New York University A Shark in The Mind of One Contemplating Wilderness Essay RECKONING ESSAY PROMPT via Merriam-Webster: &” reckon with: to take (or fa

New York University A Shark in The Mind of One Contemplating Wilderness Essay RECKONING ESSAY PROMPT

via Merriam-Webster:

&” reckon with:

to take (or fail to take) into account”;

Write an essay in which you reckon with your primary essay and its ideas; in doing so, you’ll tell your reader more about that essay’s ideas but also, and perhaps more importantly, develop an idea of your own. Unlike the Deepening essay, you will not simply “borrow” and engage with an idea from a primary text– rather you will grapple with the totality of the primary text by identifying and articulating its argumentative/logistical LIMITATIONS and by putting it into CONVERSATION WITH OTHER TEXTS* that share similar conceptual concerns but differ in approach and application.

Your job here is to both acknowledge and challenge the thinking of your primary text. “Yes, Essayist,” you’ll say (not literally, though using your own voice—the “I”;–is welcome in this essay if it suits your needs), “I see and understand your idea/thinking/argument—but isn’t there more to say about this? Isn’t it all just a bit more complicated than you’re letting on? Aren ‘t you not considering x, y, and z?” While it may seem bold, even arrogant to suggest the essayist’s thinking is incomplete or insufficient, your authority will come from your careful curating and analysis of

additional sources of evidence—mainly written, but perhaps also visual or experiential—that aim to account for what’s lacking in the primary text and broaden the conversation in illuminating and surprising ways.

This essay should have 4-5 sources:

* Your primary essay

* At least ONE additional essay from the Zotero digital anthology, though you can certain use as many Zotero texts as

you wish (the essays I linked/attached for you on our stream can also satisfy this requirement)

* An additional written text, though there is flexibility in terms of genre (essay, article, research, poem, story, play,

novel) and where/how you locate it

* Another source that may be something experiential or visual, such as a piece of art (sculpture, photograph, painting), a film, a song, or even a scientific theory, something historical, something in the news, current events, etc.

Remember: your encounter with this non-text evidence is also welcome if it serves the essay in some meaningful way. You arenot required, however, to have a first-person reflection of evidence in this essay if you wish to!

* You have permission to use ONE of the texts you already explored in your Deepening essay, if it is relevant and if you are committed to thinking about it in this new context

In this essay, you should aspire to demonstrate the following skills:

* Analyzing a text’s formal features and considering their relationship to idea

* Developing a written conversation among a group of thematically related texts

* Incorporating texts in a meaningful way (through a shared conceptual concern and context that you identify)

* Showing an understanding of texts by restating their ideas in your own words with a citation of key phrases and

sentences

* Building on your reading of texts to generate reflection and to substantiate an idea of your own

5-6 pages, typed, double-spaced + a proper Work Cited page.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2335188/a_digital_an…

