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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

Picture    Adam has just tasted the forbidden fruit; he’s bitten into the apple and he’s condemned to roll it in his mouth for eternity His mouth, wide open, is bitter The gigantic size of the apple matches in scale the enormity of the sin The same colour as the apple, a flower Looked at closely, this flower is a face What face? Sisyphus, who’s generally reduced in the mind’s eye, wrongly, to a stubborn boulder, was a crafty man, so crafty that the wordsmiths have claimed he was the father of Ulysses Wily, twisting, labyrinthine, craftiness evokes nets, laces, snares, knots And indeed, Sisyphus succeeded in chaining Thanatos who’d come to escort him to the kingdom of the dead    He’s the only mortal to have succeeded at this unheard-of exploit: cheating Death, ensnaring him, reducing him to powerlessness, to such a degree that the Immortals, jealous of their privilege, come to Death’s rescue and set him free On a corner of the apple, a squirrel… no, a hobgoblin… or rather, a bird It’s indifferent to the torments of Adam-Sisyphus and the symbolic implications of this picture    Indifferent, too, to the spectator    *   The Black Mantle    After killing the Minotaur, Theseus succeeded in getting out of the labyrinth thanks to the thread of Ariadne – Ariadne whom he would abandon (the ungrateful wretch!) on a desert island   These days, the labyrinth is empty and silent   All the same, the shadow of the Minotaur floats there, disconsolate and threatening – all in vain The shadow yearns to be set free, but it doesn’t know how to leave this sinister place and rejoin the kingdom of the dead So it continues to wander, without respite, in the inextricability of the labyrinth From time to time, it knocks into other shadows, those of its victims    On Olympus, the gods, gathered together on the occasion of a banquet, turn to Thanatos and ask him why he did he not escort the Minotaur to Hell Wrapped in his black mantle, Thanatos timidly lowers his eyes and does not answer   So the gods leave with a huge burst

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Interview

August 2016

Interview with Daniel Sinsel

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Interview

August 2016

In the decade after leaving Chelsea School of Art in 2002, Daniel Sinsel made a name for himself with...

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Issue No. 15

Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 15

In The Art of the Publisher, Roberto Calasso suggests that publishing is something approaching an art form, whereby ‘all...

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October 2012

Pressed Up Against the Immediate

Rye Dag Holmboe

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October 2012

The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched...

 

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