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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

The feeling of drug-induced euphoria could be strips of gauze between beautiful fingers Or a silver slinky sent down a torso by its own muscle, between breasts raised towards God The perfect face of Donyale Luna, all bush baby eyes and strings of jewels in sunlight Cigarette smoke sucked back in through dusty lips The indistinguishable thrusts of dancing or sex or devotion It could also be the violence of caged dogs, palm leaves dishevelled by storms, a relentless tide and the wreckage of bodies on cracked earth Composed entirely of found video and dedicated to Luna, a supermodel and actress now forty years dead from heroin, Sirens (2019) is Nan Goldin’s memorial to the act of getting high   The success of Goldin’s work – its drama, her magnetism – has burdened her over the years with the unhappy credits that are often the risk of influence In the decade that followed The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a medley of photos in which the pale and angular people of her life are splayed lawlessly over rooms and each other, then-US-President Bill Clinton accused ‘Dan [sic] Goldin’ of trailblazing ‘heroin chic’ The term came to designate the era’s romance with strung-out, starved depravity Goldin’s 1996 photographs of sixteen-year-old model James King, taken for a profile in the New York Times Style Magazine, distilled a darkly erotic aesthetic that disturbed as much as it seduced A junior veteran of drugs, King’s was the questionable glamour of a skinny girl with the face of a child – most beautiful on waking, as a friend reported, when she’s ‘coughing her guts out’   But just as our culture compulsively points at ringleaders, so does it love a messiah In recent years Goldin has swung from unholy harbinger of heroin to saviour of America’s opioid crisis Since early 2019, Goldin’s activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have repurposed art institutions as stages of dissent against the art world’s taste for Sackler family money – donations from the Pharma moguls known to have deceitfully flogged OxyContin as a safe

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Interview

February 2014

Interview with Patrick Keiller

David Anderson

Interview

February 2014

Patrick Keiller, an architect ‘diverted’ into making films, is principally known for his Robinson series, which began with  London (1994)...

poetry

October 2015

Two Poems

Robert Herbert McClean

poetry

October 2015

Another Autumn Journal Chaos (AKA Do Not Put This to Music Because You’re How Fish Put Up a Fight)...

Interview

December 2013

Interview with Tess Jaray

Lily Le Brun

Interview

December 2013

In the light-filled rooms of The Piper Gallery is a painting show that features no paint. Brought together by...

 

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