Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins (Global Aesthetic Research) 9781786607607, 9781786607614, 9781786607621, 1786607603

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Reviewing the Past

Global Aesthetic Research Series Editor: Joseph J. Tanke, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii The Global Aesthetic Research series publishes cutting-edge research in the field of ­aesthetics. It contains books that explore the principles at work in our encounters with art and nature, that interrogate the foundations of artistic, literary, and cultural criticism, and that articulate the theory of the discipline’s central concepts.

Titles in the Series Early Modern Aesthetics, J. Colin McQuillan Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, Catherine M. Soussloff Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, Edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali Living Off Landscape: Or the Unthought-Of in Reason, Francois Jullien, Translated by Pedro Rodriguez Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, Emily Brady, Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins, Zoltán Somhegyi

Reviewing the Past The Presence of Ruins

Zoltán Somhegyi

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © Zoltán Somhegyi 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0760-7 PB 978-1-7866-0761-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931531 ISBN: 978-1-78660-760-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-761-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-762-1 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

To Giorgio Paolo

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv CLASSICAL TENDENCIES

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1 The Fragile Presence of Ruins: General Aspects of the Aesthetics of Architectural Decay

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2 The Golden Age and Fall of Ruins

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3 In Front of Ruins

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MODERN APPEARANCES

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4 Ruins in East-West Perspective

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5 Contemporary Ruins: Investigations into a Contradiction in Terms

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6 “Learning from Detroit?”—From Materialised Dreams to Bitter Awakening. Aesthetics around Decayed Shopping Malls WHEN IN WORKS

113 129

7 Cracks in the Walls

131

8 Eulogy to the Fragment: Artworks and Ruination

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Contents

9 Ruins as Context and Scenery: Temporal Interference as Source of Aesthetic Experience

165

AFTERLIFE 179 10 Mall with Lamassu: Imitated Decay and Aesthetic Education in Thematic Commercial Centres

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11 What Remains of That Which Has Remained? Against the Eradication of Ruins

197

12 “Time Transformed into Space”: Orhan Pamuk and the Museums of Remembrance

215

Bibliography 227 Index 243 About the Author

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Ruins of Ephesus. Photograph by the author, 2012 Figure 1.2 Ruins of Pergamon. Photograph by the author, 2013 Figure 2.1 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal). A Lock, a Column, and a Church beside a Lagoon, 1740s. Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 67.6 cm (20 × 26 5/8 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2019. Accession Number: 2019.141.6. CC0 Public Domain Designation Figure 2.2 Francesco Guardi. Ruined Archway, 1775–1793. Oil on canvas, 29.5 × 49.7 cm (11 5/8 × 19 1/2 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection. Reference Number: 1933.1080. CC0 Public Domain Designation Figure 3.1 Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli). The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments, 1778–1780. Red chalk on sepia wash on paper. Image: 42.2/41.6 × 35.8/34.8 cm, Passepartout: 65 × 50 cm. Schiff Nr. 665. Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1940. Photo credit: Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings Figure 3.2 Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer. Doigt Colossal en Marbre, 1785. Pen, ink, pencil, watercolour, 20.5 × 19.4 cm. Courtesy Galleria W. Apolloni, Rome–London Figure 4.1 Félix Bonfils. Coupole de Douris, dans la plaine de la Bekaa–Balbek, 1872. Albumen silver print. 29.4 × 22.4 cm (11 9/16 × 8 13/16 in.). 84.XM.422.34. ix

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57 59

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Figure 4.2

Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 5.1 Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 7.3 Figure 8.1

Figure 8.2

Figure 8.3

List of Illustrations

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 79 Francis Bedford. Philæ-The Hypæthral Temple Commonly Called Pharaoh’s Bed, and Small Chapel, 1862 Albumen silver print. 9.8 × 12.9 cm (3 7/8 × 5 1/16 in.). 84.XB.1272.7. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 81 Yıldız Moran. Silhouette through the Ruin, Anatolia, Turkey, 1956. Courtesy of Yıldız V. Moran Archive 84 Gregory Buchakjian. BF4229_Achrafieh_14'11'2010, 2010. From the Abandoned Dwellings series. Photograph 87 Tarek Al-Ghoussein. Al Sawaber, 2017. Installation view at The Third Line. Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai 88 Film still from the documentary “Silent Visitors.” Directed by Jeroen Van der Stock. Produced by Savage Film (2012) 101 Abdulnasser Gharem. Concrete Block, 2010. Rubber stamps and industrial lacquer paint on 9mm Plywood board, 120 × 100 × 54 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Photograph by Capital D Studio 132 Hazem Harb. Untitled #14 from the Archaeology of Occupation series, 2015. Print on Hahnemuhle FineArt Baryta 325 gsm mounted on 3mm aluminium composite, 120 × 204 cm. Courtesy of the artist Hazem Harb. Copyright Hazem Harb 140 Jorge Méndez Blake. The Castle, 2018. Bricks, Edition of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, 175 × 1900 × 40 cm. Courtesy of the Artist 143 Bouke de Vries. Map of china of China, 2017. 18th and 19th century Chinese porcelain fragments and mixed media. 96 × 122 cm (37 3/4 × 48 1/8 in). Courtesy of Bouke de Vries/Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery 157 Mohamad-Said Baalbaki. One Hand Cannot Clap Alone, 2010. Alloy cast sculpture, 30 × 90 × 15 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Image Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery 160 Mona Hatoum. Witness, 2009. Porcelain biscuit, 49 × 24.3 × 24.3 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Image courtesy of Alexander & Bonin Gallery 161

List of Illustrations

Figure 9.1 Interior photograph from the 2013 edition of the Moving Image Art Fair, London. Courtesy of Moving Image Figure 12.1 Installation view from the Piccolo museo del diario. Photograph by Luigi Burroni

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful for all who have lovingly accompanied, critically followed, and generously supported me on this path. If going chronologically, I shall first thank my parents for sparking my interest in ruins, although involuntarily, when we regularly visited the ruins of Margaret Island in Budapest and of Szigliget in Hungary during my childhood. Many of the ideas and elements of thought that have informed my approach to questions and interpretations in general can be traced to my university and PhD study years, where I am especially indebted for the lectures, conversations, and guidance of Béla Bacsó, András Rényi, Sándor Radnóti, István Bibó, Anna Eörsi, György Széphelyi Frankl, Bálint Somlyó, Ákos Szilágyi, Werner Busch, Michael Diers, Pier Cesare Bori, Carlo Ginzburg, Sergio Marinelli, and Raffaele Milani. The nascent ideas that later served as bases for some of the chapters here were developed in conference presentations, papers, and articles. I gained a lot from these interactions and texts, which created fruitful conversations with Zoltán Gyenge, János Weiss, Judit Bartha, Zoltán Papp, András Czeglédi, Jacob Lund, Manfred Milz, and Jale Erzen. I am thankful for the editors of my earlier publications on ruins for granting me the permission to reuse my material; in most cases the original texts have been expanded and revised into their present form. The book is also enriched by the reproductions of classical and contemporary artworks, for which I am grateful to the artists, collectors, galleries, and museums for allowing me to publish these images. I was greatly inspired by the writings of Robert Ginsberg, especially his fascinating book The Aesthetics of Ruins, as well as his friendly emails and encouragement throughout our correspondence. Although we have never met personally (so far), his kind comments on my earlier publications on our common passion of ruins meant and continue to mean a lot to me. xiii

