You Can't Fuck A Shoe
You Can't Fuck A Shoe
Signed Print
Tracey Emin
£1,200-£1,800
$2,450-$3,700 Value Indicator
$2,250-$3,350 Value Indicator
¥11,500-¥17,000 Value Indicator
€1,400-€2,050 Value Indicator
$12,500-$19,000 Value Indicator
¥240,000-¥360,000 Value Indicator
$1,600-$2,450 Value Indicator
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39 x 43cm, Edition of 200, Etching
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Meaning & Analysis
This 2010 etching by Tracey Emin pictures two naively rendered high heeled shoes in blue ink. Around these strappy platform heels at the centre of the composition, haphazard daubs of ink are suggestive of Emin’s rapid and spontaneous approach to her printmaking process. Underneath the focal shoes are the witty words from which the work takes its title, written in Emin’s distinctive handwriting.
Synonymously witty and disturbing, You Can’t Fuck A Shoe is archetypal of Emin’s entire body of work. In her typically naive and sketchy style, Emin renders a pair of platform strappy heels. Underneath the sexy shoes are the words “You Can’t Fuck A Shoe” in Emin’s handwriting, perhaps as a satirical comment on the shoe as a fetish object. As a fetish object in the Freudian sense, shoes have a longstanding reputation in art history as being sexually suggestive - especially among the Surrealists. As Emin wryly suggests however, you can’t have sex with her platform heels, no matter how alluring they may be. As with many of Emin’s other prints and drawings, there is a rather infantile quality to this work, revealing her playful and ever explorational approach to sex.