Co-founded by the Dutch architect Rem D. Koolhaas (yes, he’s the nephew of Mr. OMA himself) and shoe-maker Galahad JD Clark, United Nude elevates the shoe to a true art form—where design, architecture and abstraction meet footwear. With an aim to create nothing less than contemporary iconic shoe design, “the products are conceptual: re-interpretations of architecture, archetypes, or existing classic objects.” Like, for example, the sexy form of the Mobius shoe (pictured), which is inspired by the frame of Mies Van der Rohe’s famed Barcelona chair. Made from a single strip of high-tech Kevlar, the sole and upper are an unbroken form.

Isn’t this a wonderful example of shoes as architecture? Lacanian architecture, for that matter. I mean, a möebius shoe… The possibilities are unimaginable… At work, or at a party where I don’t know many people, I sit quietly somewhere apart. I daydream, and when I daydream I have to do something with my hands so I find myself passing a finger through the strip of my shoe, from inside to outside in one boundary component. Where did it change, how did it happen? Why is the world full of such fascinating things as shoes, möebius strips, déjà vus,mispronounced words? This is shoe is the closest I have ever been to experiencing the relationship between desire and seduction…

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—.

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.

The analytic vignettes I listened to at the APCS conference were eye openers in relation to a problem I have encountering with my PhD. My sessions are going somewhere (where, I don’t know yet) and my clinical diary. for as long as I kept it, was a useful tool in relation to establishing parallels between artistic and analytic practices.

The trouble began when it was time to think about this endeavour as a public one and I had to conceive of what had gone on as a piece of writing. I did not know where to start. How could I write a PhD involving my own desire without doing written self analysis? How could I avoid replicating what had gone on in the sessions verbatim? How could I be fair to the process without including insights gained post facto? How could I avoid being too personal? How could I avoid being too irrelevant? How could I gain some distance without being objective? How could I keep subjectivity relevant? These and many, many more question I asked while my fingers froze on the keyboard; this has gone on weekly since September and what you are reading are the first words that are typed about it.

The plenary panel ‘Psychoanalysis Under Fire: Kleinian, Winnicottian, Lacanian and Relational Theory and Practice, Part II’ at the last APCS conference, chaired by Esther Rashkin (University of Utah) and comprised by Kate Briggs (University of West Georgia), Marilyn Charles (Austen Riggs Center), Karl Figlio (University of Essex), and Lynne Layton (Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society) was very useful in relation to my blockage. All presenters spoke, during two 5 minutes interventions with question intervals, about a clinical encounter.

In the best Freudian fashion, I felt the genre of case history was alive, ever compelling and relevant. There were insights and thinking (despite Figlio’s concerns with thinking) but also theories, sources, process, engagement, and, often, change. This is not new, though. When Freud wrote Dora, or Ratman these different types of content were intermingled, and he would even tell you were and how. But I must be too used to reading Freud, or must think of Freud as not alive, as cristallised, in terms of writing.

The case histories at APCS made me realise what the structure for the case history is, and what I had been doing wrong when conceiving the writing of my own: all of those encounters, and all of Freud’s histories were the result of transference and counter-transference. That is, they were relational: analyst-analysand-[supervisor].

I realised that, although Dr Sh— met with me weekly in the analytic room, I left him there when writing the PhD thesis, and so I wrote him off the case history. But, if with my photographs I aim to provoke a particular encounter between viewer and artwork, the parallel was not to work in the thesis if I shunted what stands in in the place of the artwork. My analytic process had not been a self analysis and trying to write it as one just wouldn’t work. Perhaps I had been wishing for emotional, artistic and academic independence (we are, after all considering the end of analysis). Still, if I am to write a clinical vignette in the spirit of Dora and with the energy of what I heard at the APCS, the analyst and the artwork must be acknowledged and given voice within the writing.

Now that I managed to catch up and feel sort of back on track (my job does not take it well when I am away from my desk), I have a little time to reflect and write about my trip to the US.

I came back from the APCS energized and full of thoughts. Our panel on Almodovar had the right level of engagement and controversy and showing the film beforehand meant everyone was engaged and had something to contribute to. I took notes and had many thoughts, which will hopefully inform a developed paper, with the issue of cryptophores (bearers of secrets, Vita) fully explored. My remarks for the panel, though, can be found here.

The whole conference was congenial. I was particularly encouraged by the level of discussion between academics and clinicians, and between people from different disciplines but with a common interest in psychoanalysis. The visual definitely has a place in the conference, one that I hope will be explored more and more. As Martin Gliserman said, after all, we talk about a primal scene.

There are many things I learned and could talk about, but one, in particular, has stayed with me since and plays around in my head. It is a visual thought verbalised by Elio Frattaroli, in a panel on psychoanalytic wars entitled Pax Psychoanalytica: Analysis is like the Titanic and all the analyst can do is arrange deck chairs to get a better view of the iceberg. A beautiful twist on a deja-vu metaphor.

S— said it was because they operated like eyes, which looked and saw. I agreed. She mentioned Lacan’s quote: “You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.” (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, 1978, p. 103) and some of that is true of the 140 new images I have made depicting reflections in shoe shop fronts, jewelry windows, lingerie displays and bridal-wear.

I also think fantasy has something to do with it. Whereas, in my images, shoe and lingerie shops demand consumption, bridal shops and jewelers are more contemplative. As so they belong to the imaginary of seduction, rather to the actual seduction shops represent these days. Of course, prohibitive prices and the social meaning attributed to those objects have a bearing in this matter. The tension represented in those photos is less “buy me” than “have me, if you dare”, a possession not achieved by purchasing the object, but by owning it and relating to it through phantasy. That’s why these images have trapped me, captured my imaginary.

I am off to New Brunswick, NJ, for a week. I will be talking about mothers, daughters and cryptophores as part of a Volver roundtable at the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2007 annual conference. The event, together with the proximity of New Jersey to Philadelphia —and therefore to the famous Duchamp room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art— makes me feel really excited. I’ll be sure to report upon my return on the 6 November…

Something strange happens in one’s body when they realise that a fantasy one has had for a while comes true. This is the disturbance –akin to an old box being opened– I experienced yesterday, when I clicked on the link my friend Emilio sent me.

The Galerie du Passage in Paris has a new show on. First blow to my fantasy: the Galerie is situated in one of the old shopping arcades in Paris, a favourite type of construction of mine, as a number of boundaries –outside and in, consumption and contemplation– are blurred. Arcades contain shops that invite you to look more than to buy. Once a flâneuse has crossed the threshold, the arch that represents the entry to this strange street, she is in the realm of visual seduction.

The works shown the Galerie du Passage are David Lynch’s photographs. Second blow to the fantasy: if there is a universe I would like to belong to, that is the Lynchian universe, with its schizophrenics, its personality changes, its bends in time and its Rabbit families. Lynch not only understands my unconscious, but can also represent it with unsettling accuracy.

David Lynch is photographing impossible shoes designed by Christian Louboutin. Third blow to my fantasy: while Blahnik is the uncontested maestro of shoe making in terms of object, Louboutin’s red soles and peep toes make me dream of the type of woman I could be, the type of femininity I know is within me (although hidden behind plimsolls). My red, like in those shoes, is underneath.

There is something strange about the beaten up box that has been opened, something to do with recognition, yet estrangement. Something as if the image the mirror returned was me, but not quite. Something delicate has been added, or else take away. I cannot quite put my finger on it. What do you want from me, fantasy, what do you want?

With thanks to Emilio Cendón, the best photographer alive, and one of the most charming persons I know.