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My friend and coauthor of a previous book on architectural dereliction, Max Ryynänen, had an important role in further shaping my ideas of the complexities in the evaluation of various popular cultural phenomena. I am very much obliged to those who put their trust in me and this book while it was still in its planning phase: Joseph J. Tanke, the series editor of Global Aesthetic Research at Rowman and Littlefield International, for his enthusiasm for the topic; the editorial team, Isobel Cowper-Coles, Natalie Linh Bolderston, and Scarlet Furness, for continuous technical support; and also for the two reviewers of my original book proposal, Thomas Leddy and Scott Wilson, for their valuable comments on how to develop the project. I would like to particularly thank my “first reader,” Elyse M. Byrnes, who served as the copy editor of the manuscript. Since I am not a native English writer, the importance of her work in ameliorating my original text cannot be overemphasised. As any researchers with family know, pursuing our passion for investigating topics that thrill us and writing books on them necessarily requires compromising our private lives, and for this reason, I am especially grateful to my wife, Sara, who has not only waited patiently while I finished the book but also provided me with a supportive home environment. While writing the book, our son, Giorgio Paolo, arrived, and with some—hopefully understandable and acceptable—bias I hope that when growing up he will share my passion for the aesthetics of ruins. With this aspiration in mind, the book is dedicated to him.

Introduction

I began writing this book on a birthday trip several years ago. Better to say, I decided that I would finally write this book, which meant not only putting together some already existing papers that I had dedicated to the topic of ruins in the years before, but also to complement and complete them with others that I was still planning to write, in order to compile my ideas and reflections on the aesthetics of ruins, ruination, and decay into one volume. During that trip, on an August morning in the garden of a late mediaeval monastery-turned-boutique-hotel in a lesser-known, small Tuscan town, upon finding myself in one of the calmest and most tranquil places I have ever been to, I was particularly inspired and also recharged with creative energy. In the garden of the hotel, in the shadows of centuries-old ruins that—unlike the rest of the venue—could not be converted for modern usage but was instead kept in the garden as aesthetic remains of earlier times, I suddenly felt not only the ruins’ strong presence but also the reasons for this strength of the ruins’ very presence. This fortunate moment also highlighted the interrelatedness and aesthetic relevance of the main aspects and criteria of ruins that will often appear throughout the following pages: functionlessness, absence, and time, as well as the power of Nature. Thus I had this almost Arcadian environment in which to draft the book and to decide how best to gather, organise, and present the elements of my attachment to ruins. These “elements of attachment” had been dormant in a miscellany of earlier forms—shorter sketches and longer descriptions, brief observations and extensive interpretations, hence ideas and impressions, feelings and facts—all connected to ruination and all waiting to be manifested in a more organised way. Regarding the latter, some sort of organisation was also needed as the range of considerations is quite broad, as it will be clear,

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including not only the theoretical investigation into the classical aspects of the aesthetics of ruins and their traditional representation, but also contemporary examples, art productions of lesser-known areas and artists and even topics that would perhaps not necessarily and automatically come to mind when thinking of the aesthetics of decay. It is not by chance that I began this introduction with this fragment of memory and in a tone that may seem to some as perhaps more subjective or “personal” than what ought to be used in a scholarly publication. However, this is in great part what the reader may expect, and the whole book will have a certain grade of subjectivity—naturally sometimes more explicitly, sometimes less directly—for example, in the choice and organisation of the investigated materials or in the weight and evaluation given to certain phenomena. The personal involvement of the aesthetic analyses of ruins may also be explained by a curious parallel. As it is known and will be further discussed, ruins have their own life and life-span, just like humans do, but they can also accompany our lives in their different stages: as children we play among and climb on ruins, as adolescents we daydream and have romantic—though sometimes rather kitschy-romantic—walks amidst ruins, and later they may serve as melancholic allegories of the transience of our efforts and perhaps even appear as worrying symbols reminding us of our own physical decay. Throughout our lives, then, we can admire ruins for numerous reasons, but we rarely remain completely untouched by them, hence their accompaniment alongside the human body and soul truly qualifies them as subjective and personal phenomena. This has also reinforced in me my conviction of pursuing a rather subjective approach when analysing ruins. The reader may presume by now that this subjectivity leads to certain intellectual and aesthetic perambulations around ruins. And in fact, this was my intention, too: writing a book about ruins, the structure of which would echo walking among ruins, (i.e., the actual, physical discovery of an archaeological site). Just imagine such a classical area, where there is no prescribed route or obligatory itinerary, but one can rather develop the visit by his or her own whim. This means that when exploring the site in its physicality—or investigating around the topic through this book—one may begin in one direction or another, focusing on certain routes and elements, and naturally miss others, staying longer in some places that have particularly caught his interest, and running through others that he feels less touched by. Just like during our physical perambulations in a ruin-site we may cross the same area several times from different directions, thus gleaning a more profound insight and deeper understanding of the sight from the several viewpoints, the same way that in this book various phenomena and motifs, ideas, and considerations, artists, and philosophers may come up regularly, since coming back to them also means reexamining and reinterpreting them from other directions and

Introduction

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with the comprehension gained through the visit. On the other hand, this free perambulation also signifies that the discoverer may either intentionally or accidentally miss many sights, areas, and questions that could be important with regards to ruins. This is thus the pattern that I would like to follow in this book, hence that of a ruin-explorer, who crosses the site to better understand both the ruins themselves as well as himself among, through, and because of the ruins. As will become clear, I consider ruins not only as aesthetic phenomena or former constructions with added aesthetic value but also as artworks—even if artworks (partially) created by Nature. Through this property and quality they can be(come) comparable to other works of art, since both the encounter with actual ruins as well as the aesthetic perception and interpretation of their representation may help us in our own attempts at self-understanding, just like great pieces of art can have elemental effects on how we position ourselves. As mentioned above, the structure of the book tends to imitate the free wandering around a ruin-site, hence the chapters may be read independently or even in an arbitrary order. Nevertheless, there are many connection points and cross-references between them, and the reader may also note that the twelve chapters are organised in a way that is in part chronological and in part deductive—this also explains the four thematic blocks, each containing three chapters. Thus I should perhaps partly correct myself and my analogy of the book as the free discovery of the site: there are some suggested routes on our trip between the highlights and sites, in case one prefers some guidance. In chapter 1, I set the framework of the discussion, introducing the three main—and in the later chapters often reoccurring—criteria of ruins, that of functionlessness, absence, and time. In chapter 2, I then offer a survey of the specialities on the representation of ruination, focusing especially on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through chapter 3, I continue the investigation of pictorial representations by focusing on one particular aspect, namely when it is not simply the decayed building or fragment that is the main subject matter of the work but the very encounter with them, hence when the artist is shown in front of them thus documenting and thematising the experience of this very facing of the ruins and of architectural dereliction. In the next thematic block, I open the examination to temporarily closer but at the same time geographically broader perspectives: in chapter 4 ruins as well as their representation and modern heritage management is discussed in an “East-West” perspective, challenging the applicability of the previously dominant (Western) aspects in the interpretation, evaluation, and management of ruins in and from non-Western contexts. In chapter 5, then, the possibilities of the concept of “contemporary ruins” are scrutinised, if it is at all legitimate to name recently started decay as such. The investigation partly continues in chapter 6, where derelict shopping malls are taken as a case study for the analyses of the

