To have a great primitive black crag rising up in the middle of populated streets of commerce, stately squares and winding closes’, she wrote, ‘is like the statement of an unmitigated fact preceded by “nevertheless”.
‘Muriel Spark’ by Martin Stannard, p. 3
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These are the books I read in 2011, in order of the date I finished them. 2011 was the year when I renewed my love of fiction, after 5 years of PhD, and will be marked by my first encounter with Muriel Spark, whom I can say is my favourite writer. May 2012 bring me more time to read all I want to read.
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Tuesday’s lunchtime was marred by this news report.
I feel I am writing an obituary, for, since the issues were made public, I am mourning the loss of my favourite time in Glasgow, what I have been looking forward to since I applied, booked and paid for my place in this year’s events, back in October. Winter will be a long season now.
New Moves International were behind the New Territories festival and, for 30 years, the National Review of Live Arts. And many other little pockets of activity, since the form of their events has been ever changing, forever critical of itself and its form, reflexive to point of dizziness, risky, engaged, tormented, inquiring.
The National Review of Live Art brought La Ribot to Glasgow, introduced me to Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra – with whom I was going to do a Winter School in March 2012, as part of this year’s activities – and allowed me to experience the bodily fluids and the deaths of the favourite performers of Via Negativa’s artists, first hand. It showed me that art – live art, mind you – could still give me shivers down the spine, that not all was lost to mediocrity, trends and the market. It provided a home for my own dreams of merging the visual with dance, with video, with psychology in a direct and effective way, with as little mediation as possible. It has introduced me to interesting people like Mary Brennan and her partner, whom I was always looking forward to chat, the New Moves team, starting with Nikki Millican and Colin Richardson-Webb and the Contemporary Performance Practice staff and students at the Royal Conservatoire. It made me flinch, recoil at certain experiences, like the closeness of a hammer to my skull, blood and nudity, screams, a meal made up of discarded organic elements gathered during an operation, the kiss of a man who has just drank the sweat he had produced after a whole hour in a plastic bag. It made me politically active, engaged, believing, as Gómez-Peña passed around a bottle of Havana Club 7 while declaring ‘God Bless America’, which was followed by a good 10 minutes of ‘God Bless …’ from the audience (from Finland to Glasgow, someone’s cat and anything that came into the thrilled, and tipsy, audience’s head). Those of you who know me best will have heard all of these accounts, and will remember my joy. In fact, you often ask me, at any point in the year, when is the festival taking place. And now it is not.
New Territories and the National Review of Live Art made Glasgow cutting edge, far more than any Turner Prize. In its over 30 years of life, it has reinvented itself a few times, so I have a glimmer of hope that such earthly pursuits as ‘financial irregularities’ will not stop its vital pulse. It has often been called a phoenix and I am hoping that this naming is correct and that I can be part of it again. My hands are here for any reconstruction that needs to take place.
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La Ribot’s wonderful work Llamame Mariachi, inspired me as to the technique I wanted to use for my work on hysteria.
She films movement from within, she dances with the camera and the effect is one of convulsion, but also joy.
So, since my PhD, I have changed the space I work in, from a crowded artist’s studio, with papers, notes, images, computers and sketchbooks to an empty dance space.
It is here that I rehearse the movements of hysteria, its body practice, like the famous arch of hysteria (remember La Grande Hysterique I wrote about a few weeks back), in which you may recognise the high arch prone of contemporary dance and which some of you may know in the guise of Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture. In hers, the hysteric is a man.
For hysteria is a body practice and, moreover, a choreography.
Look at Charcot’s movement classifications, from his attitudes passionelles (passionate attitudes, the seduction in hysteria), to the clownisme, epileptoide phase and delirium. All pervert (exhibitionist) phases too, I think.
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Richard Avedon, Martha Graham and the Martha Graham Dance Company, New York, 1961
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks. He’s implicated in what’s happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.
