Hysteria, by Tanya Wexler and A Dangerous Method, by David Cronenberg.
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Two forthcoming films about hysteria
Margarita Gluzberg’s Avenue des Gobelins
With thanks to the lovely Beatriz Olabarrieta for sending me these astonishing images. So mysterious, so evocative! Well, I guess I would say that given my practice but I have spent a long while trying to figure out what goes on in the picture plain, only to be sucked in by the photograph. It is [...]
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The loss of an object
Let me, first, tell you about the loss. I am mourning my PhD. Its content, the work, the hardship, my relationship with my supervisor, the safety of its structure, its intensity, everything. I even miss the exam (about which I will tell you some other time, soon). My lost object manifests itself in the most [...]
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A truth about seduction and my task
It’s exactly like Father Brown said:
It’s just because I have picked up a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you’ve seen it it’s still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it’s a platitude.
From The Arrow of Heaven, in The Incredulity of Father Brown
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Practice in my PhD
I have returned from Nottingham Trent University, where I delivered a presentation around the role of practice(s) in my PhD. The audience and the other presenter, were particularly fantastic, but the event left me ever so slightly slapped. Some members of the audience gave me a bit of a hard time over the photographs. True, [...]
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A week in Lauraland
I got on with the first few lectures on this (astonishingly interesting but quite hard work); wrote a mischievous paper for this with my supervisor, who managed to move me to the core with words; marked dissertations from my Master students and assessed my year of teaching them; inducted the new lot; pondered about this, [...]
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The look of Lucas Cranach the Elder
By now, you must know my weakness for Cranach’s paintings, for his depictions of the seductiveness of the female body, his wonderful view on Eve. I am lucky. London’s Royal Academy of Arts is hosting a major exhibition of his work, which includes a fair amount of Venuses. Five centuries later, Cranach continues to shock [...]
Donnie Darko
Isn’t Donnie Darko an amazing film? Such a beautiful portrayal of unconscious processes, 80s music (Love will tear us apart…), paranoic behaviour, teenage love, phantasy, trauma, the hope of therapy, the imaginary, the social bond, educational philosophies and politics, and science fiction. It’s so inspiring, I could watch it over and over again (I mean, [...]
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Beautiful
The veil of seduction
From the John Moores 24 Exhibition of contemporary painting 2006, at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool: Jeff McMillan, The Seducer, Oil on found painting, 51 x 61.5cm, 2005 Artist Statement For many years I have collected second-hand oil paintings from boot sales and thrift shops. These form a curious compendium of subjects and styles. ItÄôs only [...]