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contemporary fascination with ruins. The next larger block further opens the perspectives of investigations as well as offering some insight into a possible connection point between the phenomena of ruination and artworks. In chapter 7, I examine the aesthetic potential of walls as architectural elements, with special attention paid to the various modes of their planned or unintentional decay. Throughout chapter 8, the reader can follow a parallel investigation into the fragmentation of artworks and ruination of edifices, in the hope that the discussion can help not only in establishing a clearer set of categories of fragments but also in better understanding the lure and fascination of certain fragments and fragmented pieces. Ruins change their “position” in a way in chapter 9, where they are investigated as hosting spaces for other branches of art, hence, instead of being the mere subject matter of representations or of aesthetic analyses, they will be discussed in their role as the context for the showing or performing of other pieces of art. In the last block I examine the “afterlife” of ruins, again in a broader sense. In chapter 10, the reader is invited to look at the curious and dubious “survival” of classical architectural heritage in the contemporary popular cultural phenomena of thematic malls. Chapter 11 investigates the sensitive issues and tragic situation of the ruins of ruins (i.e., of complete eradication, motivated by shortsighted religious, political, or cultural fundamentalism and fanaticism). The final chapter, 12, then focuses on how fragments of history and memory can build up such meta-museums that are then able to thematise, illustrate, and even question the very process, nature, and efficiency of remembering itself. From all this the reader can see that the book aims to give a thematically and temporally wide-ranging coverage of the subject matter in an interdisciplinary perspective, combining results and methodology of aesthetics, art history, as well as references to cultural history, and even museum studies. Naturally, the aforementioned subjectivity of the investigation is also inseparable from the investigating subject (i.e., the author) and the broad temporal and thematic range of surveyed topics—that, however, at the same time is far from even aiming at being all-embracing and comprehensive—explainable by my own interests and career paths so far. As a classically trained art historian with a special interest (and a doctorate) in aesthetics, I have regularly found myself somewhere in the middle between the two great disciplines. This duality in the two distinct fields of study is however also akin to my double interest in the art production and art theoretical considerations of two different time periods, that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of contemporaneity. Although in certain periods of my life as a researcher I had been lured to choose and focus on one of them, I preferred not to become an “exclusivist” with regards to one particular temporal framework in my specialisation. I always felt that the two—the older and the contemporary—not only complement each other but mutually shed light on the other period’s

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aesthetic production. In other words, pieces of art can help us understand other works in both directions, not only in the sense that classical works influence modern and contemporary pieces, but often in the way the careful analyses and interpretation of contemporary creations will prepare us and provide us with the skills required to reveal further secrets of centuries- or millennia-old works—just as an episode from my own experience supports this latter claim: I remember how much more I understood of the particular aesthetic qualities of eighteenth century Venetian etchings after visiting contemporary graphic artists’ studios and having discussions with these artists about their work and practice than what I could gather by only reading about the classical pieces and viewing them in museums. The “geographical” focuses that the reader may easily trace are also explainable by both my personal interests and my life as an academic. The quoted Italian painters or German philosophers are definitely and necessarily influenced by my research scholarships in these countries, just like the investigated Middle Eastern artists, locations, and (popular) cultural phenomena are due to the several years spent teaching in Turkey and in the United Arab Emirates. Seen from these perspectives, the book is an organic continuation of my research and style of research thus far: I pursued a similar double temporal survey in my first book on landscapes (2008) where contemporary production was analysed together with eighteenth century Venetian and Bolognese painting. In my second book, from 2011—based on my PhD dissertation on German Romantic landscape painting—I examined the topic with regards to both art historical and aesthetic considerations. In the Yearbook of the International Associations for Aesthetics that I edited—and contributed to with a chapter—in 2017, I aimed at encompassing the broadest possible geographical expanse of the general topic of reinvestigating the past in modern and contemporary art and aesthetics. And finally, in the collection of essays on architectural dereliction, cowritten with Max Ryynänen (2018), my three chapters again analysed the phenomena in a temporally and geographically broader context. The present volume thus again attempts to cover different ages, geographical regions, media, and artistic traditions through aesthetic and art historical analyses, even if many topics and branches of art (e.g., literature or film) could not be included, in great part because, naturally, I did not want to cloud my lack of proper competence in these areas with insufficiently profound analyses. These will hence be among the areas that our aforementioned explorer of the almost infinite ruin-site has necessarily had to skip, while other parts will be surveyed more in depth. Nevertheless, I hope that the reader will enjoy the walk; what’s more, is my more ambitious hope that the reader will even feel encouraged to pursue similar discoveries in the realm of ruins and understand more of their aesthetics in and through their presence.

CLASSICAL TENDENCIES

Chapter 1

The Fragile Presence of Ruins General Aspects of the Aesthetics of Architectural Decay1

“Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape / Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age”2—we can easily share the fascination held by this anonymous AngloSaxon poet of the early Middle Ages. Ruins are thrillingly aesthetic and, at the same time, disturbingly appealing phenomena. This curious and mixed feeling of the observer can perhaps be explained by the fact that ruins have a strange presence: obviously, we sense that they are there, although we also feel that they should not be there anymore. Thus, we feel a mysterious and triggering dichotomy in their presence, namely that they are present precisely through their absence, or, as Carolyn Korsmeyer argued: “What is absent in a ruin commands as much attention as what is present, and it so commands precisely for being absent.”3 The intriguing presence and polymorph physical appearances of ruins incentivise a wide range of approaches to their understanding, and there are numerous reasons that might explain the various aspects of our curiosity: some are interested in the formal, classical aesthetic qualities that ruins display through their visual irregularity. Others might be engaged by their material resilience, how the still-surviving parts demonstrate the strength and enduring character of the original edifice. Meticulous aficionados, on the contrary, like to focus on what is changing in a ruin, even regularly revisiting the decaying site to catch the latest dereliction, each new manifestation of absence. Still, others focus on the often overwhelming emotional impact imparted by an encounter with the force of time. Some look for traces of earlier users or inhabitants, reading the ruin as a backdrop upon which to project their everyday lives and trace the signs of their activities. In certain cases, it is the most particular—and perhaps minor—nuance that captures the attention of the observer. In the “Your Pictures” section on the BBC website, readers are encouraged to send in photos along with a brief 3

