Picasso and Activision - No Strings Attached

I was at the library, watching the geriatrics shuffle in from the rest home next door, when I noticed the new issue of ARTnews (Feb. '11) on the rack. The headline read, "Picasso: Guitar Hero."

Turns out, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is exhibiting seventy works by Pablo Picasso that showcase his visual obsession with the Spanish guitar. Included are two of his sculptures - one cardboard and the other, tin - circa 1912-14. I've seen the pieces before at the MoMA and those ersatz git-fiddles are indeed spectacular in an abstract, scrap-bin sort of way. Picasso's liberation of a guitar's form from Cartesian space may be the first ever example of "thinking outside the box" - a shopworn cliché today but a perceptual sea change a hundred years ago.

My interest in these Modern Art masterpieces is heightened, if conflicted, by the fact that I too have built seventy or more acoustic guitars - real working instruments. So let me condescend for a moment. First off, I understand that Pablo couldn't play the guitar for beans. I could have played circles around him with my eyes closed. But, of course, Picasso's Cubist "guitars" are purely visual constructs that resonate, figuratively speaking, with a sense of time and history. They ring true to Einstein's relativity. Talk about negative space: Pablo inverted the guitar's sound cavity by extruding the hole into a tube, providing depth by proxy and essentially making something out of nothing. That's pretty funny - not hilarious, but I'm as much amused as awed. The jumbled aspects of his ideal guitar fold into each other like standing waves in a small listening room, or microwaves in an oven. The freeze-dried extraction liberated from its own material confines has a baked-in aesthetic that confounds my brain in a delightful way as it reconfigures itself in the appropriate corners of my head.

The author of the ARTnews article, Ann Landi, cites Picasso's creations as epistemological, whereas I would say they are downright ontological in that he imbues a sense of being, a conscious introspection as if the guitar was seeing itself from the inside looking outward to its immediate surroundings including the space it occupies. To truly know something is to be that thing, so Pablo becomes one with the object of his affectation and manipulates its myriad modalities, not the least of which is the guitar's female form...

...(Read the rest of this essay in The Intellectual Handyman On Art, a new book by Gary R. Peterson from iUniverse.)

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