More on the supposed symbolic meaning of shoes. Be careful what message you're sending gents. Just remember--red stilettos=sexual availability.

Made for Gawking, These Shoes Are In Fashion as Art --- Wingtips, Red Stiletto Heels, Boots and
Zebra Pumps All Reek With Symbolism

By Alexandra Peers
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
1,242 words
5 October 1993
The Wall Street Journal
PAGE A1
English
(Copyright (c) 1993, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.)

NEW YORK -- In a darkened room, 25 ghostly X-ray images of yawning, empty work boots seem to march
across the floor. They face a television monitor, the lips on it chanting, "Give them what they deserve." Even
jaded gallery-goers, the sort who wear sunglasses indoors, stop dead in their tracks.

The video artwork, currently at the Josh Baer Gallery in SoHo, is by Lorna Simpson and is called "Group
Dynamic: Leader Confronts Group/Group Confronts Individual." When asked what it all means, the artist
replies, "Didn't you read the title?"

Nineteenth-century France had Impressionism. Post-World War II America had abstract expressionism. We,
just now, have Florsheim.

In Santa Cruz, Calif., Gaza Bowen crafts high heels that mock traditional sex roles: Some are made of
scrub brushes and scouring pads. Surrealist Russian artist Genia Chef, whose work is shown by the Stuart
Levy Gallery in New York, paints pictures of fantasy shoes that curl up the leg like snakes. Some of them
have eyes, feathers, propellers and headlights. Why does Mr. Chef paint shoes? Says Mr. Levy: "He has a
good, warped mind."

This month, the ceramic shoes of Margaret J. Hewlett go on display at the New Art Forms Exposition in
Chicago. She does zebra-striped pumps with horns rising from the tips, high heels that balance on the
severed leg of a doll and spiked heels with real spikes.

In a "Statement of Artistic Intent" that accompanies the exhibit, Ms. Hewlett says of the high heel:
"Persistence of this absurd yet aesthetically pleasing object is evidence of a deep underlying repression of
personal expression which continues, sometimes frighteningly polarized, in our society." Some of her shoes
can also be used as candleholders.

Caroline Rennolds Milbank, a fashion historian and couture appraiser for William Doyle Galleries in New
York, maintains that "20th-century fashion history is really the history of the leg." With the ascent of hemlines
and the disappearance of fans, hats and parasols as everyday accessories, attention and artistry focused on
the shoe, she says. It is no coincidence that "Barbie was the first doll to have removable high heels."

People are obsessed with shoes to the point of larceny. Last month, shoes that Marilyn Monroe wore in
"The Seven-Year Itch" were among items stolen from a New York warehouse.

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Florsheim school is German artist Rebecca Horn's sculpture
"Prussian Blue Bride." Eleven steel rods shoot out from the wall, and 11 high-heeled white pumps twist in
the air at the end of them. Then from above, mechanical arms drip blue paint over the shoes. Ms. Horn's
art-world in-joke on the "drip" painting style of Jackson Pollock was part of a recent exhibition of her shoe art
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum here.

Both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum have mounted shoe-theme
exhibitions this year. The Southern California "shoe do" was on the designs of Salvatore Ferragamo,
so-called shoemaker of dreams (sponsored by Ferragamo Firenze SpA). The Brooklyn Museum is currently
doing the history of women's shoes, in an exhibit called "Fancy Feet."

Marie-Joseph Bossan, curator of the popular International Museum of Shoes in Romans, France, believes
that "the history of civilization can be read in shoes." The museum's huge collection of 6,000 shoes, giant
shoe sculptures and shoe-related paintings has taken over the former Sisters of the Visitation convent there.
"Shoes can be a masterpiece," Mrs. Bossan says.

Says Ms. Bowen, the shoe artist who works in brushes and scouring pads: "Shoes come with a lot of

emotional and psychological baggage that makes them so perfect for making art." Wingtips connote wealth,
and red stiletto heels "sexual availability," says Ms. Bowen. "As an artist, you can exploit all that encoded
information."

