shoes

[David C. N. Swanson]

A high school teacher took his students to a museum where, among other
things, they were to go into a particular
room, one at a time, and select a great painting which they would tell
the teacher about immediately upon leaving the
room by the other door. One student reported that he had been unable to
find "a great painting" in the room at all.
Most of the others, on the contrary, reported having had a difficult
time deciding which of the great paintings to talk
about. Strangely enough, a large percentage of them chose to talk about
a painting of a couple of shoes. The high
school teacher knew, though many of the students did not, that this was
a famous work by one of the more famous
painters represented in the room, if not perhaps the most highly
regarded of the lot. And thus, though the teacher
himself could see little of exceptional merit in a picture of what he
took to be a pair of old shoes like those his
grandfather might have worn, he suspected that the students were
catching something that he was missing. (This sort
of respect for the students had long endeared him to them, and they
spoke to him honestly.)

Some of these students spoke entirely of the texture of the paint, the
signs of the brush strokes, the color tones. A
few pointed out the weird position of the laces in the corner.

Others were delighted by the fact that the subject of the painting was
something so ordinary. They took this as a
message from the painter to themselves, saying Open your eyes to the
beauty of ordinary things even in the bottom
of your closet.

One student suggested that the shoes were painted affectionately, as if
they were a couple of old friends with whom
one had been through a lot of adventures. He said that the reason the
ordinary pair of shoes was so moving was the
absence of the person who ought to be standing in them, the suggestion
of a history and a possible future for these
shoes.

Several other students took up the same theme. One spoke of a ghost
walking in the shoes, one of which appeared to
him to be lifted off the ground. (It was that motion which snapped the
laces into a strange position.)

Another spoke of life at his aunt's farm and how these shoes seemed to
possibly [his word] tell a story about hard
days working on the farm. To him the shoes were painted with affection
because of their reliability. It was as if the
painter wanted one to look at something that one generally didn't give a
thought to.

To another these boots, as she called them, spoke plainly of long nights
dancing in various sorts of dance clubs.

To another student they spoke just as plainly of life in a European
city.

To yet another the painting glowed with images of (American) football
games in the early days of the sport.

More than one student thought the shoes were painted to depict the
beauty of out-of-date fashions, to illustrate the
continuity underneath superficial cultural changes.

Two students (independently) told elaborate stories about scraps of
exploded tires on the edge of a road. (Not a word
about shoes or boots).

And one student interpreted the shoes (assuming they are shoes) as a
subtle, if not quite comprehensible, political
statement on bisexuality.

Needless to say, I've been reading Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of
Art, Schapiro's The Still Life as a
Personal Object, and Derrida's The Truth in Painting (part IV). In
Heidegger's paper Van Gogh's painting,
variously entitled "Old Shoes", "Old Shoes with Laces", "A Pair of
Shoes"1, etc., is used (among other purposes) as
an example of a great work of art. Heidegger writes, "The art work let
us know what shoes are in truth." And what
they "are in truth" is the reliable equipment of a peasant woman who
gives them no thought. Schapiro contends that
Heidegger has illicitly brought this story to the painting, for, he
claims, there is external evidence that the shoes here
depicted were Van Gogh's own and not those of a peasant woman (real or
imagined). Derrida makes light of this
debate (if 145 pages can be called light); it serves him as raw material
for his writing - writing which does not return,
except in passing, to what I take to be Heidegger's central idea (the
interplay of "world" and "earth").