this is link for zotero

The first PDF is the primary test, second is the rubric and third one is a sample essay. 42
The Nation.
have learned that they can attempt an end­
run around the Constitution’s mighty edict
against censorship by simply using money,
from the state or from foundations arid in­
dividuals, to force compliance with their
convictions and beliefs. What they seek is
no different from what that mob in Bucha­
rest sought: a world in which people are
afraid to make art that challenges conven­
tion, that says what may not have been
spoken before. These people are bullies,
and bullies must be defied.
Don’t get chuffed-up and fill the play
with anger, which the attacks on your work
may have generated; part of the strategy of
the enemies of art is to create toxic envi­
ronments in which the art, even if on dis­
play, can’t be properly received. Trust in
the play, in your work and your talents, in
your audience.
?
A Sharkin the Mind of One
ContemplatingWilderness
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
•
~
shark swims past me in a kelp forest that sways back and forth with the current.
It is deliberate and focused. I watch the shark’s sleek body dart left and right
as its caudal fin propels it forward. Its eyes seem to slice through the water
in a blood gaze as the gills open and close, open and close. Around and
around, I watch the sharkmaneuverthrough
schools of fish. It must not be hungry. The
only thing separating me from the shark
· is a tall glass pane at the Monterey Sea
Aquarium. Everything is in motion. I press
my hands on the glass waiting for the shark
to pass by ag!lin and when it does, I feel my
own heart beating against the mind of this
creature that kills.
***’
• Inthe enormous blue room of the Ameri­
can Museum of Natural History, I stare
at the tiger shark mounted on the wall of
the second floor. Its surface shines with the
light of taxidermy, creating the illusion
of having just left the sea, now our own
natural-history trophy. I see how out of pro­
portion its mouth is to the rest of its body
and wonder how many teeth hung from its
gums during its lifetime, the rows of teeth,
five to twenty of them, biting and tearing,
thrashing and chomping on flesh, the teeth
constantly be_ing replac~d by something
akinto a conveyor-belt system. Somewhere
in my mind I hold the fact that a shark may
go through 20,000 teeth in a life span often
years. I imagine the shark sensing the elec­
trical field of a seal, swimming toward the
diving black body now rising to the surface,
delivering with great speed its deadly blow,
the jaws that dislocate and protrude out of
its mouth, the strong muscles that open, then
·close, the razor teeth that.clamp down on the
prey with such force that skin, cartilage and
Terry Tempest Williams’s next book, Leap, will
be published by Pantheon in the spring. She
lives in Castle Valley, Utah.
bone are reduced to one clean round bite,
sustained over and over again. The blue
water now bloody screams to the surface.
Even in death, I see this shark in motion.
***
Sensation. I enter the Brooklyn Museum
of Art to confront another tiger shark, this
the most harrowing of all the requiem
sharks I have encountered in a weeldong
period. Requiem sharks. They say the name
is derived from the observation that once
these large sharks of the order Carcharhinid
attack a victim, the only task remaining is to
hold a requiem, a mass for the dead. Gale­
ocerdo cuvieri. It is neither dead nor alive,
but rather a body floating in space, a shark
suspended in solution. Formaldehyde. To
preserve. What do we choose to preserve?
I note the worn, used sense of its mouth,
shriveled and receding, looking more man­
ly than fish. The side view creates a trip­
tych of head; dorsal fin and tail, through the
three panels of glass in the frame of white
painted steel. I walk around the shark and
feel the charge of the front view, a turquoise
nightmare of terror that spills into daylight.
Sensation. Damien Hirst is the creator of
The Physical Impossibi~ity of Death in the
Mind of Someone Living (1991).
I do not think about the shark. I think
about myself.
***
I like the idea of a thing to describe a feeling. A shark isfrightening, bigger than you
are, in an environment unknown to you. It
looks alive when it’s dead and dead when
it’s alive …. I like ideas of t,ying to under­
stand the worla by taking things out of the
November 29, 1999
world …. You expect [the shark] to look
back at you.
(Damien Hirst)
~
s a naturalist who has worked in a mu­
seum of natural history for more than
fifteen years, how am I to think about a
shark in the context of art, not science?
How is my imagination so quickly re­
arranged to see the suspension of a shark,
pickled in formaldehyde, as the stopped
power of motion in the jaws of death, an
