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People Feature
Blame Canada? Hell, let's declare war!
It's a vile, cold, wooded wasteland populated with propaganda-spewing lumberjacks and their irritating ilk. Who needs it?
By Lance Gould
[03/23/00]

Nothing Personal
Hugs 'n' drugs
Mackenzie Phillips: "My father taught me how to shoot up"; Halle Berry: Why do bad drivers happen to good dogs? Plus: Mariah Carey says ninth-graders are hotter than she is!
By Amy Reiter
[03/22/00]

People Feature
Where the boys are
A new wave of films shows a fresh element in filmmaking: The sexualization of the male actor by the female director.
By Jessica Hundley
[03/22/00]

Nothing Personal
Another one cites the bust
"Love my breasts" disease strikes Zeta-Jones; Hef's a uniter, not a divider; and Beck on why he was bullied ... but in a fair way.
By Amy Reiter
[03/21/00]

Brilliant Careers
Timothy Ferris
Disregarding our illusory firewalls of thought, he boldly goes where no science writer has gone before.
By William Speed Weed
[03/21/00]

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The thing about elephants is they have this unique organ, the trunk. It has 50,000 muscles, much more than the hand. It has a sense of smell; it breathes. Imagine if your hand had a sense of smell. It's amazing, really. And art is born out of necessity. There are 3,000 elephants with no jobs. We can't set them free because there is no wilderness. Animal art, social concerns, environmental concerns -- all these important subjects of the end of millennium got connected in this project.

What does this project mean for the art world?

If this goes as planned it will change art forever. No kidding. We will have 1,000 painting elephants by the end of the year. They will make maybe 100,000 pictures a year. At some point the size of the enterprise will be so big it can compete with human art, whether you want it or not -- not compete, but influence each other.

An example is photography. I remember as a young artist, the worst accusation you could make of an artist was: "Are you a photographer or what?" People were ashamed to use photography. They always did, but they kind of concealed it. Now it's fashionable to be like a photographer. These relationships are always changing. Now people say, "Are you an elephant? Come on, what are you painting?" A couple of generations will really reject elephant art. But then new artists will come and say, "Yes, we are elephants!" Maybe art students will try to find their inner beast, their inner elephant. I don't know.

So someday all art will look a little more like elephant paintings?

The highest art for us is still self-expression, something inner -- if you don't think, maybe that's the best art. That's why the late art of [Willem] de Kooning is so good. He became senile. And in a way to be senile is to be like an elephant, or any other animal, totally mindless. And in a way maybe it's the best way to produce art. At that point the elephants can compete with us; it's a level playing field. With mathematics, I don't know if we'll ever achieve a level playing field. Actually, I am almost an elephant in mathematics.

Some people say what the elephants do is not art.

Well, what is art? With modern art it's always a question. Since the time of [Marcel] Duchamp, whatever is in the gallery or museum becomes art. That's the way it is now. And the question became irrelevant because if everything is art, nothing is, in a way. We are trying to take art from the museums and see if it works or not. If an object is taken out of the museum, will it still work as a piece of art or will it lose its value? It's a field war. We're not in a classroom.

Why was "The People's Choice" so controversial?

We learned from that project that art has become a new religion; it's a full-blown religion. People really go to museums to have something to believe, to have a mystical experience and stuff like that. And anything you say that is different seems blasphemous to them. You touch on something that is holy. Religion is like art -- it's not clear what is involved. A rational explanation of either of them never works. Does God exist? Does art exist? It lives on this irrational faith, and that is part of its power.

Has there been as much controversy about the elephant art?

Well, humor saves it. But if you talk about religious subjects as if they're not religious with a religious person, you can offend someone.

Do you have faith?

I'm an artist, but an old artist. I've had different stages in my artistic career. I have been passionately in love with art, maybe in a religious way. Now I'm in my atheistic phase.

Do you believe the elephants are making a kind of automatistic art?

The whole idea of automatism was reductionism, to go down, go simpler, in our feelings. That's kind of the 20th century. Maybe this is going even simpler, going to a "lower" species. I don't know. When Jackson Pollock was painting, was he thinking about anything? If he had been blindfolded, would his art be better or not as good? These are very profound questions which unfortunately I'm not intellectually prepared to solve. But it touches on a nerve. When I was younger I was sure that I could resolve some of these things with my brainpower, but now I understand I can't understand anything anyway. The point of the artist is that we can show. I'm not sure that we can make any decisions. We can just show people and let them decide for themselves.
salon.com | March 23, 2000

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