What is our high school teacher to make of the wide array of stories he
has been told? And what would he make of
Heidegger's? Did Heidegger bring the story of the peasant woman to the
painting (if he, in fact, had in mind this
particular painting)? Did he bring only certain details of it? The
teacher believed that the various stories about the
importance of the shoes' wearer(s) (along with others, though not all,
of the students' comments) helped him to better
appreciate the painting. But he saw that the various stories could not
each be exclusively correct.2 Was there some
basic story, perhaps, which viewers elaborated to suit themselves?
Didn't this have a parallel in the discussion he had
held with his students the week before about the advantages of a novel
over a movie? But on the basis of what test of
plausibility or necessity could this basic story (if there was one) be
identified? And of what weight, if any, would (if
we could have it) Van Gogh's opinion be? And - subsequent to these
questions, and of secondary importance - what
of Heidegger's remarks in the Addendum of his paper to the effect that
"fixing in place" and "allowing to happen" are
a bad opposition, are not in fact in conflict? Granted that this way of
Heidegger's of describing things seems a useful
characterization of artistic creation, could it not, must it not, also
apply to artistic appreciation (or "preservation")?
That is, might Heidegger have been perfectly aware of what he was doing?
If we can satisfactorily answer these
questions, we can move on to an examination of what Heidegger had to
say.

The student who failed to find a great painting in the room, together
with others who did not consider Van Gogh's
shoes great, raises, as much as anyone, questions about this work.
According to David Hume, irremediable
disagreement in the evaluation of artworks results from variation in
either cultural background or temperament. If
cultural variation can be ruled out in this case, the teacher may
suspect variation in temperament. He will then be led
either to making guesses based on his observations of the students'
personalities, or to attempting to remedy the
disagreement, that is, to pointing out the merits of the painting in
order to produce in the students an experience of its
greatness. But what should he point out?

The students who spoke only of the painty qualities of the painting
could hardly have been wrong (unless everyone
was), but could hardly have been telling a complete story. The same must
be said of the students who spoke only of
the shoes, though in the latter cases one is inclined to allow greater
latitude. Would one be so inclined, however, in
comparing a student who spoke with tears and great emotion about the
texture of the paint with one who remarked
almost dismissively Yeah, it's really about the shoes' owner.? Isn't
one's initial tendency to favor the more literal
comments simply due to their appearing more amenable to some final
consensus, and not at all a matter of the brush
strokes' being mere means toward the end of the shoes? If there is
something to be found in this painting along the
lines of what Hume would point to for the benefit of those unable to see
its beauty, it will not be found without
reference to colors, shapes, textures, and human vision.3

The students who spoke of a message (Appreciate ordinary things ) can
hardly be said to be mistaken. Even if the
shoes gain their power from an implied presence (a notable absence) of
their wearer, they remain quite ordinary
shoes. But this interpretation of the painting does not go very far, is
less rich than some others. And so one hopes
that there is more. One would like to be able to show these students
that there is more. But, after one has done so,
how will one know whether the additional ideas had been in the painting
all along or were provided by oneself? The
question is clearly a bad one. Yet, abandoning it would seem to banish
any possibility of agreement. Need it do so?
What if every viewer to whom the idea of the absent shoe-wearer is
suggested (just that vaguely) assents to it, enjoys
the painting more when in possession of it? Yes, and what if a minority
demurs (say, our first student who finds
none of the paintings great, and our last who sees bisexuality)? The
suspicion naturally arises that these two are
willfully imposing desired readings on the work. This seems confirmed
when the first detests the food in the
snackbar and is offended by the roads on the way back to school, and
when the second finds bisexuality in six other
paintings that day. But what difference is there between "imposing" and
mere "providing"? I would suggest that, in
Heideggerian terms, there is this difference: providing is
fixing-in-place and is compatible with letting-happen,
whereas imposing is closed to letting-happen. I will discuss this more
fully in part II below. For the moment it is
enough to recognize that, if this distinction holds, then agreement in
the interpretation of an artwork depends on
observation not only of the work itself but of other observers of it (of
their manner of observation) - a situation which
will not always give precedence to the opinions of experts.