image of my own mortality?
My mind becomes wild in the presence
of creation, the artist’s creation. I learn that
the box in which the shark floats was built
by the same company that constructs the .
aquariums of Brighton Sea World. I think
about the killer whales kept in tanks for the
amusement of humans, the killer whales
that jump through hoops, carry humans
on their backs as they circle and circle and
circle the tank, day after day after week
after month, how they go mad, the sea of
insanity churning inside them, inside me as
· I feel my own captivity within a culture­
any culture-that would thwart creativity:
We are stopped cold, our spirits suspended,
controlled, controlled sensation.
Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5 percent
formaldehyde solution.
Damien Hirst calls the shark suspended
in formaldehyde a sculpture. If it were in
a museum of natural history, it would be
called an exhibit, an exhibit in which the
organism is featured as the animal it is. Call
it art or call it biology, what is the true
essence of shark?
How is the focus of our perceptions
decided?
Art. Artifact. Art by designation.
Thomas McEvilley, art critic and author
of Art &Otherness, states,
The fact that we designate something as
art means that it is art :(or us, but says .
nothing about what it is in itself or for
other people. Once we realize that the
quest for essences is an archaic religious
quest, there is no reason why something
should not be art for one person or culture
and non-art for another.
ild. Wilderness. Wilderness by desig­
nation. What is the solution to pre­
serving that which is wild?
I remember standing next to an old ,
rancher in Escalante, Utah, during a
contentious political debate over wilderness
in the canyon country of southern Utah. He
kicked the front tire of his picl~p 1:)1.lck
with his cowboy boot.
“What’s this?” he asked me.
“A Chevy truck,” I responded.
“Right, and everybody knows it.”
He then took his hand and swept the
W
November29, 1999
horizon. “And what’s all that?” he asked
with the same matter-of-fact tone.
“Wilderness,” he answered before I
·could speak. “And everybody .knows it,
so why the hell do you have to go have
Congress tell us what it is?”
Damien Hirst’ s conceptual art, be it his
shark or his installation called A Thousand
Years (1990)_:_where the eye of a severed
cow’s head looks upward as black flies
crawl over it and lay eggs in the flesh that
metamorphose into maggots that mature
into flies that gather in the pool of blood
to drink, leaving tiny red footprints on
the glass installation, while some flies
are destined to die as a life-stopping buzz
in the electric fly-killing mac11,ine-all his
conceptual pieces of art, his installations,
make me think about the concept and des­
ignation of wilderness.
Why not designate wilderness as an
installation of art? Conceptual art? A true
sensation that moves and breathes and
changes over time with a myriad of crea­
tures that formulate ari instinctual frame­
work of interspecies dialogues; call them
predator-prey relations or symbiotic rela­
tions, niches and ecotones, never before
seen as art, as dance, as a painting in mo­
tion, but imagined only through the calcu­
lations of biologists, their facts now meta­
morphosed into designs, spont;meously
choreographed moment to.moment among
the living. Can we not watch the habits of
animals, the adaptations of plants, and call
them performance art within the concep­
tual framework of wilderness?
To those who offer the critique that
wilderness is merely a received idea, one
that might be “conceptually incoherent”
and entranced by “the myth of the pristine,”
why not answer with a resounding yes, yes,
wilderness is our received idea as artists, as
human beings, a grand piece of perform­
ance art that can embody and· inspire The
Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind
of Someone Living or Isolated Elements
· Swimming in the Same Direction for the.
Purpose of Understanding (1991).
Call it a cabinet of fish preserved in salt
solution to honor the diversity• of species,
where nothing is random. Or call it a piece .
of art to celebrate color and form found
in the bodies of fishes. Squint your eyes:
Imagine a world of spots. Colored dots
in the wilderness. They ‘re all connected.
Damien Hirst paints spots.
“Art’s about life and it can’t really be
about anything else. There isn’t anything .
else.” Tell us again, Damien Hirst, with
your cabinet of wonders; we are addicted
to wonders, bottles of drugs lined up, shelf
after shelf, waiting to be opened, minds
opened, veins opened, nerves opened. Wil-
The Nation.
derness is a cabinet of pharmaceuticals
waiting to be discovered. •
. Just as we designate art, we designate
wilderness, large and small, as much as
we can, hoping it begins a.dialogue with our
