Genesis

In my studies of children’s drawing, I found that children move through successive generations of visual and dynamic structure. At the very beginning of the infant’s life these take the form of physical actions but it soon became apparent that these actions are linked to emergent concepts the infant is forming. Dennie Wolf (1983) has described these as ‘waves’ of different approaches to emergent symbolisation. According to my observations, there seem to be three successive generations of visual and dynamic structure which sweep through the child’s interaction with a range of objects and media like waves. The First Generation of structure is largely topological and dynamic in character. It is to do with patterns of movement and the shape of trajectories in space and time. This generation of structure manifests itself in actions performed by children’s entire bodies in time and space and my observations show that this is so of the chimpanzees. In children’s paintings and drawings this structure is translated onto a two-dimensional surface by three basic actions of the drawing or painting hand. These actions issue from the natural oscillations of the infant’s muscular and skeletal frame (Smith, 1983) and comprise a side-to-side fanning motion of the drawing hand and arm, issuing initially from the shoulder (horizontal arc); an up-and-down stabbing gesture of the arm and hand (vertical arc); and a pushing and pulling movement to-and-from the self ( push-pull). These basic drawing actions will be described in full later but they are present in the painting by the chimpanzee Congo on page 12. The Second Generation or ‘wave’ of structure redefi nes the fi rst and elaborates upon it, manifesting itself in concerns about proximal and distal relationships, adjacency, closure, inside and outside relations, and the beginnings and ends of lines in space and time. Again, these are expressed through the child’s whole body in space-time as they are by the chimpanzee. Like the child, the chimpanzee can also encode these relationships onto the drawing surface and, again, can be seen in Congo’s painting. Here, just like a human child, Congo has as it were ‘openedup’, push-pulling and horizontal arcing movements so that loops and closures are described. In other paintings by Congo, the beginnings and ends of lines are clearly demarcated. The Third Generation of structure is about emergent concepts going-through, connectivity and attachment and also moment-of-turn and angular-variation. It

also brings in structural variations which make possible ensembles capable of the expression of feelings and ideas. In Congo’s painting there are some examples of rapid direction changes of his brush resulting in sharply angled lines but other aspects of Third Generation Structure, and the concepts which, in children’s painting, emerge along with them, are not clearly represented. Additionally, the child’s use and organisation of Third Generation Structure is accompanied by a new ability to use visual and dynamic structure in reference to further layers of meaning and metaphor. Whether chimpanzees are also capable of imbuing physical and visual structure with such meaning remains a mystery. During this level of representational thinking the child may also encode projective geometrical understandings of depth, three-dimensionality and line-of-sight or viewpoint. Again, I have not detected anything resembling projective relationships represented in chimpanzees’ drawings and paintings. Over the 3-year period of my research in Singapore Zoo, I see all the fi rst two generations of dynamic and visual structure in the actions of the chimpanzees and, with the exception of projective geometry, glimpse the beginning of the Third Generation too, in terms of an interest in connectivity between forms, goingthrough hollow or tubular forms and angular-variation or moment-of-turn (for example, in the way in which a branch might be bent through points of the compass). All of the emergent structural principles and concepts which underlie human children’s drawing during the First and Second Generations of visual and dynamic structure are present in the exploratory, investigative and ludic actions of the small group of chimpanzees who live in Singapore Zoo. Toward the latter stages of my research I also see dynamic and visual structure briefl y encoded on the drawing surface by the chimpanzees just as it is in human childhood. Whether this has, as it has in children’s drawing, additional levels of representation or symbolism within it, I do not know. Still, it would seem strange if there was not even a fl ickering of this possibility within the drawing actions of the chimpanzee. After all, we once thought that children’s early marking was devoid of meaning. An interesting possibility is then, if, during the sensory-motor phase of children’s drawing there are signifi cant levels of expressive and representational thought, then perhaps there are for the chimpanzees too. The chimpanzees’ deployment of drawing actions is certainly very similar to those I observed in human infancy. They are clearly not random, anymore than those of human infants are, but sensitive, intelligent, intentioned, exploratory and investigative. They are sometimes performed quite slowly and carefully – not at all like the stereotype of the wild, human, abstract-expressionist artist. Frans de Waal (1999) also makes this important point and, although Thierry Lenain disagrees that what the apes paint or draw is ‘art’, he too notes the characteristic care with which chimpanzees paint and draw (Lenain, 1997). As in human infancy, these are dynamic-structures, in the sense of events having internal principles which hold them together as forms. They emerge in a certain developmental sequence, became interwoven together and are mutually reciprocal in the way they nourish each other and in the way in which they cause structural variation.