Ugly Blog

The Other Shoe, in C-Arts Magazine (May 2008)

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

–Oscar Wilde

Art fairs can be exhausting. Not just city-sized biennales like Venice, but even those that try to limit themselves to a couple of piers, like the New York Armory show. When I wandered those two art-filled piers, I dressed for comfort: sneakers and a VIP pass, so I could go sit in the VIP room, put my feet up and have a drink.

I’d never been in a room with quite that many gallery directors, art directors, and other art middlemen. They were beautiful. They wore the latest styles from Milan, from Paris, from that magical place with heroin-addict skinniness, bulk discounts on the color black, and eyes so sensitive they require sunglasses indoors. Except for me in my worn-out Nikes, everyone looked like they’d just walked off a catwalk, swinging hair and thin molto Italo ties, networking while appearing merely to lounge loosely.

I wondered why art attracts fashionistas. They seem antithetical. To paraphrase an artist I once reviewed, design is based on a completed pattern, however complex, while art requires the breaking of the pattern in a meaningful way. And fashion is design at its worst: It is deliberately and ostentatiously superficial. Its whole infrastructure-fetishization, marketing, shopping-has been almost tiresomely critiqued. Artists and theorists have made careers investigating the distance between art and consumer culture, propaganda, or entertainment. Even artists who shook up the lines between art and production, between installation and shop window-Neo Geo guys like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, and Hal Foster-had ideas, good ideas, behind their work. They played between two areas. The weren’t simply abdicating to the merchants.

What I didn’t know at the time, sitting in the Armory VIP room, was that my sneakers had come a long way. In a culture where street kids ripped Mercedes logos off the hoods of cars and wore them as necklaces-not as a critique, but as a way of branding themselves-running shoes had themselves become a fashion statement, complete with new models every season and one-offs: limited edition shoes that started life as failed product lines and ended as the proudest, and most expensive, possessions of urban youth. Meanwhile Niketown, the five-floor Nike museum with displays of Michael Jordan’s used shoes and an audio soundtrack of cheering fans, was the most visited Chicago institution in the early 1990s.

Nike has had a lot of such firsts: the first basketball shoe to crack $100; the first to star in a Hollywood movie (Do the Right Thing, by Spike Lee); the first footwear over which teenagers “rolled” each other; and the first to become part of the uniform of a cult that committed mass suicide in order to rendezvous with a spaceship hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp. Together with purple shroud and, um, death, the Heaven’s Gate cult of Rancho Santa Fe, California, believed the two-toned Nikes would wing their wearer beyond Hale-Bopp and on to the stars. Nike had gone from the winged Greek goddess of victory (her Roman equivalent is Victoria), to mass-market fetish, to sacred uniform.

Although this sort of sacralization of consumer goods is not unique to urban modernity-in Malaysia the Temiar people believe sacred spirits come from watches and motorcycles, in Mexico the Tzotzil elders meet to ceremonially drink Pepsi in order to commune with God, and Melanesia has several cargo cults whose intricate rituals ensure the arrival of plane loads of Western goods-what is different in a case like Nike is the existence of a formidable marketing department to steer the sacralization process, to maximize affective consumer devotion and quickly deal with events that would desacralize the product. Caricatures of fetishization like Heaven’s Gate disappear, child and sweatshop labor problems fade quickly from the media radar, and books like The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan, or the 2003 documentary based on it, have minimal impact on the relevant demographic. On the other hand, Nike’s slogan, “Just Do It,” became one of the top five ad slogans of the 20^th century, and the 1988 ad campaign that launched it has been enshrined in the Smithsonian Institution.

And then there is the star power: the list is too long for my word limit, but just among the Michaels they have Michael Jordan, Michael Schumacher, and Michael Johnson. Though Jordan probably added most to Nike’s bottom line, Johnson is a particularly good fit with the company. He was the world’s fastest man by virtue of clocking in at over 43 km/h during a 200 meter run, won both the men’s 200 meter and 400 meter events at the Atlanta Olympics, something never done before or since, and his 200 meter run shattered the world record by the biggest margin ever, leading scientists to predict his record won’t even be approached for at least twenty years. But because he raced in a pair of custom-designed Nike racing spikes, he was nicknamed “The Man with the Golden Shoes.”

Nike hopes to repeat the success it had with Johnson-it has designed another top-secret shoe for the current record holder of the 100 meter sprint, Asafa Powell, to wear at the 2008 Beijing games-but the company has also come to understand just how much iconic and cultural power it holds. So it was perhaps only a matter of time until Nike built the ultimate branding machine: an art gallery.

Before the Nike 706 gallery opened on January 5^th, 2007, in the 798 Danshanzi Art District, the last “art and shoe” event that I can think of was the open air exhibition Navidad 2005 at the Plaza Mayor in Gijon, Spain, where different artists were asked to decorate Christmas trees. The Spanish art collective PSJM decorated their tree with sneaker logos, each bearing the sentence “Made by Slaves for Free People.” Adidas complained, and the mayor of the city removed PSJM’s exhibition.

Nike 706, of course, doesn’t have pretensions of engaging in any sort of guerrilla art. Or any other idea beyond the goldenness of itself. So far in 2008 it has hosted two shows. The second was the Jordan XX3 Become Legendary exhibition, featuring shoes and posters of Michael Jordan. The first, titled Force of Love, celebrated 25 years of its Air Force 1 shoe. It was opened with a huge party, the gallery’s biggest event to date, and included commissions from nine Chinese artists whom Nike asked to “show their love of Air Force 1,” in the words of Nike spokeswoman Jeanne Huang. The result was glass cases filled with shoes, photos on the walls of celebrities wearing shoes, an installation of light shining through transparent shoes, a pair of wings, shoes painted in different colors, some graffiti, videos of shoes, break dancers, more shoes, and music by Kayne West, Clark Kent, DMC crew, and Drifterz. It had all the glamour of art-everyone coming to see and be seen, the prestige, the celebrities, the unlimited free food and alcohol-and left behind only the art. It was as though an art gallery had been freed from the art, reveling in its frictionless superficiality. When, in the middle of the opening, the lyrics of Kayne West’s Classic got to “That’s so novice, I’m so polished, I got a right to be a little bit snobbish”-as the logo machine hit its top gear and the shoes floated in the air-the three people in attendance who had grown up reading Derrida or Frederic Jameson or, for that matter, any other self-respecting thinker became dizzy and fell over.

There’s no philosopher, artist, or writer that can keep up with the speed of that machine. From New York to Jakarta to Beijing, what that machine pumps out is not shoes, not even logos, but those three Kayne West sentences masquerading as subordinate clauses. Its ambiguous crassness is like a steamroller. You can file off the logos from your cars, skis and bicycles, stick duct tape over your shoes, sew patches on your shirts and shorts. But if you make art, you can’t escape the fact that wearing a hot designer fresh out of FIT during that five second window between her first magazine article and becoming mainstream will give your art a leg up. The ability to keep up with the breakneck pace of fashion’s production cycles shows that you live in the right area, you’re networked, you’re hip and wealthy enough and the right distance ahead of the curve. It will make you marketable and that, by extension, will make your art marketable.

As culture makers, we are insignificant compared to our shoes. The best that we as artists, critics and writers can do is affect small subcultures, little niches where Nike can’t find us. And the message of the Nike 706 gallery is that she’s coming after us. In the end, she’ll take us all out beyond the comet Hale-Bopp. Nike is victory.

The only way out? Just do it. Better

–by Alexander Boldizar

The Other Shoe was originally published in C-Arts Magazine (May 2008)