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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...

In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded by the airless eroticism of Pre-Raphaelite portraiture, all drowning Ophelias and hieratic Lady Macbeths, the founder of the Museum of Transology, E-J Scott, asked a mixture of queer activists and members of the public how to go about building a museum in which ‘we can save the queer past for the queer future’ and where ‘we all can become curators of queer heritage’ For some, a queer museum was necessary so the world could see that queers exist For others, a separate queer museum would only absolve other institutions from diversifying their collections One speaker questioned why black queerness should be defined by a museum, itself a European institution long bound up with the colonial subjugation of Africa and its diaspora There was little threat of the discussion getting out of hand among the Tate’s polite, predominately white middle-class audience But just in case, Scott had distributed oversized plastic toy tools among queer activists in the audience, to control the order of the discussion One by one they were called in: hammer, screw-driver, spanner Building a queer museum, it was suggested, was a matter of finding ‘the right tools for the job’   A museum is an institution for relating things in time It arranges objects not just in rooms, but in a history that moves in a continuous line from past to present, in order to show the development of a communal identity In theory this can be the universal humanity disingenuously imagined by the British Museum or the Louvre; in practice it is often the more narrowly defined ethnic nation produced by Tate Britain, whose natural continuity and organic reproduction across time is enabled by the museum’s presentation of an archive of ‘our’ past Perhaps one reason why the discussion at the Tate had to be handled so delicately, as if disagreement was something that only happened among children, was because of a suspicion that as a way of using time a museum is inherently contradictory

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

November 2012

Film: Difficulties in Impression Management

Patrick Goddard

Art

November 2012

Difficulties in Impression Management, 2012 Running time 13’09”

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

Prize Entry

April 2015

How things are falling.

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2015

i.   Oyster cards were first issued to members of the British public in July 2003; by June 2015...

 

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