In 2014 in New Zealand, a land where sheep outnumber human beings by a factor of more than 6:1, the Wellington seat of government, granted sentient status to all so-called lower animal forms – that is any animal that is not human – under the Animal Welfare Amendment Act. After all, when the national economy depends on sheep you need to look after them and given the extent of sow stalls and battery chickens in the world to say nothing of all the rats and mice and monkeys living and dying for the sake of science you’d have wonder why it took so long. Apparently, Quebec in Canada is set to follow suit. Whatever ramifications this might have for animal rights activists and the meat trade is one avenue of discussion but what struck me was how consciousness and self-consciousness are defined. Consciousness, the mind and the soul continue to defy the efforts of science to find, let alone, explain any of them in other than abstract terms.

One definition notes that being sentient involves understanding past, present and possible futures while knowing that you are an ‘I’. Being alive is one thing, knowing your place in the world is something else. Do animals such as sheep actually know any more than instinctual behaviour? I have a cat that talks to me and not only remembers what we did yesterday but reminds me what we should be doing today. I have no doubt that she is an ‘I’.

Consciousness versus mind is a whole argument in itself. If you aren’t, as a human being conscious of self, conscious of a past and a future or are simply running on automatic as in a brain algorithm kicking in as response to a stimulus, does that put you at the lower or upper end of the scale of sentient brings? Moreover, ‘in the zone’, ‘in the moment’ and any other state where the outside world is put to one side, suggests that as artists we are no different to rabbits and antelopes taking off at the first sign of danger.

So many artists profess to be working purely on instinct, no preconceived idea, paint being applied without much conscious thought and no reference to the history of art and potential influence. I‘ve heard of more than one who claimed total originality through what amounted to automatic processes. I’d question if this is even possible but nonetheless what does automatic even mean in this context? Certain Dada and Surrealist artists worked with stream of consciousness and tapping into the subconscious, as we all know, but tapping into the depths of the subconscious may not be what they’d hoped for given what we now know at least in part of how the brain works. While it is not a computer, the brain seems to work on similar principles. The algorithms that govern its function may well be inbuilt and part of the DNA. The synaptic connections it makes – the essence of imagination – will create new combination of data but the underlying processes may be no different to the decisions made when playing a video game. The choice to take the gun, the grenade, the rocket launcher or the magnetic mine before proceeding is not really a choice at all. You’ve made a ‘choice’ but the menu was preset. Free will had little or nothing to do with it [What that makes programmers is a whole other question…the Gods of Silicon Valley?]

So, where are we as artists when we are ‘in the zone’? Abstract Expressionists hope that something worthwhile will happen if they keep at it for long enough. Coffee-enhanced and sleep-deprived or in the case of several notables, beneath layers of alcoholic stupor, the process would seem to be reliant on inbuilt mechanisms. Are you still sentient at that level? Aware, looking backward and forward in time, recognising yourself as independent of your surroundings? I would think that it’s no different than trying to create art while stoned. Brett Whitely tried it and look where it got him? Dead in a motel at fifty. Is such a state sentience or just self-delusion?

I watched film some time ago of an elephant painting. It painted elephants and trees in startlingly observed detail. It saw itself standing in a grove of trees and was capable of stepping away and observing from a distance. Whether all elephants are pre-programmed to paint elephants and trees I don’t know but to be able to recognise an elephant shape and reproduce it put the clever quadruped on a quite different level, not just seemingly sentient but artistic. Further back in time I remember Doctor Desmond Morris the animal behaviour specialist in the 60s getting monkeys to paint. The latter were more like Abstract Expressionists, painting with joyful abandon, but the elephant painted images of elephants. I wonder how many artists of any ilk can draw or paint an elephant from memory – about as many who can draw their own face or in fact a proportional human form I suspect? I am always amazed in life drawing classes how seasoned artists can’t get the form right, not just in proportion, but with the various parts articulated. It is seemingly not in our DNA or at best in the DNA of only a selected few to see ourselves objectively. We may be self-aware and sentient to varying degrees but lack what this particular elephant was born with – the algorithm to paint other elephants in proportion and without chemical aids

As a species, we have always assumed that all other animal forms are not just inferior but lack sentience. It is certainly convenient to ignore the idea that animals have feelings as we scan the butcher’s window for tonight’s meal, but the point here comes down to whether, as suggested by the biological sciences, that we are all born with inherited algorithmic programings that determine not just behaviour, fight or flight, but the very basis of being an artist. Art history suggests that we are all still working with the same sensibilities as did the cave painters and still trying to solve the same problems.

Artists are certainly sentient in that we are all conscious of the artistic problems we were trying to come to terms with yesterday, the frustrations of today and the uncertainties of another day in the studio tomorrow and we certainly think of ourselves as individual [defined as, ‘as one’] according to upbringing and any number of other cultural factors, conscious and self-conscious, forward thinking, abstract thinking and imaginative. However, if we are simply pre-programed  to respond to the world in ways set long ago and ingrained in our DNA maybe we are in fact not much more sentient than sheep, ants or bees but assume otherwise because we alone managed to leave the Earth in a rocket and spread our sentience amongst the stars.

My cat is definitely an ‘I’, aware of its surroundings, dreams, feels and speaks to me. Despite spending hours lying in a sunny spot in the studio though, it has never shown any inclination to produce art and no doubt has a certain disdain for anything that does not directly influence its food supply. I can think of any number of humans that that description would fit to a T.