Seriously Deep Insights into the Meaning of Shoefiti
Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World, by Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe takes a seriously deep look at what shoes hanging from powerlines may mean:
“Shoes hanging from city wires” is a vivid illustartion of New Wave polysemy. Rather than attempting to deconstruct the ritual to retrieve a particular meaning, I suggest entertaining ethnographic testimony, which varies according to class, race, age, and nationality, at least. What follow is a range of remarks: “Performing the feat of tossing someone else’s shoes (Adidas, jogging shoes, hi-tops, sneakers ) over city telephone wires is a contemporary cross-cultural urban practice. Performers subvert the original owner’s access to the use value of the commodity by displacing it as a fetish of that power system: they thereby demarcate new, self-proclaimed boundaries fo rthe ‘circuit’ of that ‘power’ and appropriace that power for reinscription by participating in the playful pleasure of not only posing threats to rivals but competing in skill contests among peers”; “As a practice of youth subculture, thorwing shoes on the wires suggests more than steet play among oppsing affiliations but less than organized gang warfare”; “Tennis shoes are good to use - all you need is shoes with long strings . . . You fling your shoes up when they get old and worn, to location yourselvs ‘at the top’ - in means ‘We have the power.’ . . . it reminds people of the ‘open wires.’” My personal response to the image in viewing Lola is a powerful emotional “memory” of youths slaughtered in protest in Mexico City in 1968 prior to the Olympic Games. But I think that the image itself is “an open wire.”
And there you have it.
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