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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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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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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Co-founded by the Dutch architect Rem D. Koolhaas (yes, he’s the nephew of Mr. OMA himself) and shoe-maker Galahad JD Clark, United Nude elevates the shoe to a true art form—where design, architecture and abstraction meet footwear. With an aim to create nothing less than contemporary iconic shoe design, “the products are conceptual: re-interpretations of [...]
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Something strange happens in one’s body when they realise that a fantasy one has had for a while comes true. This is the disturbance –akin to an old box being opened– I experienced yesterday, when I clicked on the link my friend Emilio sent me. The Galerie du Passage in Paris has a new show [...]
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A month and a half has elapsed since my last post and I crave giving back to this journal its daily name. Summer holidays have been and gone, a new academic year has started both for the teacher and the student in me. Summer was surprisingly active: two of my supervisors found wonderful new jobs, [...]
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Since my last post, I have been immersed in a kind of summer langueur, taking photographs, avoiding writing and feeling guilty about it. When paper deadlines loom, the internet is, of course, the best distraction. “Oh! I am going to see what Mark Lewis is up to…” Occasionally, one of those screen thoughts will bring [...]
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Meret Oppenheim, Ma Gouvernante, 1936, Moderna Museet Collection, Sweden Salvador Dali, Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically, 1974, Teatre-Museu Dali Elsa Schiaparelli, Shoe hat, (collaboration with Salvador Dal??), 1937-38, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Elsa Schiaparelli, Monkey Fur Shoes, 1938.
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From the beautiful Locher’s collection and with a zillion thanks to Michael.
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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.