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At Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty, a motley crew of scientists walks the mudflats to study fossils in the making. This reputedly dead sea is home to tar seeps, pools of raw oil (nicknamed ‘death traps’) that act as a preservative, encasing organisms as they were in life.
In this spare landscape, an intricate web of life unfurls. Halophiles―salt-hungry microorganisms―tint the brackish water pink and orange; crystals of gypsum stud the ground, glistening underfoot; and pelicans and other migratory birds stop for a crucial rest. Barn owls and seagulls flirt with their prey around the seeping constellations, sometimes falling prey to the oil themselves. Gretchen Henderson came to the tar seeps, a kind of natural asphalt, after recovering from being hit by a car as she walked in a crosswalk―a manmade asphalt. Like the spiraling artwork that made Great Salt Lake’s north shore famous, Henderson’s associations of life and death, degeneration and regeneration, and injury and healing coalesced. As she reexamined pressing issues that this delicate area revealed about the climate crisis, her sense of ecology spiraled into other ways of perceiving the lake’s entangled lives.
How do we move beyond narrow concepts of wounded and healed, the beautiful and the ugly, to care for ecosystems that evolve over time? How do we confront our vulnerability to recognize kindred dynamics in our living planet? Through shifting lake levels, bird migrations, microbial studies, environmental arts, and cultural histories shaped by indigenous knowledges and colonial legacies, Life in the Tar Seeps contemplates the ways that others have understood this body of water, enlivening more than this region alone. As Henderson witnesses scientists, arts curators, land managers, and students working collaboratively to steward a challenging place, she grows to see the lake not as dead but as a watershed for shifting perceptions of any overlooked place, offering a meditation on environmental healing across the planet.
Henderson interweaves her journey with her own vivid photographs of tar seeps and pelican death assemblages, historic maps and contemporary art, as a wayfinding guide for exploring places of our own.
In this spare landscape, an intricate web of life unfurls. Halophiles―salt-hungry microorganisms―tint the brackish water pink and orange; crystals of gypsum stud the ground, glistening underfoot; and pelicans and other migratory birds stop for a crucial rest. Barn owls and seagulls flirt with their prey around the seeping constellations, sometimes falling prey to the oil themselves. Gretchen Henderson came to the tar seeps, a kind of natural asphalt, after recovering from being hit by a car as she walked in a crosswalk―a manmade asphalt. Like the spiraling artwork that made Great Salt Lake’s north shore famous, Henderson’s associations of life and death, degeneration and regeneration, and injury and healing coalesced. As she reexamined pressing issues that this delicate area revealed about the climate crisis, her sense of ecology spiraled into other ways of perceiving the lake’s entangled lives.
How do we move beyond narrow concepts of wounded and healed, the beautiful and the ugly, to care for ecosystems that evolve over time? How do we confront our vulnerability to recognize kindred dynamics in our living planet? Through shifting lake levels, bird migrations, microbial studies, environmental arts, and cultural histories shaped by indigenous knowledges and colonial legacies, Life in the Tar Seeps contemplates the ways that others have understood this body of water, enlivening more than this region alone. As Henderson witnesses scientists, arts curators, land managers, and students working collaboratively to steward a challenging place, she grows to see the lake not as dead but as a watershed for shifting perceptions of any overlooked place, offering a meditation on environmental healing across the planet.
Henderson interweaves her journey with her own vivid photographs of tar seeps and pelican death assemblages, historic maps and contemporary art, as a wayfinding guide for exploring places of our own.
