population for their individuality, a process also called animal personality. Examples of behaviors taken as evidence of animal personality include specific food preferences, social interaction patterns, activity levels, and reactivity to environmental stimuli. More than anecdotes described in the 19th century among naturalists and those curious about animal behavior, we are compiling evidence that shows how these individualities converge to form a sense of self, a conscious mental life, and, for some species, a true “stone age” for non-human civilizations that we will probably never see given how quickly we have destroyed the biosphere and virtually all terrestrial ecological systems. In addition to the profound bioethical and metaphysical questions that this observation raises for us, it confronts us with a curious question: if there is so much mental life, intentionality, consciousness, use of tools, creativity, and culture, why have we not yet seen the self-portrait of the monkey? Where are the cave paintings, sculptures, or artistic processes that express the emotions, intentions, and questions of the mental life of these animals? What still separates art from non-human animal life?

These are the questions that could and should make us ponder our (until now) only known cognitive condition of expressing ourselves spontaneously and actively through art. It is important to highlight that the apparent absence of artistic expressions in the animal world, apart from human culture, is not due to an absence of aesthetic sense. There is converging evidence for several aspects of human aesthetic appreciation. Animals have already shown themselves capable of recognizing human emotions in photos and paintings (Albuquerque et al., 2016; Ferretti & Papaleo, 2018), demonstrating not only the ability to identify, but to prefer symmetry and proportionality (Mandoki, 2017; although not of universal form, see Mühlenbeck et al., 2016). It is also possible to identify idiosyncrasies in the creation of tools among non-human primates (Bandini & Tennie, 2020; Pal & Sinha, 2022). This type of evidence strengthens the idea of free expression and aesthetic sense in non-human animals, but it still does not constitute

artistic manifestation even in its most primitive form, as we see in the use of toys, the creation of ornaments, and the expression of paintings in hominids since the beginning of human natural history (Mithen, 1996).

I don’t think we should make this an ode to art as yet another tradition of separating the human spirit from its natural roots. I say this without any demerit to art as knowledge and a form of expression. On the contrary, the study of Neuro-aesthetics and the Evolutionary bases for artistic creation seems to be a field rich in potential insights into our understanding of the genesis of human mental life, our intellectual capabilities, and our potential for sociability, creation, and communication. However, I believe that we should return to the initial question about self-portraits: even though it can be done, the creation of self-portraits has not always been a common and valued trend and form of expression in human artistic production throughout history. It emerged as a socially disseminated practice within a context of valuing the individual and technique in a search for identity through introspective means.

As a trend or fashion, the monkey self-portrait has perhaps not yet been encountered less due to impossibility and more due to the circumstance that its non-human primate cultures have not yet identified context and value in the production of orbs, sketches, ornaments, or proto-sculptures in which the features, hair, and silhouette of notable and prominent figures and characters within the group appear prominently. For those who already seem to have a good command of tools, creativity, aesthetic sense, and recognition of artistic patterns, creating art does not seem distant and unattainable. But perhaps that’s how it seems to us who still don’t know what canvas, what watercolor, or what brush will be used to paint the self-portrait of the Ape.

References

Mithen, S. (1996). The prehistory of the mind: A search for the origins of art, religion, and science. Thames & Hudson.

Albuquerque, N., Guo, K., Wilkinson, A., Savalli, C., Otta, E., Mills, D. (2016). Dogs recognize dog and human emotions. Biol. Lett. 12: 20150883. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0883

Mandoki, K. (2017). Bio-aesthetics: The Evolution of Sensibility through Nature. Contemporary Aesthetics, 15, 1–10.

Ferretti, V., & Papaleo, F. (2019). Understanding others: Emotion recognition in humans and other animals. In Genes, Brain and Behavior (Vol. 18, Issue 1). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/gbb.12544

Pal, A., & Sinha, A. (2022). Beyond food for thought: tool use and manufacture by wild nonhuman primates in nonforaging contexts. In Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences (Vol. 47, p. 101201). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2022.101201

Bandini, E., & Tennie, C. (2020). Exploring the role of individual learning in animal tool-use. In PeerJ (Vol. 8, p. e9877). PeerJ. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9877

Mühlenbeck, C., Liebal, K., Pritsch, C., & Jacobsen, T. (2016). Differences in the Visual Perception of Symmetric Patterns in Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus abelii) and Two Human Cultural Groups: A Comparative Eye-Tracking Study. In Frontiers in Psychology (Vol. 7). Frontiers Media SA. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00408

Tisserand, A.; Philippi, N.; Botzung, A.; Blanc, F. Me, Myself and My Insula: An Oasis in the Forefront of Self-Consciousness. Biology 2023, 12, 599. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/biology12040599

Asakage, S., Nakano, T. (2023). The salience network is activated during self-recognition from both first-person and third-person perspectives. Human Brain Mapping, 44, 559–570.