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 architecture, archetypes, or existing classic objects.” Like, for example, the sexy form of the Mobius shoe (pictured), which is inspired by the frame of Mies Van der Rohe’s famed Barcelona chair. Made from a single strip of high-tech Kevlar, the sole and upper are an unbroken form.

Isn’t this a wonderful example of shoes as architecture? Lacanian architecture, for that matter. I mean, a möebius shoe… The possibilities are unimaginable… At work, or at a party where I don’t know many people, I sit quietly somewhere apart. I daydream, and when I daydream I have to do something with my hands so I find myself passing a finger through the strip of my shoe, from inside to outside in one boundary component. Where did it change, how did it happen? Why is the world full of such fascinating things as shoes, möebius strips, déjà vus,mispronounced words? This is shoe is the closest I have ever been to experiencing the relationship between desire and seduction…

End Gallery
20-23 May 2008

Sheffield Hallam University
Psalter Lane Campus
S11 8UZ, Sheffield
Opening Hours 10am – 6pm

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, my case was a puzzling one. My search had produced plenty of clues; still, the culprit – seduction – was at large.

Seduction always eludes the grasp of those that attempt to confront it directly. Its character is volatile, often linked to moral, sexual and criminal concerns. Did I ever mention to you that Frank Sinatra was convicted of an offence of seduction? It usually operates in dual situations – it is always a matter of two – and involves the getting of another to do what it wants. But do not worry; force and coercion are not part of its elegant modus operandi. Instead, it will play with the victim’s free will. Sometimes, as the evidence shows, it may even be pleasurable. Do not be fooled, though, its power is mighty.

The art gallery is a place seduction likes to visit. This gathering of clues is, therefore, a kind of trap, a way of calling it into play. The images displayed are traces of a very particular seduction, for this is a serial offender we are dealing with. What we have before us would baffle Holmes and intrigue Freud. They are the remnants of one woman’s hysterical journey through contemporary shopping arcades with their obscene displays.

The crime, in this instance, is to repeatedly stop the woman in her tracks, making her unable to look elsewhere. This will cause her trouble, as she will lose precious time (apart from her free will, of course). She will be late wherever she has to go today, inevitably very late, as she cannot resist seduction’s call. What does the object want?

I shook my head and returned my gaze to the photographs of the young woman. It suddenly seemed more playful than criminal, reminding me of the attitude seduction takes. I wondered silently who was the victim and who was the perpetrator.

I shook my head again. This case of seduction was becoming complex but I knew I would only be able to solve it by locking eyes with it and falling into its tripping game. The more I attempted to understand it, the more I found myself playing its game.

* * *
With more gratitude than language can hold for Neil Scott’s comments on this exhibition text.

I have been completely swamped by this exhibition and feel I have retreated into the imaginary universe of projections and identifications, not really living in the real world. Tuesday is the opening and after Saturday, it will all come back to a more or less normal routine, where I will be able to engage with other people. An exhibition is an essentially narcissistic thing to do and, as this is done in the context of my PhD, I have had to take care of all aspects, from invites, to mailouts, to gallery plans to private view drinks. Still a lot to do…

Occasionally, however, I have received little pricks that life outside of my head continues and yesterday’s email, kindly sent to me by Linda, made me want to engage with the world again. A good feeling (thanks, Linda). The email in question was a link to a Guardian article which, as it is not too long, I reproduce here:

Keep it zipped - the shoe of the season
Jess Cartner-Morley
Thursday May 15 2008
The Guardian

For those of you who may be a little behind with this month’s glossy magazines and weekend supplements, here is the digested read: if you don’t own these shoes, you are a loser. Granted, they don’t spell it out quite as starkly as that, but the message is nonetheless pretty clear, such is the ubiquity of Christian Louboutin’s zippy Rodita sandal, currently being snatched off shelves everywhere even at a strikingly credit-crunch-proof £405. What may look to you like a brightly coloured zip sewn on to an implausibly high heel is, in fact, the shoe of the season.

