Affect and the politics of austerity

- published a couple of months back, it was good to revisit it in discussion tonight.

Affect and the politics of austerity: an interview exchange with Lauren Berlant. Variant 39/40, Winter 2010, http://www.variant.org.uk/39_40texts/berlant39_40.html

See the whole issue of Variant here.

Lauren Berlant's blog is here

the issues raised tonight: the opportunism of nostalgia. the political strategy of nostalgia. shaming in academic discourse. and the need to consider the rewards of being seen as a shamed subject.

there's more in it. but that's for another discussion. soon

... and then it's blue

(D. Jarman, 1993). only in excerpts so far.

it's a conclusion in more ways than one. the highly saturated hues of journey to avebury are replaced by the colour of jarman's increasing blindness.

so, a film that consists of a single 'image' - the blue of one man's blindness. the blue inspired by yves klein's monochromatic paintings. it's all and nothing it seems to me. it's a refusal - to turn one's struggle with hiv-related illnesses and approaching death into a film-able narrative. so it's a social and political positioning. without images other than blue, the image recedes - in it's all-encompassingness - to make way, to heighten one's senses of voice, sound and music.

strangely, i find the hues of avebury far more disconcerting. somewhere i read a review of 'this garden of eden'. it could well be that 38c in berlin is frying my brain a bit too much, but the sickly hues of avebury shout at me: pain and the pastoral. the pastoral as pain.

houses

the book on gordon matta-clark found my way as an intervention for my current interest in land art; the dangers of a rural and remote idyll.

so matta-clark's work is a forceful pulling back into the city; into politics of development, speculation and the destruction it produces as a necessary moment within.

the land art rests for the moment as i'm working on the final set of printmaking pieces. a series of four. which i decided to be about lived in and visited spaces. rooms i lived in or visited. some old, some new, some fleeting some persistent. the prints are to be a combination of all things i learned in the course so far. so: probably culmination is a better word rather than combination.

two of the images will be new ones; two will be translations into print medium of existing images.

the home/house/interior relates to some of the sound art i recently come across, heard, saw, pondered. it concerns the spaces that are demarcated by subjective responses to the places we inhabit. the boundaries these spaces establish: of access, of use.

there is a lot more to be said and done about this. most of this is taking place off-screen and i have been coming to use the blog here more as an uncommented but carefully assembled holding space. i seem to be working in messy clusters these days.

• there is the one about about interior spaces, subjectivity as well as disappearence; 
• there is another one that is developing out of my previous work on fields, landscapism, a thorough look at landscapenature;
• and there's a third that is starting to ask questions: questions about knowledge production in art. the methodologies of artistic production and how these can be explored.

the last point opens up to the how? can i work on these issues in art/research? can i play with these in art/research? can i learn about these? can i learn about these with others?

i think these will serve well as starting questions for the next few years. there will be some visuals too. but first, take this one little intervention

one art

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

conical intersect

by gordon matta clark may just be the thing to continue with in my little line of disappearances.
slightly different scale though

deletion

... they don't come alone. and today's obliteration has been on a slightly different scale.
it concerns the size of my music folder. can you see it? it's 4 kb in size.

how on earth?!?!
so i go hunting for it... in various backups. it's nowhere to be found. 60gb of MY PAST have vanished. i feel disturbed. wrong-footed. out of sync. rather literally. somehow in all my updates my time machine decided to omit my music files.

after a confused phone call i sit back and grin a bit. just ever so slightly. all those soundtracks to events, people and locations. i can just make some of them up. forget about the unhappy, cheesy, cliched soundtracks that have been dragging along.

it's a bit more comprehensive than reinstalling apps on my phone - yes: the day of obliteration in form of a long-dodged diy firmware update that saw my apps disappear, along with some recent sound files and a few photos.

here's to new music. the one i was looking for? this one here:

breakage

so rarely do i break things that i'm used to have things around... forever.
when this one splattered all over the carpet i just wondered.
wondered over this favourite mug of mine.
wondered how it still was a pair of two.
given to us in 1993.
two stayed with me since.
firmly back to a single one.

favourite nonetheless.

sand birds

i went to the sea and saw this. how lucky am i?

unfortunately, there were a lot more images, but they got swallowed when my mac chose to die last week. how could it do that? so glad that the sand birds were safely on my phone though.

