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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....

‘To live,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘means to leave traces’ As one might expect, Benjamin’s observation is not without a certain melancholy Traces are lost in the grand sweep of history And, in today’s world of mass-production, anonymous spectacle and gleaming, sterile surfaces, it has become increasingly difficult to leave traces For Benjamin, it had become increasingly difficult to live   Yet people do leave traces in their wake: the refuse and detritus of history; the variegated remnants of daily life; or dust A trace is ephemeral, a locus of ambivalence suspended in the unstable space between construction and dispersal, presence and absence A trace is very little, almost nothing But it is also an index of life   Gabriel Orozco’s artistic practice could be described, I think, as an aesthetic of the trace The works presented in his retrospective at Tate Modern share a sense of temporal precariousness that is far removed from the mythic aura of timelessness that has enveloped today’s world In other words, the ‘eternal present’[1] that the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson diagnosed as endemic in postmodernity, a symptom of the disappearance of the subject through the ubiquity of simulacra; that is, commodified, depthless and mass-produced items that conflate time’s three horizons into an indissoluble ‘now’ (think Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980)) Orozco’s works, however, are provisional They are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone (1992) Plasticine ball and street debris The paradoxically titled Yielding Stone (1992), for instance, consists of a black lump of plasticine formed in the weight of the artist’s own body The work is rolled onto the street where this highly malleable and greasy material absorbs whatever residue it encounters Yielding Stone registers what would usually vanish without a trace, like a memorial of the ephemeral Indeed, one might literally describe the work as sedimented history Combined with its amorphous shape, this has led commentators to read the work as evocative of the archaic or the primordial In addition, its processual nature has tended to be understood in relation to

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

October 2012

Interview with Sjón

Mary Hannity

Interview

October 2012

In Iceland, they eat puffin. The best-tasting puffin is soaked overnight in milk. ‘Then give the milk to the...

feature

November 2011

Nude in your hot tub...

Lars Iyer

feature

November 2011

I. Down from the Mountain   Once upon a time, writers were like gods, and lived in the mountains....

fiction

May 2013

Cabbage Butterflies

Ryū Murakami

TR. Ralph McCarthy

fiction

May 2013

The guy looked disappointed when he saw me. My one sales point is that I’m young, but my eyelids...

 

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