Output details

The Scene of a Crime

This piece is a work of experimental writing in which a diamond ring speaks to a woman, diagnosed, in the piece, a hysteric. It is an output of research, which examined how objects seduce people, and what are the strategies that can be devised to study seduction from within. As part of this research, other outputs have been published, including conference papers such as ‘Stranger, Seducer’ (Transmission: Hospitality, Sheffield Hallam University 2010), ‘Seduction captured’ (The Social Life Of Methods, ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, Oxford, 2010) and ‘Make me yours: studying the psychodynamics of seduction through works of art’ (Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Middlesex University, 2010). This text is a hybrid between a work and an academic piece of writing, for it has its context embedded in it. It is modeled on various sources including the Marquis de Sade’s ‘Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man’ and Karl Marx’s footnote ‘If commodities could speak …’ in ‘Capital’. It merges those sources (one related to style and the other to content) to form a new object that helps to understand the capitalist condition in relation to desire and seduction. This dialogue piece appeared in 2HB vol.10, a journal for artists’ writing. Other artists publishing in 2HB include Lila de Magalhaes (based in LA), Sue Brind and Jim Harold (also in vol. 10), and Alex Impey. 2HB is edited by Ainslie Roddick, Jamie Kenyon and Francis McKee, with Louise Shelley as Editor-at-large. It is available at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, and also internationally in Berlin, Zurich, Weils and Vancouver. This text piece has served as a springboard to develop other works, especially in relation to the speech of the hysteric. These have most recently been explored for the book ‘Madness, Women and the Power of Art’.