4 3 minute wonders

they come by way of another film by luke fowler (bogman palmjaguar, 2007, currently on display the national gallery of modern art in edinburgh).

i spent a fair bit of time organising what it was that i've been doing with art in past, presence and future - how the formality of application procedures enframes the telling of a coherent story. in doing so, i stumbled again across the white room and my circling around it as an unfinished project. unfinished or in progress? these four glasgow tenement interiors are curiously related to the white, uninhabitated - or only at points inhabiated flat in berlin. they are fragmented, they are titled by people, these never appear, only in possession and the spaces they inhabit. hm... thinking... circling...

Klaus Fussmann and abandoned houses

Following our landscape excursions on Sunday and Thursday, I went to the museum from where my parent's had sent me the catalogue of Albert Koenig's prints (mainly woodcut).

Koenig's landscape representations from the 1910-1940s caught my eye when they seemed so traditional and eery - old trees, woods and heather. He did many of those in the surrounding areas of the heathland we walked and cycled through. - The area is characterised by a particular geological formation - Kieselgur, which google suggests to translate as diatomite - which was industrially exploited... for making both filters and dynamite. (Wiki knows more about Kieselgur in German)

But we weren't in luck at the Museum with Koenig's work. Instead, there was an exhibition by Klaus Fussmann. - A retrospective full of interior still lives, gardens, a few landscapes and a few portraits.

And I begun to fill my gaps (in fact: a wide open void) on German contemporary art. And went back to take another look at this interior drawings and paintings a few days later.

Many of them were done in the (early) 1970s of abandoned Berlin flats and his studios. What a very good coincidence: I could explore still life of interiors a bit more; explore the wide range of yellow-beige via reddish beige to cool blue beige; and contemplate Fussmann's paintings in their quiet melancholy and the meaning of time, memory and emptiness.

Klaus Fussmann, Atelier Steinmann, 1970
gouache, pencil and coloured pencil on board
private collection

I didn't know his work before, but was taken by this stark contrast between those empty rooms and overflowering gardens... the passing of time and all things living. I'm intrigued (if not entirely convinced) by this juxtaposition and marvel at the riches of the German language - Vergaenglichkeit was the word used - and struggle to find translations. How about :

transitoriness, evanescence, transience, transiency

... they all seem a bit flat, not quite melancholy and yet joyfully enough.... strange that...

[but I've wondered about this for long enough to know that that flatness is sometimes not more than a lack of experience and connotation assembled around a particular word]

For more info on Fussmann, try these gallery sites

• some bio info (in German)
• some of his work
• more of his work (also many prints - lino and etchings - note to self: look at them for printmaking course)

White, empty and Berlin are the connections to the White Room. More I haven't found yet. His interiors are often arrangements on tables or shelves, of bowls, vases and assorted small, white things.

In all his interiors, he paints from above. He is looking down on the objects, or even the entire rooms. It's an interesting incident. It gives him a wide perspective and it makes the objects look even more forlorn and surplus. The paintings which depict a whole room look as if painted from a high ladder. It makes for an interesting assortment. While the table arrangements are often very monochrome, the rooms have the colour of some chairs, a cloth or a jacket.

I find the paintings very strong. Very different to the quiet, joyful assemblages of trickery that Morandi rearranged throughout his lifetime on tables, these are tristesse on canvas. They are left over, forgotten, only to be found by Fussmann who rearranged them into some order and captures them in their forgottenness. Momentarily, for a final snapshot of what is left.

I'm taken by the act of a final recording, taking stock of what has been abandoned. The painter as archivist, as record keeper. Of material objects that are left.

Klaus Fussmann, Stilleben Käuzchensteig, 1974
oil and gouache on board,
private collection

Weiss, weiss, weiss, das weiss ich

White room 1, mixed media collage on paper, 35x40cm

... white, white, white, that's what I know.

A room full of white floorboards, window frames, walls and doors. And a bit of orange and lime green.

A room in a flat full of history: of someone's ex-flatmate, of others' ex-comrade, of someone's ex-lover, and another ones ex-lover. Right in the middle of Kreuzberg and the lives lived here.

And still: the flat isn't lived in, noone's home other than temporarily mine. With all its history, memories and things. And the smell of current emptiness.

A room full of white. Obvious white. What's with the layers of it - the windows got painted, new layers on top of old ones. Will they hold? Will they peel away?

Thus: some cartridge paper, some glue, some tissue paper, some acrylic ink and a marker pen. For a start.

