After Extinction by Richard Grusin

Author:Richard Grusin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2018-04-06T23:14:26+00:00

A female hatched on the 23rd of May 1999 in Boise, Idaho. We released her back on

December 28th the same year. She was in the wild until 1st of February 2013 when

she died of lead poisoning. From the beginning of her time in the wild she was a real

problem. She had absolutely no fear of people and of course our concern with that

was that people might feed her. She turned out to be one of the best birds of the

population and she also produced young in the wild. So that’s a tough thing, losing

an adult, producing bird. A hard hit to the population . . . We thought if we would have

been able to track her we would have taken her and put her in captivity forever. She

was a bird that had absolutely no fear. Generally I would say that Condors don’t have

much fear of humans and that lack is one of our biggest problems. But we were ready

to catch her — she would land at the jewelry stands on the side of the highway and

she’d land near parked cars, probably because she had been fed; they’re certainly not

stupid. Then she turns out to be one of our best birds.

Figure 5.2. Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson. Condor 210, artwork from

the exhibition Trout Fishing in America and Other stories, Arizona State University

Art Museum, October 4, 2014, through January 17, 2015 (archival photograph,

2015). Courtesy of the artists.

120    CARY WOLFE

to make good on our commitments, to materialize our “world,” to ad-

dress the other to whom we feel responsible: an adestination that stems

from the fact that the same sign or trace or mark can function variably,

even oppositely, in very different contexts.22 The constraints of scientific method and protocol constitute, of course, a canonical attempt to control,

even eliminate, this destinerrance, but its most compelling manifestation

in this installation is the lead bullet that leaves its trace, sometimes in

the discoloration of the animal’s body by lead poisoning, but sometimes

invisible, in these bodies and these images but not of them, you might

say, the materialization of two “there s” in one “place.” That destinerrance

quite literally attends such tidy ethical, legal, and political distinctions

as we like to make between the polar opposites of “game” or “trash”

animals who are deemed “killable but not murderable”— the animals

that sustain these carrion feeders— and those who, like the condor, are

“rare,” “threatened,” and “protected,” with the full backing of scientific

and political apparatuses. The archive, in other words, may record the

“official story” of body weight, reproductive rate, legal status, and so on,

but it also actualizes something more, and in that other space, that other

scene, we discover that the world is not given but made. We thus discover,

in short, a scene of responsibility.

CONDORS AT THE END OF THE WORLD    121

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