http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/01/lynch-prosthetic-god-world

"Try to count the instances of deformity in Lynch’s work, or of people being deformed on camera, and you’ll lose count pretty quickly…  Deformity, for Lynch, is not simply thematic: it is instrumental. In his films, what the continual, almost systematic replacement of body parts and faculties by instruments – crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids and ever weirder apparatuses sometimes as large as rooms – produces is a whole prosthetic order, a world of which prosthesis is not just a feature, but a fundamental term, an ontological condition."

The Lynch symposium at Tate Modern was a nice idea but listening to people clubbing Lynch's work to death in papers filled with factual errors and lazy academic jargon wasn't half as much fun as it sounds. I wrote about Lynch and deformity when I was seventeen - in 1994! One of the papers was so bad I was tempted to run from the auditorium shrieking and tearing at my hair (anyone in attendance will know the one i mean). 

Of the three artists roped in to talk about his influence on their work, one gave a magnificent talk on Stanley Kunrick, which I enjoyed immensely. Another said she didn't like DL's work and had always thought it appealed to teenage boys. I think that was her one allusion to, you know, Lynch and shit... And I liked Gregory Crewdson's talk but it didn't belong in a symposium on David Lynch. I could argue my Mother's family are Lynchian but i wouldn't charge people money to see them. 

I have loads of Tate podcasts on my iPod and generally speaking the lectures are wonderful - I've listened to talks on Francis Bacon countless times - but this one reminded me of bad a BA HONS presentation. Chris Rodley and Parveen Adams were fantastic and Roger Luckhursts's paper on deformity passed the time pleasantly enough but I expected more from Tate. 

That's just my opinion. I suppose it's possible that some of the bored/dismayed/suicidal looking people that attended were secretly enjoying it and i'm only bothering to comment now because i wouldn't want you to go the rest of your life thinking you missed something good... I've bit my tongue until now because I didn't want to be negative about something so harmless but apparently I have unresolved issues... 

Excellent read, it's amazing just how much one can find in Lynch's work.

There was a fiish..iinn the percolatrr!