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comment on a weekly theme. When the topic was “Decay,” the opening piece by “Adam X” showed the elegant though crumbling interior of a former orphanage in England, with the chandelier turned on during the daylight.4 In the caption the photographer noted: “I was amazed to find the electricity was still running”—in fact, a nice demonstration of how attuned and devoted ruin-fans can be, such that even the seemingly smallest curiosity does not skip their attention. Even if, from the short caption, we cannot decide for sure if Adam X was surprised that the electricity was still running because the entire building was crumbling or because it had presumably been quite a while since someone was paying the bills. It is common, then, for certain ruins to be experienced as aesthetically attractive, either when directly perceived in situ, or indirectly, as when represented in artwork. This attraction, however, might be considered quite a paradox, since “normally” it is precisely the perfectness, harmonious completeness, entirety, and integrity that we admire in works observed from an aesthetic perspective. But ruins seem to be exactly the opposite: They are “ruined” (i.e., a formerly complete piece of art (architecture) that has become or is currently in the process of becoming incomplete, losing pieces, and elements of Nature overtake the site). Is it not strange that we are so delighted to see something dying, destroyed, and/or still in the process of being destroyed, when in other cases we look for the pristine and harmonious? And what makes the question even more complicated is that we instinctively differentiate between ruins and rubble, considering the first as aesthetically pleasant, while the latter as unseemly and sad. We admire, represent, and conserve the first, and clean up the latter. This automatic distinction brings us back to the main interest of this chapter: What do we like in ruins? Why are we attracted to them, and how do we possibly define the elements of the architectural decay that accounts for the curious presence of ruins? It is not by chance that I mentioned Nature above, as it is strongly connected to all aspects of ruins. It seems right to start the examination of ruins with Nature, since Nature is obviously the key actor and factor of the ruination process. Buildings are originally constructed “against” Nature (i.e., as shelters to protect people from natural elements). In the case of ruins, this differentiation between the natural and artificial gradually dissolves as Nature begins to take over buildings, steadily occupying them piece by piece, even assimilating the constructions’ colors upon itself. Thus Nature accompanies the life of the ruin in all its stages, from the time when it is not yet a ruin but merely a building standing against Nature, up until Nature has overtaken it so completely that it ceases to be a ruin at all. And of course, this also explains the tendency to “insert” ruins explicitly into a natural context and landscape environment, thus emphasising the importance of Nature in this complex process and interaction (e.g., the artificial ruins in landscape gardens, the practice

The Fragile Presence of Ruins

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of picturesque landscape paintings with ruins as a central motif [especially in the eighteenth century], and the capriccio, a special genre highlighting the ruins themselves). From the above we can see that Nature has a primary role in the entire process of ruination, or, we can say that the very nature of ruins is their strong connection with Nature. In the classical form of ruination it will be Nature— the natural forces that destroy the building—that results in novel states of the former construction that, while perhaps aesthetically pleasing, is unusable from a practical viewpoint. The destructive forces thus have a key role in the process, and this is why Nature is of central importance to all three of the main elements of decay. The elements of decay (or ruination) are the concepts that I find crucial in the definition of a classical ruin’s existence. We might just as well call them “criteria” for the becoming of a real ruin. Therefore, in the following I shall discuss these three basic elements or criteria of ruination (i.e., functionlessness, absence, and time). As we shall see in the following, these prove to be significant not only in describing the ruins and their lifespan, but also in understanding their fragile presence. Though it may seem purely self-evident or unhelpfully generalising, it still needs to be said that each architectural construction is built with a special purpose and with a function that defines not only its design and appearance,

Figure 1.1  Ruins of Ephesus. Photograph by the author, 2012.

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Chapter 1

but also the building’s modes of use. The function and the fulfilment of this practical purpose stay primordial throughout the whole active lifetime and use of the edifice. And this is exactly what changes throughout the ruination process, since the building loses its function when the previous modes and ways of proper use ceases. When this primacy of purpose and function gives way, the new form of life of the building (i.e., ruination) may start. Robert Ginsberg formulated this radical change of status even more strongly in his book on the aesthetics of ruins, stating that: “The ruin liberates function from its subservience to purpose. . . . The ruin is the temple of the non-useful.”5 This is why we can list functionlessness as the first decisive criterion of ruination, or, to put it in another way: As long as the building is able to fulfil its original function or can be used in a modified function, it cannot be considered a “real” ruin, since it serves an attributed purpose. Naturally, the construction may lack proper maintenance, the need to have it restored in some parts can arise, or it may require thorough reconstruction or modernisation. And of course the above does not mean that the function of the construction is stable and unchangeable. It may easily be modified, and further functions can be added to the previous ones; we see this in the creative and often truly impressive revitalisation projects of former edifices, for example: mediaeval monasteries are turned into private mansions; Gothic churches become libraries; stock exchange halls are converted into bookshops; decommissioned airports are changed into cultural centres to host artistic events, fairs, and shows. In these above examples, despite the differences of the original and modern purpose of the constructions and their age, what is still common is that they were, in a way, saved from becoming ruins by attributing a novel function. Therefore, so long as a building has some sort of function, or, in other words, so long as it can be used in any practical, purposeful way, it cannot be considered a ruin. Although this criterion and its application for the determination of a ruin initially seems quite straightforward, we can see that it is not always so easy to draw the line between when a building can be considered functionless and thus a possible ruin, and when it cannot. For example, if the site is only “used” as a temporary settlement for wanderers, beggars, and hermits, we cannot interpret this as a proper function and, hence, the building can still be a ruin. Again, this was a popular and widespread topic in eighteenth century painting. We can recall Goethe’s highly sensitive rendering of such a view from his night visit of the Coliseum on February 2, 1787: Peculiarly beautiful at such a time is the Coliseum. At night it is always closed; a hermit dwells in a little shrine within its range, and beggars of all kinds nestle beneath its crumbling arches: the latter had lit a fire on the arena, and a gentle wind bore down the smoke to the ground, so that the lower portion of the ruins

The Fragile Presence of Ruins

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was quite hid by it, while above the vast walls stood out in deeper darkness before the eye.6

