I’ve found Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema captivating ever since I saw the first video in the series, Baboons as Friends (2007). The questions she tackles—questions about our human nature, our place in the world, and how we explain the world to ourselves—seem so fundamental, and are treated with such humor, that any rough spots in the work just emphasized the ambition of her project, and made me root for its further development. So the arrival of her Apes as Family, a new two channel video installation, at Arts Catalyst in London, was an occasion.
Rachel Mayeri, still from <em>Baboons as Friends</em>, 2007. Primatologist Deborah Forster took the footage on the left screen in the course of her research. As Forster narrates the action, males vie for access to a female. On the right screen, actors recreate the drama in human terms.
Apes as Family continues the series of cross-species dramas drawing on popular media and scientific studies. Baboons as Friends juxtaposed research footage of male baboons competing for the attentions of a female with a human reenactment mirroring the baboons’ actions—suggestively set in a bar and styled as film noir. Mayeri followed it up with How to Act Like an Animal, in which humans imitate a National Geographic documentary on the chimpanzee troop that Jane Goodall studied. In the clip Mayeri chose for re-enactment, the chimpanzees hunt and eat a colobus monkey, literally ripping it limb from limb. Sex, violence, survival…as the wild footage plays against the often hilarious recreations, viewers are squarely caught between humor and horror.
Still from <em>How to Act Like an Animal</em>, 2009. The workshop participants on the left screen have discussed "acting like a chimpanzee" with Forster. Here, they watch the excerpt from <i>The New Chimpanzees</i>, the nature documentary they will re-enact, that appears on the right screen.
In her new work, Mayeri kicked it up a notch by actively participating in the research. She spent a year working with comparative psychologist Sarah-Jane Vick, showing different kinds of video to the chimpanzees who reside at the Edinburgh Zoo. Did they prefer cartoons? Dramas? Nature shows? Television at the zoo is not as odd as you might think. Apes get bored in captivity, so best practices for their care include providing entertainment. Many zoos offer their apes television, whatever is on, and some apes like to watch. The “Budongo Trail” housing the Edinburgh apes is the world’s largest habitat for captive chimpanzees, and historically the Zoo has eschewed television, priding itself on offering more “natural” enrichments. But when the time came to introduce new chimpanzees to the group—a process which can rival the worst fraternity hazings—”video introductions” were used to build familiarity between the parties before they actually met.
So Mayeri’s proposal, to make a drama FOR the chimps, in terms that would be meaningful to them, was not particularly farfetched. It was just the first time a human filmmaker placed her imaginative resources at the service of another species. The ins and outs of that effort, what is and is not possible to transmit across species boundaries, deserve philosophic and semiotic discussion. But before we go there, let’s talk about what Mayeri actually did. In the film, human actors portray a normal event in the life of a female chimpanzee: a band of strangers arrives in her territory, and she has to negotiate with them to survive. The storyline is chimp-plausible; the setting is humanoid. As the film begins, we see a lone chimpanzee foraging in the trees near a freeway; after this day at work she returns home to an apartment well-stocked with fruits and vegetables and selects a snack to eat in the bedroom while she watches TV. But as she rests, a foreign band of chimps invades her home, eating her food and having sex in her kitchen.
Still from <em>Apes as Family</em>, 2011. On the left screen, a chimpanzee watches the scene shown on the right screen, in which the heroine forages near a freeway
When this film debuted to its chimpanzee audience, it was screened in two settings where the chimps were free to come or go. They’re a tough crowd, always more alert to the activities and sexual availability of their companions than to the screen, but they do respond to the video, sometimes quite intensely. In the installation, the drama is synced with film of its debut at the zoo, so we are simultaneously watching the drama and the chimpanzees watching the drama. At one point the layers ramify, as we watch a chimpanzee at the zoo watch a human actor in a chimpanzee suit watch an animation of a chimpanzee in a lab watching a chimpanzee in a nature documentary. And, oh, by the way, there’s a copy of Donna Haraway’s majestic theoretical work, Primate Visions, on the bedside table of the human-actor-chimp. Just in case we need a hint as to how to think about all this watching. (Haraway famously analyzed the projections of human social structure into scientific descriptions of primate relationships, a chain of reference that Mayeri’s work practically twists into a Möbius strip.)
Still from <em>Apes as Family</em>, 2011. On the right screen, the animated story becomes slyly circular and self-referential, as a scientist and lab monkey watch a documentary of apes in the wild.
Still from <em>Apes as Family</em>, 2011. The mayhem in the kitchen provokes a strong reaction from a chimpanzee viewer.
But what do we get from this that we couldn’t get just watching chimps in the zoo? Why should we as humans want to watch video made with another species in mind? It’s not like we don’t have enough video made just for us to consume. But, as Mayeri says, “The two channels create a prism for human beings to learn about the inner world of chimpanzees.” And, as she doesn’t say, learning to put the non-human at the center of our thoughts, experiencing what it might be like to exist in conversation with other species rather than in control of them, could mean the difference between creating a sustainable future or a world of misery for ourselves. Which grand thought comes down to earth in next week’s post, in which we take off from Apes as Family to imagine an art opening as a primate social drama.
Links:
Rachel Mayeri’s website
Trailer for Baboons as Friends
Trailer for Apes as Family
