Beautiful Terrible Ruins

Dora Apel

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813574080
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte y política

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films.     Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.     

1

Ruin Terrors and Pleasures

Many writers since the nineteenth century have tended to see ruins in quasisacred metaphysical terms, that is, as aestheticized and dehistoricized landscapes that find their locus of fascination in the beautiful and melancholic struggle between nature and culture. This fascination produced what became known as ruin lust. German theorist and cultural critic Georg Simmel, at the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps best articulated this view: “The aesthetic value of the ruin combines the disharmony, the eternal becoming of the soul struggling against itself, with the satisfaction of form, the firm limitedness, of the work of art.” This equation requires equilibrium between matter and nature, “a pillar crumbled—say, halfway down,” for “a maximum of charm” and a sense of unity in which “purpose and accident, nature and spirit, past and present” create a balance of tensions, although the higher pull of spirit is ultimately privileged over the lower pull of nature in a vertical hierarchy of balance.¹ The dehistoricized classical ruins that are the subjects of Simmel’s contemplation, however, constitute a different category of ruination and more easily lend themselves to this sort of subjective ennobling and romanticizing as compared to contemporary deindustrial ruins. On a formal level alone, modernist architecture refuses the return of culture to nature in the manner of ancient ruins in large part because the building materials of concrete, steel, and glass do not delicately crumble in the picturesque way that stone does.

Moreover, the classical ruin has already reached its absolute form as an aesthetic artifact, defining its status as a ruin, and its preservation in this state is enforced and maintained by the guardians of the ruins; the remaining pillars and arches are regarded as eternal. The contemporary ruin, however, is in a continuous state of flux, of “becoming and unbecoming,” as the British philosopher Dylan Trigg observes. The glass continues to break, the paint peels away, the floor and the roof are transformed through stages of collapse, all of which constantly redefine the form and therefore our relationship to the form. The sense of the eternal is replaced by a sense of impermanence, the sense of certainty by uncertainty, “by an unfolding of content in which the phenomenology of detail takes precedence.”² Far more recent in their abandonment and decay, industrial ruins are more likely to be structurally dangerous architectural hulks subject to the depredations of strippers, urban explorers, animals, weather, and other forces. In a continual state of transformation as they decay, industrial ruins largely embody formless decline and disordered space, mirroring the irrationality of the system that has produced them. Contemporary ruins are thus nothing like the Roman, Grecian, and other ancient objects of traditional romantic ruin gazing, which offered modernity a way of conceiving itself in relation to the remains of the ancient past.

Ruin Lust

Ruin gazing engendered ruin lust by the late eighteenth century, when the wealthy went so far as to build fake ruins both for aesthetic and political reasons. Fragments of monasteries and medieval castles, known as follies, were commissioned for English pleasure gardens both for their beauty and for the pleasure their patrons took in seeing the institutions these artificial ruins represented—the papacy and feudal aristocracy—in visible collapse.³ English and French garden follies also took the form of fake Roman temples, to symbolize classical virtues or ideals, as well as Chinese temples, Egyptian pyramids, or Tatar tents, in orientalizing gestures, or they took the form of rustic villages, mills, and cottages, to symbolize rural virtues. One of the most famous examples of such a rustic folly was built at Versailles, allowing Marie Antoinette to play at being a shepherdess.

Ruins of the classical world, consumed through the travel gaze of Europeans, tended to confirm for these viewers the status of European countries as the historical apex of civilization. The British in the eighteenth century, through the Grand Tour of the continent that included the Roman Empire, Greece, and the Middle East, confirmed their own sense of superiority by gazing on the ruins of other civilizations, evoking the terror and delight of the Burkean sublime. The most important aspect of this experience was that the civilizations the ruins represented were always other. The Grand Tour became a kind of ideological exercise intended to cultivate historical consciousness and prepare the upper class for their future position of leadership in the flourishing empire.⁴ Such scenes prompted travelers to make comparisons between past and present civilizations, and these comparisons inevitably privileged contemporaneous conditions over those in the past. Thus, as literary scholar Shane McGowan notes, “The act of ruin gazing reaffirmed the Enlightenment’s teleological narrative of progress, which depicted history as humanity’s inevitable journey from Oriental despotism to Occidental rationality.”⁵ This view necessarily regarded the ruins of antiquity, despite their grandeur, as vestiges of a more barbaric age, making ruin gazing a “ready tool of nationalism” as well as “an even more valuable tool of imperialism and colonialism.”⁶

