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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....

The feeling of drug-induced euphoria could be strips of gauze between beautiful fingers Or a silver slinky sent down a torso by its own muscle, between breasts raised towards God The perfect face of Donyale Luna, all bush baby eyes and strings of jewels in sunlight Cigarette smoke sucked back in through dusty lips The indistinguishable thrusts of dancing or sex or devotion It could also be the violence of caged dogs, palm leaves dishevelled by storms, a relentless tide and the wreckage of bodies on cracked earth Composed entirely of found video and dedicated to Luna, a supermodel and actress now forty years dead from heroin, Sirens (2019) is Nan Goldin’s memorial to the act of getting high   The success of Goldin’s work – its drama, her magnetism – has burdened her over the years with the unhappy credits that are often the risk of influence In the decade that followed The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a medley of photos in which the pale and angular people of her life are splayed lawlessly over rooms and each other, then-US-President Bill Clinton accused ‘Dan [sic] Goldin’ of trailblazing ‘heroin chic’ The term came to designate the era’s romance with strung-out, starved depravity Goldin’s 1996 photographs of sixteen-year-old model James King, taken for a profile in the New York Times Style Magazine, distilled a darkly erotic aesthetic that disturbed as much as it seduced A junior veteran of drugs, King’s was the questionable glamour of a skinny girl with the face of a child – most beautiful on waking, as a friend reported, when she’s ‘coughing her guts out’   But just as our culture compulsively points at ringleaders, so does it love a messiah In recent years Goldin has swung from unholy harbinger of heroin to saviour of America’s opioid crisis Since early 2019, Goldin’s activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have repurposed art institutions as stages of dissent against the art world’s taste for Sackler family money – donations from the Pharma moguls known to have deceitfully flogged OxyContin as a safe

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

July 2013

Interview with Paul Muldoon

Alice Whitwham

Interview

July 2013

A major figure in English-language poetry for decades, Paul Muldoon has enjoyed one of the most successful careers of...

feature

Issue No. 1

In Somaliland

feature

Issue No. 1

On a traffic island in the middle of Somaliland’s capital city, Hargeisa, is the rusting shell of fighter jet...

fiction

June 2013

What We Did After We Lost 100 Years' Wealth in 24 Months

Agri Ismaïl

fiction

June 2013

‘World finance had, in 2008, a near-death experience.’   The words belong to a partner of a renowned international...

 

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