Sunday, June 28, 2015

How Freud’s Couch Became a Pop-Culture Phenomenon










In 1889 Sigmund Freud was still relatively new in his field, or what we’d call pre-Freudian Freud. At 33 years old, working as an assistant to another psychiatrist, he hadn’t had any of his big ideas yet.
Freud was mostly practicing hypnosis, which was a cutting-edge but controversial treatment. One day Freud gets a new patient, a very wealthy woman named Fanny Moser. Moser was struggling from all kinds of ailments—hysteria, sleeplessness, pain, and odd tics, and she had lots of doctors. When Moser came to Freud, he would have her lie down on a couch, just like he did with his other patients. A lot of hypnotists used couches to get patients into a more relaxed state, but Freud especially needed it because he was kind of a clumsy hypnotist.
Freud would tell Moser, “You’re very getting sleepy,” and she would insist that, no, in fact, she wasn’t. Instead, Moser wanted to talk. At first Freud would interrupt her with his theories, but she wasn’t having it. She wanted to tell him her stories. That’s when the light went on. Freud realized that if you just let patients talk and don’t say anything, they will let down their defenses, and the unconscious will be revealed. This is the moment when the pre-Freudian Freud becomes the Freudian Freud. The Freudian Freud’s new techniques and theories for therapy would come to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it would be embodied, in practice and popular culture, by a single piece of furniture: the couch.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/06/18/freud_s_famous_couch_led_to_a_once_booming_industry_for_psychoanalytic_couches.html 


Saturday, June 27, 2015

Philosophers Football - Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus



"Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside." Monty Python Philosopher's football

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Porte-fenêtre à Collioure

Henri Matisse, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure, huile sur toile, 116,5 x 89 cm, 1914.

Scepticism about the Enlightenment project




Ο θεατρικός Δημήτρης Δημητριάδης. Εξερευνώντας τη δυνατότητα του αναπάντεχου

Αποτυπώνοντας μια πορεία δημιουργικής αλληλεπίδρασης είκοσι χρόνων, ο ανά χείρας τόμος αποτελεί ένα πρώτο εργαλείο προσέγγισης του συγγραφέα Δημήτρη Δημητριάδη ως δραματουργού, καθώς αρθρώνει το θεωρητικό πλαίσιο της ζωτικής σχέσης του με το θέατρο, που παραμένει ως προς σημαντικές περιοχές της ακόμη αδιερεύνητη.
Ταυτόχρονα προσφέρει αφορμή αναστοχασμού στα ευρύτερα ζητούμενα της σύγχρονης θεατρικής γραφής: Πώς εξελίσσεται η δραματική φόρμα; Μπορούμε να μιλάμε ακόμα γι’ αυτήν ως είδος και με ποιους όρους; Πώς απαντά και πώς θέλουμε να απαντά το θέατρο στην πραγματικότητα; Πώς συναντά η έννοια του «ποιητικού» την έννοια του «πολιτικού» θεάτρου; Ως προς τι διαφοροποιείται το θεατρικό κείμενο από τη δραματοποιημένη λογοτεχνία; Και από την άλλη, τι δυνατότητες προσφέρει στον σκηνοθέτη ένα αμιγώς θεατρικό κείμενο;
Τέτοια ερωτήματα θίγονται μεταξύ άλλων σ’ αυτή την πρώτη μονογραφία που αφιερώνεται στον διεθνώς αναγνωρισμένο πλέον έλληνα δραματουργό, που επιχειρεί ως νέος τραγικός να ξαναδώσει στο θέατρο τις ιλιγγιώδεις, τρομακτικές διαστάσεις του, να διανοίξει τη σκηνή εκ νέου στη δυνατότητα του αναπάντεχου.

 Δήμητρα Κονδυλάκη, Ο θεατρικός Δημήτρης Δημητριάδης. Εξερευνώντας τη δυνατότητα του αναπάντεχου, εκδοσεις Νεφελη, 2015

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Hostel

Hostel, 2015
wood, acrylic, oil, marble, tissue,
74 x 59 x 24 cm

Shiny Front


Is it you, sadness? Maudit
chiffre ma tête
Chiffrée

picotée
des grammes, de la raison
en grammes

aujourd’hui
Pas meilleur

Is that you, wayside station?
School patrol badge?

