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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...

There seems to be a general consensus about Pierre Guyotat: barely anyone reads him Those who do read him agree that his is an important body of work His sensational 1967 novel, Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (published as Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers in 2003 by Creation Books), his third book, came out when he was 27 Fashioned by his experiences in the Algerian War, where he was stationed with the French army from 1960-62, it presented the motifs that became recurrent in Guyotat’s work – namely sex, oppression and misery   Guyotat’s second big book, Eden, Eden, Eden, was also inspired by wartime Algeria Published in 1970, it was banned from being advertised and sold to minors, despite containing three prefaces by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers (with whom Guyotat was a member of the avant-garde literary collective Tel Quel, which was very close to the French Communist Party from 1968-71) An international petition in support of the book, signed by intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Max Ernst and Joseph Beuys, and a handwritten letter from French President Georges Pompidou also failed to move the censors, who maintained the restrictions on Eden   Guyotat’s radicalism can be ascribed as much to the violence of the scenes he describes as to his formal exploration of the French language: he attempts to reconcile its epic and oral dimensions, while rejecting psychology The intensity he demands from his writing is such that he has constrained himself to total sexual abstinence for close to thirty years He is a writer of living tableaux, both vivid and crude, that usually take place in brothels populated by masters, (mostly) masculine slaves, ‘whores’, and clients gone astray The whores, condemned to receiving the bodies of others from the moment of their births until death, are the incessant repositories of genitals, semen, excrements and flies This perpetual motion is enacted through dialogues with both tragic and comic dimensions Marked by the Marxist materialist ideology of the Seventies, Guyotat’s work depicts the permanence of situations of exploitation by dominant peoples to the point of obsession

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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Art

September 2016

Sitting, scrawling, playing

Emily Gosling

Art

September 2016

Amidst the drills and concrete, white walls and big names of London’s Cork Street stands a new gallery, Nahmad Projects,...

fiction

March 2011

In the Field

Jesse Loncraine

fiction

March 2011

There were flickers of red in the water, a tint the colour of blood. He stood in the river,...

poetry

June 2017

Austrian Murder Case

Phoebe Power

poetry

June 2017

At the Konditorei   Close, warm, and humming with the relaxed sounds of post- midday Kaffee-Kuchen. The  cakes are...

 

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