If you think I have been quiet since Christmas (or even before) it is because writing a thesis does not leave me much to say. All my energy is thrown into those pages, into those words, but today I had a lovely surprise when other words I had written a while ago, turned up, nicely [...]
Read this entry | 4 Comments »
2000: Moved from Manchester to Sheffield. Met Hayley and Oli and Stuart who took me to the pub. Finished BA. Met Neil. Got attacked by a goose. Moved to London. Started MA.
2001: Westminster Bridge Road. Depression. Finished MA. Started work in academia. Lost ability to make art. Won Mr and Mrs competition.
2002: Tooting. Watched Star [...]
Read this entry | 5 Comments »
I have a hip injury which nibbles at my walking and does not let me carry handbags that are bigger than clutches. I have tried everything from painkillers to rest. I have put the memory foam mattress on and off without much change. I still think it is either psycho-somatic (Neil’s bet) or a problem with alignment (my haunch). As a desperate measure, I bought a new pillow, a squarish uncomfortable looking, orthopedic thing that works best if one sleeps on one’s back – which I am not keen on, but perhaps should, for the sake or straight walking. It must have reminded me of my psychoanalyst’s couch for, the first night I slept on it I had the following dream:
Read this entry | No Comments »
We are in the last throws of preparing the texts for the forthcoming ‘Managing Creativity: Exploring the Paradox’, a book edited by Barbara Townley and Nic Beech, published by Cambridge University Press. I contributed a chapter on my favourite lemon squeezer. After writing a code of practice for work, various course reports, three chapters of my PhD thesis and a number of articles for a Spanish tendencies webzine, tackling a specialist, yet broad audience was a breath of fresh air.
Read this entry | No Comments »
I am not sure I really wanted to watch Antichrist. I like Lars von Trier a lot so the kernel of my desire was more wanting to engage in a conversation with him, to see what he had to say after a few years away from us (a few years of illness). I did not [...]
Read this entry | 3 Comments »
The tapping of television into the mystery of the psychotherapy session, into what goes on behind closed doors in the consulting room, was something waiting to happen. TV bosses have funded explorations into the world of gangsters, undertakers and death, the medical body, forensics, mental powers and numerous other enigmatic professions. A while ago, HBO launched In Treatment, a drama starring Gabriel Byrne and focusing on the therapist-patient relation. I have not yet seen much of it (other than youtube’s gifts), as it is not aired in the UK, but the choice of actor delights me. I have a transference relation with Byrne, one that is conflictive, of love and aggression at the same time. He doesn’t remind me of my psychoanalyst in any way, yet he does. He has that listening face.
Read this entry | 3 Comments »
I have uploaded the paper Sharon Kivland and I delivered at last year’s Research into Practice Conference. In it, we tried to answer the question of interpretation in Art and Psychoanalysis, through a different approach to one expects in this sort of conferences. To me, it was a great learning exercise.
Read this entry | No Comments »
I had a retail impulse and went for the Nikon D40. A strange choice, as this camera was not in any of the shortlists, but, in hindsight, it makes sense. I do not want whatever piece of kit I buy for my photography work to end up like my video camera, having not seen the day of light for about 3 years now. And when I bought it, I went as top of the range I could. What for? SO, with the D40, I bought time to test my commitment to digital photography. It is the right machine for that, lightweight and entry level, so I have no excuses to take it out everywhere.
Read this entry | 3 Comments »
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”).
There is a genre called psychoanalytic fiction and I have recently read two examples. The first one was Jed Rubenfeld’s The interpretation of murder; the second Brenda Webster’s Vienna Triangle. These two are as far apart as the category of genre allows.
Read this entry | No Comments »
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.