SHE-GOAT
PABLO PICASSO, 1950 (cast 1952)
That belly is a wicker basket. Somebody wove it to carry vegetables. Now it's the ribcage of a pregnant goat. Picasso's living down south, in a town full of potters. Which means the ground around his studio is covered in broken pots, busted ceramics, scrap metal, palm fronds, junk nobody wanted. Everybody else sees a trash heap. Picasso walks out and sees a goat. And that's the whole thing. The belly's a basket. The udders are two flowerpots somebody threw out. The slope of her back is a palm frond. The rest is scrap, found in the fields and the junk piles, bent and wired into an animal. That gap, between what a thing is and what he suddenly decides it is, that's the same trick he'd been running since he built a guitar out of tin and string, decades back. He just never stopped. And here's what's great about her. She's ridiculous and dead serious at the same time. Pregnant, heavy, planted, a real animal standing there with total dignity. And she's made of garbage. The dignity is real, the method's insane, and the two don't fight each other one bit. A couple years later they cast her in bronze. So now she weighs a ton and belongs to one of the most powerful museums on earth. But the basket's still in there. The flowerpots are still in there. Picasso turned trash into a goat, the world turned the goat into treasure, and under all that bronze the garbage is still quietly being garbage.