I dreamt Dr Sh— (my psychoanalyst) and I were in the Basque Country, taking a walk towards my Gran’s house. The way was swampy and somehow overgrown with Amazonian-type vegetation. The leaves we encuntered encountered were enormous and I put that down to my home country changing. Dr Sh— led the way in front of me. At some point, we encountered snails and I mentioned, in passing, that they disgusted me. Dr Sh— reached down the swaped swamp and pulled out a snail or slug the size of a cap cat and showed it to me. I, rationally, explained my emotions. I felt disgusted, but this was an intellectual emotion, a kind of out-of-bidybody experience.

Borrowed from El Guindo. As soon as I find out author, title, and year, I will edit this entry.

Rigorous Holes: Perspectives on Psychoanalytic Theory in Art and Performance Research.

A conference on the use of Psychoanalytic Theory in Art and Performance for doctoral students, organised by The Research Centre at Wimbledon College of Art and the School of Social Sciences, Brunel University.

The Red Room, Chelsea College of Art, Millbank 29 and 30 May 2007

Speakers include: Dr Malcolm Quinn, Professor Dany Nobus, Dr Stijn Vanheule, Dr Joanne Morra, Dr Jane Rendell, Dr Maria Walsh, Professor Naomi Segal.

I will be chairing the session entitled ‚ÄòPsychoanalysis in Doctoral Research‚Äô on the morning of the 30th May. My opening presentation is provisionally entitled ‘When Freud visited the Acropolis‘. Want to know what happened?

Funny, that. I just came back from my RF2 (PhD confirmation) presentation in Sheffield. It was very satisfactory, if only because some things were so surprising.I had all my psychoanalytic theory well tied together, even though the task of explaining Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst in 3.5 minutes was not as easy as it may sound. The first set of questions following my presentation were very fair and valid. I expected them however. Marx, consumer culture, the roles of the seducer and seducee (active-passive). All was as expected apart from the fact that there were no questions about Lacan. There may have been two explanations for this: I may have been speaking pure Lacanese or everything may have made very good sense… But, as I was thinking this, the whole discussion changed. I must tell you that, in order to remind myself to talk about methodologies, I put a picture in my presentation. A picture where I am doing something, a picture I considered documentation more that output or outcome. After a fair amount of questions and discussion around this picture, the conclusion is –more or less– this: if I am capable of deciphering what goes on in that picture (what REALLY is going on), I may have cracked my PhD. I am puzzled. So near yet so far. I now have a mystery to resolve, a la Freud or Sherlock Holmes. I have evidence, I just have to decipher it. How do I do this? Well, my supervisors were, yet again, inspiring. “Relax” they told me, “yield, let things happen”. Have you hear of a tutor telling a student to relax? Yet, I know it is precisely what I need! To stop the rules, the stop the reading lists, the things well done, and to begin to create a methodology to trip myself up. Exciting, uh?

I am not sure what goes on in that picture. I am not even sure yet why it is so important but, suddenly, I can’t get it out of my head. I have to learn to read photos, now. For the last 2 years, I have only been reading Lacan. But Lacan, although an erudite, doesn’t quite know about my specific topic, does he? The photo knows. You may be asking, what the hell is that photo? Well, you have seen it in passing. Here it is again. Anyone up for having a go at deciphering?

So, New York was amazing. Despite the cold, the snow, the blizzard, the College Art Association conference was full to the brim and our paper went very well. I judge the outcome of papers by the questions asked at the end: there were tricky ones, there were engaging ones and there were ones which showed that what Naren and I wanted to talked about was very new indeed.

It was also a fruitful trip for my research. I attended an Art and Psychoanalysis panel with a mixed outcome. I am weary of the “let’s look at this artist in the context of this psychoanalytic concept”. The shoehorn approach, as I call it, a real problem in my field. One of the papers, discussing trauma and Pollock, was very dubious. It claimed that the event that marked Pollock’s life and art was the fact that he was born with he umbilical cord around his neck. That, apparently explained his self-destructive behaviour. Although I am conscious that I am simplifying matters by just writing a quick run through, this kind of approach to interpretation is sign of a general malaise in the field of Art History. I am a practitioner and a reasonably practical person, so I went to test it. The Museum of Modern Art is probably one of the best-designed spaces to show art I have ever seen. It is full of people, but the building’s crowd management through architecture is remarkably successful. It’s most interesting feature for me, though, is the fact that one is allowed to take flash-less photographs. What fun I had! Even Pollock seamed positive to me.

Pity I couldn’t test the comic guy’s paper, which was very good, even though it also followed the approach of object+concept, in this case the “gutter” in comics and Lacan’s phallic jouissance. It may have been my sense of brotherhood everytime I hear Lacan mentioned but I found him more reasonable, at least.

My research did not stop there, though. On my last day, I found that, all along, I had been living near this:

Guess what it is? The answer, together with a few more pictures of the trip (including some amazing displays of Faberg?© eggs), is here. Lucky me, I am returning in June for more. I was totally seduced by it. Encore, encore, encore. That was what New York was, for me.

Douglas Gordon, 100 Blind Stars: Mirror Blind Greta, 2002. Photograph by Robert McKeever. Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery.

Just like people queued to see the empty space of the Mona Lisa when the painting was stolen in 1911, each time I see Gordon’s Greta, I can stop looking at it. To me, this image is incomprehensible and that quality captures my gaze. Te riddle seduces. I also tend to stare at the eyes of blind people, as if looking for something, wondering how the act of seeing takes place. Yes, I know all the stuff about light and the organ of sight, but that does not account for how I see. That’s part of the riddle; a riddle that gets more complicated if we admit that perception is reality.

