Two Variations on a Shoe Shine

This year I have witnessed two very revealing works about a seemingly ordinary, uneventful act- shining shoes. Francis Alys' "Bolero" (1996) at the Renaissance Society is a lovely and meticulous animation that includes 511 drawings on translucent paper. Simple, but visually breathtaking, Alys' piece describes how labor and repetitive gestures are integral to our lives. As alluring as this installation/animation was I forced to radically rethink this piece this week after I stopped into the INOVA Gallery at the UW-Milwaukee to see Jefferson Pinder's video installation, "Show Shine Variations" (2007). In Pinder's "shoe shine" a young black man shines a young, aloof white man's shoe so hard that the whole shoe rips apart. Pinder's piece immediately brought back to mind what was missing in Alys' work, the inequity of the relationship between the two individuals--that the types of labor we perform in society are never far from issues of race, class and gender. I had a similar nagging feeling when watching the making of Alys' "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002). The gesture in both of Alys' works are so compelling, I want to believe in their innocence, but Pinder's work has me rethinking the dynamics of a shoe shine. Jefferson Pinder's show "Anthology" is up through May 10 at INOVA.