The vision immortalised in these lines is a “picturesque” ruin-view par excellence, in which both the architectural remnants and the human figures are displayed just as if we were looking at a picture from the same period, even adding an air of mystique to the whole scene through the mirroring of the partially concealed appearance of the monument, its lower part hidden amidst the smoke, with the upper part merging into the darkness of the night sky. On the other hand, we can also find counterexamples: when an edifice seems to be a classical ruin, (i.e., the classical case of a ruin that, upon closer analysis, falls short exactly because of the present criterion of functionlessness). This is what we can experience in the case of the former city gates of Bologna. As is typical, the mediaeval city walls turned out to be less essential in the Modern Age, and today only a short section has remained. However, some of the main gates were kept, surviving in their modernised form that they had acquired in a series of reconstructions from the eighteenth century onwards. Visiting the city, one may interpret these gates as ruins, a decayed former construction standing picturesquely in the middle of the modern town, but we cannot, in fact, convincingly confer upon them the status of ruins for several reasons: not only because they were rebuilt and renovated, and not even because they do not display the random outlines of lacuna that could be said to be the typical visual manifestation the absence criterion (see below), but in great part because they are not entirely functionless. They occupy a larger clearance at the intersection of an uneven hexagonal road running around the old city centre and the straight avenues that radiate from the city centre. Since there are no walls, the former gates left in these junctions obviously cannot be said to serve as gates, but the modern structure of the roads is still arranged around them. They are like centrepieces for small roundabouts, though, curiously, the traffic often flows around them rather than through them. Their function is to organise traffic, and at the same time of course they can also appear as monuments to and from the local urban history. Due to both of these functions and purposes, they are regularly maintained—in order to not endanger traffic and to stay as characteristic monuments. There is even a short description of their architectural history placed on the gates. In this way their “functionlessness” is definitely harmed in several modes, and one cannot take them as proper ruins. “Real” ruins need to be functionless; also, we consider them as sort of artworks, or former pieces of architecture acquiring novel aesthetic qualities—even though they have become works of art not through human effort but through the processes of Nature—and, in many cases, having a direct and practical purpose is antithetical to the modern idea of a “pure” artwork created for its own sake.

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The second criterion that we can identify as defining the process of ruination is absence. The building that loses its function and lacks the regular maintenance soon develops lacuna—of course, this makes it even more unusable and dangerous, hence ruined. Formally and visually speaking, this discontinuity is perhaps the most noticeable feature of a derelict piece of architecture; the falling construction elements, cracking walls, and missing bricks characterise the actual ruinous state—or progressively more ruinous state—of the former edifice. At the same time, what makes the ruins’ negative space thrilling is that when visiting the site, the observer is not facing only the actual and present state of the absence that increasingly comes to dominate the former construction but also the constant forming and modulation of this absence (i.e., the gradual shaping of the void that is itself further shaping the building towards its final dismantling). Thus when focusing on the natural deconstruction and negative shaping of the building, we are observing the actual modes and ways the building is getting more incomplete and ruined. The continuous and unstoppable degradation thus results in a gradual disappearance of the edifice itself, through the shifting of the relative proportion of those parts (still) present and those (already) missing (i.e., where the expanding immaterial void takes over the material and materiality of the former construction). In fact, strange as it may seem, we could say that a role reversal has taken place: an artwork. That is, a ruin is formed and constructed, not in the classical sense of construction as putting pieces together but just the contrary, since here it is the absence that is growing, not the material or “body” of the artwork. As the Italian archaeologist and art historian Salvatore Settis puts it in his 2004 book Futuro del “classico”: “According to the Western tradition, ruins indicate in the same time an absence and a presence: they show, or, better to say they are the intersection between visible and invisible.”7 It is thus a constant negative formation, such that the ruins’ actual form is defined by what is visible just as much as by what is invisible. One may recall the distinction between the possible ways of creating a three-dimensional artwork (i.e., a sculpture, through either modelling or carving). We can add pieces of clay or plaster to create a work, or we can carve it out from a piece of marble or wood. In this sense, carving might seem analogous to ruination, but we must not forget the main difference in the end result: In the case of the completed sculptural work, we do not “miss” the pieces taken from the original block, while in the case of a ruin we continuously sense the missing elements. A ruin is therefore defined by the missing elements—were they not missing, we would not call the building a ruin. We sense the void that defines the ruins, and thus ruins are constantly formed by Nature through ever-growing absence. We can also say, in line with Dylan Trigg’s claim in his book The Aesthetics of Decay that this is the moment when we can trace the appearing

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of nothingness: “The presence of nothingness can only be detected because what was is now, in some sense, absent. . . . Here, in the pathway of ruin, where presence gives rise to absence, and where silence determines the illusion of sound, the Nothing comes forth from dormancy.”8 The decisive point to understand, however, is that despite the fact that a ruin confronts the viewer with an absence that is continuously forming, what’s more: growing and through its immateriality “eating up” the materials of the original edifice that for a while still struggles to resist, still, the main essence of the ruin is not simply this passing and decay but exactly the contrary: the remainder and survival—even if, as we will soon see, this clinging present is in most cases temporary and ephemeral. During this transitory period of the ruin’s life, while some of the remnants of the building still remain, they defiantly stand for their very endurance, affirming that despite the destructive forces that they are exposed to, they are still there. This “still being there,” still being present even if they should not be there anymore, is what makes their presence so thrilling. Dylan Trigg summarised this ambiguous feature of the ruin in his later book The Memory of Place: Unlike the “felicitous” space that characterizes domestic place, which allows time and place to coincide as unitary phenomena, the formal features of the ruin are situated in a negative zone, whereby what remains is defined by what is absent. Beyond its time, the ruin appears for us as being of a different era. As of a different era, the ruin’s temporality is decidedly polymorphous, at once rooted in the past and dispersed into the present. . . . The ruin’s deep relationship with time situates it in a unique place. “Submitting to and surmounting” time, the ruin operates with a strange logic, in which immobility sits side by side with mobility and constant flux. In this way, the ruin’s history is also its presence.9

Trigg focuses here on the temporal ambiguity of the phenomenon of ruin; however, his description of this dichotomous character is useful for the understanding of the physical aspects of present-absent opposition, too. In the presence of ruins, we are thus invited to partake in this intellectually and aesthetically fertile ambiguity in which the absence forms the original, and the still-surviving documents the decaying genuine state. Therefore, the visual manifestation of this gradual disappearing is what becomes most recognizable at first sight. However, the ruin stands for its own past as testament to its earlier state through its remaining. This will also be temporary. As we can see from the above, even though their lifespan can be measured in terms of the gradually disappearing, original ruins have a proper life cycle in their own right. We shall thus differentiate between the “not-yet-ruin” and the “not-anymore-ruin.” In the first case the building cannot be considered as a ruin (yet); it is merely a construction that has entered into a phase of dereliction that is still reversible. With some

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Figure 1.2  Ruins of Pergamon. Photograph by the author, 2013.

