Milan's Action @mobius : May 25th, 2009

Dave (David Chin) and I decided that we should end the entire series of three evenings of performances with Milan's participatory action.

We had the audience participate in this action all three nights with three different variations:

On opening night (Saturday May 23rd), Dave invited everyone to come to the center of the gallery and continuously throw their shoes up in the air for about 10 minutes. He did not read Milan's statement.

On the second night (Sunday May 24th), Dave read Milan's statement about the meaning behind the action first and then asked for audience participation/volunteers to throw their shoes in the air. Needless to say we got less volunteers the second night although one 9 year old girl made up for the lower numbers with her enthusiastic participation.

On the final night (Monday May 25th), Dave invited everyone to the center of the gallery to toss their shoes. He waited until we had finished and the laughter had died down to read Milan's statement.

I thought this was a fitting way to end The Politics of Shoes performances.

Here are the instructions for the action - we modified his original concept slightly so that each person used their own shoes which eventually ended up with everyone simply grabbing shoes from the pile that kept forming and emptying in the center of the gallery.

Email to the Curator from Milan Kohout (MAG):

Jane
I have another suggestion to the show. Can you gather many shoes , put them to the centre of the gallery and during the opening just throw them repeatedly to the air... do it for the duration of maybe ten minutes or longer..
Milan

"what is also intensely interesting is that after each big bombing in IRAQ the reports said that there was a lot of shoes all around and some of them were falling from heaven seconds after the explosion... "