komar and melamid
During 2001 there was an exhibition of paintings done by ... elephants, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. The Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project had been established by Komar and Melamid, two New York-based Russian conceptual artists. lt was under their watchful eyes
that elephants learned to paint. The first elephant they taught was Renee, at the Toledo Zoo in Ohio. In the States elephants have been painting successfully for two decades now. Komar and Melamid then travelled to Asia and started elephant art projects in Thailand and later in India and Indonesia.
The story of the elephant in Asia is a grim one. Not so long ago the Asian elephant ranged in thirteen countries of the Indian subcontinent. In Thailand there were once one hundred thousand elephants, many of whom were so-called timber elephants used in the logging industry. These elephants had been trained from early age by one (human) person, an elephant handler or mahout, and then carried on a life-long working relationship and friendship with this one person (mahout and elephant having approximately the same lifespan). Nowadays there are just a few thousand elephants left, most of them no longer used in human enterprise due to massive deforestation and a ban on logging. The elephants
often get neglected, start wandering around the cities, perish in traffic or fall into manholes. Or they continue to be worked and overworked in illegal logging or in badly managed tourist venues. Elephants may step on landmines in countries like Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia. Or they come into conflict with people's settlements which, due to
human population growth, need more and more