Overcoat with the shiny front?
Static hem?


Erin Mouré

Short Talk On Housing

Anne Carson, “Short Talk On Housing”, 1992

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Robert Rauschenberg's Endless Combinations


When you're Looking for the Robert Rauschenberg archive, everything starts to resemble a Rauschenberg. The chance juxtaposition of a vibrant yellow school bus next to a red Staples sign seems somehow intended, part of the artist’s grand design. So too might the pale lavender blossoms of wisteria that frame the gray painted door tucked away in a hardscrabble industrial zone of lots and chain-link fencing.

By Dan Chiasson, June 3, 2015

www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/t-magazine/robert-rauschenberg-endless-combinations.html 


Friday, June 12, 2015

Speakers' Domestic Corner

Speakers' Domestic Corner, 2015
wood, plywood, acrylic, oil, paper
33 x 21 x 26 cm

Thursday, June 11, 2015

International summit on domestic affairs

The conference adopts as a starting point the historic and cultural constitution of what has become established as “domestic” in the western historico-cultural narrative, the revision of which is being widely debated today. Do we need to revise our understanding of what “domestic” means, and which politics of household and budget management at different levels – from the private household to the region, the city, the planet – are yielded by such a shift in perspective?
Household and budget management is one thing above all else: a navigation between scarcity and surplus. Food, globalisation and politics are thereby inextricably linked. In the context of the summit, a second panel will therefore address the complex coherencies between bread and politics. If today there is talk of a “global food system”, this refers to the extensive geographies tied in with food, to the conditions of agricultural production and the huge consumption of resources that underpins this production. How to feed the growing global population is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Food politics range from urban agriculture initiatives and organic farming to dealing with the post-colonial geographies of food.
A third panel, “Towards a global domestic revolution”, discusses new models of work beyond the working society, which are already inherent in the complex practice of housekeeping. Flexible models of home-work, precarious and underpaid employment, creative work and work-related migration are already part of everyday working life in the 21st century. Global budgets combine the incomes of transnational work-related migration, home-work and family networks. Transnational households, co-working and sharing suggest other practices of conveying the essence of domestic work and re-evaluating it. They circumvent the social hierarchies inherent to the evaluation of domestic labour and thereby reveal perspectives for an emancipation of domestic work beyond the “working society”.

Closing of the Haushaltsmesse 2015 with the international summit on domestic affairs, “The world. One Household”
7 to 9 August 2015 in the complex of Masters’ Houses; 

 http://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/haushaltsmesse-2015-internationale-summit.html   

Haushaltsmesse 2015: The art of housekeeping and budgeting in the 21st century

How can we live in a healthy and 

economical way in the future?


AMETRIA

AMETRIA is the privilege of disproportion, of excess, the rejection of an overall vision, the error that turns out to be right. Out of the meeting of the Benaki Museum and the DESTE Foundation, works and objects become proofs of an impulse that, as a precise and determinate entity, takes part in the evolution of thought.
Totally uninterested in the values of community life, which promotes the virtues of measure and the happy mean, dismeasure is the expression of an original purposeless drive, which chooses neither to have nor not to have and whose sole intention is to be exercised without reserve. The degree of dismeasure is dependent on just how radical is the drive that expresses it.
When a drive that dominates the field of consciousness finds a particular form, it becomes instigation, stirring opposition or prompting imitation. If the imitation overcomes by impulse the inclination to restraint, an epidemic phenomenon occurs that forces the community to change its way of thinking and behavior and its common action. An order of dismeasure can be extended to the point of becoming a conventional value, triggering a series of effects from the social environment to the natural person.

Original Drawing by C. A. Doxiadis prepared for his article “The Future of Copenhagen: Considerations in the Abstract", 1963

AMETRIA is organized by the DESTE Foundation in collaboration with the Benaki Museum.