reinvestment in maintenance, the initial ruination can be stopped and the construction can return to its original—or close-to-original—state, continuing to serve its initial purpose, perhaps in a modified function. At the other extreme of the ruin’s lifespan is the “not-anymore-ruin.” This is a complete disappearance, when the former construction has disintegrated to such a degree that the original aspect of the building is neither recognisable nor even imaginable any longer—something similar to what Jeanette Bicknell called an “architectural ghost.” “There is a continuum between architectural ghosts and ruins. Generally, if enough of a structure remains to provide the opportunity for aesthetic appreciation of that structure, then we are dealing with a ruin, rather than a ghost. . . . If all that remains of a structure are piles of rubble or indentation in the ground, perhaps marked by a memorial plaque, then the structure is a ghost rather than a ruin.”10 This is an unfortunate and mournful state from an aesthetic and archaeological point of view; nevertheless, looking from the perspective of the ruin’s lifespan, it can be interpreted as a natural end result and consequence of the unstoppable decay in the face of natural forces. Just as in the case of the “not-yet-ruin,” the “not-anymore-ruin” is not a proper ruin, not (only) because its original state and function are no longer reparable, but also because the nothing or close-to-nothing that remains is not sufficient to facilitate in a clear imagining of the original edifice. Hence, the view

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counteracts our fantasy’s intention to complete the ruin and to be impressed by its authentic splendour. The classical ruin will thus manifest itself between these two temporal points and physical states. The left-alone building without maintenance, reconstruction, and repair gradually departs the category of “not-yet-ruin” and enters its proper ruin phase, where it continues to be “eaten up by age” and destructive forces, up until the point when so little remains that we cannot imaginarily reconstitute the original or its qualities from the extremely fragmented and amorphous pile of stones; thus, we arrive at the “not-anymore-ruin.” Already in the late eighteenth century this had significant importance—as we can learn from Inger Sigrun Brodey—in finding and defining the “ideal” ruin. “The intertwining of ruin and monument can demonstrate the late eighteenth-century’s characteristically ambivalent attitude towards authority and order. The ‘ideal’ ruin must be grand enough in stature to suggest what it once was, and, at the same time, decayed enough to show that it no longer is; grand enough to suggest a worthwhile conquest, yet decayed enough to quell any doubts about who conquers.”11 Also Alois Riegl in his often-quoted classical text from 1903 titled The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin highlighted the fact that for the creation of age-value the natural destroying force and its visible effects on the construction are required, however, if it is too much—or, in other words, if the dereliction caused by Nature is too extensive—then there is no more material left to offer the sense of age value for the observer.12 Between the above two extremities, despite the obvious and ever-growing absence, the ruin continues to remind the observer of the original; we can also say that it becomes its own monument through the passing of time, hence Sándor Radnóti’s formulation is also right when interpreting the ruin as a monument of the time in the present.13 “The most important factor of shaping a ruin is a fact, that the architect of a building is a particular man, and the architect of a ruin is time,” as Małgorzata Nieszczerzewska wrote, and her affirmation brings us to the third criterion, time, that will, similar to the previously discussed two criteria, provide us with just as many challenging questions when trying to apply it to the reading of ruins.14 The issue is that while it may seem self-evident that the temporal perspective is crucial for the start of ruination and for the “development” of the ruin, the amount of this time is hard to set—even more difficult than grasping whether the building still has a proper practical function, or how much absence is needed such that the aesthetic impact is maximized. This temporal aspect is a necessity in the interpretation of the ruins due to the obvious fact that the gradual disappearance of parts of the original construction requires time; we admire the slow work of Nature that develops over an extended span of time. The availability of such a time frame allows Nature to “work” on the building through its own means, including weathering and

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erosion by wind, rain, or snow. These are time-consuming processes, and in the classical case the more time passes the more fascinating the signs of decay appear on the building. We can read these signs of erosion as the unintentional anti-construction of Nature that, nevertheless, results in an aesthetically attractive object that could almost be interpreted as an “artwork.” If Nature itself is considered here to be the involuntary and unconscious “artist,” then the result of the creative act will be a new work wrought by overcoming a former, classical artwork, thus resulting in an “aesthetic hybrid,” as Paul Zucker defines ruins.15 Apart from Zucker’s well-formed definition, we can also remember Georg Simmel’s famous essay on the topic from 1907 (often and fittingly quoted when examining the aesthetics of ruins), and we can agree with him that in the case of ruins it becomes spectacularly evident how Nature surmounts human creation. In Simmel’s words: “For now the decay appears as nature’s revenge for the spirit’s having violated it by making a form in its own image. . . . Nature has transformed the work of art into material for her own expression as she had previously served as material for art.”16 This also serves to explain the primary difference implied in the analogy between the human artist and Nature as artist: the latter forms (better to say negatively forms, hence destroys) a building into becoming a ruin, but here we have a never-ending process that always has just temporary end-results. This temporality stays within the ruin’s lifespan that stretches between the aforementioned points of “not-yet-ruin” and “not-anymore-ruin.” Therefore, while a human artist stops at a certain point, Nature keeps on working until arriving at the final point of “not-anymore-ruin,” when only the completely deformed and scattered mere matter survives, without any reference to its former and formed self. This will be the terminal point of the span within which we could enjoy ruins aesthetically. Of course, we can stop or significantly slow down the time of the ruination process—the art of Nature—by conserving a ruin. Conservation work takes many approaches that range from maintaining the actual, current state of the ruinous building to various degrees of reconstruction and rebuilding of an imagined or recreated original. However, all this can be interpreted as taking up the battle again: (re-)constructing and conserving against Nature’s will. If we want to have a ruin survive in its actual state, we need constant maintenance and conservation; otherwise it becomes Nature’s playground once again. At the same time, the question arises of whether in such cases the ruin can still be interpreted as a proper ruin—we shall come back to this issue soon. We can now see why I claimed that the third criterion of the ruination process, time, is just as complex, nuanced, and, in certain cases, hard to apply as the other two. The length of time one feels to be “necessary” for a building to be interpreted as a ruin varies, and what makes it even more

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complicated is that it differs on various levels; there are both objective factors and subjective or emotive ones. Regarding the former, the objective factors entailed in establishing an amount of time as the criterion for ruination can depend on the building materials and local climate of the site. The stones of antique Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals struggle longer with natural forces, while sun-dried mud-brick forts are reduced to vanishing powder far quicker—naturally, this influences not only their potential for survival but also their maintenance and reconstruction, as we will see in chapter 4. Among the subjective factors, on the other hand, we can mention the emotive aspect of what counts as old for an individual, perhaps influenced by her historical sensibility, the environment of her upbringing and country of origin; a hundred-year-old building and/or its ruins can have different emotional impact for visitors from the USA or the United Arab Emirates than for other viewers coming from Turkey or China. Another aspect of ruins’ connection with time: they always have a peculiar kind of momentariness. They are constantly changing, even if this transformation might not be perceptible to us in the short time of a single visit. But if we revisit the ruin after a certain period, we may notice a new crack, another missing row of bricks, a freshly half-broken column, or another fallen tower. On the other hand, the ruin can also change aspect due to numerous modes and approaches of reconstructing or at least “organising” the fractured elements. In 1953 Rose Macaulay highlighted the speed at which these seemingly still and serene remains change appearance: Ruins change so fast that one cannot keep pace: they disintegrate, they go to earth, they are tidied up, excavated, cleared of vegetation, built over, restored, prostrate columns set on end and fitted with their own or other capitals; fresh areas of ancient cities are exposed, scattered ruins assembled together in railed enclosures, ruin-squatting populations expelled from castles and abbeys, walls repaired. Even between typing and printing, printing and publication, drastic changes in ruins everywhere occur; one cannot keep pace.17

