My car negotiated the corner of the road at eighty kilometres per hour but rather than accelerate back up to one hundred for the straightaway, I came to a screeching halt. In the middle of the New Zealand countryside was a canvas that I hadn't foreseen. Unlike the great natural beauty that I'd been absorbing all across Dame Kiri Te Kanawa's homeland, this artwork was unnatural. Clearly it was the work of human hands.
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And feet.
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My shoes have scuffed the floors of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan, all in New York City. I've paid homage to Van Gogh's lush interpretations and Picasso's unbridled creativity. I've been broken by Braques and mangled by Mondrian but none of them held the element of surprise for me. It's true that Van Gogh and Picasso shocked the art world of their day, but their canvasses have since become overwhelmingly ubiquitous. They appear, all too often, on coffee mugs and jigsaw puzzles in the dollar stores of our supersaturated world.
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So how does the modern artist, or advertising executive for that matter, use surprise to his/her advantage? In New Zealand, among other places in the world, you hang shoes on a fence, hundreds of pairs. (Mila and Imelda...are you taking footnotes?) In Toronto you put life-size painted moose sculptures in an urban environment. You build a twenty foot high potato for your roadside farm market in Fredericton. When someone turns a corner, turns a page or turns on the radio...what will you do to get their attention?
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The finest artists, writers and media mavens know how to unlock the secret. You don't provide answers, you create questions. You provoke thought about those things you deem to be important. Sometimes you want to talk about art in rural settings, so you find a fence and a farmer with a sense of humour. I know damned well that if I hung up a pair of shoes on a fence where I live, ninety-nine times out of one hundred the farmer would remove the shoes.
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On a farm, fences keep domesticated animals at bay. Some would argue that fences keep people at bay, certainly this works in Folsom, Alcatraz and Cambridge-Narrows. Most residential fences say "Mine!" You can just imagine my delight to see the Shoe Fence of Hawke Bay, New Zealand. It screamed "Yours!" I don't know who built the fence or who decided that it would be prudent to hang shoes of all kind on it, but I thank them one and all. It was a pleasant surprise.
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When was the last time a fence made you smile? Or surprised you?
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Have you surprised anyone lately? Have you juxtaposed items in your world simply for the generation of smiles, or contemplation? The fence elicited both. I'm not suggesting that you serve Nutella and herring sandwiches on naan bread to your guests. I think that most of us need to shake up our world and deliver some pleasant surprises, both to ourselves and to strangers...for the collective good of society.
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Perhaps we should all walk a mile in the shoes of the fence artist, or become one ourselves. Barefoot, if necessary.
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