Ashland shoe-throwing art gains much attention

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Marjorie Mather, 91, reacts after hitting a picture of President George W. Bush with a paint-covered shoe Friday at the new MAda Shell Gallery in downtown Ashland.Mail Tribune / Jamie Lusch

"Well, I guess I finally got my 15 minutes of fame!" Ashland City Councilman Eric Navickas said Wednesday as word continued to spread across the nation and the world of his performance art piece that drew inspiration from the Iraqi journalist who tossed his shoes at President George W. Bush.

People who visited MAda Shell Gallery during Ashland's First Friday art walk on Jan. 2 could pay a dollar to fire a paint-covered shoe at Navickas' big painting of Bush. Patrons drew back a shoe-tipped "arrow" on a bow strung with a bicycle inner tube — to imitate Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the reporter who fired his shoes at Bush during a Dec. 14 news conference in Baghdad.

Navickas' street theater high-jinx appeared in dozens of newspapers, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.; on Web sites such as salon.com, and michaelmoore.com; and TV networks including Fox News.

The story also was picked up by The Guardian in England and on other media sites around the world.

Navickas, who recently opened the gallery on the Ashland Plaza with fellow artist Amy Godard, said he hopes news of the prank will reach Iraq, "so they know Americans are in sympathy with (the Iraqi shoe-thrower's) cause and some Americans feel remorse for actions taken under George W. Bush."

Not everyone loved Navickas' artistic statement, and many readers expressed their opinions on various Web sites.

"I read a few of the comments," he said. "Those blogs are the anonymous place for rude and disrespectful comments, even racist and hate-accented comments. It's unfortunate."

Poet and Jungian analyst Kathleen Meagher of Ashland, who pelted the president's visage, said she was surprised the art and her comments about it had made their way around the world in an Associated Press version of the story, but "there's so much feeling built up in people in the U.S. and around the world about this administration for the past eight years."

Although proclaiming herself as a non-violent person, Meagher said she sent the paint-daubed shoe-arrow flying to support the original Iraqi show-thrower.

"People (shooting at Bush) felt release," she said. "They expressed energy bottled up for so many years. It wasn't mean. It was, as a Jungian archetype, about exposing the totalitarian father, the king who needed to be exposed for what he is.

"I'm glad we live in a country where we can do this and I wanted to support the gallery people who created it."

Navickas said proceeds from the stunt will be used to fund future exhibits.

Navickas has made news before. He participated in a nude sit-in at City Hall before being elected to the council in 2006, and he personally sued the Mount Ashland ski area to stop its proposed expansion. He said his art gallery is intended to give people an alternative to the town's tourist-oriented art and create a dialog for "political and social interaction," a perspective that was advocated at the recently closed Newandart Gallery on A Street.

He described his Bush painting as "anti-art," in which viewers use a random action to destroy the image.

For next month's First Friday, Navickas said he and Godard are working on an "anti-Valentine" theme.

John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.

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