1  

The  Future-­‐Past:  Competing  Temporalities  of  the  Ruin.  

Ruin  Lust,  Tate  Britain  4  March  –  18  May  2014.  

   

A  fascination  with  ruins  has  not  always  been  with  us.  It  presumes,  for  one,  a  linear  notion  of  

time,  in  other  words  the  idea  that  the  past  is  irrevocably  lost.  It  is  also  born  of  a  forensic  –  or  

archaeological  –  interest  in  history,  one  that  sees  in  broken  remains  the  traces  of  past  acts  

and  endeavours.    The  desire  to  contemplate  ruins  also  suggests  wistfulness,  the  inevitable  

melancholy  borne  by  something  broken  that  was  once  complete,  together  with  a  warning  

against  hubristic  assumptions  of  permanence  of  any  kind.  

Ruin  Lust,  at  the  Tate  Britain,  is  a  meandering  visual  essay  curated  mostly  out  of  works  in  the  

Tate  collection  by  writer  and  critic  and  UK  editor  of  Cabinet  magazine,  Brian  Dillon  (together  

with  Emma  Chambers  and  Amy  Concannon).    The  title  is  a  loose  translation  of  the  German  

term  Ruinelust,  resurrected  by  novelist  Rose  Macaulay  in  1953.  But  the  English  term  loses  in  

preciseness  what  it  gains  in  vigour  and  impetus:  the  German  word  Lust  would  more  correctly  

be  translated  as  pleasure,  though  ‘the  pleasure  of  ruins’  doesn’t  quite  cut  the  mustard  as  a  

crowd-­‐puller.  It  does,  however,  serve  as  the  moniker  for  two  of  its  rooms.  Svetlana  Boym,  

who  has  made  the  conflicting  temporalities  of  nostalgia  in  architecture  and  urbanisation  her  

object  of  study,  suggests  ruinophilia  as  the  appropriate  term,  but  ruin  lust  offers  the  perfect  

sound-­‐bite  for  a  show  that  fascinatingly  invites  us  to  contemplate  not  so  much  ruins,  as  the  

idea  of  the  ruin  and  our  passionate  attachment  to  this  idea,  explored  by  artists  from  the  

eighteenth  century  to  our  own  times.  This  exhibition  brilliantly  plots  a  tour  through  our  

culture’s  obsession  with  decay,  from  the  dreamy  contemplation  of  the  crumbling  remains  of  

classical  antiquity,  via  fantasised  evocations  of  future  ruins,  through  urban  hinterlands  to  

military  apocalypse.  

The  first  room  sets  the  tone  of  the  exhibition.  Here,  John  Martin’s  theatrical,  psychedelically  

lit  The  Destruction  of  Pompeii  and  Herculaneum  (1822),  a  painting  that  itself  was  subjected  

to  ruin  and  revival,  is  pitted  against  John  Constable’s  heavily  scumbled  outdoor  oil  sketch  of  

the  ruins  of  Hadleigh  Castle  (1828).  The  two  paintings  stand  for  distinct  styles  of  British  

Romanticism  –  the  sublime  and  the  picturesque  –  and  both  are  set  against  Jane  and  Louise  

Wilson’s  photograph  Azeville  (2005),  showing  the  abandoned  remains  of  the  Allied  airfield  

built  in  that  Norman  region  towards  the  end  of  World  War  II.  The  tour  proper  is  then  

launched  with  works  that  are  hung,  especially  in  the  first  few  rooms,  in  dialogue  with  one  

another.  Piranesi,  Turner,  John  Sell  Cotman,  but  also  John  Piper,  Graham  Sutherland,  John  

Stedzaker,  Edward  Allington  and  Laura  Oldfield  Ford.  Where  the  works  are  more  

traditionally  and  predictably  linked  –  the  two  astonishing  architectural  conjectures  of  Rome  