The very absurdity of this shoe is, of course, what makes it special. There is no longer anything remarkable about a woman with a shoe fetish. Quite the contrary: being obsessed with Manolos/blowing the rent on Choos has become a Girl Guide badge of belonging for the modern woman. Love of shoes has become the most boring cliche of modern womanhood. If you don’t agree, try buying a birthday card for a woman between the ages of 20 and 70, and you will see what I mean: when you discount the cards that have footballs/pints of beer on them, and ignore the ones that feature either Bratz or sentimental poetry in swirly handwriting, what you are left with is an endless selection of pictures of shoes.

As fancy shoes have become ubiquitous, fashion has had to edge further into crazyland just to keep a respectable distance from the masses. Note that these zippy numbers are by Christian Louboutin: just as a gourmet in a chocolate shop might demand Valrhona or Amedei over Green & Blacks in order to signal connoisseurship, the hardcore shoe obsessive likes to namecheck Louboutin rather than, say, Dior or Prada, in order to signal her refinement. They are ankle-breakingly precarious, endowed with enough hardware to set off security alarms at 20 paces and dizzily high. But when the girl next door is wearing 4in patent slingbacks, what can a fashion victim do?

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited

Contrary to what many people may think, I am not a Manolo girl (I am definitely a Carry girl, but not a Manolo girl). While I admire most of the Maestro’s designs, his falls have also been spectacular. I loved his exhibition at the Design Museum, but that was pure theatricality, as it made the shoes reveal themselves as something other than what they are known empirically to be… The shoes were more than shoes.

Outside of the gallery space, however, Blahnik’s works are, well, too goody-two-shoes, despite the pun. Now Louboutin has also had spectacular falls, and the Rodita sandal is nowhere near the revered peep toe platforms. Louboutin, however, has a number of things going for him, applicable to all designs. First is the fact that his inspiration seems to come from a relationship to perversion, to deviant thoughts about shoes. This is best exemplified in his collaboration with the master of perversion, David Lynch. Second is the way this design trait manifests itself in his trademark red sole. Whatever one is wearing on the top part of one’s feet, underneath is a world of perfect red, only visible to the knowledgeable and the attentive. I have never wore Louboutin’s myself (a dream) but I suspect it must be like wearing garters, or ethereal underwear. It is this particular shade of red that will always make Louboutin’s designs right.

I will be speaking at the delightful Architexture: Exploring textual and architectural spaces conference at te University of Strathclyde, which will run from 15 to 17 April 2008.

My paper is scheduled on the 17th April, from 13.30 to 15.00. Here’s what I will be talking about:

Reflections on Seduction

Every morning, I get to work 10 minutes late. What keeps me is the fact that I have to wait for the women at the jewellers in Glasgow’s Argyle Arcade to appear in the shop windows, polishing and displaying diamond rings. This compulsion to repeat represents the core of this paper. The regular stop in my journey is pleasurable and has qualities associated with what is commonly known as retail therapy. At the same time, and like everything related to desire, it provokes anxiety.

The rings and I are mediated by real (public) and imaginary (private) screens. These define my position, which is similar to that of the viewer in the art gallery or the analysand in the analytic room. In those situations, the privileged enclosure and the distance between subject and object structure both encounters. The screens regulate the relationship and, through them, new spaces appear, in which the objects and I are positioned together, in close proximity, as happened in Lacan’s experiment of the inverted bouquet. The rings are mine; I am theirs.

What occurs, every morning, is an act of seduction, like the one that took me all the way to Philadelphia to see what a Spanish door hid behind. Gaze, of course, is crucial to this relationship. Those rings hail me; they say: hey you! Look at me! And I let myself being led astray because I know that commodities, with their fetish qualities, are mysterious and enticing by nature. But the concept of seduction, although pervasive in contemporary culture, is complex and will need teasing out. In this journey — which takes the form of a walk and a practice-led investigation — Duchamp, Marx, Freud and Lacan are my companions and to them I will look for help to understand what makes an object seductive.

The 24 yearly hours marking the date when I was born are a torment to me. I get an uncontrollable sorrow, a desire to be away from everything and everyone. I do not answer phones, and whatever attempts a smiling are clearly seen as an effort. It is not ridiculous to say that I am slightly moody. I have my tempers but what happens on the 31 March defies any kind of rationality. I have been lectured, analysed, tried to be talked out of it. Yet, anxiety soars. The worst is the cake and the song. They are triggers in my eyes, giving me a loud GO for sobbing.

