I have been completely swamped by this exhibition and feel I have retreated into the imaginary universe of projections and identifications, not really living in the real world. Tuesday is the opening and after Saturday, it will all come back to a more or less normal routine, where I will be able to engage with other people. An exhibition is an essentially narcissistic thing to do and, as this is done in the context of my PhD, I have had to take care of all aspects, from invites, to mailouts, to gallery plans to private view drinks. Still a lot to do…

Occasionally, however, I have received little pricks that life outside of my head continues and yesterday’s email, kindly sent to me by Linda, made me want to engage with the world again. A good feeling (thanks, Linda). The email in question was a link to a Guardian article which, as it is not too long, I reproduce here:

Keep it zipped - the shoe of the season
Jess Cartner-Morley
Thursday May 15 2008
The Guardian

For those of you who may be a little behind with this month’s glossy magazines and weekend supplements, here is the digested read: if you don’t own these shoes, you are a loser. Granted, they don’t spell it out quite as starkly as that, but the message is nonetheless pretty clear, such is the ubiquity of Christian Louboutin’s zippy Rodita sandal, currently being snatched off shelves everywhere even at a strikingly credit-crunch-proof £405. What may look to you like a brightly coloured zip sewn on to an implausibly high heel is, in fact, the shoe of the season.

The very absurdity of this shoe is, of course, what makes it special. There is no longer anything remarkable about a woman with a shoe fetish. Quite the contrary: being obsessed with Manolos/blowing the rent on Choos has become a Girl Guide badge of belonging for the modern woman. Love of shoes has become the most boring cliche of modern womanhood. If you don’t agree, try buying a birthday card for a woman between the ages of 20 and 70, and you will see what I mean: when you discount the cards that have footballs/pints of beer on them, and ignore the ones that feature either Bratz or sentimental poetry in swirly handwriting, what you are left with is an endless selection of pictures of shoes.

As fancy shoes have become ubiquitous, fashion has had to edge further into crazyland just to keep a respectable distance from the masses. Note that these zippy numbers are by Christian Louboutin: just as a gourmet in a chocolate shop might demand Valrhona or Amedei over Green & Blacks in order to signal connoisseurship, the hardcore shoe obsessive likes to namecheck Louboutin rather than, say, Dior or Prada, in order to signal her refinement. They are ankle-breakingly precarious, endowed with enough hardware to set off security alarms at 20 paces and dizzily high. But when the girl next door is wearing 4in patent slingbacks, what can a fashion victim do?

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited

Contrary to what many people may think, I am not a Manolo girl (I am definitely a Carry girl, but not a Manolo girl). While I admire most of the Maestro’s designs, his falls have also been spectacular. I loved his exhibition at the Design Museum, but that was pure theatricality, as it made the shoes reveal themselves as something other than what they are known empirically to be… The shoes were more than shoes.

Outside of the gallery space, however, Blahnik’s works are, well, too goody-two-shoes, despite the pun. Now Louboutin has also had spectacular falls, and the Rodita sandal is nowhere near the revered peep toe platforms. Louboutin, however, has a number of things going for him, applicable to all designs. First is the fact that his inspiration seems to come from a relationship to perversion, to deviant thoughts about shoes. This is best exemplified in his collaboration with the master of perversion, David Lynch. Second is the way this design trait manifests itself in his trademark red sole. Whatever one is wearing on the top part of one’s feet, underneath is a world of perfect red, only visible to the knowledgeable and the attentive. I have never wore Louboutin’s myself (a dream) but I suspect it must be like wearing garters, or ethereal underwear. It is this particular shade of red that will always make Louboutin’s designs right.

I will be speaking at the delightful Architexture: Exploring textual and architectural spaces conference at te University of Strathclyde, which will run from 15 to 17 April 2008.

My paper is scheduled on the 17th April, from 13.30 to 15.00. Here’s what I will be talking about:

Reflections on Seduction

Every morning, I get to work 10 minutes late. What keeps me is the fact that I have to wait for the women at the jewellers in Glasgow’s Argyle Arcade to appear in the shop windows, polishing and displaying diamond rings. This compulsion to repeat represents the core of this paper. The regular stop in my journey is pleasurable and has qualities associated with what is commonly known as retail therapy. At the same time, and like everything related to desire, it provokes anxiety.

The rings and I are mediated by real (public) and imaginary (private) screens. These define my position, which is similar to that of the viewer in the art gallery or the analysand in the analytic room. In those situations, the privileged enclosure and the distance between subject and object structure both encounters. The screens regulate the relationship and, through them, new spaces appear, in which the objects and I are positioned together, in close proximity, as happened in Lacan’s experiment of the inverted bouquet. The rings are mine; I am theirs.

What occurs, every morning, is an act of seduction, like the one that took me all the way to Philadelphia to see what a Spanish door hid behind. Gaze, of course, is crucial to this relationship. Those rings hail me; they say: hey you! Look at me! And I let myself being led astray because I know that commodities, with their fetish qualities, are mysterious and enticing by nature. But the concept of seduction, although pervasive in contemporary culture, is complex and will need teasing out. In this journey — which takes the form of a walk and a practice-led investigation — Duchamp, Marx, Freud and Lacan are my companions and to them I will look for help to understand what makes an object seductive.