By the nineteenth century, however, critique of empire entered the romantic lexicon in literature and art. Edward Gibbon’s multivolume history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), firmly established the idea of the unstable and transitory nature of all power, and after the 1793 Reign of Terror, romantics became increasingly skeptical of enduring faith in reason and progress. J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, produced at the height of Great Britain’s wealth and power following the collapse of Napoleon’s empire in 1815, offered another warning of imperial decline, while Joseph Gandy’s painting An Imagined View of the Bank of England in Ruins (1830) pictured the collapse of the major financial underwriter of the Napoleonic Wars (figure 3). Gandy’s aerial perspective of the interlocking maze of offices became reality almost a century later when the bank’s interiors were demolished in the 1920s. Thomas Cole’s series The Course of Empire, depicting the rise and fall of an imaginary city that refers to Carthage, was influenced by Turner and carried the warning of imperial decline into 1830s America. Ed Ruscha then reimagined the fall of American empire in the post-9/11 era, producing a series of works representing industrialized modernity in decay as part of the exhibition The Course of Empire shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in conjunction with Cole’s series in 2006, transforming spectators into ruin gazers and witnesses to the decline of empire once more.⁷ Hovering over the Whitney exhibition were the spectral images of the Twin Towers as the most chilling warning of contemporary imperial decline.

The Third Reich provides an example of ruin lust in the form of planned future ruins. Albert Speer’s conception of “ruin value” in Nazi monumental architecture was designed with an eye toward its future picturesque decay through the use of stone rather than concrete and steel. The concept of ruin value was meant to assert both German imperial power far into the future and German mastery over its own ruination. While Speer asserted that his theory of ruin value arose in response to Hitler’s definition of architecture as a “bridge” across time, German studies scholar Julia Hell suggests that Speer reinvented the ruin gazer in the Third Reich because the Nazis were pre occupied with countering the specter of imperial decline, especially after publication of Oswald Spengler’s highly influential The Decline of the West (the first volume was published in 1918 and revised in 1922; the second volume was published in 1923), which embraced modernity’s ruination.⁸ While Spengler allows for the possibility of a future barbarian ruin gazer from a foreign culture, Hell argues that Hitler and Speer were at pains to construct a future Aryan ruin gazer who would marvel at the spectacle of Nazi imperial power while keeping the future “barbarian” ruin gazer out of sight through their program of slavery and genocide.⁹ Hell also suggests that the unique Nazi articulation of imperial creation and destruction represents an anxious awareness and fear of the retaliation that awaited them for the crimes of monstrous proportions they knew they were committing. It was this awareness that ultimately drove the Nazi mania for ruins, a plan that was nevertheless foiled.¹⁰ Although Hitler insisted that his architects build for “eternity,” Speer’s Reich’s Chancellery, his most famous building, completed in 1939, did not crumble picturesquely like the Roman ruins shown to Hitler by Mussolini on his visit to Rome. Instead, the Chancellery was bombed by Allied air raids four years later and then razed by the Soviets, defeating the future realization of Aryan ruin gazing.

FIG. 3 Joseph Gandy, An Imagined View of the Bank of England in Ruins, 1830. Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

What distinguishes the experience of contemporary ruin gazing from that of viewing ancient ruins is not only the difference in the physical nature and materials of the ruin but also the greater mental effort required to distance oneself. This distancing is what facilitates a sense of political and cultural superiority over the disaster of ruination. But what happens when those ruins are in one’s own homeland? Modern ruins cannot be safely ensconced in obsolete civilizations that only demonstrate the superiority of our own. Unlike eighteenth-century follies and Grand Tours that reinforced notions of cultural and political superiority in relation to the failed empires of past foreign cultures, contemporary ruins function as a critique of our own social conditions and thus are more closely aligned with the critical perspective of late romantic art and literature. The warnings of imperial decline through a postapocalyptic aesthetic, which began to picture ruins within the West itself in the late romantic period, suggest a critique of empire that begins at home.¹¹