The opinion of the student who spoke of an (unidentified) missing person
impressed the high school teacher. He
thought of the shoes as having been painted "affectionately". This does
not mean that the student himself was
necessarily brought to feel affection for the shoes. But what does it
mean? What are kind guitar chords,
compassionate sculptures, affectionate paintings of old shoes? Well, at
the risk of seeming evasive, I have to answer:
If we knew that , we could all go home and not write another word.
Nevertheless, we can make suggestions.
Clearly the subject matter (the shoes, their type and condition) is
pertinent, as are the details of the colors, shapes, and
textures used. One can go some distance with color theories (the "warm"
tones, particularly inside the shoes, as well
as the care visible in the multitude of brush strokes), and a greater
distance with psychoanalytic-like theories of
shapes (the femaleness of the shoe on the left - the sheltering "earth"
- and the maleness of the jutting "world" shoe on
the right. These shoes are active companions ready to jump to one's
assistance, but at the same time pitiably weak and
worn down, embarrassingly so, worthy of profound gratitude and comfort.
The impression that they may be two left
shoes heightens this contrast, without erasing their role as a pair of
shoes. Do not look for logic.) But this is not a
complete explanation and never can be, short of communicating every
single speck of information constituting the
painting itself. These sorts of ideas serve to share an experience with
others. But that is not the same as explaining the
causes of the experience, much less formulating rules for
experience-types. Nothing has been said to indicate that an
affectionate painting of shoes could not contradict every detail we find
pertinent in this one.

The student who spoke of a ghost walking in the shoes seemed, it should
be said, to regard this as something of a
joke - the reaction he might have had to a pair of trick shoes actually
approaching him across the floor of the museum.
Can this be read as an imposition of his playful temperament on the
"true" perception of the painting, to which he is
not altogether blind? Well, and if Vincent were replaced by the
signature of Dali'? Or had Vincent been a happy
family-man with two ears? No, this "Intentional Fallacy", as it has been
well-called, cannot help us. Or can it? What
if Vincent had given this painting the title "Ghost Dance"? Would one
still object that one of the shoes was inside-out
and therefore not meant as a shoe being worn (just as one objects when
Henry James calls The Turn of the Screw a
straight-forward ghost story)? Can one detach a title from a painting?
What if Vincent had used the title "Old Peasant
Woman's Shoes Laid Aside on a September Night"? In that case Vincent
would be wrong, no two ways about it. He
would be underestimating his creation. (The Cafe' du Tambourin arguably
has nothing to do with Van Gogh's
Woman at a Table in the Cafe' du Tambourin ). One could, of course,
produce a painting of (exclusively) peasant
woman's shoes (and one could use one's own non-peasant shoes as models,
thus somewhat satisfying Mr. Schapiro)
but what this means is that someone with knowledge of the culture of the
painter's audience would recognize peasant
woman's shoes in the painting. This could even occur despite the
painter's declared intentions to paint a male
peasant's shoes or the shoes of a city girl. As Heidegger points out,
the artist of a great work is (in the work)
inconsequential; the work is "self-subsistent". Or as Stephen Dedalus
put it: "The artist, like the God of the creation,
remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,
refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails."

The student who thought the shoes might "possibly" tell a story about
farm life was more clearly honest or self-aware
than what Schapiro takes Heidegger to have been. But, as Derrida points
out, Heidegger did not rely on the painting
to speak of peasant shoes, but of reliability. Had Heidegger possessed
more sympathy for city-dwellers, he might
have recognized (would he, in fact, have disputed it?) that this
reliability or equipmentality, allegedly revealed in the
painting, speaks also of urban shoes. No doubt it also speaks, equally
well, of one's own or another's shoes. It's
curious that none of the students suggested that the shoes belonged to
the painter. It's difficult, however, to picture
them objecting to that possibility. The lines from Knut Hamsun quoted by
Schapiro add to (elicit from) the
painting.4 But even these lines are not limited to one's own shoes. To
imagine the shoes of another is, among other
things, to imagine what they are for that other person. One can imagine
Hamsun writing pages and pages of
illuminating text about Van Gogh's painting. One can imagine poems
composed and symphonies conducted which
contribute to our understanding of it. From this it should be clear that
the painting lives a life quite apart from the
painter's.

