Rhinoplasty, digital

I first posted this on New Savanna on December 18, 2010. I'm bumping it to the top for Leanne, who's written a not-yet-out article on Dürer's rhino.

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I first wrote this back in the early 1990s, before the internet. I firstpublished it at The Valve a few years ago.

A decade or so ago I read an article about appropriation as a BIG THING in the art world. I thought it was silly. And so I did what any intelligent person does when confronted with high-toned silliness, I riffed on it.

I took Albrecht Dürer's famous rhinoceros as my starting point:

I then scanned it into my Mac using a clever device that turned a dot-matrix printer into a low-res scanner. I then created variant images and wrote a bit of text, and voilà! Digital rhinoplasty.

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“Do you think he would mind?”

“Who?”

“Albrecht.”

“Albrecht Einstein?”

“No, Dürer, Albrecht Dürer, the print maker.”

“Mind what?”

“If I appropriated his rhinoceros.”

“What for?”

“I want to do some genetic engineering.”

“Genetic engineering?”

“Yes. I had this dream the other night. A voice kept repeating 'zebroceros' over and over again, with a very deep and meaningful intonation.”

“What's a zebroceros?”

“Well, it must be a cross between a zebra and a rhinoceros.”

“And you want to get into genetic engineering so you can make the cross. Isn't that going to be difficult? I mean, the zebra and the rhinoceros are such very different animals. Do you think the cross will take?”

“Don't see why not. This isn't like ordinary cross-breeding. Here we get right into the genetic material, the information specifying the organism's form and function. We just splice one strand of information into the other and voilà! we've got it.”

“I see. Tell me. Do you think we could make a rhinana?”

“A rhinana?”

“Yeah, a cross between a rhinoceros and a banana.”

“Well, if it's OK with Albrecht. It's his rhinoceros.”

“You mean there's no problem about the rhinoceros being an animal and the banana a plant?”

“Of course not. When you get down to the genes it's all just information. Bits and bytes of biocode.”

“Well, then let's try something between animate and inanimate. Wrapping paper. Yeah, a rhinoceros and wrapping paper.”

“But wrapping paper doesn't have any genetic code at all. No DNA to splice.”

“But it does have a pattern. And the pattern is information, just like the DNA. What should I call it”

“Wrappoceros? Papoceros? Zigzagoceros?”

“Oh.”

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In his classic book, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Ernst Gombrich argued that drawing and painting realistic representations required the creation of numerous schemas from which to craft the image. In particular, the repertoire of available schemas often overwhelmed actual observation. As an example, he offers Dürer's famous print of the rhinoceros (from 1515), which was rather fanciful in its depiction of armor plating. Yet that image seemed seemed to have dictated how European artists depicted the rhinoceros over a century and a half later. Gombrich remarks (pp. 66-67).

When Dürer published his famous woodcut of a rhinoceros [59], he had to rely on secondhand evidence which he filled in from his own imagination, coloured, no doubt, by what he had learned of the most famous of exotic beasts,the dragon with its armoured body. Yet it has been shown that this half-invented creature served as a model for all renderings of the rhinoceros, even in natural-history books, up to the eighteenth century.

When, in 1790, James Bruce published a drawing of the beast [60] in his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, he proudly showed that he was aware of this fact: ‘The animal represented in this drawing is a native of Tcherkin, near Ras el Feel . . . and this is the first drawing of the rhinoceros with a double horn that has ever yet been presented to the public. The first figure of the Asiatic rhinoceros, the species having but one horn, was painted by Albert Durer, from the life. ... It was wonderfully ill-executed in all its parts, and was the origin of all the monstrous forms under which that animal has been painted, ever since.... Several modern philosophers have made amends for this in our days; Mr. Parsons, Mr. Edwards, and the Count de Buffon, have given good figures of it from life; they have indeed some faults, owing chiefly to preconceived prejudices and inattention.... This ... is the first that has been published with two horns, it is designed from the life, and is an African’.

If proof were needed that the difference between the medieval draughtsman and his eighteenth-century descendant is only one of degree, it could be found here. For the illustration, presented with such flourishes of trumpets is surely not free from ‘precon- ceived prejudices’ and the all-pervading memory of Durer’s woodcut. We do not know exactly what species of rhinoceros the artist saw at Ras el Feel, and the comparison of his picture with a photograph taken in Africa [6] may not, therefore, be quite fair. But I am told that none of the species known to zoologists corresponds to the engraving claimed to be drawn al vif!

The story repeats itself whenever a rare specimen is introduced into Europe. Even the elephants that populate the paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been shown to stem from a very few archetypes and to embody all their curious features, de- spite the fact that information about elephants was not particularly hard to come by.

These examples demonstrate, in somewhat grotesque magnification, a tendency which the student of art has learned to reckon with. The familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar; an existing representation will always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record the truth.