Laura Gonzalez

blog

3 Dec 2004

Research Cult

It must be professional deformation or mental illness. Each time I have to present in front of an audience, about any subject whatsoever, I appear to be the only one who has written it down in grammatically correct text rather that bullet pointed keywords, the only one who has rehearsed and timed the talk, one of the few with an actual point.

You may think that my systematic way of approaching presentations, conference papers or talks is a rigorous sensible one, but I very rarely get any feedback comments or questions apart from ‘oh, that sounds good’ or ‘you seem to have a pretty good idea of what you are doing’. Sometimes I can even hear a ‘phew!’ with that gesture of a hand going over a head.

I can’t wait to start my PhD and distance myself even more from the majority. I think was born to be a small minded researcher who will spend her whole live furthering knowledge for the benefit of other people. That, ladies and gentleman, requires rigour, rehearsals and arguments, to mention just a few qualities.

Posted in Blog,PhD


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About Me

Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.

Her doctoral project, completed in 2010, investigated psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction, including an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes as objects of desire, a disturbing encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks.

She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.