IRRESISTIBLE

Research into the V&A Museum

1.

From its early beginnings as a Museum of Manufactures in 1852, to the foundation stone laid by Queen Victoria in 1899, to today’s state-of-the-art galleries, the Museum has constantly evolved in its collecting and public interpretation of art and design. Its collections span 5,000 years of human creativity in virtually every medium, housed in one of the finest groups of Victorian and modern buildings in Britain.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/about-us

2.

What is in the collection:

The Museum holds many of the UK’s national collections and houses some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewellery, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/about-us

Ideas:

Enriching people’s lives by promoting research, knowledge and enjoyment of the designed world to the widest possible research.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/about-us

Objects from my home country:

There are approximately 16,000 objects from China in the collection, dating from the 4th millennium BC to the present day. They include a rare group of gilded wooden Buddhist figures from around 1200 AD and a spectacular Qing dynasty carved lacquer imperial throne.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/100-facts-about-the-va

Objects from the year of my birth:

Fish (Vase), Jacket, Suit, Shirt, Braces, Trousers, Suit, Shirt, Tie

3. 10 objects.

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4. I’m always interested in emotions and identities and I think all the objects involve those themes in some degrees. They cover multiple mediums, installation, sculpture, photography and product. I’m mostly interested in photography but I don’t know if it’s suitable for this project as artefact sounds more like physical products…

The first visit to the V&A Museum

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LINCOLN 3D SCANS

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Oliver Laric

Richard Serra

Repetition compulsion

Later psychoanalytic developments

Object relations theory, stressing the way ‘the transference is a live relationship … in the here-and-now of the analysis, repeating the way that the patient has used his objects from early in life’ considered that ‘this newer conception reveals a purpose … [in] the repetition compulsion’:^[25] thus ‘unconscious hope may be found in repetition compulsion, when unresolved conflicts continue to generate attempts at solutions which do not really work … [until] a genuine solution is found’.^[26]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion

Object relations theory

History

Freud originally identified people in a subject’s environment with the term “object” to identify people as the object of drives. Fairbairn took a radical departure from Freud by positing that humans were not seeking satisfaction of the drive, but actually seek the satisfaction that comes in being in relation to real others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_relations_theory

Defence mechanisms

Structural model: id, ego, and superego

For example, when the id impulses (e.g., desire to have sexual relations with a stranger) conflict with the superego (e.g., belief in societal conventions of not having sex with unknown persons), unsatisfied feelings of anxiousness or feelings of anxiety come to the surface. To reduce these unpleasant feelings, the ego might use defence mechanisms (conscious or unconscious blockage of the id impulses).

Definitions of individual psyche structures

Freud proposed three structures of the psyche or personality:

Id: The id is the unconscious reservoir of the libido, the psychic energy that fuels instincts and psychic processes. It is a selfish, childish, pleasure-oriented part of the personality with no ability to delay gratification.

Superego: The superego contains internalised societal and parental standards of “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong” behaviour. They include conscious appreciations of rules and regulations as well as those incorporated unconsciously.

Ego: The ego acts as a moderator between the pleasure sought by the id and the morals of the superego, seeking compromises to pacify both. It can be viewed as the individual’s “sense of time and place”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanisms

Dilation and emotion

Love and attraction

Our pupils dilate when we see someone we consider attractive.

Sadness

Constricted pupils are associated with sadness (Harrison, Singer, Rotshtein, Dolan, & Critchley, 2006).

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Book/2014/Pupil_dilation_and_emotion

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Mona Hatoum

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PETROC SESTI

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Cathy De Monchaux

Both a celebration of female sexuality, and a mirror of repressed and guilty female desire, her sculpture was profane and pagan, Gothic and theatrical, and touched on what Kristeva called the abject. Or to use the words of the poet WB Yeats, there was “a terrible beauty” about her work.

https://elephant.art/deep-woods-cathy-de-monchaux/

Titles such as Hide 1988 (private collection), Brace 1989 (private collection), Slink 1990 (FRAC Haute-Normandy, French National Collection),Wrench 1990 (private collection), like Erase,represent embattled psychological states and attitudes which oscillate between the positions of aggressor and victim.

De Monchaux’s sculptures often have an underlying sense of violence, hinting at the darker side of eroticism and suppressed or taboo desires. She frequently uses contrasting materials and finishes, juxtaposing soft luxurious textiles with elaborately cut sheet metal or steel bolts to explore a wider series of oppositions: the explicit and chaste, the beautiful and grotesque, the seductive and repulsive, the body and machine.

Gallery label, August 2004

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/de-monchaux-erase-t06915

What she said below was exactly what I want to express! That’s crazy!

“I use the erotic as a metaphor for angst,” she explains. “A lot of people’s angst comes from how they relate to other human beings, and a lot of that is to do with attraction and repulsion. Every relationship becomes fraught after the first burst of enthusiasm, and I suppose I use the whole erotic thing as a metaphor for that fraught-ness.”

Take a second look at her semi-explicit triptych – Lust’s False Empathy, on sale for £20,000 – and you see exactly what she means. Alluring at first, the puckered leather gradually becomes unsettling. Something that quickened desire soon provokes disgust.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3647439/In-the-studio-Cathy-de-Monchaux.html

Man Ray

Attaching a photograph of Miller’s eye to the metronome, he linked his memory of her to the idea of an insistent beat or pulse that was both irksome and unending – a metaphor, perhaps, for human desire.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/man-ray-indestructible-object-t07614