Sensible Shoes

Description

"Sensible Shoes: pictures from television advertising spots, talk shows, pictures from Hollywood films - particularly clichés of the action variety; 'show-downs' - and 'love' (romance) pictures that take Times as the content. All this gives a loose context for the story told by a 'voice over'. More precisely, many short episodes, scurrilous stories with plenty of black humor, artfully woven into a whole. Sensible Shoes, is the art of telling a hundred stories in ten minutes.
The picture always comes first, usually mute, a voice comments - apparently tautologically - on the things shown in the pictures. The there is a deviation, in picture or sound, and you have something new. The idea as such is simple; i.e. it is also possible to tell completely different stories with the existing pictures. For instance this story of the revenge of a deserted lover: (...)." "The Relationship of Picture. Copy & Reality" in Video in the Cinema screenings being shown in The Abaton, written by Lothar Kurzawa, TAZ Hamburg 22nd May 1986. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

"I love eidting, I really do. But I can't talk about my work unless I'm drunk. I was in a bar the other night with a woman. I was drunk then. We both were. I was trying to persuade her to do the voice-over for Sensible Shoes. This is what I said. "Well it's about this woman in a room on her own. She's watching TV and reading the newspaper. ut not really watching. And not really reading. Day-dreaming mostly. Reminiscing about a one-time lover and fantasizing about new acquaintance. He's fantasizing too. In another room. But not about her. He looks a lot like me. In fact he is me. I play the man. He's watching TV too. A different program, at a different time maybe. Time is important. Manipulated. And words will come up on the screen. They are important too but in a different way. They will coincide with the voice-over. There are lots of other images too, but a lot of the time the screen will be blank. No, we don't see the woman and sometimes the visuals don't match the voice. And someone else is in another room at the same time. That's me too. But this time it is me. I'll be deciding what happens to the woman and the man. It's going to be Romance and violence. No sex though. it's not that sort of tape. That's it. But there's a surprise ending. And you see it differently the second time around OK. Will you do it? She said, I said 'No, what?'. She said, "we don't have to go to those silly meetings". I'd heard it before but I'm really gen, erous. I give my friends all the best lines." (John Adams, description of Sensible Shoes in Recent British Video catalogue, 1983) (Source, pdf, Rewind)

"Sensible Shoes is a witty collision of fiction and reality, ironically rendered as a multi-textual pastiche of mass media and personal narratives. Adams' fragmented collage is structured on the stream-of-consciousness monologue of an unseen woman, who collapses fantasy and the everyday as she "zaps" the television dial and skims the newspaper. Seamlessly integrating her daydreams of romance with appropriated images of violence, love and consumerism from popular British TV programs and ads, Adams tells the story of how the mass media dictates the construction of personal narratives. Visuals, voiceover and on-screen words are juxtaposed in a tightly edited assemblage of off-air TV imagery, shrewd wordplay and visual puns. The source of the handwritten text that propels the spoken and image-driven narrative is revealed in an ironic twist at the tape's end. - Electronic Arts Intermix" (Source, website, Rewind)

Additional Informations

Shot on 16mm and Umatic. (Source, website, Rewind)

Collaborators:
"Video: John Adams, Kenneth Dodds
Film Camera: Ken Slater
Narrator: Veronica Latham" (Source, website, Rewind)

Image of Sensible Shoes from the catalog accompanying the 13th Montreal International Festival of New Cinema 18th-28th October 1984. (Source, website, Rewind)

Video still from John Adams' Sensible Shoes. Part of the 5th video art festival View Videos. (Source, website, Rewind)

Introduction written by Stuart Marshall for the exhibition Recent British Video, New York 1983. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Program and explanatory information on video and performance works exhibited as part of the British/Canadian Video Exchange '84: Installations, performances and videotapes, Toronto, May - June 1984. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

5th Junior Dublin Film Festival, Irish Film Centre, UCI Tallaght, UCI Coolock, Dublin 14th-25th November 1994. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Abstract text for Sensible Shoes in the catalog accompanying the 13th Montreal International Festival of New Cinema, 18th-28th October 1984. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Piece written about John Adams and his video works for the Electronic Arts Intermix Catalogue. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Introduction by Jean-Luc Outers and abstract for Sensible Shoes in the catalog of the exhibition See videos 5th edition, Wallonia, Brussels, London 3-5th May, 1985, p. 27 and 29. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Tuesday Screenings, Summary Video UK - Program of video works from Recent British Video Exhibition, Toronto March '84. Presented for the first time at the ICA Cinematheque, The Mall, London, 1984. Includes the work Sensible Shoes. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Program of ICA June 1984 events, screenings etc. Including Tuesday Screenings, Summary Video UK - video works drawn from Recent British Video Exhibition, Toronto March '84. Presented for the first time at the ICA Cinematheque, The Mall, London, 1984. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Subverting Television. Deconstruct, Scratch, Alter Image, a three-part program of British video art, includes information on John Adams' Sensible Shoes, Arts Council Film and Video Umbrella Programme, 1984; Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, March 1985. (Source 1, Source 2, pdf, Rewind)

Presentation place

- 13th Montreal International Festival of New Cinema, 18 - 28 octobre 1984. (Source, pdf, site web Rewind) - Video Screenings, Summary Video UK, ICA Cinematheque, The Mall, Londres, 12 juin 1984. (Source, pdf, site web Rewind) - Subverting Television. Deconstruct (A Three Part Programme of British Video Art), sélectionné par Marc Wilcox pour Netherlands Video Circuit, Arts Council Film and Video Umbrella Programme; Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, mars 1985. (Source 1, Source 2, pdf, site web Rewind) - Voir des vidéos, 5ème édition, Wallonie, Bruxelles - Londres, 3 - 5 mai 1985. (Source, pdf, site web Rewind) - 5th Junior Dublin Film Festival, Irish Film Centre, UCI Tallaght, UCI Coolock, Dublin, 14 - 25 novembre 1994. (Source, pdf, site web Rewind)

Publications and Periodicals which reference the work

- Recent British Video, [s.n.], [s.l.], [1983?]. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Stephen Partridge & Sean Cubitt (eds.), REWIND| British Artists' Video in the 1970s & 1980s, John Libbey Publishing, East barnet, Herts, 2012.