  2  

by  Piranesi,  or  the  views  of  Tintern  Abbey  by  Turner  and  Peter  van  Lerberghe  respectively,  

or  of  Netley  Abbey  by  Francis  Towne  and  Samuel  Prout  respectively  –  the  show  is  certainly  

more  beautiful  and  educative  than  surprising.  But  where  the  gathering  of  artists  is  truly  

heterogeneous  and  quirky  (clearly,  limitations  were  set  by  working  within  the  given  

parameters  of  a  single  collection),  hazarding  a  loss  of  visual  coherence,  the  curatorial  line  of  

thought  becomes  at  once  riskier,  and  more  adventurous.  Rooms  2  and  3  –  under  the  rubric  

of  The  Pleasure  of  Ruins  –  where  old  works  are  most  blatantly  juxtaposed  with  more  recent  

ones  in  suggesting  that  the  pleasure  we  take  from  ruins  spans  different  areas  of  interest,  is,  

while  fascinating,  the  least  cohesive  section  of  the  exhibition,  and  one  where  the  line  of  

thought  seems  least  clear,  though  in  an  exhibition  dedicated  to  ruins,  perhaps  lack  of  

cohesiveness  has  to  be  seen  as  a  positive  value,  if  not  a  downright  curatorial  strategy.  

The  later  rooms  lead  us  through  different  notions  of  the  ruin,  now  more  consistently  figured,  

not  as  vestiges  of  the  corrosive  effects  of  time,  but  as  the  remainders  and  reminders  of  

human-­‐  or  regime-­‐made  disaster.  Particularly  moving  are  the  ruins  of  war,  or  what  cultural  

theorist  Paul  Virilio  has  dubbed  ‘bunker  archaeology’,  which  is  the  title  given  to  Room  5.  

Virilio  coined  the  term  in  its  narrowest  sense  for  the  haunting  (and  haunted)  remains  of  

German  bunkers  on  the  French  coast,  but  used  it  more  generally  to  refer  to  the  abandoned  

remains  of  military  prowess  and  as  a  point  of  departure  for  a  consideration  of  war  in  

general.  (In  a  recent  television  programme  on  BBC4,  Bunkers,  Brutalism  and  

Bloodymindedness:  Concrete  Poetry,  Jonathan  Meades  explored  the  fascination  exerted  by  

such  structures).  The  paintings  of  John  Piper  and  Graham  Sutherland  (I  profess  no  lost  love  

for  either  artist)  look  tame  and  illustrative,  but  Paul  Nash’s  paintings  and,  especially,  his  

photographs  suggest  an  analogy  between  the  devastated  landscapes  of  war  and  the  bare  

bones  of  human  and  animal  remains.  Contemporary  works  are  almost  ubiquitously  

photographic,  and  include  prison  walls  discovered  in  Iraq  and  the  headquarters  of  Saddam  

Hussein’s  Baathist  Party,  photographed  by  the  duo  Adam  Broomberg  and  Oliver  Chanarin,  

whose  work  has  shone  a  light  on  anonymous  photographs  taken  in  twenty  first  century  

conflict  zones;  and  Jane  and  Louise  Wilson’s  dramatic,  large,  black  and  white  photographs  of  

the  Nazis’  defensive  Atlantic  Wall  (2006),  invoking  further  along  the  exhibition’s  trajectory  a  

memory  of  the  first  room.  

A  particularly  affecting  instance  of  the  representation  of  military  damage  is  Tacita  Dean’s  

image  of  explosions  across  a  battlefield  in  Crimea,  one  of  a  series  of  twenty  photogravures  

based  on  postcards  of  disaster  and  destruction  that  the  artist  bought  at  various  European  

flea-­‐markets.  As  it  happens,  this  work  now  sounds  a  particularly  resonant  cautionary  note  

about  historical  repetition,  more  tragic  than  farcical  to  be  sure.  The  body  of  work  to  which  it  

belongs,  collectively  titled  The  Russian  Ending,  drolly  refers  to  the  different  endings  for  films  

produced  by  Danish  cinema  to  cater  to  the  divergent  tastes  of  the  American  and  Russian  

