Isn’t this the most wonderfully obscure symposium ever? I wish I could go – alas, I will be at another very obscure one, Jacques Lacan Today at UCL, in London. This is one of those event when one is guaranteed to share interests with the rest of the attendees. I should write to the Catalonian [...]
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I am reading a lovely book on Casanova’s self portraiture. It was written by Stefan Zweig and published by Pushkin Press. I do like the object books that Pushkin Press produce. They are tactile, and have wabi-sabi. The more the book lives in my handbag and travels with me, the more good-looking it becomes. But [...]
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Have you heard the latest criticism on Alexander McQueen’s 2010 Spring Show unveiled in Paris? Well, it is all about the shoes, what they do to the body, hurting, desire and the ability to walk. Something I have to hear constantly about my own collection of stilettos. Why, why, why is the eternal question. Incidentally, Rodolfo, my ballet teacher, has pointed out that high heels help with posture if we follow his basic exercises of core control.
Stephen Fry understands the precise feeling: I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out [...]
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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 [...]
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Sometimes, this humble blog sounds like a death blog. All these R.I.P.s, with some personal ones I did not even mention… It is summer and it is time to change the tone, although what I am going to mention also involves death (death, the ultimate seducer, do you remember Baudrillard’s story in Samarkand?). This time, [...]
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Farewell, beautiful Pina Bausch! My first encounter with Café Muller is one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. Here are Neil Bartlett’s accurate words (from an article written for the Guardian in 2005): ‘No theatre was as brutally or as elegantly in the present tense as Bausch’s, no women are more powerful [...]
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By now, you know I hate my birthday. I have always done so and every year, I go on a self-questioning journey, trying to find out why, to make amends. I have decided that this year will be different. I have a strange relationship to gifts, to presents, not letting myself be pampered and always wondering if I deserve it, if I will be required to give in the same way. I worry too much and I am not grateful enough. I love but don’t let myself be loved very well. This year, my birthday has reached its peak of spoiling-ness (no, it is not a real word but it will work).
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The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize is being announced tomorrow and, as always, there are a couple of really exciting entries. Shortlisted artists are British Paul Graham, Saudi Arabian Emily Jacir and Americans Tod Papageorge and Taryn Simon. My money is on Paul Graham, of course, fan as I am, but I have to say that
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On Monday, I taught my session on Supervision for which I use Lars Von Trier film ‘The 5 Obstructions’ (and for which I have to thank Dr Malcolm Quinn). The movie is compelling and work as a teaching tool. At the beginning, students don’t know what to make of the relationship and the works produced but, by the end of the second obstruction, something falls into place and the blank stares and silences turn into comments, opinions, ventures. They change from the role of student to the role of the supervisor.
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Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.
Her doctoral project, completed in 2010, investigated psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction, including 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 is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.