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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



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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...

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is the story of the post-war avant-garde Born out of the rubble of Nazism — Kassel was a manufacturing centre specialising in the production of tanks, and was heavily bombed during the Second World War — the state-funded exhibition sought to reframe attitudes to culture skewed by the Third Reich’s denunciation of entartete kunst, its attacks on free expression, and its recapitulation of art as propaganda Unsurprisingly given the circumstances of its birth, Documenta has historically been defined by its profound suspicion of the systems of money and power that serve to instrumentalise art It enshrines a vision of culture as a means of resisting the kind of group think — characterised by the passive acceptance of images and information — that precipitated Europe’s descent into chaos, and which now threatens to do so again   Those points of resistance have shifted over the decades In the wake of Fascism, the free expression of Henry Moore and the playfulness of Alexander Calder’s mobiles thrilled audiences in 1955; in the coming editions, as Germany struggled to deal with the legacy of its actions during the war, visitors flocked to see Pop Art’s promotion of American freedom When the mood shifted against capitalism and consumerism, so Harald Szeemann’s 1972 Documenta — one of the most important exhibitions in contemporary art history — focused on performances and ideas, meaning works of art that can’t be sold (although the market, ever ingenious, soon found a way)  In 2002, Okwui Enwezor’s celebrated eleventh edition put forward a global vision of art that challenged the priority of North America and Europe and set the agenda for a decade in which institutions focused on acquiring Latin American, African and Asian art in order to balance out their collections (for one example, visit the recently rehung Tate Modern) So it goes on: Documenta is both survey and manifesto, redrawing the parameters of contemporary art at five-year intervals according to the socio-political circumstances in which it is staged   Which brings us to 2017,

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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Prize Entry

April 2017

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Anna Glendenning

Prize Entry

April 2017

 1. PhD   Blue bedroom, Grandma’s house, Aigburth, Liverpool   I gave birth to one hundred thousand words. Tessellated,...

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June 2014

Turning the Game Around

Daniel Galera

TR. Rahul Bery

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June 2014

Once upon a time there was – no, better: you are a thief who wanders through the cities and...

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March 2013

Heroines

Kate Zambreno

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March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking...

 

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