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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....

Four or so years ago, at what was then the single Peckham establishment to serve a selection of sandwiches (the competition is, now, dispiritingly intense), my breakfast companion recognised two girls at a neighbouring table from the previous evening’s party We struck up a pleasant conversation, the substance of which escape me, but which ended, unforgettably, with their inviting us to a naked barbecue and film screening at the house in which they lived I didn’t go, despite promising to at the time, and have ever since regretted it   This, I would later discover, was the nudist commune in which the artist Spartacus Chetwynd lived [Editor’s note: since the publication of this interview, the artist has changed her name to Marvin Gaye Chetwynd] Spartacus had even then the aura of a legend among South East London’s art community, having established a cult following for her absurdist, fabulous theatrical happenings with productions including:   – ‘An Evening with Jabba the Hutt’ (2003): in which Spartacus herself is among a scantily-clad harem attending to Star Wars’ notorious slave trader, re-imagined as a smooth-talking Lothario with a platform to expound his opinions on global politics – ‘The Fall of Man’ (2006): for which passages from the Book of Genesis, Paradise Lost and The German Ideology are reconceived for performance by puppets manipulated by glum, painted pierrots – ‘Hermito’s Children’ (2008): a multi-screen, narrative video work describing the efforts of transgender detectives to solve the case of a girl who dies after suffering an excess of orgasms on a dildo seesaw Her work combines epic ambition with a jerry-rigged aesthetic in performances that often inspire the audience (and participants) to giggles This hilarity does not, however, disguise or contradict the work’s radicalism and sharp social commentary Take ‘The Walk to Dover’, a week-long march in the guise of Dickensian street urchins from London to Dover, which followed in David Copperfield’s footsteps The 2005 work draws comparisons between Victorian debtors’ prisons and our contemporary reliance upon credit cards that now seem unnervingly prescient This was the same year – to contextualise – that

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

January 2017

Interview with Barbara T. Smith

Ciara Moloney

Interview

January 2017

Californian artist Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931) is something of a performance art legend. It was in the 1960s...

Art

November 2015

None of this is Real

Anna Coatman

Art

November 2015

Rachel Maclean’s films are startlingly new and disturbingly familiar. Splicing fairy tales with reality television shows, tabloid stories, Disney...

feature

Issue No. 16

Scroll, Skim, Stare

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 16

1.   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples. It includes no examples because its...

 

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