From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.
A Pair of Shoes
by Vincent van Gogh
(1885)
The Origin of the Work of Art
by Martin Heidegger
(1935)
靴
by ゴッホ
1886年
芸術作品の根源
by マルティン・ハイデッガー
translated by 関口浩
靴という道具の履き広げられた内側の暗い開口部からは、労働の歩みの辛苦が屹立している。靴という道具のがっしりとして堅牢な重さの内には、荒々しい風が吹き抜ける畑地のはるか遠くまで伸びるつねに真っ直ぐな畝々を横切って行く、ゆっくりとした歩みの粘り強さが積み重ねられている。革の上には土地の湿気と濃厚なものとが留まっている。靴底の下には暮れゆく夕べを通り抜けて行く野路の寂しさがただよっている。靴という道具の内にたゆたっているのは、大地の寡黙な呼びかけであり、熟した穀物を大地が静かに贈ることであり、冬の荒れ果てた休閑地における大地の解き明かされざる自己拒絶である。この道具を貫いているのは、泣きごとを言わずにパンの確保を案ずることであり、困難をまたも切り抜けた言葉にならない喜びであり、出産が近づくときのおののきであり、死があたりに差し迫るときの戦慄である。この道具は大地に帰属し、農夫の世界の内で守られる。このような守られた帰属からこの道具そのものが生じ、それ自体の内に休らうようになるのである。
The Still Life as a Personal Object
by Meyer Schapiro
(1968)
When van Gogh depicted the peasant’s wooden sabots, he gave them a clear, unworn shape and surface like the smooth still life objects he had set beside them on the same table: the bowl, the bottles, etc. In the later picture of a peasant’s leather slippers he has turned them with their backs to the viewer. His own shoes he has isolated on the floor and he has rendered them as if facing us, and so individual and wrinkled in appearance that we can speak of them as veridical portraits of aging shoes.
Restitutions of the Truth in “Pointure”
by Jacques Derrida
(1978)
There is another line, another system of detaching traits: this is the work qua picture in its frame. The frame makes a work of supplementary désœuvrement. It cuts out but also sews back together. By an invisible lace which pierces the canvas (as the pointure ‘pierces the paper’), passes into it then out of it in order to sew it back onto its milieu, onto its internal and external worlds. From then on, if these shoes are no longer useful, it is of course because they are detached from naked feet and from their subject of reattachment (their owner, usual holder, the one who wears them and whom they bear). It is also because they are painted: within the limits of a picture, but limits that have to be thought in laces. Hors-d’œuvre in the œuvre, hors-d’ œuvre as œuvre: the laces go through the eyelets (which also go in pairs) and pass on to the invisible side. And when they come back from it, do they emerge from the other side of the leather or the other side of the canvas? The prick of their iron point, through the metal-edged eyelets, pierces the leather and the canvas simultaneously.
The word “pointure” (pointing) that Derrida uses is so important to his essay that he uses it in the title.