The World Eaters and Lee Bontecou’s Flightless Birds

Abstract This essay reconsiders Lee Bontecou’s early sculptures of birds in relation to emerging ideas about the planetary — and interplanetary — scale of human activity. Produced in Rome between 1957 and 1958, Bontecou’s bronze and terracotta birds — assemblages of fractured surfaces and exposed cores — reference grounded birds driven to extinction by human exploration and overconsumption, such as the dodo, moa, and great auk. Citing H. G. Wells’s fiction, bird dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, and Cold War weapons systems, I argue that Bontecou’s heavy, clunky birds resist fantasies of the ‘conquest of space’ by reminding viewers of colonial predation and ecological dislocation. While often framed as expressions of space-age awe and wonder, Bontecou’s better-known ‘swallowing’ reliefs (as Donald Judd called them) of the 1960s are best understood next to the flightless birds: both address a world-eating drive that risks self-devouring.