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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...

I   As soon as I sat down, I remembered the quote by Enrique Vila-Matas which in some way had brought me there: ‘the best thing to do is to travel and to lose theories, lose them all’ I had stumbled across it while reading Dublinesque, and a week later, there I was, sitting in the aeroplane that would take me to Geneva, trying to lose theories but always looking for them I was traveling to Switzerland convinced that a change of scenery would be providential in my quest to write an essay on the work of the Spanish writer I was leaving London in the hope that the land of the silent Robert Walser would be able to bring to life the series of mad ideas that previously had translated into heavy, tedious, infertile digressions More than to lose theories – I understand that now – I was making this journey in order to embody them I’d been drawn to Lausanne for years, that city on the banks of Lake Geneva where the artist Jean Dubuffet had established his fascinating collection of outsider art, or art brut, as he’d called it Guided by the idea that all worthy art has ‘a great deal to do with delirium’, and by his interest in the anti-cultural, marginal qualities of art, Dubuffet had started collecting, throughout the 1940s, art produced by those writing at the margins, outsiders who defied the rules of the academy ‘Madness lightens the man, gives him wings, and promotes clairvoyance,’ he had said Recently I’d come to think that in these scrawls drawn obsessively in asylums or prisons, by psychiatric patients or criminals, the fleeting essence of every true avant-garde could be found Beyond the historical categories we had learned at school – beyond Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism or even Surrealism – I wanted to think of the avant-garde as an impulse, as a force that helped art reach the limit of obsession, and then take, as Maurice Blanchot had requested of it, the step where it ran the risk of madness and solitude

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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poetry

June 2014

Death on Rua Augusta

Tedi López Mills

TR. David Shook

poetry

June 2014

Translator’s Note Death on Rua Augusta is a book I knew I would translate before I had even finished...

poetry

Issue No. 19

Two Poems

Sophie Robinson

poetry

Issue No. 19

sweet sweet agency   the candy here is hard & filled & there is nothing i love more than...

Interview

July 2012

Interview with David Harvey

Matt Mahon

Interview

July 2012

David Harvey is rare among Left academics: his work is as much appreciated by anarchists and the Occupy movement...

 

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