On the difference between making art and thinking (in) art

Maria Popova, editor of the always-interesting monthly newsletter ‘The Marginalian’, took the death of primatologist Jane Goodall in September 2025 as an opportunity to write an editorial for October 2025 of her monthly newsletter entitled “The Measure of a True Visionary: Jane Goodall on the Indivisibility of Art and Science” on the connection between nature, life and art, which, as a topic, is central to the mission of GRASPnetwork.

In June 2018, I had to close my art gallery KoKo in Vienna – since then, it has been incorporated into GRASPnetwork as a project. Coincidentally, on the same day in June 2018, a female gorilla kept in captivity – also named Koko – died in Woodside, California. She was said to have artistic abilities, among other things.

Jane Goodall also visited Koko and talked to her at her habitat in California.

Koko gained international attention after her scientifically qualified carer Francine Patterson and other scientists at Stanford University taught her to communicate with humans using a modified form of American Sign Language. Koko mastered over 1,000 signs in her language and understood nearly 2,000 spoken English words. This is almost equivalent to the vocabulary that normal people use in everyday life. 

Koko also expressed herself with brushes and paint and created about 20 acrylic paintings on canvas. Three of them are sold online as limited-edition high-resolution prints. Two well-known paintings by Koko are titled ‘Bird’ and ‘Love’. The creation of ‘Bird’ is attributed to a bird that often visited Koko and settled on her back. Koko seems to have painted the picture from memory. The bird had been rescued after being injured in a storm. Koko gave it the name ‘Tongue’ because of its protruding tongue. This bird was always hungry and Koko loved to feed it. The painting by Koko titled ‘Love’ is more expressionistic than representational. When someone suggested asking the female gorilla to paint feelings, Koko chose bright pink and orange to represent her interpretation of the feeling of “love”. Koko’s representation of ‘love’ happens to be heart-shaped and has therefore become a popular motif for many Valentine's Day cards in the US.

I am not (yet) aware of any scientific study that has examined whether Koko actually ‘created art’ or whether her application of paint to canvas should be recognised as another form of articulation of her linguistic thoughts. It seems to me that, for reasons of spectacle, human viewers of Koko's paintings have read more into them than Koko herself would have described. However, as an aficionado and connoisseur of so-called Art Brut, i.e. art produced by people who are generally intellectually disabled, I embrace the idea that the ‘art’ created by Koko can certainly be recognised as another form of expression beyond rational language.

But what struck me much more about Maria Popova's article quoted at the beginning is that, in her tribute to Jane Goodall, she makes an initial reference to Alexander von Humboldt's philosophy of nature. It was Humboldt in the 19th century, after all, who, with the attribution of being the ‘inventor of nature’, summed up the Western understanding of nature and gave it its most common definition: Nature as a cosmos in which everything is connected to everything else and in which there are no isolated cause-and-effect relationships, but rather, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela defined half a century ago, everything that exists in nature is a collection of processes of autopoietic self-generation and self-preservation of (living) systems and their interactions.

Maria Popova has drawn a touching parallel between Alexander von Humboldt and Jane Goodall by highlighting Humboldt's definition of nature as a network consisting of everything that exists, leading to the ‘nature of living beings’, which was Jane Goodall's life's work, as her ‘invention’. Popova analyses that Goodall succeeded in this insight into what life is primarily because she never viewed science as a separate, isolated field from the wilderness of life. I quote Popova's characterisation of Jane Goodall: 

‘She placed the raw material of literature — compassion — at the centre of her scientific work, drawing on her passion for artistic creativity to make her revelatory discovery of chimpanzee tool use — that selfsame impulse to bend the world to the will that sparked human creativity when we descended from the trees to the caves to invent fire and figurative art’.

This does not mean that Goodall directly attributes artistic abilities to great apes in the human sense that we are accustomed to, but rather that she is open to the idea that, as with many great minds, the method of artistic expression opens up a dimension in which, thanks to art, we can ‘grasp’ our understanding of the object of our (scientific) observation beyond the immediately phenomenological, which we at GRASPnetwork deliberately mark with the term GRASP.

To conclude with Jane Goodall, here is a citation she wrote in 1958 when arriving first time back home to England from Africa, which we at GRASPnetwork will now add to our collection of favourite quotes:

‘It is lovely to be in an artistic atmosphere again. I realise now, more than ever before, that I can never live wholly without it. It feels so heavenly to be able to just sit in front of the fire & talk for hours — of cabbages & kings — poetry, literature, art, music, philosophy, religion. It's wonderful, marvellous, terrific...’