Richard Avedon
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Being embodied is a mixed fate for the hysteric, who does not want to be excluded by anyone from anything, and yet, given the shocking secrets of sexuality – revealed by the self’s won developing body knowledge experiences this body and what it knows as a depraved epistemology. This fact is a vital constituent in the format of the hysteric because in so many different ways – enervation in the nineteenth century, fatigue in the twentieth century – hysterics indicate trouble with the body. It imposes the unwanted, and the response to the body’s invasion of the self varies from irritated indifference to paranoid grudge.Christopher Bollas, Hysteria, p. 19
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The Comforters, Muriel Spark, page 138
Georgina wielded the bigamy in terrified triumph. Her terror lest Eleanor should take public action against the bigamist was partly mitigated by the fact that Eleanor had a reputation to keep free of scandal. ‘But my name would suffer more than hers. I’ve always been respectable whereas she’s a dancer,’ Georgina declared.
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Here is a little more of my current jumbled thinking on hysteria and perversion, influenced by what I have been reading.
Sharon Kivland’s work A Case of Hysteria is a feminine detective story telling of a dependence to Freud’s case history (which I also suffer from, and I have been trying to avoid speaking of Dora until now). In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, published in 1905, Freud writes of his encounter with an 18 year-old patient whom he saw for only three months, after which she flew, abandoning treatment. Dora, whose real name is Ida Bauer has aphonia. She has lost her voice but there is no physical reason why this may be so.
The case is famous for two reasons: first, because he discovered the power of transference (the love relation between a patient and her doctor) and, second, because it was a failure. You can read about the case directly from Freud, or from Jed Rubenfeld, who, in the Interpretation of Murder, gave a rather trashy, B-series but very perversely enjoyable fictional account, which makes the links between Freud’s case histories and detective cases admirably.
Claire Pajaczkowska also revisited Freud’s most famous case in a film.
And then, there is perversion …
Kivland’s most recent work Le cri de la soie is also related to the nineteenth century, which, together with hysteria, saw the rise of female perversion, especially in relation to the touch of fabrics such as velvet, silk and velour and the consequent public display of pleasure that ensued. The materiality of the object was the conduit to the psychical manifestation of symptoms, and the result was their internment in psychiatric penitentiary units, accused of kleptomania. Gaétan Gatien De Clérambeau tells about these women in his work Passion érotique des étoffes pour la femme.
Are perverts so far away from hysterics? Freud and Lacan see them as opposites in their relation to questioning and fantasy. I guess this is something I will find out in my project, as it is my main concern. The performativity of hysteria, its exhibitionism is a pervert trait but that has not been addressed by analysts. Artists, as you can see, have had a go. Which is where I am heading.
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In the Nineteenth Century, Doctor Charcot worked at the Salpetrière in Paris, a hospital dedicated to treat hysteric women through hypnosis and other like treatments.
Charcot’s Tuesday lectures were very famous and well attended and Brouillet’s painting shows what was then named ‘La Grande Hysterique’ (believed to be a patient called Blanche Wittmann). Watch her and remember her, for something of her will return to my writing on this blog.
Freud had a print of this painting in his study in his house in London (now a museum). You can see it is placed above the couch.
These are some of the sources I have been exploring, especially the first book, Georges Didi-Huberman’s The Invention of Hysteria, around how Charcot used photography to enhance the performativity of the illness. For both doctor and patient performed for each other, believe me (and remember Brouillet).
I encountered these books during my study of seduction (my PhD), so I cannot say that this constitutes a new project. It is a tangential strand, a free association of some elements of my PhD.
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The conference was an outstanding success.
It all started early on, as I walked through a warm September Copenhagen towards the stunning Medical Museion.
The two day workshop took place in the apt and rather elegant medical theatre, a comfortable learning space with a great colour palette. Everything looked beautifully put together to me, from the decor to the Danish pastries we had for breakfast.
Sensuousness started with Lucy Lyons and Thomas Söderqvist’s welcome. It continued with the conference proper, at 9.40, with Mats Fridlund’s airmindedness and gas masks, and with Secil Ugur’s stress technology. Jan-Eric Olsén really impressed me with his thinking in action about the blind collection – which, incidentally, one could not touch – and his conversation. To the sources! he urged, and he liked Pessoa.