White room 1 (Detail), mixed media collage on paper, 35x40cm

Weiss, weiss, weiss, das weiss ich....

It's about experience and knowledge in the middle of interior still life. I am sitting on my new bed and marvel at the sights of whiteness, colour and their invisible connections to past and presence.

Next: better glue, more marker pen, more ink, other walls and windows.

Let's disappear with Turner

JMW Turner, Venice with the Salute, c1844
Oil on Canvas, Tate Britain

How about into this piece of art?


As the lady next to us said: 'You can't possibly see what's in that'.

Or can you?



And in a blink, he, it and I are gone. Nowhere to be found.


.

Let's skive with Turner

JMW Turner, The Val d'Aosta, 1840s
Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

... and so we did. Just as well, seeing that tomorrow would have been too late (and not a day for skiving anyway... facilitating PhD students on how to become effective).

So: there was at points nothing to see and yet the paintings were so full of everything. Talking about Turner... hm, dunno... while happy to take Twombly apart (well, a bit), Turner is something different altogether.

So, while I'm getting over introductory shyness and am sussing out some of the obvious and less obvious links why this has been a phantastic day out in Edinburgh, here's some of my favourites.

JMW Turner, Landscape with River and distant Mountains, c1845
Oil on Canvas, Walker Art Gallery, National Museum, Liverpool

From Elqui 1 to more fields via de Stael

Nicolas de Stael, Landscape: the road to Uzes, 1954
Oil on Canvas, 80x53.4 cm, private collection

There's someone I haven't been able to get out of my mind for the past few weeks. - Well, the title already gives it away. De Stael's landscapes are on my mind rather persistently. Quite some time back I enthused about Agrigente when I came across him via Chris's admiration for him. I did a few experiments with his compositions to help me work out the final abstractions from the first fields. And then I stopped.

I need to go back. No: First I really need to see some of his paintings in real life. But hunting for them only ever seems to lead to: 'held in a private collection'. If I ever was to have one single painting, it would be one by him - anyone. I happily take one of his tiny compositions, or the footballers, or a nude but really, really, really: I'd love one of the Agrigente paintings. That heat, that tension, that drama in a minimal composition.

The exhibition catalogue I have is in French, so it's a bit tedious but it's nonetheless delicious. It talks about the drama and danger of how de Stael constructs space across the canvas. They have - albeit from a different angle (or plane?) a similar impact on me as Joan Eardley's seascapes. I wholeheartedly and passionately submit to them, let them take over and be all there is. A canvas to loose yourself in. How delicious.

How did I not know before that art can do something so powerful? But now I do and it will remain. How wonderful.

The thing is - de Stael's landscapes are full of ghosts too. I haven't figured them out, maybe I won't try much further. But I suspect that such impact carries so much 'other' with it that there have to be ghosts. Hm, well, I of course know of his depression and anguish. But that is far too simple for ghosts, I've decided.

Nicolas de Stael, Landscape, 1953
Oil on canvas, 80x65.1cm, private collection

Did I intend to be practical today... I actually did. But not much chance of that. So: more posts on de Stael. And some sketching on my part of Chilean fields as mediation between myself and de Stael. How presumptious and how delicious at the same time.

Oh... and my best chance for seeing one of his paintings seems to be this one at the Tate Modern. So: London, very soon.

And I'm also curious: have you seen one of his paintings? Which one and where?

Now: please, please, please - can I have a de Stael retrospective somewhere nearby and very soon...

Layering across space

Elqui 2, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

... from Elqui Valle to the Scottish West Coast?

I had posted a number of work in progress updates of the three oil paintings I've been working on over the past months (e.g., here at: art? anyone?). They are finished now.

In the process a number of intriguing things took place.

(a) I lost the hill tops and managed to continue on Elqui 1 as an abstract piece at the first attempt. This was where I wanted to get to with the oil paintings but, on the basis of previous iterations required to move from representation to abstraction had not thought it would happen so quickly. But, Elqui 1 is for the next post.

Today, I want to talk about the Elqui 2 and Elqui 3. Well, they were meant to be larger - 80x70cm like Elqui 1 but somehow I very successfully have (still) mislaid my framing tools and so while I have stretchers I cannot for the life of me find the stapler nor the canvas I bought ages ago.

So, the two pieces are only 50x50cm - one on a bought deep canvas, the other one on a handstreched rough(ish) cotton canvas. One was too slick in surface, the other one far too rough.