  3  

markets,  the  former  with  its  hunger  for  happy  resolutions,  the  latter  with  its  lust  for  the  

tragic  denouement.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  Dean’s  work  cannily  intertwines  a  love  of  obsolete  

technologies  with  a  reflection  on  how  ruins  are  emplaced  and  mediated  by  different  

mediums  and  representations.  Tacita  Dean’s  thoughtful  and  consistent  exploration  of  the  

ruin  in  particular,  and  of  obsolescence  in  general,  is  acknowledged  by  her  being  the  only  

artist  granted  her  own  section  in  the  exhibition  (Room  4).  

The  itinerary  concludes  with  two  rooms,  7  and  8  (titled  On  Land  and  Cities  in  Dust),  

dedicated  to  the  interstices  and  edgelands  (the  term  was  coined  by  poets  Michael  Symmons  

Roberts  and  Paul  Farley)  of  our  modern  cities.  These  include  Jon  Savage’s  bleak  photographs  

of  underpasses  in  the  1970s,  John  Latham’s  project  for  post-­‐industrial  monuments  made  of  

shale  heaps,  and  Rachel  Whiteread’s  photographs  of  the  demolition  of  tower  blocks  in  

Hackney,  Demolished  –  B:  Clapton  Park  Estate  (1996).  Keith  Coventry’s  Heygate  Estate  

(1995),  where  a  few  thick  black  lines  on  an  impasto  white  ground  resemble  the  pared  down  

aesthetic  of  early  twentieth-­‐century  constructivist  works,  is  in  fact  the  graphic  schema  of  the  

layout  of  the  housing  estate  named  by  the  title.  Together,  Whiteread  and  Coventry’s  works  

read  as  testimonies  to  the  limits  –  or  failure  –  of  modernism.    Indeed,  these  last  rooms  of  

the  exhibition  chart  the  desolate  ‘drosscape’  of  contemporary  urban  environments  as  the  

ruins  of  the  utopia  of  modernist  urbanisation.  

Drolly,  in  his  black  and  white  photographic  series  A.O.N.B  (Area  of  Outstanding  Natural  

Beauty),  Keith  Arnatt  –  an  underrated  photographer  and  an  artist  whose  work  I  happen  to  

love  –  photographs  the  sites  visited  by  the  eighteenth  century  artist  and  writer  William  

Gilpin,  who,  with  Turner,  set  the  bar  for  ruinophilia  as  a  constituent  part  of  scenic  pleasure.  

With  these  deadpan  images  of  suburban  hinterlands,  Arnatt  invokes  the  destruction  of  a  

landscape  once  picturesquely  inhabited  by  ruins  to  which  we  might  have  become  

nostalgically  attached,  a  different  kind  of  desolation.  

The  nostalgia  of  the  fragment  for  the  lost  whole  is  paradoxically  the  pre-­‐condition  of  ‘ruin  

lust’,  and  the  desired  circumstance  of  its  emergence.  The  exhibition  makes  it  clear  that  while  

poets  and  painters  of  the  Romantic  period  loved  nothing  more  than  a  ruin  serving  as  an  

object  of  meditation  on  mortality,  on  the  evanescence  of  beauty  and  human  endeavour,  for  

writers  and  artists  of  the  twentieth  and  twenty  first  centuries,  the  ruin  simultaneously  

preserves  an  image  of  history,  and  stands  as  a  warning  metaphor  for  the  casualties  of  

competing  ideologies.  Perhaps  most  famously,  for  Walter  Benjamin,  whose  shadow,  

together  with  W.G.  Sebald’s,  hovers  over  the  conceptual  framework  of  this  exhibition,  the  

ruin  was  a  multivalent  trope,  at  once  redemptive  and  cautionary.  His  notion  that  ‘the  

development  of  the  forces  of  production  shattered  the  wish  symbols  of  the  previous  

century,  even  before  the  monuments  representing  them  had  collapsed’[1]  suggests  that  our  

