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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Stephen Fry understands the precise feeling:
I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that [...]
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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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Wonderful! Arttra have published my thoughts on the 53rd Venice Biennale here.
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Yes, another RIP. I skipped Merce Cunningham’s because I thought I would get a reputation. You see, self consciousness has been on a high, lately, due to my creative writing (this endless chapter 3) and the fact that, this week, two people greeted me with ‘hey, I was showing your blog to my wife…’ I [...]
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Today, I woke up with the news of the death of Mario Benedetti, a Uruguayan poet that accompanied me during and since the tedium of my teenage years, a constant in my life, a voice of dissent, a compromise to politics and literature. He showed me that poetry can make you laugh, really laugh. [...]
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I received feedback on my second chapter from my Director of Studies. Very fair and helpful but it filled me with dread in relation to losing the plot and the focus of the thesis. It is more difficult to write a thesis-as-piece-of-work than a thesis report. I know the challenge would be here all along. I have had it pretty easy until now, no data gathering in the conventional sense, no number crunching, no narrative analysis, no conventional, run of the mill method. Because of this, it is not, at the time of analysis and evaluation that I am finding it difficult. What I do requires a lot of thinking and a lot of looking because it is evanescence. It disappears in my hands as I write. Then, at times, it also surprises me.
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I have uploaded the paper Sharon Kivland and I delivered at last year’s Research into Practice Conference. In it, we tried to answer the question of interpretation in Art and Psychoanalysis, through a different approach to one expects in this sort of conferences. To me, it was a great learning exercise.
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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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There is a genre called psychoanalytic fiction and I have recently read two examples. The first one was Jed Rubenfeld’s The interpretation of murder; the second Brenda Webster’s Vienna Triangle. These two are as far apart as the category of genre allows.
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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.