(b) The task? Undo layer 1. The challenge: How? The palette, though very limited, is strong with the two cadmium yellows. I stuck with turpsy paint right throughout, for each layer work first with brush, then a bit with palette knives; often softening the knife marks again afterwards with brushes or rags.

Undoing - initially it was going to disappear under a white layer. But I didn't dare too... as you can see. I kept the original composition for the most part and discovered the fabulous greys in that palette. So, on went a succession of grey layers interspersed with keeping local colours and the main composition.

Elqui 3, Detail, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Here, the rough and poorly primed canvas of Elqui 3 proved a fascinating ground for experiment. Suddenly, I ended up with a whole new series of edges, lines and half disappearing vistas. Even more bizarrely, the piece - solely designed to explore hue and markmaking was taking on some landscape element. Well, despite the name it wasn't never going to be a landscape. Even more strangely: it wasn't the arid valley of the Chilean Cordillera that was appearing but some West Coast of Scotland seascapes.

I kept working on it - something I am very pleased about. With oil paintings I have in the past closed them off far too quickly. Quickly I would no longer be able to see what to do next. Not so with these ones. Somehow I managed to keep them open for much longer, adding more layers in the process described above.

Elqui 3, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

And, what did I learn?

1. painting with oils is fabulous (well: I knew that before, but now I do with even more resolve)

2. the palette of cobalt blue, cadmium yellows and burnt siena so easily creates landscape associations, regardless what you do

3. layerings with grey build up distance (possibly also sense of time? - need to explore that further); wiping these and reworking at various stages of drying can strengthen that illusion further

4. I now know how to keep open a painting for longer

Towards the end of the painting process I deliberately played with 2. and 3. - to have a little flirt with the landscape elements in the paintings, to bring them out, muddle them up again, displace them and so on. VERY enjoyable. It was also interesting to get people commenting while I was painting. How much they enjoyed being able to see a landscape - something - emerge and how sure they were that that was what they saw. Interesting... let's think more about that...

How to paint (with) ghosts

Elqui 2, Detail, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Ok,... two gears down and turning to the left. I know (albeit not explicitly) what I'm after with my exploration of spectres. A quick verbal sketch (aka a list) turns up the following

• the ways, means and politics of hiding: domestic violence, migrant workers, politics of war
• past experiences, memories and ghosts (my own)
• other people's ghosts (e.g. Don A.'s, but there are plenty more)

... they all need care, caution and time; so I'll be doing plenty of: two steps forward, one back or three. What is however, much easier is painting technique and also, how others have dealt with spectres in art.

There has been plenty of this so far in here... and while I'm a bit rubbish at providing comprehensive summaries, how to guides and similar, I think I should spend some time on digging up those earlier posts on this.

Right now, I am thinking of

• Cy Twombly is painting loss (i-iii)
• Accidental loss
• The Bull's Hollow along with its various exploration of pond, depth, reflections and the vagaries of when the wind blows
• There is much in my working through the fields of where I grew up which is ghostly, at points ghastly.

More recently, the Elqui series of oil paintings is exploring the effects of adding layers of turpsy murky greys to add depth, distance and a general blur. Similarly, much of my printmaking has turned rather experimental and tried to hide, undo, whiten out earlier layers.

I will start with more detail on these two work processes, while I'm trying to reorder my tags and unhide some of the various strands of my new project of a new world unorder.

Elqui 3, Detail, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Other people's ghosts (i): Bienvenido a la Casa AM

Ok, that's the bus station, La Serena, after eight hours drive, a bit of sketching and the beginnings of the desert. Let's find a taxi and go to this place - it sounds nice enough: a garden and a friendly family house. I hope the taxi driver won't rip us of like the one this morning - too tired for that, my stomach is feeling very unwell. R., did you understand what he said? Where are the word endings in his speech? Did he say 3.500 for the town centre? He doesn't know Brasil? Let's go to Plaza de Armas instead. Why does he drive back to the Panamericana? I'm sure he takes us round the whole town... what do you think? Oh no - there's Calle Brasil. Oiga - el hostal esta en ese calle. Si, si - yo lo se. Heh - so he knew where we wanted to go? But why was he so funny about it? Ok. There it is. That's nice, he gets out of the car and rings the bell. The door opens. The owner speaks English and has rooms.

