Marilyn Monroe

Barbara Zucchi

This shoe sculpure is part of a series of 20 sculptures of shoes dedicated to the most relevant women in history, literature, cinema and comics. This project has been commissioned by Superstudio Milan and ANCI, and chosen as opening event for the MICAM 2006.

Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn has died. Suicidal.
She is gone to bed wearing some drops of Chanel n.5 and some tubes of barbiturics in her stomach. She maybe killed herself for self-defence as Ophelia or, perhaps, someone killed her and made up a dramatic scene of suffering and inability to resist to the star doom’s pressure. I just know that together with Monna Lisa she is an universal icon, a sort of holy picture, a cyclic representation that I have seen and I will see, as everybody, everywhere. So, she’s never died, and nobody killed her, or, if they did, by killing Marilyn they granted her eternal life. It’s sure that one associates the word “Marilyn” to these random images: Happy Birthday Mr. President, JFK, Andy Warhol, the white pleated skirt that lift up on the grill, suicide, barbiturics and who knows what else. Her heel is the emblem of an unsolved American case: a tube of “Goodnight America”.


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