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.
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It’s exactly like Father Brown said:
It’s just because I have picked up a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you’ve seen it it’s still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it’s a platitude.
From The Arrow of Heaven, in The Incredulity of Father Brown
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The first realisation I had during my PhD was the fact that what I was looking for, the objects of seduction I longed for, were already out there. I did not need to spend unfruitful hours trying to re-create, imitate what industrialization, and capitalism had already achieved. To compete, in terms of seduction, what I had to devise was a way to capture the relationship, to apprehend what was going on, to replicate it in order to study it in depth. Photography was my discovery.
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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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In order to do more than just talking the talk, I joined a Burlesque class. If you have participated in such activities before, you will know that one of the first tasks of the Burlesque student is to come up with a name. Our teacher (Viva Misadventure) does not want to know our birth names [...]
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The other day, someone accused me of lack of engagement. This was mainly directed at my online life but also had a bearing in what I do in real life. Lack of engagement is not a good thing when you are trying to study seduction, which needs mindfulness. I was engaged when I took my photographs, I was there 100% and remember every action, every thought related to my fall for the object.
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When I first read, many years ago, Titian, nymph and shepherd by John Berger, I discovered the strange power communicating by letters can have. I find there is something mesmerising about them. Not only in their physicality, which of course counts (the things themselves, the handwriting of the loved one, the journey through the postal system…) but the voice.
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On the 9th December the Museum at FIT, in New York, opened an exhibition dedicated to Seduction in Fashion. I have followed the exhibitions at the museum for a while now and earlier this year, when I realised they were hosting a show on Christian Louboutin and desire, the distance separating me from those glorious objects almost became too much.
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74
Charcot was modest. He was only a scientist and not a theorist. Lacan was a guérisseur, through charm and through the verbal. He was not a scientist. He was a con man. Freud and Lacan did nothing for the artist. They were barking up the wrong tree. They don’t help any. I simply can’t use [...]
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