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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...

‘To live,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘means to leave traces’ As one might expect, Benjamin’s observation is not without a certain melancholy Traces are lost in the grand sweep of history And, in today’s world of mass-production, anonymous spectacle and gleaming, sterile surfaces, it has become increasingly difficult to leave traces For Benjamin, it had become increasingly difficult to live   Yet people do leave traces in their wake: the refuse and detritus of history; the variegated remnants of daily life; or dust A trace is ephemeral, a locus of ambivalence suspended in the unstable space between construction and dispersal, presence and absence A trace is very little, almost nothing But it is also an index of life   Gabriel Orozco’s artistic practice could be described, I think, as an aesthetic of the trace The works presented in his retrospective at Tate Modern share a sense of temporal precariousness that is far removed from the mythic aura of timelessness that has enveloped today’s world In other words, the ‘eternal present’[1] that the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson diagnosed as endemic in postmodernity, a symptom of the disappearance of the subject through the ubiquity of simulacra; that is, commodified, depthless and mass-produced items that conflate time’s three horizons into an indissoluble ‘now’ (think Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980)) Orozco’s works, however, are provisional They are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone (1992) Plasticine ball and street debris The paradoxically titled Yielding Stone (1992), for instance, consists of a black lump of plasticine formed in the weight of the artist’s own body The work is rolled onto the street where this highly malleable and greasy material absorbs whatever residue it encounters Yielding Stone registers what would usually vanish without a trace, like a memorial of the ephemeral Indeed, one might literally describe the work as sedimented history Combined with its amorphous shape, this has led commentators to read the work as evocative of the archaic or the primordial In addition, its processual nature has tended to be understood in relation to

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

Issue No. 10

Patterns

Christian Newby

Art

Issue No. 10

poetry

January 2016

Sex-Desert

Galina Rymbu

TR. Joan Brooks

poetry

January 2016

I’m screaming lying alone in this settlement     everything empty only emptiness sex – is a desert  ...

poetry

July 2012

Fig-tree

John Clegg

poetry

July 2012

He trepans with the blunt screwdriver on his penknife: unripe figs require the touch of air on flesh to...

 

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