The 24 yearly hours marking the date when I was born are a torment to me. I get an uncontrollable sorrow, a desire to be away from everything and everyone. I do not answer phones, and whatever attempts a smiling are clearly seen as an effort. It is not ridiculous to say that I am slightly moody. I have my tempers but what happens on the 31 March defies any kind of rationality. I have been lectured, analysed, tried to be talked out of it. Yet, anxiety soars. The worst is the cake and the song. They are triggers in my eyes, giving me a loud GO for sobbing.

Ritual image, a few years ago. Photo courtesy of Neil Scott

Yet, I do try to exorcise this feeling as much as possible. In January/February, I make my master students organise a birthday party for me a their project management training brief. A surprise party is my biggest fear. I have had gatherings, of course, but these were safely outside of the dreaded date and controlled to the last detail. I do tell myself, towards the end of March, that this year will be different, that things are better than ever, that it is only a day like any other. Yet, the repressed, in the form of a compulsion to repeat, returns.

The best description of what overcomes is grief, mourning. What I feel is peculiarly similar to loosing someone, to arriving at the understanding that we are not going to see them ever, ever, ever again, no matter how much we try or want. Let us see where this takes me by looking at the source of mourning.

Photo courtesy of Neil Scott

The first point of call could be a lost year, another one. But this does not ring true. I look much younger than I am, pathetically so. I still get asked for ID regularly (and not only in the US) and my facial features have caused me some troubles in terms of authority at work. I have never considered getting old. It is a thought that rarely occurs to me consciously and in relation to myself.

Is it a trauma, then? A childhood trauma related to a birthday? Admittedly, I never liked the damned day. my mother was horrified of inviting many children home for a party so I had to put up with the next door neighbour, who was born the same date as me, and her 3 brothers. They were neighbours, not friends, or crushes, or cool people. Every year we would rotate the place of the party: our house, their house. The same building. And then there was the year when we were going to celebrate with Gran and everybody departed, inadvertently leaving me locked at home. A party without me. These trifles, however, are like those in any child’s history, I presume. They are not hidden, or repressed. I vividly remember and the provoke the same amount of cringing as of laughter.

Again, I am not getting anywhere, although this may be the key. Fréderic Declercq’s paper at the 2007 APCS conference, argued that the difference between anxiety and fear is the fact that fear has a known cause whereas anxiety does not. He made us look at examples within Freud’s Little Hans and it was quite humourous to see that his Lacanian approach provoked both anxiety and fear in the audience. Fear is understandable, anxiety is irrational, as the cause is not known. It always takes one by surprise and attempts at dealing with it are easily overcome by the overwhelming feeling. It is not impossible to find a cause for it, though, ir to construct it in order to work though the feeling but it will require many hours on the couch, as the knot is tangled. Very tangled. Today, more than ever, I miss Dr Sh—.

By now, you must know my weakness for Cranach’s paintings, for his depictions of the seductiveness of the female body, his wonderful view on Eve. I am lucky. London’s Royal Academy of Arts is hosting a major exhibition of his work, which includes a fair amount of Venuses. Five centuries later, Cranach continues to shock and contradict, as the poster for the exhibition was almost pulled out from advertising spots on the London underground. Is it really that outrageous? what is it about the image that is uncomfortable to show? The nudity or the look? I wonder…

These images have influenced so many others… The first I can think of is Tizian’s Venus of Urbino, almost its contemporary, although less defiant. Then there’s Manet’s Olympia, of course. I recently attended ArtSheffield 08. Like when in Venice, I enjoyed the social aspect more than the art. There was one piece, however, at the interesting Millennium Galleries display, that broke the indistinguishable continuum I felt reigned over the other spaces. A look was at its centre, although this time, the figure was a man, fully clothed.

This image of Morrissey by Wolfgang Tillmans showed me, tracing it back to Cranach, that the challenge resides in the look, much more than in the pose, in the nudity, in the political stance of the images. The look, the gaze… Always them, at the centre of works of art…

I do not, of course, believe that photographing reflections in shop windows is a groundbreaking or truly original thing. My contribution to the genre, and to seduction, is a little more subtle and made of a number of elements combined. When extrapolating the images, however, and looking only at them in the context of art, it is quite useful to locate sources. I knew they were there but I could not identify them until Lorens showed me his wonderful Lee Friedlander book. There they were. Friedlander’s series in Like a one-eyed cat:

What was useful about unlocking this piece of my unconscious (the kind Lorens and I chatted about) was that not only the detail of the information was useful for my PhD – as it will inform the analysis of my practice –, it also revealed things about my photos that I hadn’t seen before. Friedlander’s images are often typified as self-portraits. In my photos, the body that appears on them is mine but I don’t relate to it. At least for now; we’ll see what happens in the gallery space. Thinking of them as kind of self-porttraits, of which all art has something, is interesting in relation to certain things on seduction and narcissism I have written about. For this, as well as for showing me the second volume of his thesis and, with it, a way into analysing images where screen and space are central, I have to thank him.

