Zooquest In Art
Applying Arts Reasoning To Explain Sustainability
On 20 May 1515, an Indian rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon from the Far East. It was a gift from Sultan Muzaffar Shah II, ruler of Cambay (modern Gujarat), to Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, who was seeking permission to build a fort on the island of Diu. Albuquerque’s mission failed, but diplomatic gifts were exchanged, including the rhinoceros. At that time, the rulers of different countries would occasionally send each other exotic animals to be kept in a menagerie. The Diu rhinoceros was already well accustomed to being kept in captivity so Albuquerque decided to forward the gift, known by its Gujarati name of Genda, and its Indian keeper, named Ocem, to King Manuel I of Portugal. The rhino and its keeper sailed on the Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, which left Goa in January 1515. The ship, captained by Francisco Pereira Coutinho, and two companion vessels, all loaded with exotic spices, sailed across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and north through the Atlantic, stopping briefly in Mozambique, Saint Helena and the Azores.
This brief historical episode recorded in Durer’s imaginary woodcut of Genda set in motion a revolution in how humans view their non human biological relatives. In particular, it sets the scene for Zooquest In Art (ZIA), which is a network of schools emulating the story of Genda by exchanging artistic renderings of animals as conservation gatekeepers of their favourite nature site, local or international, with postcards and/or blog posts. In this context ZIA is a development of UNESCO’s concept of biosphere reserves as places where local communities are encouraged to become involved in defining their local wildlife and the plans for its conservation management. The standpoint of ZIA is that nature art acts as a messenger spreading ideas and achievements to other communities.
In a wider context, ZIA is an expression of a culture of nature that has sprung up, born of anxiety and anger around global warming, but passionate and progressive in its application of arts reasoning to explain sustainability. As an international movement it involves millions of people spilling across all art forms, media and behaviours that is extraordinary in its energies and its diversity. This turn towards cultural ecology has occurred in nurseries and universities, apiaries and allotments, transition towns and theatres, woodlands and festivals, charities and campaigns and in photography, film, music, the visual and plastic arts and throughout literature.
An important aim of these nature artists is the portrayal of symbolic content for communication with the viewer. This motivation is inherent in the work of the prehistoric cave artists of Lascaux and Chauve and the paintings of the abstract modernist, Paul Rothko and Adolf Gottlieb. Replying to a New York Times critic’s comments on a 1942 exhibition of their work, they wrote that art is ‘the significant rendition of a symbol. They asserted that the point of a work of art did not lie in an ‘explanation’ but in the interaction with the viewer, who must be persuaded by the paintings to see the world ‘the artist’s way’, not his own way. On climate change, for instance, we have the science, but still there are many people who do not accept it, even when we throw numbers at them. So what do we need? According to Patrick Kabanda, author of The Creative Wealth of Nations, we need stories. We need poetry. We need an emotional connection and it is important to reach people across the world in art as a common language. Art, as the UN puts it, can “help bring us together to reimagine a world ‘rebalanced,’ to be designed and built together for present and future generations.”
Along with the human form, animals were subjects of the earliest art ever created. We imagine that, to prehistoric artists, beasts represented food, but were also sacred, spiritual beings. Animals remained a vital component of all art in all cultures. With the Renaissance, the depiction of animals themselves, which had been important in much classical and medieval art, was neglected in favor of supposedly more elevated subjects, yet re-emerged in the eighteenth century with artists such as Stubbs, with his animal 'portraits,' and became part of the vocabulary of artists such as Géricault and Delacroix. The representation of animals also played an important and often overlooked rôle in the development of Modernism, which often sought subjects far away from anecdotal or heroic allegories. As an example of this, Anthony Roland, film maker and art expert, has created a unique archive of international talent in film-making and contemporary writing: the work of 230 film directors from 25 countries and 116 authors in conversation, in this award-winning collection of over 400 films covering prehistory to the present day. One of these themes is ‘animals in art’.
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