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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....

I decide to drop by Arseny Zhilyaev’s workshop at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow last November, only to find that instead of sitting quietly in the corner and listening to presentations, I am expected to assume the role of artist myself Along with my new-found colleagues, I am to make art as part of a role-playing game set in the Russian Cosmic Federation of the near future By this point in human history, all art is created by AI, but man’s input is still required to advance the performance of machines What we produce is to be evaluated by an assistant curator at Garage, and Zhilyaev himself, who will decide which of us is to represent the Russian Cosmic Federation at an Intergalactic Biennale   I am nervous before the game starts, and bubble with excitement as everyone around me transforms into inhabitants of a post-futurist art world But I get prematurely bored after the first two rounds of producing concepts as a member of the collective, Experimental Zombie Formalism Turns out the art world’s grip on creative freedom can feel suffocating, even in the future In response, my comrades and I go on strike, organize an alternative (and highly irreverent) annual biennale, and end up establishing a cult, of which I am the chief goddess Fictional CEO of a fictional cult, with a divine status acknowledged by a board of devoted disciples – not the worst outcome for a struggling artist in a precarious sci-fi future My brief period of art making, however, does not bring me intergalactic institutional recognition, nor does my work make it into planetary collections I shall perish, nameless and forgotten, as my body dissolves into the ether   Zhilyaev’s work – a mixture of installation, fiction, archival research, publishing, and most recently role-play games – combines Russian cosmist philosophy with a vision of a dystopian soon-to-come The philosophy of cosmism – a mind-boggling combination of science, technology, and spirituality – was originally dreamed up by the nineteenth-century Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorov Fedorov advocated for immortality, and the resurrection of all human beings, proposing that our ever-extending

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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feature

June 2015

Uneasy Lies the Head

William Watkin

feature

June 2015

Last October I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for espresso to trickle from the spout of our imposing...

Art

July 2014

Operation Paperclip

Naomi Pearce

Patrick Goddard

Art

July 2014

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of...

poetry

January 2015

Why I'm Not a Great Lover

Clemens J. Setz

TR. Ross Benjamin

poetry

January 2015

Why I’m Not A Great Lover   The circumstances. The zeitgeist.   The inner uncertainty. The lack of belief...

 

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