Painted welded steel, 110 x 52 x 24, 2014.
Major Key is two objects with the same body plan, fused so that each supplies the other’s parts. A key has a bow, a shaft and a toothed bit. A guitar has a round body, a neck and a head. McCourt stands the form on its round end, with the head at the top, and serrates that head. In profile the long edge of the shaft is notched too, which is the edge a key presents to a lock. The upright figure can be read as a guitar with a key’s cut profile or as a key with a guitar’s fittings.
The body is built the way the Cubists built the guitar. A large disc carries a smaller disc, a tilted square and a set of triangular wedges, all overlapping flat planes. In Picasso’s constructed Guitars of 1912 to 1914 the sound hole is the one element that survives the fragmentation, a cylinder thrust forward from the planes. McCourt keeps a single circular opening at the center of the stack. It is the sound hole of the instrument and also the eyelet of the key’s bow, the hole a ring or cord passes through.
The neck repeats that circle at small scale. A ladder of square cells runs down it, each pierced by a round opening, so the motif of the body is carried up the shaft in a rhythm of repeated divisions. That rhythm reads as the spacing of a fingerboard and as the regular cutting of a key.
