I am not sure. I am definitely not sure and the more I think about it, the less sure I am about this iPod inspired iPad building (not convinced about the pun, either). Of course, iPods are a way of life, identity-bearing devices and saving graces when I am stopped by charity touts in Glasgow‚Äôs Buchanan Street. Still, I am not sure they would make good dwellings or offices; I doubt people would want to live in them. Besides, where is the iClick wheel? And the screen? And I know it is only inspired on the iPod design but, as it currently stands, it could also be a swanky cigarette packet, a gigantic tic-tac box…

You know I love shoes. You know I would [almost] do anything for a pair of Manolos, but I think boundaries are important when it comes to architectural design. I mean, iPod in hand, shoes in feet, and architecture all around. Lets not mix them.

With many thanks to Mike Press for making me think about the limits of my love for shoes.

Meret Oppenheim, Ma Gouvernante, 1936, Moderna Museet Collection, Sweden

Salvador Dali, Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically, 1974, Teatre-Museu Dali

Elsa Schiaparelli, Shoe hat, (collaboration with Salvador Dal??), 1937-38, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Elsa Schiaparelli, Monkey Fur Shoes, 1938.

From my excellent trip to Berlin, I brought you the most beautiful piece of work I have seen in a long time… Look at the knife, the necklace, the transparent fabric… And there there is the look. What is that look saying? Ah, so much defiance… She will do it if you push her, you know? Then again, maybe she is playing up, putting you where she wants you to be, just like seducers do. THAT is the look of the seducer.

Lucas Cranach 1472-1553
Lucretia, 1533
37.3 x 23.9 cm
Gemäldegalerie

From the beautiful Locher’s collection and with a zillion thanks to Michael.

… from Susanna Hesselberg

… from Melanie Pullen

… from Sylvie Fleury

… from Pilar Albarracin

So far we have:

reflexivity and mystery and Object (a) and systems;
screens and layers and me and not-me;
the subject and the object and desire and the fetish;
use value and exchange value and surplus and commodification;
gaze and the fall of gaze and tripping and not quite seeing;
things and wanting to posess them and the impossible, the unattainable;
of course seduction and anxiety and womanhood and woman’s construction;
readings and interpretations and things that can’t be articulated and power;
roundness and innocence an the image and a smile;
the difference between art and design and windows everywhere and play, play;
flesh and need and survival and historical context;
status and objecthood and artefacts and what escapes me;
strategies and che vuoi and not recognizing myself or seing myself as other;
transformation and duality and masculinity and enjoyment;
whips and submission and his desire and the cure;
theatricality and fashion and victims and Frank Sinatra;
the hysteric and attraction and the devil and the Bible;
sexuality and definition and improper conduct and…

All this in just one image.

I am doing a talk on Juicy Salif next Wednesday… That reminds me I must bookmark this, which comes from a very interesting blog on Art and Design. No, not as a subject area, but as two ways of thinking and seeing that talk to each other. Pretty groundbreaking conception, no?

Talk info:
Juicy Salif as a cultish totem. The Discipline of Creativity: Exploring the Paradox, Session: ‘Ars longa’: establishing value, Institute for Capitalising on Creativity, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, 2 May 2007.

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?