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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....

Iconoclasts have never known quite what to do with the ruined fragments that they leave behind If we imagine the first English iconoclasts in action as they undertook to rid churches of images and holy objects in the sixteenth century, images of grim-faced fanatics wielding hammers and flaming torches are likely to spring to mind But if iconoclasm is loud and violent in its fury, it is haunted by its quiet aftermath, in which the meanings that it releases prove troublingly difficult to control One response might be to leave nothing behind at all In 1547, as iconoclasm in England assumed new ferocity under Edward VI, a royal injunction urged the clergy to remove and destroy all ‘monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition; so that there remain no memory of the same’   This enforced forgetting, however, was a dangerous strategy If superstition were utterly purged and its memory obliterated, there was the risk that it might be repeated The overcoming of error needed to be remembered if its repetition were to be guarded against In many churches broken statues or desecrated images were accordingly left in situ, as salutary reminders of a reviled past This too had its risks, however Even in their broken form, such idols might continue to inspire reverence rather than revulsion After all, if the fragmentation of relics in the Middle Ages in no way reduced their sanctity – a splinter from the True Cross was as holy as the whole – then the sacred remained sacred even in its ruined state Iconoclasm, which seemed to aim at absolute and irrevocable change, turned out to be torn between forms of remembrance and forgetting that it could not fully control   Art Under Attack is the first exhibition devoted to the history of British Iconoclasm, and it is in many ways the realisation of an iconoclast’s nightmares If the iconoclast wants the object to vanish and be forgotten, the exhibition reveals the stubborn tendency of defaced objects to linger and accrue new meanings The first two rooms, devoted to the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth century,

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

January 2017

Take Comfort

Heather Radke

feature

January 2017

I. One week after Buzz and Heather broke up, she dragged her mattress into her living room. She moved...

fiction

January 2016

By the River

Esther Kinsky

TR. Martin Chalmers

fiction

January 2016

  For Aljoscha   ST LAWRENCE SEAWAY   Under my finger the map, this quiet pale blue of the...

 

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