What about the dancing boots, the European city shoes, and the football
equipment? Well, why not? Are there signs
that these readings are being imposed? What signs could there be? Well,
if one can oneself derive from the painting
what they suggest, this should be sufficient confirmation. But if one
cannot, one must remain in doubt; one must look
away from the painting and at the students. Do they object to generally
recognized readings of the painting which they
imagine erroneously to contradict their own? Do they have a tendency to
find similar meanings in a suspicious
number of artworks? Are they not "disinterested"? Are they tense and
insistent? One must be careful here of jumping
to conclusions based on simple correspondences between the subject of
the painting and conditions in the students'
own lives. A student, even a high school student, is far less easily
decipherable than any painting. And an eccentric
tendency can as well be the key to appreciating a painting as a bar to
doing so. Analysis of the observer should not
jump ahead of attempts to bring him to point out more distinctly what he
sees in the work. But sometimes such
analysis is the only resort, and leads to the greatest certainty one can
acquire.

The students who admired the beauty of "out-of-date fashions" are, no
doubt, finding something in the painting
which earlier viewers could not have found. The same may be said of
Americans in 1995 who relish great novels
about Brits circa 1850. The same may be said about Mr. Heidegger's
appreciation of Greek Temples. Even at the
level of an artist's intentions, need we assume that he works only for
those with whom he is familiar, any more than
the Egyptian pyramids were built only for the generations building them?
In Heidegger's view a work loses its
extraordinariness when its world fades. What is left is the familiar, a
mere "recollection", if admittedly a powerful
recollection, of what was. What is left is a mere object of the "art
industry". But does familiarity not, in its turn, fade
away, and a different (perhaps lesser) form of the extraordinary return?
When Heidegger strives to produce
extraordinary philosophy, does he not turn first to what was familiar to
Greeks? Keats' Grecian urn speaks to him of
truth and beauty despite or because of Greece's being long since gone.
An ancient Japanese palace is extraordinary to
me. Moreover, "mere object of the art industry" seems a little harsh.
What of modern art objects created specifically
for museums? I know (or think I do) what Heidegger is saying. There is
something very special about new artistic
innovations which stretch one's mind. But to recognize such innovations
in the distant past is to admit that something
of them remains. Much of what Heidegger says of the Greek Temple would
be as clear to a Chinese as a Greek. I get
a lot out of familiar old cathedrals. Van Gogh's painting is not, I
think, entirely lost on me because I am not
"acquainted with" this type of shoe, as Heidegger thought "everyone"
was. A building is not lost as soon as an
unplanned-for building goes up beside it. The unplanned for is planned
for.

This mention of the Greek Temple brings to mind two further difficulties
in Heidegger which ought, I think, to be
addressed before returning to the next student patiently waiting in
line. These are the problems of 1) types, and 2)
simplicity. The problem of types is, roughly, this: does Heidegger
consider the generic idea of "Greek Temple" (or
"Peasant Shoe Painting") a great work, or can he comment usefully on the
varied greatness of the many different
Greek temples? The temples were/are not all identical either
programmatically or formally. (It is possible to read
Heidegger as being concerned only with the program [the use], and this
raises possible questions regarding an
atheist's gasping at the beauty of a church, for example. But this
reading is neither necessary nor charitable. In fact it
conflicts with Heidegger's initial statements about the thingly quality
of works.) Heidegger has in mind both the form
of the temple and the role it played. But what can he say of any
particular temple? Derrida wonders whether (or how
much) Heidegger had a particular Van Gogh painting in mind (though
Heidegger believed he did, if only as a
pedagogical reference point, if we are to trust his reply to Schapiro's
letter). Does this classification of types weaken
Heidegger's thinking? No, not in the sense of rendering it false; but it
points out the limitations. If there is a single
truth to be found in an artwork, it is a far more complex and nuanced
truth than any of those Heidegger articulates - or
could be expected to articulate in so few words.

