Crazy 20th Century Bull Heads

I'm taking a 20th Century Art class at UC this quarter. It has pretty much been blowing my mind. Aside from all the theory we have to read in order to even vaguely interpret what the hell was going on in art at the time, some stuff in just CRAZY. I know this isn't a very articulate description of modern art, but coming in with a heavy Medieval/Renaissance/Baroque background, I think crazy is the best way to describe how I feel about it: crazy good, crazy bad, crazy interesting, crazy confusing. I just really like flipping through my book. One thing that I did learn about is a photograph by Man Ray, called Minotaur (1934), reproduced poorly below.

Get it? If you don't get it right away look a little harder. If you still don't get it, its a photograph of a man's body, but whoa! its shadowing makes it look like a minotaur!! Crazy, right?

Eight years later, Picasso was all like "yeah, I can do that too," and came up with this:

Bull's Head, 1942. Now, instead of a photo he took a bicycle seat and handlebars, put them together, and got the head of a bull. Not a minotaur, but pretty much the same thing. Now, according to the book I'm using for class, they fit into different places in art history- Man Ray's photograph taking its place in the antiaesthetics movement, and Pablo Picasso falling in line with Saussure's "arbitrariness of the sign." But if you ask me, all they were doing was creating something that looks like something else, which is pretty damn cool no matter who you are, and is something that not many artists can accomplish like these two have. Crazy!