THE SYMBOLISM OF FOOTWEAR

IN his classic essay on art, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Martin Heidegger analyses a pair of shoes as depicted in a painting of Vincent van Gogh.

- PRASHANT BAGAD

We see in the painting nothing else than a mundane pair of shoes of a peasant woman. However, the painting is not just a copy of some footwear. The peasant woman's world seems to surround it. We can glimpse her labour, her hardship, the cycle of seasons, the harvest, the joy and the sadness.

Heidegger uses another philosophical concept to explain the nature of our experience of the painting: the earth. He thinks the painting reveals not only the world of the peasant woman, but also the earth. The peasant's work, life and experiences constitute her world; the earth is the ground from which this meaningmaking structure springs. The world is what the peasant makes of the brute earth. The world is a human interpretation of the earth, a humanised earth. As we gaze at van Gogh's painting, we witness this interplay of the world and the earth through a worn pair of shoes.