The phrase “ruin lust” was coined by English novelist and essayist Rose Macaulay. When Macaulay returned to her flat in London following the death of her sister in 1941, she discovered that her home and all her possessions, including her beloved library, had been destroyed in a bombing a few nights before. Macaulay was haunted by the loss. Yet in 1953 she published Pleasure of Ruins, in which she discussed the history of ruin lust and meditated on the nature of “new ruins” and the pleasure they inspired:

New ruins have not yet acquired the weathered patina of age, the true rust of the barons’ wars, not yet put on their ivy, nor equipped themselves with the appropriate bestiary of lizards, bats, screech-owls, serpents, speckled toads and little foxes which, as has been so frequently observed by ruin-explorers, hold high revel in the precincts of old ruins. . . . But new ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality. . . . What was last week a drab little house has become a steep flight of stairs winding up in the open between gaily-coloured walls, tiled lavatories, interiors bright and intimate like a Dutch picture or a state set; the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky.¹²

In her phrases describing the “smell of fire and mortality” and the “roofless summit” of a staircase meeting the sky, Macaulay captures the rawness of new ruins while asserting that “ruin pleasure must be at one remove, softened by art,” as well as poetry and fantasy. For ruin pleasure, she asserts, is “merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”¹³ Macaulay’s acute insight into the need for a “remove” in order for ruin pleasure to occur merits further exploration through the concept of the sublime.

The Deindustrial Sublime

The strategies of contemporary ruin imagery are necessarily in dialogue with romanticism and the aesthetic of the sublime. The romantic sublime came to apply to catastrophic events and to the act of ruin gazing in the eighteenth century; scenes of ruin became both spectacles of eerie beauty and testaments to the humbling power of nature in which the spectator could delight in experiencing its visual effects while escaping its ravages. For both Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the two most important theorists of the sublime in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the experience of the sublime depended upon distance and safety as conditions that were crucial for the enjoyment of a scene that would otherwise be too terrifying to endure. This distance could be spatial or temporal, but it was always mental.

Mental, temporal, and spatial distance thus allows for the conceptual grasp and rationalization, or the domestication and taming of the terror before us, permitting its aestheticization and enjoyment. As Kant explained in his Critique of Judgment, sublimity is, in fact, never found in nature but only in the mind: “Hence sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us (as far as it influences us). Whatever arouses this feeling in us, and this includes the might of nature that challenges our forces, is then (although improperly) called sublime.”¹⁴ Kant asserts that the forces in nature that arouse sublime experience are improperly called sublime because it is the internal mental act of mastery that transforms the terrifying into a thrilling sense of superiority.

This understanding of the sublime as aesthetic experience arrived at through contemplation made possible by safety and distance—the sublime as a “taming category” by which the terrifying is made enjoyable—helps to explain the compelling power and pleasure of contemporary ruin gazing and ruin imagery. Since the taming of terror is a crucial component of the sublime, it follows that catastrophe, destruction, and ruination can produce subjectively sublime experience. In addition to events such as fires, droughts, floods, tsunamis, tornados, hurricanes, meteor crashes, and viral pandemics, in modern times, catastrophe and the ruined landscape also can proceed through the quicker or slower events of nuclear power plant meltdowns, explosions and warfare, climate change, deindustrialization, and economic collapse. The terror these events produce are aestheticized not only by picturing the beauty of actual decay but also through fantasy disasters, from the Cold War era sci-fi thrillers of killer monsters, mutants, robots, and aliens to contemporary zombie invasions and other apocalyptic catastrophes.

It is telling that the romantic sublime was conceptualized following one of the most catastrophic events in Europe: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Combined with subsequent fires and a tsunami, the earthquake almost totally destroyed the city of Lisbon, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Modernity in Ruins
• 1. Ruin Terrors and Pleasures
• 2. Fear and Longing in Detroit
• 3. Urban Exploration: Beauty in Decay
• 4. Detroit Ruin Images: Where Are the People?
• 5. Looking for Signs of Resurrection
• 6. Surviving in the Postapocalyptic Landscape
• Conclusion: Your Town Tomorrow
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author