Ruins I

Ruins are physical. They remain. Yet they are also fragmentary, elusive and incomplete. Ruins speak to us about the past, exist in the present, and yet warn us about our future. The are in fact saturated with juxtapositions and paradoxes and their meanings can swing wildly between extremes. Are ruins a fatalistic warning from a previous civilisation regarding the inevitable outcomes of our own, or an image of balance and harmonious entanglement between the natural and the manmade? A scene of economic decline in the wake of the post-industrial city, or a memorialised graveyard of war and catastrophe? Might they represent the implicit beauty of decay, or the residual trauma of tragedy? The ruin evokes the past, the present and the future; simultaneously addressing something that has passed, remains and is continually re-imagined through its visual reproduction and the scopic regime of the cultural conditions of its observance. Within this ambiguity, of both the ruin and its visual reproduction, exists a chasm of authority and authenticity, a removal of ‘aura’, as Benjamin defined it. A blank canvas, vulnerable to a myriad of retellings, ruins hereby become a contested battleground of meaning, and the challenge of bringing ‘sense from their silence’ seems fraught with an equivocal futility. Boym reminds us that ‘ruin’ means ‘collapse’, but that in actuality say ‘more about remainders and reminders’. Photographs too deal in these fragmentary glimpses, as Berger writes, “A photograph arrests the flow of time in which the event photograph once existed. All photographs are of the past, yet in them an instant of the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived past, it can never lead to its present”.

It is between the recorded event and the present act of seeing that, Berger claims, the viewer experiences a “shock of discontinuity” where an ambiguity arises at the terminus of any further moment.

This post will attempt to explore some of the cultural frameworks with which ruins have been depicted, considered and reflected up, from the Early Romanticism of the Picturesque movement in art, to the contested ideologies of the political ruins of war. The essay will look at the divergent implications of modern ruins, where questions around urbanism, industrialisation and the concept of linear progress emerge, and finally addresses some of the contemporary assemblages of the 21st century, where the ubiquity of ruination (and of images) in contemporary society has founded post-apocalyptic visions and reactionary social practices of ruin tourism sit beside a multiplicity of individual and collectivised forms of ruin aesthetics in the age of internet connectivity.

Although set out in a roughly chronological order, the examples given in this paper are not designed to be considered a detailed, exhaustive or concise history of the image of ruins, nor are they intended to define significant eras or periods of ruin-gaze, but rather to explore how the effects of the cultural gaze, or scopic regime, contextualises the perception of ruins.

Romantic Ruins: The Picturesque

Ruins, considered as a place of contemplation and meaning, are a product of modernity. A development from the Middle Ages where the stones of an unearthed, lost site were often reused, recycled and redeployed to the intended use and desires of a prevailing new settler, with little consideration around former uses. It is not until the Renaissance onwards where the Classical ruins of antiquity become a naturalised source of fascination to artists, poets and writers alike, who might extract inspiration and technique from the models and methods of a past civilisation toward establishing their own idealogical futures; learning, studying, borrowing and reflecting, in an effort to (re)build the future in the past’s image.  “Ruins embody anxieties about human ageing”, this anthropomorphism emerges out of antiquity in the art and science of the Renaissance as a conflation of nature, architecture and the human body.

By the eighteenth century, this technical knowledge attributed a greater secular focus in the West, with an emergent antiquarianism, based on scientific reason finding feet as a discipline (Kennedy, pg. 79, 2002), so too developing into a growing aesthetic movement in the arts toward the Picturesque that championed a rich engagement with a natural landscape charged with a reflective sentimentality.

Reverend William Gilpin’s ‘Observations on the River Wye’ (1782) started a fashion of picturesque landscape appreciation, positioning itself as a formal guide to establishing the inherent beauty in the native English countryside and equating that sense of embodied natural experience alongside emotive, personal reflections.  The wild, untamed and rugged natural landscapes were depicted alongside the irregular forms of decay and ruin in a romanticised theme, one which departed from the marriage of landscape and utility toward a morality and identity that would be increasingly subject to nationalist moderation into the nineteenth century. The notable ruin of this particular excursion, Tintern Abbey, would become a much referenced ruin for English landscape painters and writers alike.

This trend toward images of ruin that might be depicted as though imbued with religious sentimentality or higher, spiritual resonance, and the apparent blending of the natural, pastoral landscape of England with the fragmentary decaying vestiges of ruins that married the qualities of visual beauty in the ruinscape alongside the emotive feelings heightened by a sense of  transcendent, embodied importance, was echoed in the works of a plethora of writers and painters and evidenced too in the production and popularity of many lesser considered yet still instructive forms of anonymous printed media, travel writings and postcards.

In the 1798 poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ (a poem that is often presented alongside the artistic visions of Turner’s Abbey), Wordsworth, who barely references the physical ruin of the poem’s title, begins with an ode to nature and shifts to reflections of nostalgia, demonstrating the experiential quality of sublime contemplation that sites of antiquity evoked for the socially mobile classes of the eighteenth century.  To English landscape painters and writers, the domestic scene proving aptly preferable, as though the European Grand Tour were offered on a local scale, closed borders with France during the Napoleonic War harbouring an insular appreciate of the English landscape and its overlooked antiquities in favour of further glorifying those deemed inaccessible and perhaps politically incongruent abroad.

The Picturesque, as cultivated in the arts and writing of the late eighteenth century, drew upon an aesthetic assemblage of natural and manmade features and stylised vistas of the landscape, as if merged together in a harmonious entanglement of a form and meaning. Kostelnick asserts that Wordsworth subscribed to a richer and more layered understanding of the Picturesque, namely through the analysis of ruins in the poems of Tintern Abbey and The Ruined Cottage, where it is claimed that, akin to Ruskin’s ‘Modern Painters’, Wordsworth’s understanding of picturesque decay evolves into something beyond mere aesthetic appreciation toward that of a moral, philosophical aspect that mirrored with scrutiny at a greater sense of ‘picturesque dignity’ where the authors sympathy with the dynamics of suffering and struggle denote an attitude toward a ‘noble picturesque’ over a ‘surface picturesque’ (Hanley & Walton, 2010). Regardless, “the picturesque flourishes in that oscillation between extremes and opposites” and ruins, therefore, become one of the favoured motifs of the landscape with which to draw upon alongside this new aesthetic sensibility in art.

This oscillation between extremes is evidenced most curiously in J. M. Gandy’s portrayal of the Bank of England in ruins (1830).  This visualisation, rendered as a premonition to its eventual demise, is echoed by the design ideologies of Hitler's architect of choice Albert Speer.  The associations of war in Europe form a greater focus in Part II as it is considered how the emotional distance in time between the event of ruination and the image of ruin shortens, the impact of ruination becomes more visceral.