I am clearing up, throwing things away, filling, and wrapping, as you do when you finish as long a project as this five-year work. I cannot quite stop yet, I am not resting, although I know I need to. I keep contacting my supervisors with more or less legitimate excuses – my new symptom, it [...]
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I’ll be showing Misrecognition and SplitFlip as part of As We Speak, a Glasgow International 2010 event. Come down to Stereo (Renfield Lane) on Wednesday 28 April at 8pm to see them and other wondeful experimental videos and moving image artworks. So as my other show closes, new works appear in the city. Who said [...]
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I had a retail impulse and went for the Nikon D40. A strange choice, as this camera was not in any of the shortlists, but, in hindsight, it makes sense. I do not want whatever piece of kit I buy for my photography work to end up like my video camera, having not seen the day of light for about 3 years now. And when I bought it, I went as top of the range I could. What for? SO, with the D40, I bought time to test my commitment to digital photography. It is the right machine for that, lightweight and entry level, so I have no excuses to take it out everywhere.
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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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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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Click here and scroll down to 1995 and watch Mark Lewis’ amazing “Two impossible films”, a single film of 28 minutes duration. In the film, Lewis has a go at two previously failed film projects: Marx’s Capital (attempted by Eisenstein) and Sam Goldwyn’s idea of filming the complete works of Sigmund Freud. Need I say [...]
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Teaching a proper course is such a different experience from my experience delivering the PhD training programme, I can not overcome certain aspects of it. Having started my academic career at the top of the degrees pyramid (don’t get excited, that pyramid doesn’t match the salary pyramid) I have missed certain aspects such as curriculum, [...]
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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.