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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...

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ The immortal first line to L P Hartley’s The Go-Between wistfully condenses the problems inherent to memory and history Distant, intangible, unreliable, lost, our histories, at the levels of personal and national, are at best half-remembered and at worst actively misrepresented Within the sphere of contemporary art, and more specifically moving-image, artists seem increasingly to be responding to the challenges posed by reconstituting the past in order to chart collective and individual memory through a strategy of re-enactment   The function and effect of such work is powerful: as academic Andreas Huyssen states, ‘[the] past is not simply there in memory … it must be articulated to become memory’ A number of video works in the past decade have interacted imaginatively with archives and the documentary genre in order to reanimate marginalised stories and revisit personal or collective traumas In the latter case re-enactment draws on psychotherapeutic methods used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress In ‘talk therapy’ the patient is asked to discuss the traumatic experience, and through cognitive analysis find some way through the damage wrought Treatment is continued through ‘exposure therapy’ in which a patient is made to confront the very thing that they fear, and through repetition learn strategies to cope with it   Re-enactments also provide the artist with a means of representing the past using a theatricality that through its distancing of the viewer deconstructs history as truth, allowing for fresh interpretation Writer Rebecca O’Dwyer, defending re-enactment in contemporary art against charges of conservatism, reads it instead as an active form of remembering through which we can establish a new relationship to the past, a past understood as being in a constant state of flux Here we examine six moving image works that negotiate the past through reconstruction and re-enactment     Jeremy Deller, ‘The Battle of Orgreave’, (2001) Excerpt from The Battle of Orgreave from Artangel on Vimeo     For this Artangel commission, a masterpiece of re-enactment, Jeremy Deller orchestrated a

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

November 2015

Interview with Dor Guez

Helen Mackreath

Interview

November 2015

Dor Guez, artist, scholar, photographer, archivist, wants to avoid being classified, but it’s difficult not to fall into the...

fiction

June 2015

Hollow Heart

Viola Di Grado

TR. Antony Shugaar

fiction

June 2015

2011   I. In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself.   On July 23, at 3:29 in the...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Jem Cohen

Steve Macfarlane

Interview

October 2014

Jem Cohen may be one of the quintessential New York filmmakers of our era. Peerless in his knack for...

 

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