Designer Shoes

INSA, a UK artist, has created some of the most bizarre shoes we’ve ever seen, as part of a new exhibit at the Tate Modern – a collection of responses to Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. What was controvertial about Ofili’s piece – that the Virgin Mary was made from elephant dung – is also what makes INSA’s shoes mentionable…they too are partly made of elephant dung.

I’d like to think the shoes are meant to represent something; perhaps the way in which the Western world’s fashionable culture requires people to put themselves at a distance from the poverty third world before splashing out thousands on clothes and shoes. I’d like to think the thick layers of dung that make up the bottoms of the shoes are representational of us walking all over the third world, having to use ever-greater heels to balance ourselves against the size of our oppression – although we look quite good, our ’soles’ are essentially crap.

Sadly, however, I think it’s probably just attention seeking nonsense, like most of what I see in the Tate Modern. Make it first, define it later – the poser’s guide to art. A press release claims INSA “sourced dung from the same family of elephants that produced the dung used in Chris’s infamous paintings” – as if that makes any difference whatsoever.

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