Writing block… oh… writing block…

I am mourning, at least I feel all the signs and symptoms of it. What I am mourning, though, is something I did not expect to mourn: my relationship with my analyst. I have missed two would-be sessions. The thing is, we had been planning to stop since our return to normal after the summer break so it did not come as a surprise, especially to me, who initiated the process. You see, committing time and money to the sessions, those two things Freud considers essential to the work of analysis, had become impossible for me. That doesn’t mean I did not care. In fact, most of the important work in my analysis happened between September and January, the months of the End of Analysis, as I call them in my clinical diary.

Issues of control, of deep pain and fear and frustration came up, the realisation that I feel something so true that part of me feels it’s wrong, such intensity… But Dr Sh— thinks that I would have left in a matter of months, no matter what. He was very kind to me during those difficult sessions. On the last one, he wishes me good fortune with my show and my PhD work (that’s what brought it all up, I am leaving analysis to do art, I am cured). It’s not a matter of luck, he said, but of fortune, and his door is open. In fact, he did not wish to see my work and said so, even though this is available online, because he is still my analyst. The work of analysis certainly does not finish with the last session. My symptoms have been stronger lately.

He told me he thought I left some things there with him. And I have, I think. But I have also taken some others with me, hence the mourning. In these last two weeks, I have thought to myself a couple of times: “oh, I must mention that to Dr Sh—, I wonder where it will take me…” only to realise a minute afterwards that there will not be another session in the near future. And that is sort of painful, emotionally straining, actually. The analysis room has become more vivid. The fireplace, the books, the deep green accoutrements, especially the Apple computer I only glimpse and smile at when I go in… They have taken a sort of childhood image status, like something vivid but far far away.

I did not want to lag with my last payment. I have an enormous sense of duty for my analyst because he has never been less than extremely professional. Once a transactional analyst actually went out of the consulting room where I was sitting, in order to answer a telephone. Dr Sh—, if he sees people out of the window, tells me he is going to draw the curtains so we get privacy. Of course, I do realise this is still strong transference. Let me go back to the payment. I tried to do it as quickly as possible, as I always do, but I also wanted to do something special, something small, not melodramantic (which is how I was feeling) but something that would mark the moment of that indefinite break. I wanted a postcard picture of Nicole Kidman, since she had featured so heavily in my last months of analysis (don’t ask), but this was impossible to find. So I turned to my faithful postcard collection which mainly contains works by Schiele, Kahlo and Duchamp (this, in itself, is telling). I chose a postcard with an image by Frida Kahlo, entitled “What I saw in the water”.

I wasn’t sure of why I chose that one at the time, although I knew nothing is deliberate, of course. But the more I think about it now, the more I realise that I do/did my best thinking in psychoanalysis and the bath and that both share a similar point of view. What I see in both is my feet, restful or restless, me laying down. This is the image of me thinking, or rather, working through. Actually that is what happens in the bath, I work through my research problems, I see in the water. Of course, there’s the body too, that body of mine that my year and a half of analysis help me not so much discover as locate, identify as mine (not someone else, as I thought).

I am glad to get a little bit of analysis post-analysis. Don’t be scared if, in the next few weeks or months, there’s some rambling here, about my mother, about self-harm, about feeling inadequate. Before you write it off as silly self-awareness, please remember I am mourning.

A wonderful moment at the Vicissitudes: Histories and destinies of Psychoanalysis conference’s French panel:

Stéphane le Mercier, artist:

9- …ce á quoi souvent il faut répondre:
«Que faites-vous dans la vie?
- Je reléve des chutes.»

9- … what I often have to answer:
«What do you do for a living?
-I pick up what has fallen down.»

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, psychoanalyst:

Funny. You and me have the same job.

It has been a while. I have been a hermit, distanced from online activities, wholly immersed in constructing Chapter 1, figuring out A Case of Seduction (End Gallery 12-17 May 2008), attending a Psychoanalysis and the Arts and Humanities conference (Vicissitudes : Histories and Destinies of Psychoanalysis) and coping with the end of my analysis. I know, I know that each time I disappear for a while I come back with a list but I have had to put all of my energies on Chapter 1. It has felt like a milestone, with all the effort it takes to actually reach it. Literally, a PhD is like a marathon and I have had to concentrate on putting one foot forward, and then the other and so one, not tripping, advancing a little at a time. And not to mention a really traumatic Christmas period, of course, from which I wish I could have taken some holiday. Alas, I had Masters assessments on 7th January.

I will write about all of those things I mentioned, in particular the end of analysis, once the mourning period eases my throat. I missed being here. Like Sh. and F. mentioned to me at The Freud Museum last Saturday, blogging is a particular form of writing that suits only some people. To me, it is like tidying my desk, or filing my stuff… I tell you what, I really need to clear some things. The mess has really accumulated while I had my guard down.