On Apr 12, 2009, at 11:15 AM, William Conger wrote:
Chicago's Field Museum has a huge wall display of shoes through history and cultures. The conflation of art and utility and what comes through most of all is that shoes signify aspirations...even beauty.
I think it was Henri Focillon who observed that a significant difference between architectural sculpture (e.g., jamb statues or typanum reliefs) and architectural ornament (e.g., decorated capitals) was that ornament is contained by the element it decorates, it's held in by and conforms to its supporting shape. The rambunctiousness of clothes are analogous to that: they are expressions of ornament contained by their underlying forms, namely, the kind of garment it is--shoe, hat, jacket, skirt.
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