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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...

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in the ‘digital age’, or the inescapability of ‘late capitalism’ and all its surreal portents It is not incidental that these women are largely estranged from the seats of power behind these worlds, as formative as these industries may be to their psychologies Silicon Valley and Wall Street and their international counterparts are both distinct but not dissimilar wellsprings of the worst forms of male delirium, and only appear to make room for women if they are preternaturally beautiful arm candy (Margot Robbie, imperious and magnificent, stamping a stiletto onto Leonardo DiCaprio’s forehand in The Wolf of Wall Street), girl-genius rebrands of iconic men (Elizabeth Holmes, forever in that Steve Jobs-inspired black turtleneck) or savvy can-do businesswomen who can play with the most vicious of them (Sheryl Sandberg, leaning into a void)   Market-friendly femininity is created in boardrooms filled by people who do not care for its subjects at all To live so far from the seat of power but feel it so intimately gives rise to a fragmented, ever-refracting selfhood that hates her particular slice of the world yet cannot help but feast on its scraps I spend too much money on Glossier products, despite knowing that the cool-girl beauty brand is snake oil for wannabe socialites I can’t stop following the Riverdale actresses on Instagram I do not know how to manage a savings account, and continually fail to girlboss my way to financial freedom despite Sheryl Sandberg’s best efforts I am impotent, trivial, shallow, and stupid – and at the same time entirely convinced of my own importance   You may call this self-delusion, or in the words of New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, the inevitable result of growing up in a time when femininity operates as a ‘trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault’ Tolentino had written those words in 2015 as deputy editor at self-proclaimed ‘supposedly feminist website’ Jezebel while reflecting on

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...

READ NEXT

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May 2014

How Imagination Remembers

Maria Fusco

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May 2014

How imagination remembers is twofold, an enfolded act of greed and ingenuity. I believe these impulses to be linked...

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October 2014

Blood Out of a Zombie

Laurence A. Rickels

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October 2014

The German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has on three different occasions put the camera aside and directed for the theatre, each...

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June 2017

Turksib

Lutz Seiler

TR. Alexander Booth

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June 2017

The jolts of the tracks were stronger now and came at irregular intervals. With my arms outstretched, I held...

 

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