Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels contains a parable about an empire divided between factions distinguished only by the height of their heels. The “high” and “low” heel dispute—a matter of a mere fourteenth of an inch—becomes a metaphor for the absurdity of political division and the vanity of power. Swift’s satire remains one of the sharpest lessons on how authority, fashion, and ideology intertwine. It is also a reminder that true subversion does not necessarily appear as open rebellion; it may arise from revealing how shallow distinctions sustain entire systems of control.
In this sense, the most enduringly subversive art does not shout. It undermines, exposes, and reorders perception. Its task is not to align with a party or cause but to reveal the fissures in what is taken for granted—to show how the world’s “heels,” whether high or low, mark difference where there should be thought. Subversion begins where art turns attention to the imperceptible measures of power: the cultural drurrs that separate inclusion from exclusion, privilege from invisibility.
For me, the political in art resides in this deeper undercurrent, not in slogans. My gallery has long aligned itself with artists who, like Swift, work beneath the surface of convention—artists who resist conformity, refuse complacency, and treat irony as a mode of revelation rather than mockery. Their art insists that belief, conviction, and imagination are themselves political acts, precisely because they cannot be absorbed by the machinery of consensus.
I have never been interested in art that feels safe. The works that matter confront, confuse, or compel me to think harder. Every exhibition I have organized has been, in truth, a private search for understanding: a way to learn through the artist’s process of revision and discovery. Intelligence, curiosity, humor, and risk are non-negotiable. Like a writer revising a line until the rhythm locks into place, the artist adjusts, cuts, and shifts—until something unexpected happens. That moment of change, when form acquires a new logic, is where subversion lives.
Since its inception, my gallery has been a home for such acts of resistance. Sigmar Polke inaugurated the space in 1987, setting the tone for a program of artists who have turned their backs on fashion and orthodoxy: Georg Baselitz, Dieter Roth, Martin Kippenberger, William Copley, Dorothea Rockburne, Barry Le Va, and Jonathan Meese among them. Each defied inherited hierarchies of style and subject matter; each, in different ways, tested art’s capacity to mirror or mock the world’s contradictions.
Barry Le Va’s startling installations from the late 1960s, for instance, dismantled the very idea of sculpture as fixed and monumental. His use of menacing materials conveyed the instability of perception and the psychological pressures of contemporary life—concerns that recall the restless skepticism of Swift’s writing. Dorothea Rockburne, folding a single sheet of paper in the early 1970s, transformed a humble act into an inquiry into the geometry of thought itself. Both artists understood that art’s most radical gesture often lies in the smallest deviation—a fold, a fracture, a fourteenth of an inch.
Today, the questions remain the same, though the terrain has shifted. My current exhibition (open through December 20, 2025) brings together three artists—Tim Brawner (Brooklyn), Jonathan Meese (Berlin), and Dennis Tyfus (Antwerp)—whose works embody the Swiftian spirit of defiance through absurdity. Each addresses the tension between authentic experience and the synthetic realities produced by media, politics, and digital simulation. Their art blurs the line between parody and prophecy, suggesting that the deluge of online images engulfing us is every bit as dividing—and as ridiculous—as Swift’s warring heels.
Meese’s operatic paintings and performances, Tyfus’s anarchic soundscapes, and Brawner’s psychotropic images all resist assimilation into a market that prefers art to be polite, safe, and collectible. Their subversion lies not in shock but in intelligence—in their ability to dismantle what our culture presents as coherent. They reveal how belief systems—like shoe fashions—can become absurd through repetition; and how laughter, irony, or chaos can restore the possibility of seeing anew.
To champion such art is to take a position against the corporate flattening of culture, against the reduction of creativity to brand identity. The gallery, at its best, is not a temple of taste but a field of contestation where meaning remains open, unstable, and alive. Subversion, then, is not merely an attitude; it is an ethics of attention—a refusal to let difference be defined by the inch.
Swift’s lesson endures: an empire will always find new heels to measure itself by. The artist’s task, and ours, is to remember that the height of the shoe has never been the point. What matters is the step it takes—the direction it moves—and the ground it unsettles.
David Nolan has maintained a gallery in New York City since 1987. Now located at 24 East 81st Street, New York, 10028, his program is known for presenting artists whose work upsets familiar hierarchies of vision and meaning.
