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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

A huge swirl of whipped cream, garnished with a drone, a fly, and a maraschino cherry: so insistent that I avert my eyes on purpose, like how I won’t look at strangers revving the engines of bright convertibles Still, each time I circle the traffic-choked drain of Trafalgar Square on my bicycle, I can’t avoid it It squirts into my consciousness an airy sugar, a heady fume   Heather Phillipson’s The End (2020) is the Fourth Plinth’s latest topping; since 1998, the public art project has invited contemporary artists to respond to the square and its monuments The project has resulted in a number of meditations on imperialism, such as Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) and Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2019), as well as middle fingers to the patriarchy, as with Katharina Fritsch’s giant blue Hahn/Cock (2011) Hans Haacke’s skeletal, riderless Gift Horse (2015), its front legs wrapped in stock market ticker-tape, embodied the vulture-pecked wealth of the city’s dead centre Invoking themes of surveillance and empty excess, Phillipson doesn’t break from this cynical tradition The piece was conceived and commissioned in 2016, the year that finally dug the grave of American exceptionalism with Donald Trump’s election, and of the European project with the Brexit referendum; the year that Phillipson says she ‘lost her sense of humour’ to despair Hence the titular fatalism of The End, in spite of its ludicrously pop encasement 2020’s cascading disasters, and the attendant strain placed on public consensus and societal cohesion, have only clarified Phillipson’s worst instincts, turning The End into a portent of a precarious era   Phillipson initially planned The End for Trafalgar Square’s everyday atmosphere of touristic fantasy and formalised dissent, intending instant pleasure with a top note of subversion But on March 16 — the eve of the first nationwide lockdown, coinciding with The End’s scheduled unveiling — the square’s protesters, buskers, tourists, and gaggles of teens evaporated as

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Paula Rego

Ben Eastham

Helen Graham

Interview

Issue No. 1

Dame Paula Rego introduces me into her North London home with a crooked smile and a plate of biscuits....

fiction

August 2013

Foxy

Siân Melangell Dafydd

fiction

August 2013

If you don’t want to lose your eyes, grab them by the veins sticking out of their behinds and...

feature

Issue No. 1

On the Notoriously Overrated Powers of Voice in Fiction or How To Fail At Talking To Pretty Girls

D. W. Wilson

feature

Issue No. 1

On a Tuesday afternoon in July, not too long ago, a friend of mine struck a pose imitating a...

 

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