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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...

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching A lot Ariana Grande is dressed in hot pink—tight cropped vest and high waisted trousers She is on her knees, leaning backwards, in a tiny room with white walls and a little curtain Maybe it’s a doll’s house, maybe it’s a closet, maybe it’s a cage Her trademark oversized ponytail, which seems to have been designed for the purpose of making her appear even smaller than she already is (in the world of Ariana worship, smallness is akin to godliness), splits at the top knot and falls in two directions Half over her breast, half drawing a line south With the index finger of her right hand she flicks a miniature chandelier that is dangling from the ceiling, making it swing lightly back and forth GIFs are the internet’s present to erotics The best ones, like this one, exist in a seamless loop, enabling the viewer to remain suspended indefinitely in a moment of aesthetic bliss Flick, flick, goes Ariana, for a sweet eternity   I’m aware that this is a dirty crush (One shared by a lot of the world, admittedly, but since when did populism ever make anything cleaner) My Ariana-lust is treated by certain friends with the sort of stretched tolerance usually reserved for the bad politics of elderly relatives Which is another way of saying I just about get away with coveting a mirage of hyper-femme youth, sex, and tininess, because in the political and pansexual new dawn of queerness, at age 32 I seem to have become the equivalent of Stonehenge: a heritage lesbian artefact to be handled with curiosity and compassion I could try to intellectualise my love of the flicking GIF, by claiming it in the lineage of queering I could even try explaining the chandelier in relation to Roland Barthes’s ‘punctum’, which has always seemed to me an unfortunately dry metaphor for the clitoris, anyway: that small locus of power, the magnetic point of attention around which photographs, like certain bodies, are organised But fuck

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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fiction

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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Issue No. 6

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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...

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January 2017

Take Comfort

Heather Radke

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January 2017

I. One week after Buzz and Heather broke up, she dragged her mattress into her living room. She moved...

 

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