© 2010-2020 Bodega
Sebastian Black
Crocodile Tears
Hand carved wooden Croc, child's size 10
2013, Edition of 10 + 3 AP, all left foot
I knew some painters in graduate school who wore Crocs around the studio. Because I always liked how they looked with wool socks, and because I trusted Mario Batali's implicit yet sanguine endorsement, I decided to go downtown and get myself a pair. To my surprise the Crocs store in Soho was hocking a kind of temporal mutant which they had named Limited Edition Jackson Pollock Studio Clogs. This was a streamlined rubber space shoe, sheathed in digitally reproduced drips of color and stamped with the artists signature on the heel. I had the distinct impression that the past had spilled paint on the future and I felt fundamentally disconnected from both. So I bought two pairs and went to the studio.
Later that evening while researching clogs I came across an unsubstantiated etymology of the word "sabotage." It described the habit of 15th century Dutch textile workers to toss their wooden shoes (sabots) into the gears of the mechanical looms that they feared would one day replace them. It's a good story, I thought, and as such is easily assimilable. These days it appears in various forms, in numerous press releases for shows of what amount to tastefully unfinished tapestries all over New York. This is the era of the painter as clog tosser I guess.
These clogs are light and I imagine would fly pretty far given a good throw and an amicable breeze. I've initialed them, and so has Brian Sims, the craftsman who carved them. Pollock has not signed them because his hands have been indexically shackled to history, but you may imagine that he has, if 800 dollars seems too much to pay for my soul alone.
-SB