In Malraux’s Shoes, Dennis Adams masquerades as André Malraux (1901–1976), the French writer, adventurer, Resistance fighter, cultural provocateur, art theorist, orator, statesman, and passionate archivist of the world history of art. Malraux’s arrest at age twenty-one by French colonial authorities in Cambodia for stealing bas-reliefs from a Kumer temple is an early testament to what would become his obsessive sampling of visual art from diverse cultures. For Malraux, this sampling was a means of laying claim to the very possibility of art’s transcendent value. Over the last forty years of his life, Malraux would assemble, disassemble, and reassemble montages of photographic reproductions to create Le Musée Imaginaire, which ranks as one the twentieth-century’s seminal manifestations of the archive along with Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Hanne Darboven’s Cultural History 1980–1983, and Gerhard Richter’s ongoing Atlas project. Malraux’s idea of an imaginary museum, a “museum without walls” (which he first announced in 1947), is a prescient manifesto of the digital age that enacts the displacement of the physical art object and the museum by photographic reproduction. Malraux’s privileging of curatorial over artistic production is also notable in its anticipation of current practice.

The set for Malraux’s Shoes is a reconstruction of the iconic photograph of Malraux standing with the plates of his book The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture laid out on the floor before him. The entire video is shot on this single set of a wooden floor covered in images. Adams literally steps into Malraux’s shoes, suit, and style. We see him walk on and over the images as we overhear his interior monologue, pierced by random punctuations of vocalized mumblings, ravings and verbal tics. Over the course of the video Adams moves freely between Malraux’s time and the present, and in moments, the persona of Malraux is overshadowed by Adams’s own personal speculations, doubts and anguish.