http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2006/09/18/bendrick/index.html?source=daily
You deal with the theme of repulsion and attraction -- you show animals committing acts of violence and sexual acts. Are
you asking us not to look away from the reality of nature?
Well, partly that, and partly the animals are acting like people. Partly it's the way that all the animals in Alice in
Wonderland are rude. They are all presumptuous and rude and outrageous and idiotic, and they sort of anticipate the Marx
Brothers in the way that they act, sort of ridiculous, overturning of convention all the time. Sometimes it's just fun
to make the animals do things like that.
To show us our own behavior?
Space Monkey, 2001. Watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper. 59 1/2 x 36
inches.
Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery, N.Y. Photo by Adam Reich.
Yeah, or to shuck off a cliché. There's a blatantly pornographic image of chimpanzees that I made that is telling a
sort of biological truth. It shows a female chimp with her genitals all swollen and a male chimp is on the ground. It's
a bonobo, actually, and they're the most sexual of animals, but it's a matriarchy and the matriarchy is enforced by
promiscuous behavior on the behalf of the females who blur lines of paternity by having so many different lovers that
the males no longer have any political power.
These female chimps figured out that if they had multiple partners, nobody could figure out whose kid is their kid and
therefore can't kill their rival's offspring. My feeling about it was that until you had these female primatologists out
in the field, you never would have found this out. The bonobo was an invention of feminism on some level. So, the
painting is called Space Monkey, which is a Patti Smith song, because I'm thinking Patti Smith is the reason these
monkeys were found, on some weird level, right? It's not just because I feel like painting a hard-on on a monkey. I had
a thesis that I was trying to work out in my own head and all the paintings that have that kind of behavior had a thesis
like that. It's not like this would be a better picture if one of the animals is fucking the other one -- they've got to
have a pretty good reason.
