A Shoe Story - Van Gogh, The Philosophers And The West

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The book is a meditation on Van Gogh’s painting Boots and Laces, and a reflection on the engagement of twentieth century thinkers with that work – principally Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Derrida. This Shoe Story begins with descriptions of the painter’s life and struggle, and his part in the invention of what Chamberlain calls “the new materiality.” The new materiality is “a new version of art being about objects over which life has passed;” “a dimension of the existence of things in being that we had not seen before” Four chapters deal with “the Heidegger revolution:” essentially the disclosure that “We’re all, as truth-seekers, and workers, just in motion, en route, to nowhere in particular, except our own deaths.” From this “A new way to live, and to live with art, would build on a firm grasp of immediate experience, albeit with the question of meaning left open;” “Things suddenly steal up on us and illuminate what we tend to forget bout our being-here. Art, when it goes to work, is that stealing up and