If you think I have been quiet since Christmas (or even before) it is because writing a thesis does not leave me much to say. All my energy is thrown into those pages, into those words, but today I had a lovely surprise when other words I had written a while ago, turned up, nicely [...]
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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.
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We are in the last throws of preparing the texts for the forthcoming ‘Managing Creativity: Exploring the Paradox’, a book edited by Barbara Townley and Nic Beech, published by Cambridge University Press. I contributed a chapter on my favourite lemon squeezer. After writing a code of practice for work, various course reports, three chapters of my PhD thesis and a number of articles for a Spanish tendencies webzine, tackling a specialist, yet broad audience was a breath of fresh air.
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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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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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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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The talk at MFIT went very well. I realised afterwards that this is the very first time I have talked about seduction without any of the padding that you usually have to put together for conferences, in order to fit into the overall theme. I confronted seduction in a public way for the first time, and it was fantastic. I was motivated, enlivened by the subject and its curious manifestations, by its contradictions, by the philosophies that try to study it.
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I’ll be here doing a talk as part of the Seduction exhibition at the Museum at FIT.
Do pop in to say Hi if you are in the New York area.
It’s fashion week and I want to take photos of shop windows, people wearing amazing clothes, all done up, dressed up, acting out. [...]
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One of my students alerted me to the existence of a Shoe Tree in Newcastle’s Armstrong Park. The concept was new to me: it sounds like a pet cemetery, but in a tree and for shoes. She told me that the strange rituals people engage in are a real problem to the council, who has to take the shoes down and repair the tree’s branches regularly. So the location of the tree is either found by mistake, perseverance, or shared through word of mouth.
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Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her practice encompasses drawing, photography and sculpture, and her work has been exhibited in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has participated in numerous conferences, including Research into Practice (2008), College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (2007). When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx's footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.
She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project, which investigates psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction within the fields of fine art, consumption studies and material culture. Her research includes 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 seeks refuge and inspiration in psycho-geography, especially if it takes her to shopping centres, those mysterious places.