However, in any of the above cases, regardless of whether it is due to further dereliction of the site, partial reorganisation of the scattered pieces, or total recovery of the construction, the new appearance of the ruin naturally offers a new aesthetic experience and, quite often, may also require a new interpretation. This aspect makes the parallel between artworks and ruins even more apparent: artworks too need to be constantly reinterpreted and should provide us with new experiences and more interpretations with each review. We can clearly see that in all these cases the amount of time is decisive. Converting a building into a picturesque ruin requires a lot of time, taking imperceptibly slow steps, and, in many cases, it far outlasts a single human

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life. Therefore, we admire the sublime amount of lapsed time manifest in picturesque ruins, so often surmounting our own given lifespans. What’s more, as Brian Dillon reminded us, this surmounting is not only in the actual quantity of years, but it also has future perspectives. “The ruin, despite its state of decay, somehow outlives us.”18 This is why in the presence of ruins we can trace a complex structure composed of the interplay of various timesegments that all influence our experience of the ruin and of the time that is mediated through the ruin itself. We have 1) the time of the construction of the original building; 2) the amount of time constitutive of the lifespan of the edifice while it served in its original function; 3) the long time period of its slow destruction, culminating in 4) the particular moment when we observe the ruin; and finally, 5) our own given time, that is, (in most cases), so much less than the ruin’s existence between the phases of “not-yet-ruin” and “not-anymore-ruin”. When we take all of these temporal segments into consideration while enjoying the aesthetics of ruins, we are faced with the ruins’ almost unimaginably long-lived semi-eternality in contrast to our own brief lives. From this we can see that these three criteria of functionlessness, absence, and time, can certainly provide us the framework of defining a ruin. However, there are undeniably many cases in which we encounter some difficulties. The rigid application of these criteria in the identifying of a ruin as such may get a bit too exclusive, limiting, and even confusing sometimes. In other words, they describe the purest and most classical forms of ruins: when a several-centuries- (or millennia) old structure is not in daily use anymore, left abandoned without proper maintenance, and Nature has started to reclaim it. This “purest” form of the process of ruination exists relatively rarely, however, and we can think of numerous counterexamples that challenge this classical form. Among these counterexamples is the aforementioned case, when the former city gates of Bologna call into question the criteria of functionlessness, as they were given a new function in the novel structure of organising the flow of traffic. Another example, also briefly mentioned above, is the case of the well-maintained ruin or archaeological site, where the crumbling edifice’s decay is stopped through various forms of conservation, perhaps in order to deep-freeze the current state, or to provide a safe environment for the visitors; thus the remnants serve as a sort of musealised ruin-monument. In this example the criterion of absence is the primary casualty in a way, because even if there are some lacuna on the body of the building, they are cured and preserved, or, in certain cases even fully repaired or rebuilt; hence the absence is not increasing and the missing parts are not growing in proportion to the still-surviving sections. And, as illustration of the challenges regarding time or the long temporal perspective of the ruinous building, the obvious example is the occurrence of so-called contemporary ruins—I analyze these

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and why I consider the description a contradiction in terms in more detail in chapter 5. The position and aesthetic status of modern or recent buildings in decay, among them many industrial ones, are very popular subjects among theoreticians, heritage specialists, professional artists, and amateur photographers, too. Nevertheless, if we explain the attraction of ruins through the sublime amount of time between their original state and the present form that they incorporate and make manifest in an aesthetically valuable form, then the modern or contemporary buildings in decay may fall short in qualifying as “ruins.” Despite these often ambiguous cases, the three criteria above still serve as a definite frame of reference for the interpretation of the fragile presence of ruins and its aesthetic consequences, as well as for the mapping of the various derivations of this classical state, many of which will be further analysed in the coming chapters. However, still with regard to the classical forms, appearances, and fascination of ruins, there are some further aspects that may help us in the understanding of the thrills they often provide. Earlier we saw that the ruins’ attractiveness is very much based on the fact that here we can aesthetically encounter not only the power of Nature but also the passing (of) time. Through observing ruins, not only can we admire the power of Nature in time, it becomes much more profoundly sensible than by simply “knowing” the date of the (original) building. A simple number of centuries does not astonish us as does the perceptible manifestation of decay. Obviously, here we come very close to the concept of sublime, much discussed and analysed particularly from the eighteenth century onward, which is at the same time the flourishing period of ruin-examinations, excavations, depictions, and even of the building of fake ruins. The sublime, as a category describing the reasons of appeal given through a phenomenon that surmounts human limits, helps us in understanding why we can get aesthetic pleasure when visiting and observing ruins; the decayed results of Nature’s power manifested through time, a power that is so uncontrollable through human intervention. Ruins represent and manifest an almost incredible and unimaginable amount of time. Thus, this temporal grandeur of ruins can be placed in parallel with the physical grandeur of other elements that are traditionally connected to the concept of sublime: deserts, high mountains, or the sea. It is also intriguing to see how the reasons for the sublimity of a building can change from physical to temporal; originally it may impress the viewer by its size, real and physical grandeur—just think of the Coliseum or the Baths of Caracalla—and then, as ruin, the same complex, the former edifice, can be considered sublime because of the greatness of time that it incorporates. Apart from the concept of the sublime, the picturesque is also a key concept connected with ruins. One of its most important theoreticians, William Gilpin, in the eighteenth century intended to place it on the palette of aesthetic

