SIMIAN AESTHETICS

Her pastels are explosive and bright, but we much preferred the "food color" paintings, in which the artist mixes her colors and produces rich organic tints, especially a complex and rather melancholic brown (one thinks of the notorious sadness of zoological confinement), which differs slightly from piece to piece, since Nonja produces it by mixing all available paints. The browns are set off by brighter colors. The lines are crisp and distinctive, not at all like "scribbles", strongly reminiscent of writing (rather like Japanese "grass-style" calligraphy): - quite formal, very elegant.
Arboreal apes move in a much more 3-dimensional space than our own hominid flatland, and it's interesting to think of Nonja's canvases as 2-D representations of 3-D kinetics. The pastels appear more in this style than the paintings, however, which seem to demonstrate an appreciation of the flatness of the surface and the constraints of the square or rectangular canvas.

It's difficult to agree with Ms. Kment's assertion that ape-art remains on the level of the scribbling of two or three-year-old humans, and must be consigned to the realm of "pre-aesthetics". The pastels might be interpreted thus, but the paintings seem far more deliberate, and are in fact indistinguishable from the work of certain abstract expressionists. Representation is missing, but not aesthetic sense, or "taste" - or motor control, for that matter. Nonja was born in the Zoo, which places her in a liminal space between wildness and "culture". How interesting, if she could use some of her art earnings to finance a visit to her ancestral jungle and get back to her "roots". Would her style change?

Do we need to protect our privileged "humanity" from all suspicion that cognition and self-awareness (and not mere "consciousness") are more widely distributed in the biosphere than current orthodoxy might allow? Apes seem non-human in that they do not "invent" art - but they are sapient enough to produce it, given the encouragement of some sympathetic Zoologists - and given some paint and brushes!

The line that separates Nonja from an Australopithecine tool-maker is not (I suspect) a distinct and measurable line. Evolution - whatever that may be! - appears to result in fixed categories such as "species"; but espirit (whatever that is!) follows a much rougher or fuzzier boundary. Perhaps a fractal boundary. An appreciation of such complexity might rescue us from the rigidity of our own definitions, including our definition of "self".

Nonja the artist is more than a curiosity. She is an enigma