Unearthing the Ruin: Brian Dillon · 2009-11-06 22:05
A quick, free talk by Brian Dillon (editor of Cabinet Magazine) at Barbican Lates, to celebrate Robert Kusmirowski’s Bunker in the Curve. It’s interesting and alluring, as it’s a field I’m not very familiar with. It will be explored from a different angle on the 18th Nov, in a discussion about Defensive Architecture in Offensive Times. You can also read a more narrative account than these garbled notes in Cabinet.
Very rough notes (it’s not a topic I’m familiar with):
Looking at the history of ruination.
(Acoustics are unexplored in ruination).
The Renaissance: ruin appears not as object, but a theatrical scenography.
Theatre runs through the history of ruination and fake ruins.
18th Century: “ruin lust” / picturesque.
More poetic fakery of ruination – in English literature.
Ruins give atmosphere and historical background.
Change to ruin study in and of itself.
End of the 18thC: fantastical projection of the ruin into the future.
Sir John Soane – projection of ruination of the Bank of England.
Hubert Robert’s Louvre in Ruins.
Fuseli’s The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins.
Literary: Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey.
Imagining the past and projecting it into the future.
Kubla Khan – itself a fragment, a ruin.
Link between ruination and melancholy – Chateaubriand.
Ruination in contemporary art –
Robert Smithson, an ironic, absurdist take: A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (pdf)
“the ruin in reverse”, 20thC monuments that dot Passaic, especially along the river, excavated for road building, read as a classical ruin / eternal city.
A dialectical landscape: Central Park.
19thC decayed into the 20thC.
Shuttles between past, present and unknowable future. Projects ruination into the future – the coming catastrophe.
Paul Virilio – Bunker Archeology. Photos taken in the 50s, Nazi Atlantic Wall.
Anthropomorphic structures, modernist. Link between 50s/60s architecture and defensive architecture.
Relics of the very recent that has accelerated ruination, and it talks about a future that hasn’t happened.
90s art – 99 – Tacita Dean – Sound Mirrors. (Disinformation’s prior art)
Future anterior, a relic from the future (now a cliche in culture).
An unlived and impossible future.
Dean’s Palast, 2004 (film of the Palast der Republik)
A highly charged ruin. Now erased from the immediately recent history – to be replaced with a fake Schloss.
A moment in art of thinking about the relics of British modernism.
Now – Hiorns,… Seemingly romantic view of ruins.
St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross near Glasgow, (1, 2, 3 ), under the influence of Le Corbusier.
Murray Grigor’s film Space And Light (apparently also recently reshot, shot-for-shot in the ruins):
(more videos, Urban Splash rear their heads)
Jeremy Millar: Ajapeegel, filmed in 2 Estonian power stations, recreating Tarkovsky’s film ‘Stalker’.
Bunker: foregrounding of theatricality. People want to treat it as immersive, there’s an invitation of textures. Picks up a strand of frank fakery, the spectator is aware. What is the pull/attraction when we know it’s entirely fake? (similarly with fake gothic).
Questions –
Bunkers of France? Art Deco style? – to be covered in the talk on the 18th.
Acoustics of ruin?
Millar’s Time-Mirror, recreating the sounds of Stalker using the power station on the Isle of Grain. Layers of fiction and distance.
There was a project proposal for the sound mirrors, to recreate exact replicas on the French Coast so that they could correspond – too literal. Invention & storytelling needed, a refusal of the literalism, literal resonance.
Nostalgia?
That’s the big inescapable question. At the heart of most recent art. Psychological links between ruin lust and nostalgia, both 18thC afflictions. Aesthetic archeology to be done. So much work about – when you claim to have escaped it, you’ve normally fallen right into it.