Writer's Block Magazine

When I try to trace back the moment I first realised how much I enjoyed drawing and painting, I always settle on the art classes I took at Artis when I was still in primary school. The zoo here in Amsterdam has a special programme called ‘Artis Ateliers’ which is meant to offer the city’s children – who would otherwise spend so much of their time cooped up inside cramped apartments – the opportunity to meet the animals, while simultaneously allowing them to pick up art skills to brag about to their classmates at school. The programme still runs to this day, and as far as I can tell, it’s as popular as it ever was.                                       

Recently, I found a folder with drawings I made during the years I was there, and for the first time I noticed that in all these different pictures, there was not one reference to a cage, a fence, or any other type of enclosure at all. Little me seemed to have subconsciously worked around every record that these drawings had been made in a zoo, though I can still remember very well how frustrated my classmates and I would become trying to make our drawings be true to life. Yet the animals in my little art archive live in open oceans, mysterious jungles, and sunny deserts; all products of an imagination run free, and which seemed to take an aesthetic dislike to cages.                                                                          

I’m sure we were aware of them. One memory that springs to mind is of an afternoon spent at the gorilla enclosure. While we were staring through the large glass walls, the teacher was pointing out different features of the animal and suggested which ones to focus on when we started sketching. There was one boy who seemed to be bored the instant this explanation started, and I can vividly remember looking on in horror as he walked over to the glass wall and started licking it. Needless to say, we could see the barriers between us and the animals; some could even taste them on their tongues.                                             

Berger, in his essay ‘Why Look at Animals’ makes an interesting observation. When we look at an animal, we don’t really see the animal —the individual— we see a representative of a species. Better yet, we see the species itself. As such, if we’ve been taught that lions live on the savannahs in Africa, spend their days hunting gazelles and fall asleep at the end of the day under the shadow of an Acacia tree, then that is the image we create around the animal, even if the only time we see it in real life is in a zoo: thin, stuck behind a fence, in the shadow of a cement canopy. We seem to be more focussed on the generalised idea and understanding we have of a species, a stereotypical understanding, than of the reality that we are confronted with.                                                                                             

I left the Artis Ateliers programme when I turned twelve, but went back to the zoo one more time when I was sixteen for a school project. This time, I was there to help my former art teacher with one of her classes making sure a new generation of children managed to finish their drawings on time. While many things seemed to have stayed the same, there was one major change that surprised me. The children were now allowed to take their phones with them and were even encouraged to use them to take pictures to use as references. I could still remember how frustrated the people in my own group would become when we were asked to sketch these animals who never seemed to move until the moment we would show up with a pencil and a piece of paper.  Usually this meant that we would look at the animal for a little bit and then lock our eyes on our paper and base our sketches off the images in our imagination without ever really looking up. The teacher would beg us to “try to draw what you’re seeing. Look at what is in front of you” and we would spend the afternoon ignoring her and pursuing the animals and landscapes we came up with in our minds. This new group of children had pushed it a bit further. They could base their drawings off their own pictures and even pictures from the internet. As a result, their lions and desert landscapes looked much more realistic than mine ever had.            

Now, I’m not saying “back in my day, we didn’t get to rely on all these gadgets. Kids these days don’t know what hard work means”. I haven’t reached that stage yet and hope I never will, but what I am trying to point out is that despite their ability to literally copy and paste a still of reality as it was in front of them, these children went out of their way to place their photo-realistic animals in environments that couldn’t be found anywhere in the boundaries of a zoo. They too ignored the fences – despite the photographic evidence they had of their existence – in favour of open natural landscapes.                                                                      

Then the question which remains is: why? Why not include the zoo in our drawings? Did we feel guilty about it? Did we somehow already know as six-year-olds that these animals were unhappy, kept against their will? That it was unnatural for them to be there, in the heart of the busy city centre? That last one, I guess we did. The animals in our drawings were always running happy and free in the wild environments we’d been taught they belonged to, existing as the more natural versions of the depressed and trapped creatures we were trying to ignore.

While working on this post, I came across a PowNews video. The interviewer was asking people to respond to the Animal Party’s proposal to close Artis and remove the animals from their cages to more natural habitats. The responses ranged from confused to downright angry. Complaints about the moral shortcomings of keeping animals in captivity, especially in a small zoo such as Artis, are still seen as complaints about nothing. Besides, the argument goes, the animals are given food, they’re safe from any physical harm, so why should we be expected to feel bad?                                         

Still, I wonder why it is that generations of young children refuse to see the fences in zoos; refuse to include them in their drawings. Entire afternoons they spent with their faces, and in some cases tongues, pressed against the enclosures, half of them yelling “do something!”, the other half with a pencil in hand screaming “stop moving!” as the teacher jitters in between, desperately pleading: “look at what’s in front of you.”