  4  

built  environment  is  the  space  on  which  capitalism  is  inscribed.  Sooner  or  later,  such  

‘monuments’  stand  as  realised  fragments  of  the  utopian  dreams  of  capitalism.  But  

Benjamin’s  assertion  also  suggests  that  the  present  moment  contains  the  pre-­‐history  of  the  

future  ruin,  one  where  current  objects  of  desire  are  already  imaginatively  figured  from  the  

perspective  of  their  future  devastation.  

Room  6  of  the  exhibition,  Ruins  in  Reverse,  materialises  this  layered  and  paradoxical  

temporisation.  The  term  ruins  in  reverse  was  coined  by  American  land  artist  Robert  

Smithson  to  describe  ‘the  manner  in  which  modern  architecture  and  infrastructure  seemed  

not  to  fall  into  disuse,’  the  wall  text  tells  us,  but,  in  Smithson’s  words,  to  ‘rise  into  ruin.’  

Here,  the  ruin  is  not  so  much  the  eventual  outcome,  but  rather,  the  telos,  a  desired  and  

inevitable  point  of  arrival.  This  notion  was  echoed  by  novelist  J.G.  Ballard’s  view  that  post-­‐

war  concrete  architecture  held  the  premonition  of  its  own  demise.  Such  future-­‐pastness  (or  

the  nostalgia  for  a  redeemable  pastness)  could  readily  be  bolstered  by  referring  to  the  

writings  of  both  Walter  Benjamin  and  W.G.  Sebald.  The  whole  of  Benjamin’s  essay  ‘Theses  

on  the  Philosophy  of  History’  could  be  invoked,  but  a  sentence  near  the  beginning  of  

Sebald’s  magisterial  Austerlitz  will  serve  as  a  particularly  evocative  example:  ‘At  the  most  we  

gaze  at  it  in  wonder,  a  kind  of  wonder  which  in  itself  is  a  form  of  dawning  horror,  for  

somehow  we  know  by  instinct  that  outsize  buildings  cast  the  shadow  of  their  own  

destruction  before  them,  and  are  designed  from  the  first  with  an  eye  to  their  later  existence  

as  ruins.’[2]  Sebald’s  musings  on  monumentalism,  dotted  throughout  this  book,  seem  

elliptically  to  allude  to  the  official  architect  of  the  Nazi  state,  Albert  Speer,  whose  vast  

projects  were  modeled  on  an  imperial  past  figured  as  glorious,  but  with  an  eye  to  their  own  

potential  as  a  future  ruin.  The  name  coined  for  this  concept,  which  Speer  claims  to  have  

invented,  but  which  originates  in  Romanticism,  was  Ruinenwert  (ruin  value).  

The  built  in  obsolescence  of  every  form  of  futurism  –  every  prospect  of  the  future  contains,  

embedded  within  it,  the  notion  of  a  ruin  -­‐–  is  explicit  in  Room  6,  but  it  is  implicit  in  the  whole  

exhibition.  One  of  the  most  remarkable  early  works  on  the  show  is  Joseph  Gandy’s  cutaway  

view  of  John  Soane’s  design  for  the  Bank  of  England  from  the  future  perspective  of  its  own  

devastation    (1830,  borrowed  from  the  John  Soane  Museum),  bizarrely  and  perspicaciously  

commissioned  by  the  architect  himself.  The  work  might  well  have  been  used  to  illustrate  

Benjamin’s  analysis  of  the  inherent  obsolescence  of  desirable  commodities  within  

capitalism;  or  indeed  might  stand  as  an  illustration  of  the  contemporary  fetishisation  of  

disposable  commodities  requiring  constant  ‘upgrading’  against  a  background  of  distrust  in,  

but  dependence  on,  the  protocols  stipulated  by  banking  institutions.  

