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.

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.

What would I do without my peer groups? A very interesting discussion on that foto here, here and here. In Spanish though, and with bad language, as it should be…

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.

Just finished reading Tortajada, M (2004) Eric Rohmer and the mechanics of seduction. Studies in French Cinema, 4 (3). pp. 229-238. In this paper, she examines a category of seduction, which she calls seduction through ambiguity, by studying Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’automne. In passing, she mentions other methods of seduction which she discusses in her book, Le spectateur s?©duit: le libertinage dans le cin?©ma d’Eric Rohmer et sa fonction dans une th?©orie de la repr?©sentation filmique (1999, Paris, Kime). Pick up caught my eye and, as I was googling for it, I came across this page. Seduction has its own language, literally.

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