highest and basest selves. We are animals,
in search ofa home, in relationship to Other,
an expanding community with a mosaic of
habitats, domestic and wild; there is nothing
precious or nostalgic about it..We designate
wilderness as an installation of essences,
open for individual interpretation, full of
controversy and conversation.
“I always believe in contradiction,
compromise … it’s unavoidable. In life it
can be positive or negative, like saying,
.’I can’t live without you. ‘ “Damien Hirst
speaks again.
I cannot live without art. I cannot live
without wilderness. Call it Brilliant Love
(1994-95). Thank the imagination that
some people are brave enough, sanely
crazy ·enough, to designate both.
“Art is dangerous because it doesn’t
have a definable function. I think that is
what people are afraid of”
Yes, Damien, exactly, you bad boy of
British art who dares to slice up the bodies
of cows, from the head to the anus, and mi'{
them all up to where nothing makes sense
and who allows us to walk through with
no order in mind, twelve cross-sections of
cow, so we have ·to take note of the meat
that we eat without thinking about the to­
pography of the body, the cow’s body, our
body; we confront the wonder of the or­
ganistn as is, not as a continuum but as a de­
sign, the sheer.beauty and-texture of func­
tional design. We see the black-and-white
hide; there is no place to hide inside the guts
of a cow sliced and stretched through space
like an accordion between your very large
hands. You ask us to find Some Comfort
Gainedfrom the Acceptance of the Inherent
Lies in Everything (1996).
We have been trying to explain, justify,
codify, give biological and ecological cre­
dence as to why we want to preserve what
is wild, like art, much more than a specimen
behind glass. But what if we were to say,
Sorry, you are right, wilderness has no de­
finable function. Can we let it be, designate
it as art, art of the wild, just in case one such
definition should arise in the mind of one
standing in the tall grass prairies of middle
America or the sliding slope of sandstone in
the erosional landscape of Utah?
Wilderness as an aesthetic.
. Freeze. Damien Hirst brought together
a community of artists and displayed their
work in a warehouse in England, these Neo­
Conceptualists who set out to explore the
big things like death and sex and the mean-.
ing oflife. Wilderness designation is not
43
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44
The Nation.
November 29, 1999
The Blue Whale, the Tiger Shark, Sun­
so dissimilar. In your tracks, fi·eeze, and · docent, how we brought the schoolchildren
watch the p~rformance art of a grizzly walk­ to this room to lie on their backs, thrilled fish, Tunas, Eels and Manta Rays, the
ing through the gold meadows of the Hay­ beyond words as they looked up at this Walrus, the Elephant Seals, the.Orea with
den Valley in Yellowstone. In your tracks, magnificent leviathan who, if alive, with its head poking through the diorama of ice
freeze, a constellation of monarch butter­ one quick swoosh of its tail would be in Antarctica, are no longer the natural his­
tories of creatures associated with the sea
flies has gathered in the moµntains of Mex­ halfway across Central Park.
I only then noticed that the open spaces but simply decoration.
ico. No definable :function except to say,
Everything feels upside down these
wilderness exists like art, look for an idea below. where the children used to lie on
· . with four legs, with six legs and wings that their backs in awe was now a food court days, created for our entertainment. Re­
filled with plastic tables and chairs. The quiem days. The natural world is becoming
resemble fire, and recognize this feeling
called survival, in this received idea of wil­ tables were crowded with visitors chat- invisible, appearing only as a backdrop for
derness, our twentietli-century installation . ting away, eating, drinking, oblivious to the our own human dramas and catastrophes:
creatures surroiµiding them. How had I hurricanes, .tornadoes, earthquakes and
as Neo-Conservationists.
floods. Perhaps ifwe bring art to the dis­
missed the theater lights, newly installed
A shark in a box.
on the balcony, pointing down to illumi­ cussion of the wild we can create a sensa­
Wilderness as a box.
Wilderness as A Thousand Years with nate the refrigerators humming inside the tion where people will pay attention to the
flies and maggots celebrating inside the showcases with a loud display of fast foods shock of what has always been here Away
advertising yogurt, roast beef sandwiches, from the Flock (1994).
corpse of things.
apples and oranges?
Wild Beauty in the Minds of the Living.?
Q: What is in the boxes?
A: Maggots.
Q: So you’re goingto put maggotsin the
whiteboxes,and thenthey hatchand then
they fly around…
