GUITAR
PABLO PICASSO, 1914
For as long as there's been sculpture, there were basically two ways to make one. You carve it out of stone, or you model it in clay and cast it. Either way you start with a solid lump and find the thing inside. Picasso looks at all that and goes, nah. He grabs flat scraps. Cardboard, paper, string. Later, cut sheet metal. And he builds a guitar. Doesn't carve it, doesn't mold it. He assembles it, like a kid with a cereal box, out of bent flat pieces and empty air. Nobody had really made a sculpture this way before. He basically invents building one instead of carving one. And a hundred years of modern sculpture walks through the door he just opened. Now look at the sound hole. On a real guitar that's a hole. A dark round nothing in the middle. Picasso makes it a little tube that sticks straight out at you. He took the empty part and turned it into the solid part. The hole pokes out like a nose. Sounds like a gag. It's not. He'd been looking at an African mask where the eyes poke out at you instead of sinking in, and he stole the logic. Flip it inside out. The nothing becomes the thing. It's cardboard and tin and string. Looks like it took an afternoon. And it quietly rewired what sculpture was allowed to be. Years from now, an old man builds a whole goat out of garbage. Starts right here. A flat tin guitar with a hole that sticks out.