I approached the photographs cautiously. It had been my decision to assemble a public exhibition of the evidence of my investigation, but the reality appeared to have an uncomfortable edge. I was trying to learn from previous inquiries, Sherlock Holmes’ search for Mr. Hosmer Angel’s identity and Sigmund Freud’s explorations of Dora’s hysteria. Like theirs, [...]
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I do not, of course, believe that photographing reflections in shop windows is a groundbreaking or truly original thing. My contribution to the genre, and to seduction, is a little more subtle and made of a number of elements combined. When extrapolating the images, however, and looking only at them in the context of art, [...]
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A wonderful moment at the Vicissitudes: Histories and destinies of Psychoanalysis conference‘s French panel: Stéphane le Mercier, artist: 9- …ce á quoi souvent il faut répondre: «Que faites-vous dans la vie? – Je reléve des chutes.» 9- … what I often have to answer: «What do you do for a living? -I pick up what [...]
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The analytic vignettes I listened to at the APCS conference were eye openers in relation to a problem I have encountering with my PhD. My sessions are going somewhere (where, I don’t know yet) and my clinical diary. for as long as I kept it, was a useful tool in relation to establishing parallels between [...]
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Throughout the last 2 years, I have built a very extensive image database, collecting visual things I have encountered in a provisory way, as they may be able to help me make my argument in my thesis. In addition to this, I have also accumulated a number of images documenting my work and creative process. [...]
Taking photographs in New York’s Fifth Avenue is a completely different experience to taking them in Glasgow’s Argyle Arcade. I know, I know, this statement may seem obvious to any person familiar with both contexts, but in this global world of ours, where Guinness and Starbucks are ubiquitous, the statement is perhaps a little more [...]
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I have to train my eye, reader, train it to a new method of working. That way of working is a lot more technical and scientific than what I have been used to, with my little collages, my clay sculptures, my silly objects. Photography has its own way of being, especially if one is interested [...]
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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 [...]
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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 LacanÄôs Discourse of the Analyst in 3.5 minutes was not as easy as it may [...]
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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.