A: And then they get killed by the fly­
DANIEL GRANT
killer, and maybe lay eggs in the cow
heads.
n 1989, after several years of controversy, legal wrangling and numerous public
Q: It’s a bit disgusting.
A: A bit. I.don’t think it is. I like it.
forums, Richard Serra’s sculptural installation Tilted Arc was removed from
Q: Do you think anyonewill buy it?
a federal plaza in New York Cify by the US .government’s General Services
(DamienHirst
A: I hope so.
interview with Liam Gillick,
Administration (GSA), which had originally commissioned the piece through
Modem Medicine, 1990)
its Art-in-Architecture program. The em­ sented by a flood of books and studies that
Do I think anyone will buy the concept ployees in the building had objected strenu­ aim to help agencies head off complaints
of wilderness as conceptual art? It is easier ously to the large, rusted metal work, claim­ before they occur and lessen their intensity
to create a sensation over art than a sensa­ ing that it blocked the sun and took away after they arise.
tion over the bald, greed-faced sale and de­ the space where they ate their lunch and
“Controversy is a result of a process
velopment of open lands, wild lands, in the enjoyed occasional outdoor concerts.
of commissioning and installing a work of
United States of Ame1ica.
No one came out ofthis looking good: public art that didn’t work well. It’s not so
I would like to bring Damien Hirst out The GSA struck the employees in the build­ much because of the content of the art,”
to the American West, let him bring along ing, many political leaders and much of the said Cynthia Abramson Nilcitin, director of
his chain saw, Cutting Ahead (1994), only public as insensitive to the public interest; public art programs at the Project for Pub­
to find out somebody has beat him to it, Rj.chard Serra’s art reputation was black­ lic Spaces in New York City and a frequent
creating clear 7cut sculptures out of nega­ ened, and he was personally characterized
essayist on public art. “The customary ap­
tive space, eroding space, topsoil running
as unwilling to listen or compromise; those proach to public art, which was absolutely
like blood down the mountainsides as mud. complaining about the installation were the case with Richard Serra, was to put art
Mud as material. He would have plenty of denigrated as philistines, and Serra’s apol~ that’s hard to take in an environment that
material.
ogists looked out of touch with the rest is inhospitable to the enjoyment of art.”
Tlie art of the wild is flourishing. .
of the world as they described the artist’s
For Abramson and others in the field,
How are we to see through the lens of standing in the art world and defended the the key to making public art a successful
our own creative destruction?
panel system that had selected the work in experience-is through involving the com­
A shark in a box.
the first place.
munity, first in planning where the artwork
Wilderness as an installation.
In the intervening years, a sea change has should go, and second in teaching the com­
A human being suspende·d in formalde-‘
taken place in the field of public art, as both munity about art. Listening to what resi­
hyde.
public and private commissioning bodies dents and employees want and don’t want,
My body floats between contrary equilib­ have increasingly altered the way they se­ .prodding them to participate in the process
lect new works (and the types of pieces .of selecting and siting the artwork-this
riums.
(Federico Garcia Lorca)
they select) and the way they are sited and should diminish the likelihood of another
hen I leaned over the balcony of the installed. Studying public art controversies Tilted Arc controversy. The larger questions
great blue room in the American Mu­ has itself become a growing field, repre- for the rest of us are, Does the effort to
lessen controversy affect the art that is
seum of Natural History, I looked up
at the body of the Blue Whale, the . Daniel Grant is the author of The Fine Artist’s picked? Is that good or bad?
The nineties have been a decade in
largest living mamma! on earth, sus­ . CareerGuide,The Artist’s ResourceHandbook
pended from the ceiling. I recalled being a and The Bu~inessof Being an Artist (Allworth). which the arts community has licked the
BlandArt in Every Pot
I
W
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Reckoning Essay Rubric
Representation
Primary Text
A
Gives strong, succinct
overviews of all
textual evidence, with
particular aspects of
focus; incorporates
summary, paraphrase,
and citation.
Representation
acknowledges the
unfamiliar reader,
provides necessary
context, and anticipates
any confusions a reader
might have; presents a
fair and accurate
reading of text.
B
Provides an overview
of all textual evidence,
…
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