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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....

It is the standard procedure, when visiting someone in central Paris, to ask in advance for the door code that allows you into an antechamber from where it is possible to buzz your host’s apartment I always forget this So it is that I find myself on the street, separated from the studio of one of the most exciting artists of the era by the width of a door and my own logistical incompetence The neighbouring crèche gives me short Parisian shrift I consider how embarrassing it might be to shout ‘Philippe Parreno! Philippe Parreno!’ when the man himself emerges, smiling at my predicament I tell him that I was rebuffed by his neighbour; he explains that she was only attempting to disguise the fact that the kindergarten is Parreno’s own clandestine ideas factory, in which the superficially motiveless creative activities of the unwitting children are, at the end of the day, gathered up as R&D for new projects   The joke is a good one because, to co-opt the cliché, it is not entirely implausible in the context of Parreno’s radical, witty approach to creative practice He is an artist who has spent his career challenging received notions of how art should be made and experienced Foremost among his principles is a kind of communalist approach, appreciable in the two defining characteristics of his work The first is his disdain for the notion of artist as individual genius and his embrace of collaboration (with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, Hans Ulrich Obrist and many others) The second is his relegation of the discrete objects in an exhibition to mere constituent parts in a wider network of relations   The exhibition is the work of art, much as in the case of opera we accept that the individual performances – of music, of set design, of the actors – should be appreciated collectively rather than in isolation We might think of Parreno as a choreographer, leading visitors through immersive, theatrical environments in which events take place according to a script or score This was in evidence during Parreno’s extraordinary

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...

READ NEXT

Art

May 2013

Techno-primitivism

Vanessa Hodgkinson

David Trotter

Art

May 2013

What follows could have been an essay or an interview. In the event, it resembles the one as little...

fiction

April 2013

The Story I'm Thinking Of

Jonathan Gibbs

fiction

April 2013

There were seven of us sat around the table. Seven grown adults, sat around the table. It was late. We...

feature

November 2014

Every Night is Like a Disco: Iraq 2003

Paul Currion

feature

November 2014

That day at Kassim’s, there was no music. There was almost no sound at all, not even the echoes...

 

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