"The more simply and authentically the shoes are engrossed in their
nature, the more plainly and purely the fountain is
engrossed in its nature - the more directly and engagingly do all beings
attain to a greater degree of being along with
them." This is the problem of simplicity in Heidegger. His examples are
a painting of (nothing but) two ordinary
shoes, and a short and to-the-point poem about a (generic, or should I
say particularly simple ) Roman fountain.
What would he say about Respighi's Fontane di Roma , or of many of the
fountains themselves, or of San Carlo
alle Quattro Fontane (hardly a lesser work than a Greek temple), or, in
short, of any more complex art, a novel for
instance? He is reported to have enjoyed The Death of Iva'n Illyich, but
what about Anna Karenina - a book which
Milan Kundera (in The Art of the Novel ) uses as an example of what he
takes to be the novel's primary merits:
ambiguity and complexity? I see no reason why Heidegger's ideas cannot
enrich one's understanding of complex and
contradictory art, but must suspect that Heidegger rated such art
beneath his simple paradigms.

[material deleted here]

Applying Heideggerese to perceptionally complex art means stepping
beyond Heidegger.

The students who saw pieces of tires, rather than shoes, in the painting
are extreme cases of a common occurrence
(and since they are fictional students, their creator may be blamed for
their extremeness). Because there are two of
them, one takes them seriously. What proof, after all, do we have that
there are shoes in the picture? Well, we have a
certain asymmetry. We can bring them to see the shoes, and they cannot
bring us to see the tire scraps. But let's
imagine that one of them speaks of the tire scraps as the remnants of an
old reliable piece of equipment, while the
other describes a gory seven-car accident. Would we be inclined to
listen to the first of these? We might, but we
would also welcome some sort of quick-reaction tests designed to
determine whether the student had shoes anywhere
near the surface of his thinking.

Finally, what can be said of the proponent of bisexuality? One cannot
demand necessary and sufficient conditions for
a painting's being about bisexuality unless one is prepared to provide
the same for its being about shoes. But one can
remain sceptical until the bisexuality is shown to one. And if it is
shown to one, one can recognize that the painting
is also about shoes.5 It is helpful in these discussions to keep in mind
the remarks on Freud made by someone who is
also a much better formulator of extreme examples than myself: Ludwig
Wittgenstein. His name comes to mind
frequently when reading Heidegger: ("Building and plastic creation. . .
always happen already, and happen only, in
the Open of saying and naming."6) One should not, Wittgenstein notes,
underestimate the attraction of Freudian
mythology - of the desire to discover exciting explanations and to
assert that others' reluctance to accept them
constitutes unhealthy resistance. This is not to suggest that there is
not much of great merit in Freud. Exactly what
Derrida's thinking is in this area I do not now feel qualified to say.
This is a topic for another paper.

To conclude my "clearing of the air" (by which I mean my wondering
whether the Schapiro-Derrida affair weighs
heavily, or at all, on Heidegger's paper), I propose that it does not.
Neither Heidegger's nor Schapiro's use of the
painting is necessarily illegitimate; nor can any future discovery of a
lost letter from Van Gogh alter this fact. (Derrida
would agree, at least as regards any unknown letter). Heidegger has the
reputation of having been unable to admit a
mistake. But, in so far as he may have made one here - in so far, that
is, as he supposed his interpretation of the
painting to be the only one possible - he would have lost little by
admitting his error.7 We have no reason to doubt
that the painting did for Heidegger what he claims it did, and
potentially much to gain from his description of that
happening. Schapiro's assertion that an actual pair of peasant's shoes
would have worked just as well is simply
wrong. One could, of course, take out an actual pair of peasant's shoes,
place them in the middle of a well-lit room,
sip some German beer, and study them. But one would be at a double
disadvantage. First, one would have to fight
the tendency to wonder what the actual specific facts about these actual
shoes were, the actual never quite matching up
with the ideal. Second, one would be on one's own without Vincent's
capable help. In the painting the proper
positioning, lighting, shading, and distorting of the shoes has already
been taken care of.

This is the beginning of a longer paper. The rest of it, and the
footnotes, are available on request.

dcs...@cstone.net
http://www.cstone.net/~dcswan