Mounds and Trenches
Robert Morris
(Lithograph on Wove Paper)
1969
The eye is a liar. Easily duped, the mind interposes memories onto the everlasting present moment. Each tree is hundreds of trees. Each face is a murmuration of likenesses. The eye can’t quite figure out where it is. For Morris, to look at the blueprint of an interminable sculpture carved from the earth is it to induce a kind of vertigo. It is only on paper that you could capture the entire system of rivulets woven into an empty field in Missouri. To move through the actual landscape is to encounter the work as a series of minutes. The eye, hungry for the snapshot, the instant impression, cannot make sense of the whole. It is akin to the classic philosophical problem pertaining to clouds. Each bundle of water droplets bleeds into its neighbor, despite what the eye sees, despite what it would prefer to see. They seemed important once, the margins. How, as a child, flying to a funeral, we barrelled through each distinct parcel of potential rain until everything collapsed into everything else. It happened so quickly. Something was lost. The eye was occluded by a thick patina of tears. I couldn’t believe it.
Bird in Space
Constantin Brancusi
(Polished Brass)
1932-40
It is not a tanager, not honey-creeper, nor conebill. No flying thing filling the empty vault of sky. No heart. No body to breeze through the moments. Not political, some say, as they move on to the geometric calm of the Mondrians. Lift, perhaps. Thrust. Contour, like a smudge of ink on a scroll, begging the human mind to fixate on flight. To recall the isthmus of childhood, the land riven through with American robins. To own it. It is curved, the mind, not like a bird but a talon. It eats notions like worms. If it swallows anything, it swallows sense, not bees nor wasps. I’ll not knot it into meaning, nor give it the consequence of a name. It is not nothing. I know nothing when I see it.
Matthew Tuckner is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah. He is the author of two collections: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Four Way Books, 2025) and Cloud Chamber (Four Way Books, 2028).