A fancy footwear art installation in the middle of nowhere.
Feeding into the irony, the Prada Marfa installation is, in fact, not in Marfa. It is a 30-minute drive down a stretch of nowhere, just past Valentine, Texas. This architectural pop art (read: little building) was erected in 2005. It houses part of the Prada 2005 footwear line for perpetuity (or the foreseeable future). To protect it, it now has museum status.
When we arrived, my daughter ran to open the door, and then was super sad that she couldn’t go in. The shopping gene skipped a generation in my family. Fortunately, she had her grandmother with her to commiserate.
The Prada Marfa has gone full circle a few times with it’s anti-/pro-consumerism symbolism, particularly with respect to the amount of money people spend on the thin veneer of ourselves we put forth into the world. I’m fairly confident it is currently losing the “anti” camp with the number of times people have posted themselves in front of it on Instagram.
Next to the building is a chain-link fence with a bunch of padlocks all over it. I thought this was an additional symbol of being locked to consumerism. Yeah, laugh: I’m old and my days of romance are few and far between. It turns out these are love locks, the modern-day version of scratching yours and your partner’s initials on a tree, or a bathroom stall. So, not like anti-anything at all.
Anyway, go see it. It is totally worth an afternoon drive to cool off from all the walking around you did in Marfa, or to get your little ones to take a nap. Don’t forget your Insta-shot to stick it to the man.
Get out, and make it meta.
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