Nathan Tough and me had been running a clothing company called The Big Shoe Corp. that was named after a lazy Big Issue seller’s sales pitch at Brixton tube station. We were approached by the marketing department of Dunlop to customise a pair of their Green Flash tennis shoes for a press event re-launching the shoes featuring 35 other artists and fashion houses.Nathan and me both hated those tennis shoes and arranged for the BigShoeCorp’s Medical Examiner to do an autopsy on them so that we could present its findings as our piece.
At the launch night in Clerkenwell me and Nathan grabbed a free beer and then found a spot in a corner where we could watch as the C.E.O and his sycophants walked around the room like a civilised congo, all happily ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ at the collection of whackly tagged sneakers.
That is until they reached a shoe that had been surgically de-constructed with each bloodstained piece labelled and vacuum flat-packed into A2 sheets of plastic and fixed on the wall.
Next to the artefact was an accompanying print out of the autopsy in which our Chief Medical Examiner had declared that the trainers were already ‘Dead On Arrival’. The Dunlop man spat out his beer and had to be quickly steered away from our work whilst shouting “WHO DID THIS, WHERE ARE THEY?”.
A Kodak moment indeed.