The Camel as Art

Camels are for deserts, cigarette packages, Christmas cards, circuses and zoos. Most camels, that is. An exception must be made in the case of the incredibly lifelike, lifesize, unnervingly dignified Bactrians created by Manhattan's Nancy Graves, 28, a graduate of the Yale University art school and a former painter. She builds her camels on wood and steel armatures, stuffs them with polyurethane, covers them with goat hair or sheep's wool tinted with brown oil paint. She adds carefully molded toes and ears of cast acrylic, and voild!--the result makes a taxidermist's liveliest effort look damnably dead.

Three of these remarkable beasts stood last week, grazing or reflectively chewing their cud, in a rectangular pasture that was actually a blue-lit room in Manhattan's Whitney Museum. The dim light evoked the ambience of a silent desert night, but what chiefly provided the mood--a wonderfully eerie mood of austere melancholy--was the shambling, work-scarred beasts. Their hair was realistically matted, their baleful glass eyes shaded by the camel's peculiar glamour-girl eyelashes. One even wore a camel's remote, superior smile.

More than a few museumgoers suspected that Nancy Graves' camels were part of an ingenious put-on, particularly since the Whitney was handing out extraordinarily pretentious brochures in which Miss Graves was quoted as proclaiming that "these camels do not find their organization in the real world but are the result of my experience. I cannot imagine or perceive a camel until it is completed." It sounded rather as though she were kidding the highbrows who insist that great art must be abstract. Since the abstract artist--by definition--depicts shapes for which no exact models exist in the visible world, he sometimes refers to his work as "not perceived until completed."

Miss Graves, however, when approached directly, maintains that all she cares about is camels. "There's as much possibility for fresh invention in making a camel as in making a human figure," she says. Come to think of it, since nobody else has done much using the camel as a subject, there is probably more.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.