Laura Gonzalez

blog

10 Jun 2007

Coin de chasteté

And since I am thinking about Surrealism (having just read the excellent catalogue accompanying the V&A’s Surreal Things exhibition; having just posted about Surrealist shoes…), I can’t help but share with you my favourite seductive artwork, my screw. A postcard of this object is what I turn to when I am lost, when I ask myself “why, why, why? why do this, why study something so elusive?”. Like Object a, Duchamp’s Coin de chastet?� is my object of desire and my object of anxiety, all in one. As things go, it doesn’t quite fit into my PhD, even though it is MY object of seduction. Maybe it’s because. So much to say about it, yet so simple. One can think about masculinity and femininity; about opposites working side by side (like in the unconscious); violence and harm… A previous version of this object was given as a wedding present for his second wife. Coin de chastet?� is related to, but quite distinct from other Duchamp pieces such as Female Fig Leaf.


Marcel Duchamp, Wedge of Chastity (Coin de chastet?�) 1954, cast 1963. Tate Collection

Posted in Blog,Seductive artworks


One Response to “Coin de chasteté”

  1. Pat Laa said:

    S and P’s credit scoring should certainly inevitably awaken the American people to the fact that most of their political agents are doubtlessly most likely the most futile, overpaid bunch of fools that ever graced our political world, shame on them.

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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.