On the auction block, until recently, the only shoes that sold for big bucks were a pair of red ones that a
young Judy Garland wore on the road to Oz. They fetched a record $165,000 at auction in 1988. Currently,
less-famous slippers are commanding respectable prices. On Sept. 30, the footwear collection of
shoe-designer Beth Levine was auctioned off at William Doyle. Pairs of Mrs. Levine's size 4B, 1960s pop-art
inspired boots and vinyl slippers sold for as much as $1,350. In May a shoe-themed work by Ms. Horn --
brown leather men's shoes that break into a tap dance thanks to wires and hidden motors -- sold at
Christie's New York auction house for $38,000.

So, what does it all mean? Serious, symbolic things, psychosexual things. In his 1992 essay
"Post-Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson traced the
history of 20th-century society through shoe art. He sees shoes as a "clue or symptom for some vaster
reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth."

Thus, Vincent van Gogh's "A Pair of Boots" (of the hobnail kind) is "a Utopian gesture" commenting on "the
whole rudimentary human world of agricultural misery," Mr. Jameson explains. Surrealist artist Rene
Magritte's bare feet with laces, in the painting called "Le Modele Rouge," Mr. Jameson says, "take on the
carnal reality" of humanity. And Andy Warhol's superficial and decorative painting "Diamond Dust Soles"
foreshadows "the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital."

In short, shoes matter.

The art world's sudden foot fetish has various meanings for museums, artists and art lovers. For museums,
shoe shows tend to be both cheap to produce and to insure. They are politically correct, since they often
feature the artistry of women and address feminist issues. And they are big with school groups.

Nonetheless, "there's still a great deal of snobbery in the art field itself" about shoes, says Patricia Mears,
curator of the Brooklyn Museum's "Fancy Feet" exhibition. She thinks shoes aren't taken as seriously as
they should be either as sociological material or as art.

To the artists, shoe art -- because of the haunting sense of emptiness and intimacy shoes convey to them
-- is a logical outgrowth of last spring's dominant art trend, death and dismemberment. Looking at piles of
shoes, "there's a sense of ghostliness," says Ms. Mears. "You know there was a human being attached to
this."

The artist Ralph Brancaccio is lining up 25,000 pairs of shoes for a "Silent March" next year at New York's
City Hall. For the event, as much politics as art, Mr. Brancaccio is collecting shoes belonging to people with
AIDS. The shoes are to be piled up around the building.

For art lovers, the popularity of shoe art may have something to do with a growing synthesis of trends, in
high art and low. Dealers and curators say that people who invest in baseball cards with the same
enthusiasm their grandparents reserved for Currier and Ives prints don't make big distinctions between art
and craft and popular culture.

"Objects wander today" back and forth from "popular and profane to sacred and aesthetic," says Richard
Martin, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. These days, art "gropes in fashion's
pockets."

Sounds like the kind of questions regularly posted by trads on 'the other place'.

And don't they always get it so wrong anyway? If you follow the line of thought of the guy in the first post, he graduated from loafers to saddle shoes?

For at least 30 years saddle shoes were teen fashion...

I think that there is a huge difference b/w people like Boyer and Flusser who while we might disagree with some of their conclusions can agree that they know their stuff. A lot of these so-called newspaper fashionistas seem to be coming out of nowhere with their opinions. I used to read the Globe & Mail's male fashion columnist and it would drive me crazy. He would do a good job of advising people on the basics (obvious colour-clashing advice) but so much of what he said was just non-sense that gained the worst sort of legitimacy through publication. I remember him going on that guys should replace their normal-rise jeans with low-waisted numbers which would be such a mistake. What makes it worse is that if it was simply an opinion, fine, but the way it gets printed it comes out as gospel truth, which it isn't.

Chums,

Perchance the first article explains what is wrong with modern times.  A 35 year old is afraid to look grown up?

Perchance worse,, the expert tells the lad he will look more casual and less grown up in cap toed shoes??

What planet are these lads from?

Cheerio.