Ritual image, a few years ago. Photo courtesy of Neil Scott

Yet, I do try to exorcise this feeling as much as possible. In January/February, I make my master students organise a birthday party for me a their project management training brief. A surprise party is my biggest fear. I have had gatherings, of course, but these were safely outside of the dreaded date and controlled to the last detail. I do tell myself, towards the end of March, that this year will be different, that things are better than ever, that it is only a day like any other. Yet, the repressed, in the form of a compulsion to repeat, returns.

The best description of what overcomes is grief, mourning. What I feel is peculiarly similar to loosing someone, to arriving at the understanding that we are not going to see them ever, ever, ever again, no matter how much we try or want. Let us see where this takes me by looking at the source of mourning.

Photo courtesy of Neil Scott

The first point of call could be a lost year, another one. But this does not ring true. I look much younger than I am, pathetically so. I still get asked for ID regularly (and not only in the US) and my facial features have caused me some troubles in terms of authority at work. I have never considered getting old. It is a thought that rarely occurs to me consciously and in relation to myself.

Is it a trauma, then? A childhood trauma related to a birthday? Admittedly, I never liked the damned day. my mother was horrified of inviting many children home for a party so I had to put up with the next door neighbour, who was born the same date as me, and her 3 brothers. They were neighbours, not friends, or crushes, or cool people. Every year we would rotate the place of the party: our house, their house. The same building. And then there was the year when we were going to celebrate with Gran and everybody departed, inadvertently leaving me locked at home. A party without me. These trifles, however, are like those in any child’s history, I presume. They are not hidden, or repressed. I vividly remember and the provoke the same amount of cringing as of laughter.

Again, I am not getting anywhere, although this may be the key. Fréderic Declercq’s paper at the 2007 APCS conference, argued that the difference between anxiety and fear is the fact that fear has a known cause whereas anxiety does not. He made us look at examples within Freud’s Little Hans and it was quite humourous to see that his Lacanian approach provoked both anxiety and fear in the audience. Fear is understandable, anxiety is irrational, as the cause is not known. It always takes one by surprise and attempts at dealing with it are easily overcome by the overwhelming feeling. It is not impossible to find a cause for it, though, ir to construct it in order to work though the feeling but it will require many hours on the couch, as the knot is tangled. Very tangled. Today, more than ever, I miss Dr Sh—.

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 and contradict, as the poster for the exhibition was almost pulled out from advertising spots on the London underground. Is it really that outrageous? what is it about the image that is uncomfortable to show? The nudity or the look? I wonder…

These images have influenced so many others… The first I can think of is Tizian’s Venus of Urbino, almost its contemporary, although less defiant. Then there’s Manet’s Olympia, of course. I recently attended ArtSheffield 08. Like when in Venice, I enjoyed the social aspect more than the art. There was one piece, however, at the interesting Millennium Galleries display, that broke the indistinguishable continuum I felt reigned over the other spaces. A look was at its centre, although this time, the figure was a man, fully clothed.

This image of Morrissey by Wolfgang Tillmans showed me, tracing it back to Cranach, that the challenge resides in the look, much more than in the pose, in the nudity, in the political stance of the images. The look, the gaze… Always them, at the centre of works of art…

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, it is quite useful to locate sources. I knew they were there but I could not identify them until Lorens showed me his wonderful Lee Friedlander book. There they were. Friedlander’s series in Like a one-eyed cat:

What was useful about unlocking this piece of my unconscious (the kind Lorens and I chatted about) was that not only the detail of the information was useful for my PhD – as it will inform the analysis of my practice –, it also revealed things about my photos that I hadn’t seen before. Friedlander’s images are often typified as self-portraits. In my photos, the body that appears on them is mine but I don’t relate to it. At least for now; we’ll see what happens in the gallery space. Thinking of them as kind of self-porttraits, of which all art has something, is interesting in relation to certain things on seduction and narcissism I have written about. For this, as well as for showing me the second volume of his thesis and, with it, a way into analysing images where screen and space are central, I have to thank him.

Writing block… oh… writing block…