July 21,2010
“Walking Tall” Exhibition Celebrates Shoes as Art
The Palm Desert Community Gallery welcomes works from eight Coachella Valley artists in its new exhibition “Walking Tall” Artists: Ryan Campbell, Michael Giddings, Gary Paterson, Karen Riley, William Schinsky, Patricia Seyfried, Lisa Soccio, and Clonard Thomas have re-imagined the shoe. These artists have taken a variety of flats, boots, loafers, heels and have transformed them using paint, collage, and other mixed media into artworks that celebrate some of history’s most famous figures. The footwear-focused exhibition includes both two- and three-dimensional artworks with references to the musings and imagery of Frieda Kahlo, Claude Monet, Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, Marcel Duchamp, and Vincent Van Gogh.
Well, I must say that the current exhibit is different and engaging. Frankly I was not in WOW moment, never them less the Van Gogh’s shoe story is quite impressive and controversial.
Philosophers Rumble Over Van Gogh’s Shoes, Scott Horton
Soaking up the Art vibe.
“Walking Tall” Exhibition Celebrates Shoes as Art
The Palm Desert Community Gallery welcomes works from eight Coachella Valley artists in its new exhibition “Walking Tall” Artists: Ryan Campbell, Michael Giddings, Gary Paterson, Karen Riley, William Schinsky, Patricia Seyfried, Lisa Soccio, and Clonard Thomas have re-imagined the shoe. These artists have taken a variety of flats, boots, loafers, heels and have transformed them using paint, collage, and other mixed media into artworks that celebrate some of history’s most famous figures. The footwear-focused exhibition includes both two- and three-dimensional artworks with references to the musings and imagery of Frieda Kahlo, Claude Monet, Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, Marcel Duchamp, and Vincent Van Gogh.
Well, I must say that the current exhibit is different and engaging. Frankly I was not in WOW moment, never them less the Van Gogh’s shoe story is quite impressive and controversial.
Philosophers Rumble Over Van Gogh’s Shoes, Scott Horton
The Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne,Germany has launched an impressive new exhibition entitled “Vincent van Gogh: Shoes,” built around a celebrated painting by the Dutch master from 1886. Some might wonder how an exhibition can be framed around a single work with such a modest subject matter, but the curators provide us an impressive model. The exhibition focuses on the extraordinary role this painting has played in modern philosophy surrounding art, its reception, and its relationship to the history of ideas. A half dozen philosophers and art historians have written about van Gogh’s painting of shoes, including Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida. The exhibition takes us on a trip through their writings—sometimes comic, occasionally downright rude, and often exhilarating. These thinkers certainly bar no holds in their clamber to be exceedingly profound.
Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886)
We should start with the facts now established as to the origins of this painting. In 1886, van Gogh visited a Paris flea market and came across a pair of worn-out shoes. He bought them and brought them back to his atelier in the city’s Montmartre district. It’s not clear why he bought them, but it could be simply that he needed a new pair of shoes. Apparently, he did try to wear them and found the fit impossible. Instead, he decided to use them as a prop for painting, and the shoes soon became the most celebrated footwear in the history of modern art. But that may be less the direct result of van Gogh’s painting than of its critical reception by eminent writers.
In The Still Life as a Personal Object (1968), Meyer Schapiro gives the painting his own best take: When van Gogh depicted the peasant’s wooden sabots, he gave them a clear, unworn shape and surface like the smooth still life objects he had set beside them on the same table: the bowl, the bottles, etc. In the later picture of a peasant’s leather slippers he has turned them with their backs to the viewer. His own shoes he has isolated on the floor and he has rendered them as if facing us, and so individual and wrinkled in appearance that we can speak of them as veridical portraits of aging shoes. And then we come to Jacques Derrida. There is another line, another system of detaching traits: this is the work qua picture in its frame. The frame makes a work of supplementary désœuvrement. It cuts out but also sews back together. By an invisible lace which pierces the canvas (as the pointure ‘pierces the paper’), passes into it then out of it in order to sew it back onto its milieu, onto its internal and external worlds. From then on, if these shoes are no longer useful, it is of course because they are detached from naked feet and from their subject of reattachment (their owner, usual holder, the one who wears them and whom they bear). It is also because they are painted: within the limits of a picture, but limits that have to be thought in laces. What, one wonders, would Vincent make of all of this? What did he really mean by those shoes? Sometimes shoes are just shoes, but the visitor coming away from this exhibition may realize that a pair of shoes can contain an entire universe.
Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886)
We should start with the facts now established as to the origins of this painting. In 1886, van Gogh visited a Paris flea market and came across a pair of worn-out shoes. He bought them and brought them back to his atelier in the city’s Montmartre district. It’s not clear why he bought them, but it could be simply that he needed a new pair of shoes. Apparently, he did try to wear them and found the fit impossible. Instead, he decided to use them as a prop for painting, and the shoes soon became the most celebrated footwear in the history of modern art. But that may be less the direct result of van Gogh’s painting than of its critical reception by eminent writers.
In The Still Life as a Personal Object (1968), Meyer Schapiro gives the painting his own best take: When van Gogh depicted the peasant’s wooden sabots, he gave them a clear, unworn shape and surface like the smooth still life objects he had set beside them on the same table: the bowl, the bottles, etc. In the later picture of a peasant’s leather slippers he has turned them with their backs to the viewer. His own shoes he has isolated on the floor and he has rendered them as if facing us, and so individual and wrinkled in appearance that we can speak of them as veridical portraits of aging shoes. And then we come to Jacques Derrida. There is another line, another system of detaching traits: this is the work qua picture in its frame. The frame makes a work of supplementary désœuvrement. It cuts out but also sews back together. By an invisible lace which pierces the canvas (as the pointure ‘pierces the paper’), passes into it then out of it in order to sew it back onto its milieu, onto its internal and external worlds. From then on, if these shoes are no longer useful, it is of course because they are detached from naked feet and from their subject of reattachment (their owner, usual holder, the one who wears them and whom they bear). It is also because they are painted: within the limits of a picture, but limits that have to be thought in laces. What, one wonders, would Vincent make of all of this? What did he really mean by those shoes? Sometimes shoes are just shoes, but the visitor coming away from this exhibition may realize that a pair of shoes can contain an entire universe.
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