Ruins in Reverse

Read this article on The Economist’s arts blog, Prospero

Visiting Detroit a couple of years ago, you could enjoy a dust-frosted cupcake from a dilapidated bakery, admire the way weeds twisted through a pavement crumbled to rubble, or take pleasure in the perversity of parking in a multi-storey car park regardless of the empty street below. The city’s dramatic industrial decline famously gave rise to what has been termed “ruin porn” – an influx of photographers, urban explorers and ruin tourists gorging on the artistic and adventurous possibilities of some 80,000 abandoned buildings. Since Detroit filed for America’s largest ever municipal bankruptcy in July last year, the city has been jolted out of its fairytale time-warp. With little scope for fantasy, flatteringly pixelated ruin porn now seems uncomfortably high res.

So, is it really time for a major new show at Tate Britain to be celebrating the artistic products of “Ruin Lust”? The exhibition’s title skirts the exploitative implications of “ruin porn”, focusing instead on the rich history of the aestheticisation of ruin: from the fantasies of 18th century Romantic nostalgia, to the projected ruins of the future iconically defined by Gustave Doré’s engraving “The New Zealander”, to Robert Smithson’s notion of “ruins in reverse” – the idea of a modern world which rises into ruin even as it is created, the terrain of contemporary artists such as Tacita Dean and Gerard Byrne.

For Rose Macaulay, writing “The Pleasure of Ruins” in 1953, “Ruinenlust has come full circle: we have had our fill”. The fact that this statement might equally apply to the present says more about our appetite for ruin than it does about a point of saturation.

What is it that persistently attracts us to ruins? There are as many theories as there are psychogeographers and photographers prowling London’s derelict hotspots from Hampstead to Silvertown. However, it is enough to cite the exhibition’s claim that “we ask a great deal of ruins, and divine a lot of sense from their silence.” In other words, stripped of their original function, form and identity, ruins offer boundless possibilities for subjective interpretation, leaving the imagination free to burrow into minute excavations, or zoom out into grand narratives. “Ruin Lust” can be seen as part of a recent trend for ornately eclectic exhibitions indulging our partiality for visual spectacle, where themes such as archeology or cabinets of curiosity provide a carousel of material traces unanchored by time or place.

What type of sense is really formed from those silences? Is it constructive or indulgent, progressive or self-perpetuating? Wandering through post-revolutionary Saint Petersburg, the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky quipped that the crumbling city was morphing into a Piranesi engraving. A variant of this phenomenon might be interpreted in London’s building projects, from the multi-million property development of London’s most iconic ruin, Battersea Power Station, to the proposition to revitalise Elephant and Castle with a pop-up shopping mall constructed from disused shipping containers. At best, our fascination with ruin is a genuine questing to regain what Hannah Arendt termed “the shock of experience”, an attempt to pop the digital bubble and experience things first hand. At worst, it is a slightly less domesticated version of shabby chic, a kitsch urban inversion of the recent boom in nature writing in which the whimsical “flaneur” maps himself onto the landscape.

As we crawl up the curve of perceived economic recovery, it might be time to ask ourselves how to build the passive ruin gaze into positive practice: architecture which isn’t afraid to factor ruin into the design process. We’ve seen hints of this in projects such as the renovation of Astley Castle, winner of the 2013 Riba Stirling Prize, which celebrates the broken silhouettes and new sightlines that are the upshots of decay. But an engagement with the processes of ruin might equally be applied to campaigns of urban regeneration, typically geared towards denying the possibility of future deterioration. The notion of “ruin value” is notoriously accredited to Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, whose blueprints imagined a future Berlin which would match the majesty of the ruins of Rome. Yet, there is something to be said for a type of city planning that engages with, even celebrates, the process of ruin – not in terms of megalomaniac presumptions or idealised degeneration, but of long term sustainability.

Read this article on The Economist’s arts blog, Prospero