Gerard  Byrne’s  three-­‐screen  video  installation  1984  and  Beyond  restages,  in  overlapping  

loops,  a  conversation  published  in  Playboy  magazine  in  1963,  in  which  twelve  well-­‐known  

  5  

sci-­‐fi  authors  imagine  the  global  politics  of  the  now-­‐past  future.  The  work  explores  the  

limitations  of  cultural  imagination  with  regard  to  the  future,  with  reference  to  signifiers  of  

the  recent  past  (architecture,  sculpture,  clothing,  hairstyles,  music).  The  group  included  

Isaac  Assimov,  Arthur  C.  Clarke,  Ray  Bradbury  and  Robert  Heinlen,  and  all  twelve  

protagonists  of  the  conversation  are  rather  woodenly  played  by  actors  in  iconic  modernist  

architectural  settings.  Naturally,  the  fact  that  the  predictions  themselves  are  dated,  ‘almost  

comically  optimistic  regarding  life  as  it  might  be  lived  two  decades  thence,’[3]  throws  into  

relief  the  futility  and  inevitable  anachronism  of  all  futurologies,  while  the  film’s  structure,  

based  on  an  edited  transcript,  reminds  us  constantly  that  we  are  viewing  an  artifice.  

Another  striking  work  to  capture  contradictory  temporalities  is,  again,  by  Tacita  Dean.  In  her  

grainy,  looped  film  Kodak,  using  16mm  film  (Dean  has  remained  a  firm  exponent  of  analogue  

mediums),  she  has  recorded  the  production  of  the  same  film  in  Kodak’s  factory  at  Charlon-­‐

sur-­‐Saône.  The  film  was  unwittingly  made  at  precisely  the  time  when,  in  the  face  of  the  

pervasiveness  of  digitisation,  the  company  had  decided  to  stop  all  such  film  production.  

Svetlana  Boym  remarks  on  the  importance  of  early  twentieth  century  sociologist  Georg  

Simmel  in  defining  our  fascination  with  ruins.  She  highlights  Simmel’s  emphasis  on  the  

collaborative  workings  of  nature  and  culture  in  the  fabrication  of  the  ruin  (‘Nature  has  

transformed  the  work  of  art  into  material  for  her  own  expression  as  she  had  previously  

served  as  material  for  art’;  Simmel,  ‘The  Ruin’).  Simmel’s  theory  of  ruins  –  he  positioned  

them  in  direct  opposition  to  the  notion  of  the  epiphanic  moment  pregnant  with  potentiality  

–  reveals  in  ‘retrospect’  what  such  moments  held  in  ‘prospect.’  This  Boym  terms  

‘imaginative  perspectivism’[4]:  the  capacity  to  hold  hope  and  a  tragic  sense  of  inevitability  in  

balance.  It  is,  above  all,  this  imaginative  perspectivism  –  a  gaze  upon  the  ruin  that  does  not  

simplistically  pit  past  against  future,  and  that  acknowledges  the  intertwining  of  historical  

and  natural  temporalities  –  that  we  take  away  from  this  compelling  exhibition.  

Ruth  Rosengarten  ©  April  2014.  

londongrip.co.uk  

[1]  Walter  Benjamin,  ‘Paris,  the  Capital  of  the  19th  Century’  in  The  Arcades  Project,  (The  Belknap  Press  University  

of  Harvard  Press,  2002),  p.13  

[2]  W.  G.  Sebald,  Austerlitz,  trans.  Anthea  Bell,  New  York:  Modern  Library,  p.  19.  

[3]  Brian  Dillon,  ‘The  Art  of  Gerard  Byrne,’  in  The  Guardian,  Saturday  19  June,  2010.  

[4]  Svetlana  Boym,  ‘Tatlin,  or,  Ruinophilia,’  Cabinet,  Issue  28,  Bones,  Winter  2007-­‐8,  

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/boym2.php//  

 

  6