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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....

‘IN SUNLIGHT I WAS PLASTICINE PERFORMANCE’, Juliana Huxtable wrote about her teenage years, in her first book published earlier this year ‘MUTING CREATIVE AND SEXUAL IMPULSES TO APPEAR AMICABLE AND DIGESTABLE TO THOSE AROUND ME I WAS THE BIRACIAL GIRL IN A TARGET AD WITH A CATALOGUE SMILE AND UNASSUMING SILHOUETTE AND PROFILE, IT’S NEGRO VIRILITY PACIFICED’ Huxtable’s work regularly draws on her biography and appearance, creating prose, poems and photographic self-portraits that have established hers as a voice of progress in a society in retrograde   Huxtable’s first solo exhibition in the UK is untitled, and on entering Project Native Informant, I encounter a set of photographs of tattoos, on the arm, chest, and back of a muscular brown man One image shows a right bicep, on to which a bearded man wearing a ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-shirt has been inked Another photograph shows the words ‘Anti-AntiFa: Alternative Fashion’ written across the man’s pectoral A rightwing alliance formed in opposition to the anti-fascist movement, Anti-Antifa exemplify the manner in which white supremacists have taken to co-opting the language of civil rights activism It’s hard to reconcile how two such opposing tattoos appear on the same body The photographs are difficult to decode I spend time with them and consider the authenticity of the tattoos, whether they have been transferred on, or, if they are permanent, why somebody would choose such contradictory iconography? There’s a clear and conscious hi-jacking of meaning within these forceful symbols that remains in play throughout the exhibition   Project Native Informant’s show follows from one at New York’s Reena Spaulings Gallery in May 2017, ‘A Split During Laughter at the Rally’ There, Huxtable exhibited Untitled (The Wall) (2017), a flowchart that traced the complex, and politically fraught, devolution of skinhead symbology What started out as an aesthetic that belonged to the first wave, anti-racist Punk movement in 1960s Britain – a movement that included West Indian communities through ‘skinhead reggae’ – was soon appropriated by successive Neo-Nazi groups, before it was adopted by the fashion industry (think Vivienne Westwood), and then used as iconography for mundane consumer culture

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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Art

Issue No. 3

Borism

Lee Rourke

Oliver Griffin

Art

Issue No. 3

ES9 is the latest body of work by Oliver Griffin in his archival series The Evaluation of Space. Taken...

fiction

Issue No. 8

The Lady of the House

Claire-Louise Bennett

fiction

Issue No. 8

Wow it’s so still. Isn’t it eerie. Oh yes. So calm. Everything’s still. That’s right. Look at the rowers...

poetry

March 2013

The Humming Lady

James Byrne

poetry

March 2013

The humming lady arrives in a smiling orange smock and orders from the waiter a plate of overripe oranges,...

 

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