1Over and over in the essays in this volume, we read about the complicated worlds in which humans and elephants interact, the borderlands where their cultures collide, and the practices which have made collaborations possible. In his “Foreword,” Vivek Menon described the “intertwined existence of man and elephant,” and this book makes clear that when we ignore how the lives of humans and elephants have always been interwoven, both of their communities suffer. To bring this book to a close, I would like to offer a brief history of what I think many might see as an almost trivial sideshow in the context of the serious challenges of human-elephant cohabitation in the 21st century. I offer the story, though, because I believe it points to both the dangers and hopes embedded in contemporary thought about elephants.

2In July 2001, I found myself outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. Watching the ferries coming and going while looking out to the opera house and busy harbour, I wondered about the unusual show I was about to see. When I finally joined the many people entering the museum that day, I couldn’t help but think that as much as the show was about paintings, it was also about the people thronging to see the works and the conversations they were having as they tried to figure out the importance of the exhibit.

3There were different historical paths leading people to the show that day. A few visitors followed a trail of interest in non-figurative art in the 20th century. As I caught snippets of their conversations, they reflected upon “the gallery” in defining art, the importance of intention and technique in understanding artists and their works, and whether the creation of art, the appreciation of beauty, and the ability to experience and reflect upon emotion might possibly be shared with other species. These visitors scrutinized artist biographies posted near the works, the apparent reactions of other visitors, and even the frames around the paintings, as much as they considered the works themselves.

4There was another path that was meandering through the museum that day, however. It was built out of the practices of commodification and their relation to the aura of objects in specific times and places. Shaped by a long history of collecting, this path was marked by hyperlinks to an online auction where the works were being sold, the obvious desire of the museum to host a perhaps controversial show that would bring in a large audience, and the brand of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that was to receive a portion of the proceeds.

5Guiding people along these two paths were the stewards of the “When Elephants Paint” show, the Russian-born conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who were then already well known for their critiques of “art,” “commodity,” and “realism.” For these two human artists, the show seemed to present the possibility of both puckishly ridiculing the high culture art industry and seriously trying to do something good for elephants and the communities in which they lived.

6Komar and Melamid had tapped into a quite old debate about whether the creation of art should be seen as a distinctive marker of humanity. Since the mid-19th century, that argument had led to a recurring interest in exploring nonhuman creativity with captive animals in zoos and circuses. Most of that interest had been directed at primates, but there had been consistent stories of elephants doodling in the sand of their enclosures. Those stories began to spread more widely when 50 drawings and paintings by a young elephant named Siri, who was born in 1967 and is still alive as I write this, were circulated and eventually published by one of her keepers, David Gucwa, and the science journalist James Ehmann in their thoughtful 1985 book To Whom It May Concern: An Investigation of the Art of Elephants.

7Siri, though, was just one of what would eventually become scores of painting elephants in American zoos in the 80s and 90s. When, then, Komar and Melamid heard in 1995 about one of these “pachyderm Picassos” – Ruby at the Phoenix Zoo, whose paintings were selling well and were being compared by journalists to those of Frankenthaler, de Kooning, and Pollock – they quickly arranged an opportunity for an extended collaboration with an African elephant named Renee at the Toledo Zoo. In their 2000 book with art historian Mia Fineman, When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand, Komar and Melamid describe Renee as a “kindred spirit, a fellow immigrant haunted by a similar sense of loneliness and displacement” (p. 13). At a historical moment that would also see elephant dung controversially enter an art museum, Komar and Melamid seem to have realized that elephant paintings might provide a weighty counterbalance to the art market’s usual posturing about masterpieces, museums, and value.

8After working with Renee and then reading about the challenges faced by elephants and mahouts in Asia, Komar and Melamid began pitching an idea of starting an elephant art academy in Thailand to bring needed international attention and financial support to Asian elephants. With eventual backing from the WWF and guidance on the ground from conservationist Richard Lair in Lampang, the artists went to Thailand in 1998, where they eventually collaborated in the opening of art academies in Lampang, Ayutthaya, and Surin. Soon there were stories in newspapers around the world; 60 Minutes and the BBC showed up with film crews; in New York, Christie’s held an auction and Barneys did a window; elephant paintings were included in the 1999 Venice Biennale; and, in 2001 in Sydney, “Untitled” paintings by Juthanam, Boon Yang, Nawaporn, Bird, Nom Chok, Bok Bak, and others were shown along with photographs of Red Square by a young chimpanzee named Mikki. The review in the Sydney Morning Herald on the exhibit’s opening day of June 21st pretty much said it all with the headline, “Give a Pachyderm a Paintbrush and a Whole Circus Comes to Town.” The playfulness of Komar and Melamid was clearly part of that circus. In a typical moment from When Elephants Paint, for example, they relate a conversation between Melamid and a couple from Michigan who wondered out loud if the project was a hoax. “Of course, it’s all a hoax!” said Melamid. “But all art is a hoax” (47).

9It was perhaps inevitable, after all the hype and press, that a deluge of elephant art would follow in Komar and Melamid’s wake. It was probably also inevitable that the early, seemingly innocent, and even humorous collaborations with elephant artists would be replaced by what have been described as elephant art factories. Then, something almost miraculous appeared to happen. Around 2008, what became a viral video was uploaded to the internet of a young elephant painting a representational work of a side-view of a walking elephant holding a flower. For many, the work was confounding, and one can still find all kinds of cringe-worthy discussions from the time among artists, art historians, and philosophers about what the work meant. Before long, ethologist Desmond Morris and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins were flying to Thailand to observe the artist in person. They needn’t have stepped onto the plane. The trick was a classic misdirection. While everyone watched with understandable fascination as the elephant, brush in trunk, carefully applied the paint to the canvas in long, sure strokes, no one noticed the mahout standing behind the artist, unseen by the camera, guiding the elephant with vocal commands and small directional tugs of the animal’s ear. The camera’s focus was on the trunk and the canvas and not on the larger context. Soon, the paintings of Siri, Renee, Juthanam and others that recalled the spontaneity and vitality of the abstract expressionists were replaced in the market by simple, colourful line drawings of elephants, trees, and flowers. The art market had created a paint-by-numbers for elephants, more and more videos were uploaded, and tourists flocked to watch the bizarre spectacles.

10I think one of the important lessons in this story—a lesson repeatedly also drawn throughout this book—is that we must resolutely try to understand the world of elephants as one that is always impacted in important ways by humans. The daily life of every elephant alive today is shaped by the weight of humanity on this planet, and we must resist our persistent desires to think that somewhere there are elephants whose lives have not been touched by our roads, fences, cities, crops, zoos, tourism, climate change, and so much more. There remains much in the story of the popularization and commodification of elephant art that should make us concerned. That many have tried to acknowledge the creativity of elephants and have sought ways to support and collaborate with them remains, I believe, something we can honour in our histories. Like so many of the accounts of human-elephant interaction in this book, the story of elephant art continues to unfold; our best hope, I think, is that we can continue to learn from the past as we work toward more sustainable futures.