Good. An old town house, an inner courtyard, the rooms off the hallway, none with external windows. The furniture like my grandparents'. The rooms look ok. That's all fine. A, the owner seems nice enough. Late forties, he seems very nervous, anxious, he doesn't seem to find time for breathing between speaking. He tells us breakfast is at 9.30, there's a computer we can use. All fine.

The room is damp, mouldy even. I only realise when R asks if I've got a cold - no, I don't, but can't stop coughing before I finally fall asleep.

Getting a shower requires a complex lighting of the boiler procedure. The house is charming, in a very old-fashioned sense. But, why are these two elderly women sharing that room? One of them always in her dressing gown and slippers. She never speaks. All you hear is shuffle, shuffle, shuffle through the house. She looks at you and quickly looks away. The dogs bark, they howl, right outside our bedroom. The wash basin has this amazingly complex crack, right through it. I need to remember to sketch it.

Out for the day, we come back to loud music - a mix of 1950s Cuban, a bit of Kurt Weil and some Ella Fitzgerald. They are in the kitchen, high-spirited, making dinner. I talk about our day in Coquimbo, we laugh and joke. I ask A if we could have breakfast at 8 next morning because we'll be going to Elqui Valle for the day. No problem. They laugh as A's stumbling over his words - 'El vodka', his son says and laughs some more.

R and I sit outside for a bit, drink some wine, have a cigarette. Inside, A's son now tries to persuade A to go to bed. But instead, he's slumped over the computer, unconscious, there are coughing fits, I think he's been sick now. He doesn't want to go to bed. Finally he goes. All the while, R and I sit outside - far too close in the family home.

The next morning there's no breakfast - A's angry with us 'I don't serve breakfast before 9.30'; so we leave without. The son ignores us, so does the woman who was there the night before.

We come back late at night, after having seen Saturno y sus circulos. A shadowy figure runs out of one bedroom, runs back in, comes back out again... shouts after us... 'Here's your remaning 1000 pesos. You mustn't leave the water tap dripping when you leave the house'. He's agitated. It's past mid-night. The woman shuffles through the house. Somebody runs into doors, furnitures. I can't sleep. The house overwhelms me. I joked to R the day before: 'In a few days we'll decipher the various comings and goings of people'. But now there are far more than those living present. I can feel them, and I think of Allende's Ghost House. So much secrecy and so much malevolence. I'm writing it down before I try and sleep so as not to offload it to R., it would probably stop her from sleeping too.

The next morning we say we're leaving. A. comes out briefly to do some breakfast, disappears into his dark bedroom again. The Lady with the Slippers can speak - fast and loudly on the phone, we realise. But noone talks to us. I'm writing another blog entry. While opening Explorer the adjacent Word document is entitled 'Los etapos del alcoholismo'.

I wonder who put it there. His friend who refused to serve us breakfast yesterday morning and merely said that it was Don A.'s house so we should speak to him. R. was upset about it, I thought: well, good for you, co-dependency is so easy to accomplish. Or maybe his son? Who knows.

We leave, move three houses further along and stay two more days in La Serena. How friendly the city suddenly becomes.

Don A. also saw a ghost - two days later and 10 mins before we were taking the taxi to the bus station, he runs past me, sitting in a cafe. I felt someone watching, ignored, and ignored a little more, only to look up to see him having seen me, dazed and confused. His life at that moment clearly wasn't one for a bright morning sun.

Family secrets. Not to be witnessed, not to be known. We stumbled into some. Alcoholism was probably only one of them. We had to go. Days later, R told me of the fresh blood she found the morning we were leaving on the living room floor. And what were the dirty blankets doing on the couch in the dining room? Why was there this immaculate front room with everything around it falling apart? Why did noone of them go out during day time?

Ghosts? Memories. Experiences. Things and people that were and remain so powerful. There'll be more.

Who is it you are?

Elqui 2, WIP, Detail
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

My inbox has been getting, aside the usual junk, a few anonymous emails. Some of them were comments made on the blog and I'll start with these.

Anonymous 1 commented on my 'Notes to future self' said that in order to know my future self it was crucial to know who I was now, and promptly recommended I'd buy a book - HIS book, I suppose. It struck me as an intriguing, if slightly off-kilter and possibly not very successful way of marketing one's publishing efforts. I should possible try the same.

But, anonymous had a point there and I'll come back to that later.