After lunch James Edmonson took us through the history of medical examinations, the distance between the hand and the ear of the doctor to the skin of the patient. He mentioned the Salpétrière and the word ‘embonpoint’ (plumpness, nice!) and his work told of a very curious study on relations. This was picked up by Linda Thomson, who explored if patient’s wellbeing was enhanced through handling museum objects by using a PANAS (Positive affect and negative affect) and VAS (Visual Analogue) scales. The qualitative material reported by the patients was very moving.
Then, after coffee, I wore a hysterics restraining belt (an absolute fantasy of mine), watched a little bit of the film Possession and looked through a speculum. My day just got better. I received generous responses, people suggested books – which I have followed up and thanks to their thinking, found some gems – and, overall, what I did enhanced conversation. It was a joy, and a privilege. Thank you for inviting me, Lucy.
Bernd Kraeftner followed, with squirrel pillows and recordings of the laughter of coma patients and, at this point, it dawned on me just how important the work of artists in hospital is. In vain, I tried to sway him towards the unconscious and Freud. He is from Vienna so I thought it would be easy … Jennifer Nomura van der Grinten was the perfect closure before the drinks reception. She spoke of vibrators in Japan, but not the ones you are thinking: face vibrators and the cult of the image. It was, simply, fascinating and I could have listened to her all day. She had great images and objects too. It was disturbing to handle them, as their weight and shape reminded me of kitchen mixers and other cooking implements. A lot of the conference was uncanny, though, the homely made strange and the strange brought peculiarly close …
Day two began with Ansa Lønstrup take on sound and one of my favourite artists: Pipilotti Rist (who currently has a solo show in London at the Hayward Gallery and which I will visit in November). She was followed by Eduardo Abrantes who took sound a step further and devoided it of image, of direct image in any case, as he manipulated an object away from our eyes, magnifying the sound. It was sensuously uncomfortable, as things in a medical theatre should be. Successful and interesting, like his PhD thesis. Brian Dougan made coffee taste better by engaging in the phenomenology of creating cups to drink it. I had a very strong reaction to one of them, so strong that I did what I rarely do: I asked him if I could keep it. Coffee does really taste better in his cup and I owe him one.
Per Roar made us move and brought a dancer with him. How lucky to be amongst kindred spirits. Could you get any more sensuous than a dancer exploring the body?
Carsten Friberg made us play and think about the room we were in by giving us mischievous games: to touch the shoulder of the person we knew the longest, of the person whose dress we liked best, of the last person we spoke to yesterday … In this way, he brought to attention the most astonishing object we handled during the workshop: the room we were in.
After lunch, Marlene Little’s presentation allowed us to think and touch something I had no concept of: a hip replacement. She showed it in X-ray, object form and artistic photograph in a way that reminded me of the language games of Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art work. Her paper was meta-linguistic and made me think a lot about the conference format itself. Louise Whiteley also made us work by making us travel to different rooms and handle and look at a rich variety of objects related to X-rays. We handled heavy, very present, phantoms and spoke of ghosts. She recommended me two awesome novels and, with her work, I think she has enormous potential to write her own. Her presentation made me dream. Coffee brought me back (a little reluctantly).
Anette Stenslund followed the narrative theme. She got the director of the museum to lay down on an operating table and play corpse while she spoke of life and death in relation to the green medical paper covering bodies. Her narrative worked, oh boy, it did work. She wrote her paper beautifully, she delivered it even better. I really hope to listen to her again. She also puts us on the scent of smell, which Anne Krefting followed. She brought us back to the here and now, to corporate research on smells and how they make us feel, to the performance of smell in cultures, in the high street, to Actor-Network theory. And to art. It was wonderful.
A speaker cancelled at the last minute and the end of the conference could not have had a better turn: a collegiate, communal sharing of a view of Lucy’s drawings, which I had not seen since her excellent PhD exhibition. Now, that was as much of a celebration as the beers we had afterwards. I hope the idea of the book gets off the ground, so this work can be shared beyond the 45 privileged people who were there.
Photos by Lucy Lyons, Louise Whiteley and others. More photos of the event here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/64255892@N03/
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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.
