My ant could paint that!
What invertebrates’ creations tell us about art
While compiling images for a guidebook to invertebrates and their tracks, Western Massachusetts-based biologist Noah Charney began entertaining an unscientific notion. Looking at the complicated patterns created by bees as they excised circular patches from leaves, the delicate arrangement of tiny hatchmarks made by a slug chewing its way across an algae-covered branch, or the radiating paths marking the progress of beetles through the bark of a fallen log, he made an observation: it looked like the bugs were making art.
We’re often helpless (even those of us, like Charney, with a master’s degree in biology) against a tendency to anthropomorphize nature: we’re forever seeing rock formations that look like faces, or animal behaviors that remind us of our own. Suspending his disbelief, Charney put together an online gallery of photos devoted to the question of invertebrate aesthetics. The question was, if insects are artists, what kind of artists are they?
As it happens, insects are Modernists. Their work is suffused with abstraction, pattern, and process. They favor bold, all-over compositions that emphasize the physicality of their materials: the rich colors of soil and leaves, the intricate interior structure of wood, the texture of sand and stone. They turn simple actions like chewing, carving, and egg-laying into complex displays of repetition and variation. When it comes to sculpture, insects are born bricoleurs. They fashion ad hoc constructions out of salvaged materials (like the chamber of the caddisfly larva, a casual yet considered arrangement of found rocks and debris) with an intuitive feeling for texture and color that would have made the Catalan architect Gaudí proud.
Interestingly, bugs seldom produce work that we would consider “naturalistic.” It certainly doesn’t depict the world the way we see it, or look the way that art is conventionally supposed to look. As with other Modernists, their work ditches a whole library full of art-historical knowledge: the rules of perspective, the principles of academic realism, and the accepted hierarchy of genres in the visual arts. (They don’t work in landscape, they work in the landscape.) So while you may discover the Matisse of the insect world, you will never find its Andrew Wyeth.
The irony here is that abstraction, the signal achievement of Western visual art in the 20th century, is still often regarded as a profoundly artificial art form. Abstract art, we’re taught, was symptomatic of a society’s estrangement from the natural world. For some people, the notion that it’s art at all is still up for debate: the popular critique of abstraction - that it doesn’t “look like” anything - has been around as long as the movement has.
For Modernists, this confusion was deliberate and necessary. Progress in art meant first of all scrapping some outmoded ideas: that art had to depict the observable world; that it needed to appeal to history, religion, or myth for grounding; that it necessarily involved any one set of tools, techniques, and materials. The result was an art of reduction and experimentation. From the Surrealists’ investigation of automatism (drawing or painting without conscious planning, in order to tap the secrets of the unconscious mind) to the exuberant play with materials that characterized the work of mid-century artists like Yves Klein and Morris Louis, artists attempted to get back to basics: of the self, and of the nature of art.
Abstraction was a useful visual language in which to conduct these inquiries. Freed from the task of representing things, the artist explored new relationships to the world and the artwork. Writing about “action painters” like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who had abandoned traditional components of painting like figure and composition in favor of an improvised exploration of mark-making and materials, mid-century critic Harold Rosenberg proclaimed that “what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” In other words, art became less a discipline or craft than a behavior: a repeated set of bodily gestures and interactions with materials that resulted in an artwork. And for many artists, the best behavior was spontaneous, instinctual, and free from cultural presuppositions - in short, natural. “I work inside out, like nature,” said Pollock, whose legendary painting approach - circling the canvas from above and dripping paint off the ends of brushes and sticks in loose, rhythmic whorls - more closely (and intentionally) resembled a spider spinning a web or the tracks of a beetle across a sand dune than the refined brushwork of Ingres.
Depending on our estimation of Modern artists and insects, the comparison between the two can be more or less flattering to either party. In a way, it’s a short leap from the timeworn complaint of the bemused art viewer - “My kid could do that!” - to asserting that the most esteemed examples of 20th-century art look like bug droppings. But in fact, the resemblance says a lot for the success of Modernism’s redefinition of the artwork: when we say that the work of invertebrates looks like art, we don’t mean that it resembles a Grecian bust or an Impressionist landscape. We mean that it looks like abstraction.
Roger White is a painter and a founding editor of the art journal Paper Monument. Noah Charney is co-author, with Charley Eiseman, of “Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” scheduled to be published in 2010 by Stackpole Books. More information at www.northernnaturalists.com. 