Shortly after, Anonymous 2 left a comment which slightly threw me. I got the first rant against my art in the commentary. It was intriguing too, intriguing for the fact that within 2 years it was indeed the first commentary left that thought the prints I showed were awful. I thought of my brother's joking how art commentaries tend to be of the nature 'oh, I think that's wonderful'. And my brother's right. Art blogs work very different from other, notably political blog that the people who usually do radio phone-ins or write angry letters to the editor don't really participate.

That point was made even clearer when I was reading - in the newspaper - about the death threats and all assorted violence directed at a feminist blogger in the US. She poignantly stated: 'These are only ever left by that unknown angry entity that is 'anonymous'. Funny that, isn't it?

There is such power in remaining anonymous.

So, I was thinking of these two comments when earlier this week I received a password and login details for one of those business sites where recruitment panels send job applicants to for psychometric testing. The anonymous email stated 'if you have any questions about this test, please contact your administrator who initiated this email'. In the Notes from Administrator section there were no notes.

It left me wondering who at my work place - and it was clearly initiated form my workplace wants to know who I am? Whether I'm extrovert, intuitive, thinking and perceiving, or the opposite. I wondered if it had anything to do with the redundancy procedure notice I received recently, or with a new tutoring job I applied for, or, or, or...

Curious me left the email untouched but did a bit of Myers-Briggs personality testing anyways. I find them curious, a bit more reliable than horoscopes, I suppose. And fascinating how much of personel management builds on these 16 types. So, even curioser I wondered if people were all equally distributed across those 16 types. Of course they aren't. And I grinned that I end up in one of the rarest category. How funny is that. Now I need to find something about the prevalence of certain types in academia. I think I can have a good guess. :)

So are we anonymous or one of 16? That's not really a binary question, is it? It's a bit similar to the following: how many possibilities are there in a limited palette?

And so they disappear while everyone is (not) watching

There has been a series of high profile cases of very young children abused and killed at the hands of their parents and their partners. In some cases, social workers have had over 300 meetings and visits over 18 months before the child's death. This is the trailer of a current series of documentaries on Britain's Forgotten Children.




It goes into my notebook on disappearances while all are watching.

For all to see, right?!

Elqui 3, WIP, Detail
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

On Friday I spoke at a seminar on the role of policing for securing well-being. My brief concerned the role of policing for securing urban regeneration and more importantly, economic growth.

One of my two fellow speakers was the Chief Constable of the police force which saw on the day before the conviction of the biggest internet- based ring of paedophiles in the UK so far. No surprise that he was buoyed up by having secured the conviction of eight men so far with some 30 charged across the UK. As he said, these were ordinary middle-class and very respectable men. The news coverage went to some detail to list the - thoroughly proper - job titles of each of the men.

I'll be sticking with crime for this post, but it'll get to the (in)visibility challenge I'm posing myself for the time being.

The end of my talk led to a call for (a) acknowledging the necessity of conflict over the use of public spaces - that this is political and not subject to a predefined, however narrow 'consensus'. And (b) to name and make visible all those that get hidden, evicted, arrested when public space is for consumption only - young people, junkies and homeless.

But even more so: that focus on street crime is so reductive in its own sense. And the guy from the centre for business crime was rightly upset that I wouldn't present figures of how much shoplifting is done by junkies. But what I should have done and didn't do was present figures over health and safety offences committed in city centres by businesses; and of all those crimes committed BY businesses.

However, the one thing I got to, and which was thankfully picked up by the audience was the problematic division of public and private. A focus on street crime and the surveillance of street crime - while apparently a response to women's fear of crime leaves out the most dangerous place of women in the world: the home.

If it's on CCTV it's for all to see, right?

Two images and stories have been sticking in my memory all week.

Story 1: the first full face transplant undertaken by American surgeons. Now, several months after the operation, the patient gaver her first interview, accompanied by many photos of how she looked at various points in the past, how she may look now and how she may look in the future. What happened to her face? Her husband shot her in the face. So, after over thirty operations she can take food through her mouth again and hopefully will be able to taste at some point.

Story 2: a young man on steroids got convicted to a life-time sentence. Why? He befriended a TV presenter on facebook (I., I'm telling you: it's dodgy!!); went out with her, when she said no, he beat her up and raped her; after that she hid for a couple of weeks in her flat. Finally, she left the house. He was waiting outside with another man and threw a full canister of sulphuric acid into her face at point blank. She was quoted how she recounted that moment and every single moment since. She too has had more than thirty operations since.

So, what is it to see if you look at one's face?