Elephant artist is up to the tusk

Published on Sunday 23 July 2006 00:41

THE age-old debate about What Is Art grew four new legs last Thursday when paintings by a six-ton Thai elephant found their way across the ocean and onto the walls of Edinburgh's Dundas Street Gallery.

Paya, the dexterous elephant-turned-artist responsible, is claimed to have painted - among other things - her self-portrait after being trained to hold a brush in her trunk.

This, as you might expect, has attracted much bemusement in the art world. In a sense it takes us back almost 90 years, when French pop artist Marcel Duchamp pitched up at a gallery, urinal in hand, and announced he had created a sculpture.

Decades and concepts apart they may be, yet each define the same conundrum: who decides what qualifies as art and what constitutes an artist?

Next month, Edinburgh will host two giants of the art scene, Robert Mapplethorpe and Ron Mueck - both controversial and complex in their own right, both damned and celebrated by critics in equal measure. Where does an animal whose artistic integrity has yet to be validated fit in? Indeed, does it fit in at all?

Does the gallery hanging our four-legged friend's work validate its artistic licence by the very act of hanging it there? Perhaps most vitally, what is the motivation of the people who have already bought a 260 Paya painting?

It would be enlightening were we able to ask Paya herself whether, on the basis that her work is hanging in a gallery and has sold to collectors, she now considers herself an artist. Sadly, despite her many talents, she hasn't mastered verbal communication with humans. Yet.

Art and artistic folly have become dangerous bedfellows for a variety of reasons. As a society we are becoming more visceral consumers: open, adaptable and driven by the zeitgeist and what's in vogue. At a time in which so much can be, by definition, art, it can be difficult to draw definitive conclusions.

So too has the celebrity endorsement and fascination with pop-art blurred the boundaries between being an artist and actually creating art.

The musician Pete Doherty was accused of injecting a female fan, Laura McEvoy, with heroin as she lay unconscious at his Hackney flat, following publication of a photograph in May. Later he reportedly told police he was drawing blood to use in his "paintings". It is claimed a collection of Doherty's "works" - mostly painted by syringe using his own blood - will be shown as part of a public exhibition at a London gallery.

In June, the Royal Academy in London made its own - infinitely more amusing - judgment call when it accidentally selected a plinth that had become separated from its sculpture for its Summer Exhibition. With this decision, a slate slab and a bone-shaped stand became worthy of display alongside high-profile works by Eduardo Paolozzi and Damien Hirst.

Perhaps the success of the underdog (or in this case elephant) is a timely reminder that the value of any work might be determined by its strength to strike a universal chord through the emotional impact it creates.

Paya's elephant portraits will never have the status of a Peploe or a Van Gogh. But does that make them any less art? If trunk-painting elephants are in vogue this week, so be it: the joy of art, high, low or otherwise is in its diversity, its impact and in the pleasure it brings. The critics might disagree. But, frankly, they can stick it in their trunks and smoke it.