Price: $17.99
Pages: 230
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Imprint: Trinity University Press
Publication Date:
25 April 2023
ISBN: 9781595342744
Format: eBook
BISACs:
NATURE / Ecology, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays, SCIENCE / Environmental Science
Praise for Ugliness: A Cultural History
“In her wide-ranging and frequently illuminating study, Gretchen Henderson traces the connections—some obvious, but many not at all—between aesthetic norms and cultural anxieties, from antiquity to the present day. Henderson’s totemic character is Polyphemus, the half-divine Cyclops whose appearance in Homer’s Odyssey is one of the poem’s most harrowing episodes. Set apart by his ‘non-Greek race, enormous size, congenital disorder and demigod status’ (or, to put it more broadly, by his difference, hybridity, and hypervisibility), the monster exemplifies the lasting tendency to equate appearance with less tangible values. . . . Henderson artfully links the Polyphemus myth to the ‘hierarchy of species’ found in Aristotle’s ‘Generation of Animals.’ Aristotle’s ‘downhill slope’ is topped by men, followed by women, then devolves into ‘hybrid offspring’ like satyrs and fauns. This motion, from powerful to exoticized, illustrates the trick—later employed at the height of phrenological and eugenic crazes—of forcing the worth, and, ultimately, the humanity, of certain individuals to correspond with often arbitrary aesthetic categories. . . . Beauty does more than simply seduce: it masks and perfumes, freezes moral categories in place. Ugliness—with all its seams unconcealed—is sometimes the closest thing to the truth.” ― New Yorker
“A fascinating meditation on a slippery subject.” ― Guardian
“Henderson approaches her topic through an impressive number of examples, spanning disciplines, mediums, usages, geographies, and chronologies, and including works of fine and popular art, architecture, mythology, cultural moments, historical facts, and human individuals and groups. The book offers an anecdotal survey of what people have termed ‘ugly’ in various contexts. . . . The author manages to take the discussion of ugliness into its own territory, beyond a mere opposition to beauty. This book provides an engaging and accessible cultural history that is informative and entices the reader to see things in a different perspective.” ― History Today
“Ugliness: A Cultural History is a provocative book because, while exploring our relationship to that which we brand as ugly (or beautiful), Gretchen Henderson forces us to reflect on our tastes and fears, our social conventions, and our everyday notions of justice. Such a call to attention is always very useful; in our prejudiced age it has become essential.” ― Literary Review“Henderson’s cultural history of ugliness skates, at an entertainingly high speed, across large swathes of territory, cultural, historical, and biological, always fascinating...[T]he existence and resistance of the ugly is a reminder—urgent and intense and necessary—that the world does not exist for us alone.” ― Times Literary Supplement“We tend to use the word confidently, as though ugliness has a self-evident and unchanging meaning. In fact, Henderson writes, the “shape-shifting” term has a long, strange, and “unruly history.” Breaking her lively study into sections—“ugly ones,” “ugly groups,” “ugly senses”—she touches on an impressive assortment of cultural eras in order to form a rather, well, unbecoming picture of human fears, anxieties and prejudices . . . through this well-illustrated study, she makes a terrific case for how we’ve regulated the borders of acceptability and mistreated whatever crosses the line.” ― Maclean's“In this brief but expansive cultural history, Henderson removes ugliness from its binary relationship with beauty, probing how the term functions as a signifier of cultural boundaries and sites of transformation. . . . Henderson's multidisciplinary approach to the topic makes the book a valuable resource for scholars throughout the arts and humanities. This would also be a useful text for freshman seminars because the writing style fosters discussion and critical thinking. Overall, the book is a highly recommended addition to academic and art libraries.” ― ARLIS/NA
“Engaging ugliness beyond the realm of art and aesthetics and into the realm of sound, sight, and embodiment, Ugliness: A Cultural History makes a valuable contribution to the contemporary study of ugliness and its myriad functions in Western culture. Henderson traces how ugliness moves ‘beyond “ugly” anomalous individuals and resistant ugly groups to break down borders through “ugly” senses that place all human beings into an equal camp.” . . . Henderson’s work ultimately demonstrates that ugliness is far more than an aesthetic category. Instead, ugliness operates relationally between people, things, spaces, bodies and modes of being, and that it continually negotiates different meanings and challenges its own stasis. It is ugliness, as much as beauty, that makes us human.” ― PopMatters
“Full-blown examination of deformity through history—the medieval gargoyles, monsters, human-animal hybrids in so-called ‘freak shows’ and the like." ― Toronto Star"If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is ugliness. For proof, look no further than the concept’s own history, most recently traced by Henderson. Although there are some objectively repugnant moments—until the late twentieth century, cities including Chicago and Omaha had 'ugly laws' that made it illegal for people with disabilities to appear in public—any transgressions that once seemed ugly now look like progress. Among them: the seventeenth-century Chinese painting Ten Thousand Ugly Inkblots, which resembles lauded work from Jackson Pollock, and the music once described as 'grunts and squeaks' also known as jazz. 'Rather than mere binaries,' Henderson writes, 'ugliness and beauty seem to function more like binary stars. They orbit and attract each other, and we can admire both.'" ― Time Magazine
