Playing on the popular adage, ars simia naturae (art as the ape of nature), medieval artisans depicted monkeys as avatars for themselves and personifications of the crafted image. Painted into the margins of illuminated manuscripts and sculpted into the nooks and crannies of cathedrals, monkeys can be found messing with the conventions of pictorial representation and punning on the idea of the artisan as imitator. The monkey is the longest-standing personification of art in western tradition, and many artists and writers continue to represent the monkey as an alter ego or trickster figure—a means by which to subvert conventional frames of knowledge and power or to transcend the trappings of representation through play—but in western culture, the monkey has also figured prominently in anxieties around what it means to be human and it has long been weaponized as a means of caricature, especially aimed at the dehumanization of non-Christians, women, and foreigners. In this sense, the monkey figure is a nexus both for formative ideas about art and for some of the deepest fears and contradictions within western aesthetic traditions.
SIMIA is a research project that takes the monkey figure as a springboard for thinking about the complex politics and poetics of art-making.
