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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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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....

‘When you love, you are nailed to the cross,’ says a character in Rainer Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) In Cigarettes, Harry Mathews’s novel published in the same year, a character finds himself quite literally crucified, replete with a crown of thorns – a consequence, and perversion, of love In Catholic theology, the idea of a love so pure as to evoke the ultimate sacrifice is approximated through the relic: a scrap of a shroud, a fragment of bone, a nail once pierced through flesh Imbued with the charge of history and the promise of salvation, these items both fuel and sustain the particular desire for proximity to holiness among believers   Pilgrims to Danh Vo’s mid-career survey at the Guggenheim Museum may find such desires pricked, teased, and thwarted by works that package the relic for the contemporary art market The Danish-Vietnamese artist, known for conceptual installations comprising rare and curiously sourced ready-mades, has been a fixture in blue-chip galleries and private collections At the Guggenheim, these objects are sparsely arranged on the museum’s winding ramp, where they are called upon to invoke grand themes: the legacy of American imperialism, and the artist’s lapsed Catholicism, among them Vo was born in Bà Ria, Vietnam toward the end of the Vietnam War, and moved with his family to a refugee camp in Singapore, settling eventually in Denmark Interspersing family photographs with artefacts from colonial Vietnam, the exhibition oscillates between intimate glimpses of the artist’s life and the sweep of history   Vo’s connection to a network of high-profile lenders has abetted a practice of skilled connoisseurship that allows the artist to impress audiences by the sheer incredulity of his acquisition Hung along the Guggenheim’s ramp is a chandelier from the former ballroom of the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where the Paris Peace Accord ending the Vietnam War was signed in 1973 In 2012, Vo acquired a group of objects from the estate of Robert S McNamara – the American secretary of defence between 1961 and 1968 – when the Vietnam War began to escalate Lot 20 Two Kennedy Administration

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...

READ NEXT

poetry

April 2014

Lives of the Saints

Luke Neima

poetry

April 2014

‘I’m tending to this dead tree,’ he tells me. Last time he was rolling the hard rocks down into...

poetry

June 2011

Testament: Two Poems

Connie Voisine

poetry

June 2011

Testament What’s the difference? You might wear it out touching, touching, not buying. Like a snail on a stick,...

feature

October 2013

A World of Sharp Edges: A Week Among Poets in the Western Cape

André Naffis-Sahely

feature

October 2013

In Antal Szerb’s The Incurable, the eccentric millionaire Peter Rarely steps into the dining car of a train steaming...

 

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