The eyes of Greta, the eyes that feel see me but I can’t see remind me of the eyes of Dr Sh‚Äî, my analyst. Also the stare of the artwork, that which stays with me and watches me when I am not in the gallery. How can something you see see you? And what does it do to you when you feel you are being seen? That is part of the pont of analysis; so is the case when the gallery space. You know? Freud was analyzed by the Acropolis; or, as he put the object caused a disturbance of memory in him.

Ah, the scopic drive and its relationship to desire! So much to say, so little time. Must get back to my PhD confirmation report…

A while ago, I reported on a change of direction in my PhD. It had been under my nose all this time but it is common knowledge in psychoanalysis that the most obvious tends to be the most invisible (see Lacan on Poe’sThe purloined letter). In my obsession with the scientific and the objective I somehow overlooked the fact that what I am talking about, from a practice point of view, is feminine seduction.

There is a split, a contradiction between thoughts and my actions. I want to think objective, but I act subjective. I am drawn to shoes, to pinks, to retail therapy, shopping sprees and tiaras. The problem came when I tried to present an image of unity, when I tried to argue that what I experienced as subjective was, in fact, universal. But subjective knowledge can, after all, constitute knowledge and I may be able to get my PhD in spite of this contradiction, right? Lacan’s Seminar XX (Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge) was helpful to put monsters at rest for a while. But I am a visual person, as I keep repeating to my psychoanalyst, images, colours, forms, are what stays with me. I discovered Silvie Fleury’s work while reading Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated. I did not like her then: although I thought her visuals were enticing, I felt there was something distrustful. A little like a Mantis Religiosa, I thought that, if I got too close, she would deceive me; so I kept my distance. But isn’t that what seduction is? Deception, in the best and worst sense, is what is at heart of it. See Valmont, Juicy Salif and Baudrillard. Once I could see that and decided I did want to be deceived (just for the pleasure [principle] of it), I saw myself reflected in her work.

Sylvie Fleury, Pleasures

Above: Sylvie Fleury, Prada Shoes, Courtesy of Art&Public

I have always had a soft spot for what other people might consider bad photographs. Call them errors, mistakes, mishaps, shakes, parapraxes, slips, forgetfulness, out-of-focus, wrongly lit, stupidity, lapsi… The thing is that, for me, they hold something of the moment that straight pictures, in all of their sanitised composion, don’t. Obviously, my point is that the unconscious speaks though them. I have rescued many of these over the years. I remember when photographs used to come in paper and my dad went through the set and chucked away those that were “bad”. More than once, after being put to bed but unable to get to sleep, I would get up and safe some of those photographs from eternal repression. “I am thirsty” ‚Äì I would say, if someone asked me what I was doing. The answer was not totally false. I was trying to understand.

Email received today at 14:38:

www.sheffieldart.blogspot.com
www.objectsinwaiting.co.uk

Disturbingly, Lexa Walsh’s objects are very similar to mine. She calls them seductive too, although they embody everything I don’t want mine to be. I think they are closer to a fetish, someone else’s fetish, than to a seductive object. They silence my look somehow, I don’t want to be near them. That revulsion, however, is not the lack of gratification required of the artistic object. These objects do gratify a fantasy, a fantasy one may have about art, what art does, where art goes.

Partially, broken apart, however, they do have something that makes me think twice: the doll’s look, the similarity of the brown objects to both feces and chocolate, the sexual references in Mickey Mouse, hair without body. Hair, hair, always hair, the fetish object excellence. These elements are not seductive characteristics. They don’t lead astray. They are the reminders and the remainders of an other’s desire.

Victoria Civera does not qualify her objects as seductive. They are not fetishes either. They talk about desire, about little objectual passions we all have even if they manifest themselves through a different object choice. The object in Civera’s work often stands for something else; or, to put it in another way, it calls something else into play.

If I am to be right in my quick diagnosis of Lexa Walsh’s abject work, her fetishes would also have to call something into play. That something, however, is not Das Ding or Objet Petit a, as in Civera’s case. Althought the two examples of work may look the same, they couldn’t be further away when related to my research. This distinction between seductive, fetish objects, and their relationship to abjection and, of course, desire [through my objects, my desire, the desire of the Other], is something I am going to have to address in this year’s report.

I dreamt dad and I were driving to Gran’s house (as we used to do every Sunday). On our way, we encountered a group of terrorists, who stopped us and made us get out of the car and into a barn/house/caserio-type building. In that building, there we many other people . Our car had been left in a gravel car parked outside the barn, where there was also a yellow bus, one of those American kids go to school in. Inside the barn, the terrorists (at least one man and one woman) told us to give them what we had on us —including watches, wallets, credit cards and contact lenses, which we had to pierced so as not to escape.

I said I needed to go outside in order to take my contact lenses off. I took with me a little white eye shadow container which had a dirty mirror. the woman terrorist came out with me and my dad. I remember being able to communicate with my dad telepathically. My dad said, with his voice: “I am going for a stroll within the confines of the garden”. Outside, other people were everywhere, getting rid of their possessions. I knew my dad was going to try to escape and I decided to stay and make friends with the terrorist woman to get her attention, so my dad could try to get us some help. I talked to her about girly things. At some point, I said to her I was going to see what a group on the far end of the garden were up to (or was I going to the loo?). She let me go. One I was on the far side of the garden, I could see through a glass door that my dad had been successful in getting help. A group of armed SAS is helmets and glowing yellow vests was coming towards me. I decided to escape and look for dad as they were entering the garden.

All was mayhem; people running in different directions. In this chaos, I saw Julio, a tall boy I used to fancy in high-school come towards me and pick me up, really happy to see me. When he put me down, I saw my dad come out of the gents, freshly shaven and smelling of eau de cologne. He asked me: “why didn’t you escape with me?” and I replied that I though I’d better distract the terrorist.