Shoes Kill Flies But Safeguard Liberty

Shoes Kill Flies But Safeguard Liberty

 

 

The sign of a healthy society is one that doesn’t cough much and doesn’t censor much – or at all! The reverse is just as true. Historically this can be proven beyond a doubt. Simply map the greatest censoring of artistic expression and you shall have pinpointed the most brutal, shameful moments in human civilisation.

 

 

Every time some warped megalomaniac seizes power, the arts – and by that I include all creative forms of human expression, including protest – are policed, censored and destroyed.

 

 

Given the cyclical nature of things, I decided to find out where we are in the machine at present. To this end I contacted a few experts in the field. Professor Charlotte Andrews-Joplin, formerly of Kinshasa, now living in Devon, had this to say: “Well, in Congo things are pretty grim right now so people mostly just walk about very slowly in gaudy slip-on shoes with funny heels. It’s the preferred means of expression for the moment because anything more might get one killed. Anyway, there aren’t any art supply shops, or any shops really, so art as you know it is not an option. As for Britain, I think you are in danger of shoes overtaking art as the foremost symbol for where you’re at because even though you have many great art shops and will not be killed if you do express yourselves, most people are more interested in shoes.”

 

 

Marty Great-Top, a gallerist from Clevedon, says: “I think shoes are a load of rubbish. They are bourgeois. All great artists wear flip-flops or those chewy shoes you get for your dog to gnaw. As for where we are in the cycle of oppression, it’s been bad but the clampdown is losing momentum because the government spent so much money on fancy shoes they ended up broke, so now people are becoming more suspicious of their motives, thank god. So in a way, shoes are the thing that has stood between we the people and all out fascism.”

 

 

The Banksy show at Bristol Museum is a good example of how the criminalisation of art can be unpopular to the point of unprecedented attendance. However, the same week the show opened, a 19-year-old graffiti artist was sentenced to 9 months in prison and nobody did a thing about it.

 

 

Imogene McGee of Stokes Croft, mother of 48 and an interesting person, had this to say: “The irony is that it’s all the wrong people who are told to shut up. It’s always the stupid people shutting up the clever people.”

 

 

I asked McGee how she would define those two groups. “Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “The clever people are creative and the stupid people are the ones who think they are clever. The clever people also wear more black.”

 

 

When asked about where she thought we were in the clampdown cycle, she said she thought we were at about one o’clock. “It’s a good place to be because noon is the darkest hour and we are just coming out of that because the government have no money and no credibility left. However, if we do not stand up and speak out now, we may well slip backwards and actually end up even worse off than we were at noon.”

 

 

When asked to give an hour to describe that moment in time should it come, McGee said it was tricky to say because the symbol of the clock was a bit limited and didn’t give her a lot of room to manoeuvre. She then tried: a ladder, a Rubic’s cube and a Welsh dresser as metaphors, then when none of these worked she said: “Bugger.” Then she said: “Just speak up now. It’s crucial!”

 

 
Posted by: Toffie Toff on 04 March 2010