The talk at MFIT went very well. I realised afterwards that this is the very first time I have talked about seduction without any of the padding that you usually have to put together for conferences, in order to fit into the overall theme. I confronted seduction in a public way for the first time, and it was fantastic. I was motivated, enlivened by the subject and its curious manifestations, by its contradictions, by the philosophies that try to study it.
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I’ll be here doing a talk as part of the Seduction exhibition at the Museum at FIT.
Do pop in to say Hi if you are in the New York area.
It’s fashion week and I want to take photos of shop windows, people wearing amazing clothes, all done up, dressed up, acting out. [...]
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One of my students alerted me to the existence of a Shoe Tree in Newcastle’s Armstrong Park. The concept was new to me: it sounds like a pet cemetery, but in a tree and for shoes. She told me that the strange rituals people engage in are a real problem to the council, who has to take the shoes down and repair the tree’s branches regularly. So the location of the tree is either found by mistake, perseverance, or shared through word of mouth.
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I have completed 3 weeks of the 15-week “Psychoanalysis in Art and Culture” course for postgraduates I devised last Autumn. Focus on my own subject area won over my busy schedule and despite lacking time above anything else, I agreed to fit this in. I tend to stretch towards the impossible, sometimes to my own detriment, but I think one regrets more what one doesn’t do than what one does. Us Spaniards have an expression for this: que me quiten lo bailao (kind of “you can’t take off me what I have danced”).
Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her practice encompasses drawing, photography and sculpture, and her work has been exhibited in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has participated in numerous conferences, including Research into Practice (2008), College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (2007). When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx's footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.
She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project, which investigates psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction within the fields of fine art, consumption studies and material culture. Her research includes 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 seeks refuge and inspiration in psycho-geography, especially if it takes her to shopping centres, those mysterious places.