Rapture

A go-to subject for many artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, shoes have played multiple roles in art: they represent fashion trends, function as coveted status symbols or as the objects of projected psychological desires, and stand in for their wearers due to their close associations with the human body.

Perhaps the ultimate fetish object, the red high heel takes center stage in Willie Cole’s Rapture. Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí had explored the fetishistic power of the red pump in his infamous assemblage Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically (The Surrealist Shoe). Dalí's intention was that a sugar cube be dissolved in a glass of warm milk placed inside his wife’s shoe, which he envisioned as an enactment of the Freudian desire to return to the womb of the mother, represented by the milk. In < I>Rapture, by contrast, Cole completely de-fetishizes the red pump by converting its repeated silhouette into an abstract, all-over pattern reminiscent of African textile traditions. Cole frequently creates such Africanized forms by transforming household objects into symbols of power and memory.