Rough Notes Towards The Psychoanalysis of Trash

On Thursday April 7 I am giving a short talk at The Gopher Hole on Old Street in London as part of Pretty – Ugly, a fundraising event being organized by postgraduate communication design students from Central St Martins. They describe the aim of their project as follows:

The title Pretty―Ugly is a casual phrase imbued with a range of subtexts: aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, desire and repulsion, interest and disinterest, surface and essence, polish and sincerity. In a sentence: we are interested in exploring a ‘naïve’ aesthetic as it is created by very aware, professional designers.

Through our workshops, exhibition, series of talks and our auction, we hope to raise a critical discussion on the subject of contemporary ‘undesign’.

The talks are scheduled to take place within 6.00 pm and 7.00 pm – there is also an exhibition, and a publication will be available on the night. My presentation will take the form of a brief return to, and reflection upon, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Trash’, one of the lectures I gave as part of Neville Brody’s Anti-Design Festival last year. Some of the notes for the talk are reproduced in the Pretty – Ugly publication.

In the meantime, a video of my Anti-Design Festival lecture on trash has been posted on Vimeo by Ignite Creative TV – overall, the footage looks pretty good, although the opening title identifying me as Jennifer Walshe probably doesn’t speak too highly for the company’s post-production skills.