“In her wide-ranging and frequently illuminating study, Gretchen Henderson traces the connections—some obvious, but many not at all—between aesthetic norms and cultural anxieties, from antiquity to the present day. Henderson’s totemic character is Polyphemus, the half-divine Cyclops whose appearance in Homer’s Odyssey is one of the poem’s most harrowing episodes. Set apart by his ‘non-Greek race, enormous size, congenital disorder and demigod status’ (or, to put it more broadly, by his difference, hybridity, and hypervisibility), the monster exemplifies the lasting tendency to equate appearance with less tangible values. . . . Henderson artfully links the Polyphemus myth to the ‘hierarchy of species’ found in Aristotle’s ‘Generation of Animals.’ Aristotle’s ‘downhill slope’ is topped by men, followed by women, then devolves into ‘hybrid offspring’ like satyrs and fauns. This motion, from powerful to exoticized, illustrates the trick—later employed at the height of phrenological and eugenic crazes—of forcing the worth, and, ultimately, the humanity, of certain individuals to correspond with often arbitrary aesthetic categories. . . . Beauty does more than simply seduce: it masks and perfumes, freezes moral categories in place. Ugliness—with all its seams unconcealed—is sometimes the closest thing to the truth.” ― New Yorker
“A fascinating meditation on a slippery subject.” ― Guardian
“Henderson approaches her topic through an impressive number of examples, spanning disciplines, mediums, usages, geographies, and chronologies, and including works of fine and popular art, architecture, mythology, cultural moments, historical facts, and human individuals and groups. The book offers an anecdotal survey of what people have termed ‘ugly’ in various contexts. . . . The author manages to take the discussion of ugliness into its own territory, beyond a mere opposition to beauty. This book provides an engaging and accessible cultural history that is informative and entices the reader to see things in a different perspective.” ― History Today
“Ugliness: A Cultural History is a provocative book because, while exploring our relationship to that which we brand as ugly (or beautiful), Gretchen Henderson forces us to reflect on our tastes and fears, our social conventions, and our everyday notions of justice. Such a call to attention is always very useful; in our prejudiced age it has become essential.” ― Literary Review“Henderson’s cultural history of ugliness skates, at an entertainingly high speed, across large swathes of territory, cultural, historical, and biological, always fascinating...[T]he existence and resistance of the ugly is a reminder—urgent and intense and necessary—that the world does not exist for us alone.” ― Times Literary Supplement“We tend to use the word confidently, as though ugliness has a self-evident and unchanging meaning. In fact, Henderson writes, the “shape-shifting” term has a long, strange, and “unruly history.” Breaking her lively study into sections—“ugly ones,” “ugly groups,” “ugly senses”—she touches on an impressive assortment of cultural eras in order to form a rather, well, unbecoming picture of human fears, anxieties and prejudices . . . through this well-illustrated study, she makes a terrific case for how we’ve regulated the borders of acceptability and mistreated whatever crosses the line.” ― Maclean's“In this brief but expansive cultural history, Henderson removes ugliness from its binary relationship with beauty, probing how the term functions as a signifier of cultural boundaries and sites of transformation. . . . Henderson's multidisciplinary approach to the topic makes the book a valuable resource for scholars throughout the arts and humanities. This would also be a useful text for freshman seminars because the writing style fosters discussion and critical thinking. Overall, the book is a highly recommended addition to academic and art libraries.” ― ARLIS/NA
“Engaging ugliness beyond the realm of art and aesthetics and into the realm of sound, sight, and embodiment, Ugliness: A Cultural History makes a valuable contribution to the contemporary study of ugliness and its myriad functions in Western culture. Henderson traces how ugliness moves ‘beyond “ugly” anomalous individuals and resistant ugly groups to break down borders through “ugly” senses that place all human beings into an equal camp.” . . . Henderson’s work ultimately demonstrates that ugliness is far more than an aesthetic category. Instead, ugliness operates relationally between people, things, spaces, bodies and modes of being, and that it continually negotiates different meanings and challenges its own stasis. It is ugliness, as much as beauty, that makes us human.” ― PopMatters
“Full-blown examination of deformity through history—the medieval gargoyles, monsters, human-animal hybrids in so-called ‘freak shows’ and the like." ― Toronto Star"If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is ugliness. For proof, look no further than the concept’s own history, most recently traced by Henderson. Although there are some objectively repugnant moments—until the late twentieth century, cities including Chicago and Omaha had 'ugly laws' that made it illegal for people with disabilities to appear in public—any transgressions that once seemed ugly now look like progress. Among them: the seventeenth-century Chinese painting Ten Thousand Ugly Inkblots, which resembles lauded work from Jackson Pollock, and the music once described as 'grunts and squeaks' also known as jazz. 'Rather than mere binaries,' Henderson writes, 'ugliness and beauty seem to function more like binary stars. They orbit and attract each other, and we can admire both.'" ― Time Magazine
Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrative sciences. Her recent essays have appeared in Ecotone, Ploughshares, and the Kenyon Review, with co-authored articles in Nature Sustainability and Conservation Biology. Her four previous books include Ugliness: A Cultural History and Galerie de Difformité, cross-pollinating genres and arts and translated across five languages. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and has also taught at Georgetown University, MIT, and the University of Utah, where she was the 2018–19 Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities. Born and raised in California, she is the 2023 Aldo and Estella Leopold Writer in Residence in New Mexico and lives in Arizona.
CONTENTS
Wayfinding
composition : decomposition
I. Death Traps
Great Salt Lake
II. Stuck
American West
III. Unspiraling
North America
The Big Here
Earth
Field Notes