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categories somewhere between the beautiful and the sublime.19 A main characteristic of the picturesque is that it does not generate such an intense emotional response in the viewer as does the sublime (i.e., it is not so strongly connected with an educative or moral function). The picturesque strives much more for a pure aesthetic pleasure, simply taking joy in what is seen; that’s why the name of the concept comes from the objective materialisation of the view: picture. So, while on the one hand the sublime aids us in describing the effect elicited by the observation of the otherwise insensible amount of time, mediated by the ruins, the picturesque, on the other hand, explains the popularity of ruins in certain genres of art, particularly from the eighteenth century on. Especially if we consider that ruins are often associated with nostalgia and melancholy and at the same time with the wish to regain the original, if only through the imagination. As Jean Starobinski put it: “The poetics of the ruin is always a meditation in front of the invasion of oblivion. . . . The melancholy of the ruin lies in the fact that it has become a monument of the lost meaning.”20 But what can and what should we do about this “lost meaning”? Find it? Or find it out? Naturally this lost meaning gives immense space for imagination and poetics, which sometimes can even result in counter-scientific attitudes by refusing archaeology’s and other disciplines’ necessity in the research and reconstruction of ruins. In the aesthetic discourse around 1800, which in many ways is still relevant today, the question was whether to put the accent on the still existing or on what has disappeared forever? On the present presence and continuity, or on the absence and discontinuity? This debate also had a political aspect, as we can read in the very informative book of Carolyn Springer, analysing the relationship of archaeological excavations and politics in eighteenth–nineteenth century Italy: “If Byron reads the ruins of Italy as the sign of an absence, both the Church and its democratic opposition celebrate antiquity as a palpable presence, daily restored through the agency of archaeology. Thus they concur, despite dramatic ideological differences, in invoking archaeology as a figure of political rehabilitation.”21 In this sense, the scientific approach to and artistic appreciation of ruins divert from each other. Archaeology—similarly to reconstruction—tries to “fill” this absence by collecting information on what is lost, but from an aesthetic perspective absence is not a disturbing feature that needs to be exceeded. On the contrary, the emphasis upon absence better facilitates the (melancholic) poetics of ruins. “Too much” scientific research of ruins can reduce the possibilities of arts—at least, according to the artists themselves. “Byron’s bias is anti-archaeological; like Keats interrogating the Grecian urn, he implies that what is gained for erudition is lost to the imagination,”22 Springer writes, and we can agree with the Romantic poets’ point of view; creative poetical fantasy is best inspired from something that is less

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researched scientifically, thus leaving more space for interpretation. A similar valuation of the incomplete, what Nina L. Dubin called a kind of “imaginative pleasure afforded by the ruins,” can be read in Charles de Brosses’s Italian Letters. On the remnants of the Constantine Basilica, he writes: “I cannot tell you what that temple was, but only that that isolated column is the most beautiful thing in architecture in the whole world, and that seeing it gives me as much and perhaps more satisfaction than the view of any complete building.”23 We shall not forget, however, that the opportunity to achieve the highest levels of the “imaginative pleasure” depends on what and how much has survived from the earlier structure; this is why when evaluating ruins, we constantly need to be aware of their lifespan that terminates in the phase of not-anymore-ruin. In his previously quoted essay, Simmel briefly touches upon this point in a quite straightforward judgement with regard to the remnants in the historical centre of Rome: “The metaphysicalaesthetic charm of the ruin disappears when not enough remains of it to let us feel the upward-leading tendency. The stumps of the pillars of the Forum Romanum are simply ugly and nothing else, while a pillar crumbled—say, halfway down—can generate a maximum of charm.”24 The fascination with the partially survived elements’ role and the exploration of these manifold interpretive possibilities continued; a much later literary historical parallel from the twentieth century illustrates just how long this dichotomy of the lost or recreated meaning of the incomplete could inspire artists. As Tyrus Miller demonstrated in an essay on the dualism of tradition and avant-garde aspects in modernism, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are exemplary representatives of the two approaches. Where Eliot emphasised the inaccessibility of the past due to fragmentation itself and the loss of context, for Pound it was precisely this fragmentation that provided the artist with the opportunity for poetic creation and recreation. As Miller argued: “If for Eliot the past was inaccessible because of the fragment’s separation from its original context, for Pound it was this very separation that rendered the past available for appropriation and reinscription—for the poet’s granting not its original life back, but a new life projecting forward.”25 Evidently then, we can see that instead of the “exact” reconstruction, or the striving for it, the creative, imaginative, and personal reconstruction becomes paramount. In this sense, viewing ruins and imagining their original complexity is very similar to the question of creating or recreating Antiquity—an idea that also often occurs in the aesthetic discourse around 1800. It is enough to think of Novalis writing in his “Fragment on Goethe,” from 1798, that Antiquity is not obviously available and “present,” but it should be brought forth by us (sie soll von uns erst hervorgebracht werden).26 Goethe himself came very close to this idea twenty years later, when in his Antik und Modern, from 1818, he argued that even if in his or her own way, everyone should

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be a Greek (Jeder sei auf seine Art ein Grieche! Aber er sei’s.).27 Just like in the case of Antiquity in general, and with ruins in particular, the personal interpretation and imagination is what becomes decisive—not for finding the absolute answer or the exact state and aspect of the original, but for its relevance to us. As we saw when encountering the ruin, we can really face time, and it lets us meditate upon our historical and existential position in the world. Thus in the presence of ruins we can understand our own present better through the analyses of our relationship to the past. Summarising these considerations we can affirm that paradoxical though it may seem, a real ruin is a very complex structure. Not only was it complex while the original building was complete and in use, but even in its decay its complexity remains or evolves through the “addition” of void. The artistic work of Nature—the slow un-construction—illuminates how time has passed over human creation, and our aesthetic interest and pleasure very much depends on this almost palpable perception of the sublimely incomprehensible vastness of time: through this “touchable perception” (i.e., touching the dilapidated physical layers of the edifice is like getting in touch with the temporal layers of the passing time). As Carolyn Korsmeyer argued, “Touch furnishes a sense of being in actual, literal contact with something. The urge to touch is common when encountering objects singled out for their age and historical uniqueness.”28 Visiting, walking around, and touching ruins brings us into direct contact with time, and it can become a form of encountering the passing time and passing of time. The presence of ruins becomes manifest and tangible—especially if we use the word “presence” to refer not only to the temporal but also a spatial relationship, just like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht did in his book The Production of Presence. In his words: “And are we not precisely longing for presence, is our desire for tangibility not so intense—because our own everyday environment is so almost insuperably consciousness-centered? Rather than having to think, always and endlessly, what else there could be, we sometimes seem to connect with a layer in our existence that simply wants the things of the world close to our skin.”29 This sort of tangible perception of temporality is what we can directly experience in the presence of ruins through sensing the discrepant rhythm between the slow flow of the ruin’s time and our own. This is what helps us answer our earlier question from the beginning of this chapter: why is rubble not attractive? It is because of the lack of time in their decay: rubble, either the result of human aggression (war) or natural catastrophes (earthquakes, tsunamis), can always be considered as “sudden” when contrasted to the centuries and millennia of ruins. Rubble is a consequence of a sudden destruction, whose final result, an immense pile of debris, cannot be compared to the aesthetic attractiveness of real ruins. It cannot impress us with the unimaginable, almost incomprehensible amount of time needed

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to change its state. And, what’s more: rubble will never become ruins. They cannot be displayed on the timeline of “not-yet-ruin” or “not-anymore-ruin,” They are not “not-yet-ruins,” because the building, of which they were a part, does not exist anymore. But they are not “not-anymore-ruins” either because their aesthetic insignificance is not the result of a terminated erosion. While the ruin ceases to be a ruin once too little remains, a quick and sudden destruction does not allow rubble to incorporate any kind of reference to temporal sublime. Here we can see that, even if at the beginning it might seem arbitrary to formally differentiate between ruins and rubble, in both cases we have buildings that are not in use anymore; here the time-factor becomes definitive of both. This is what Marc Augé put very briefly but extremely clearly in his 2003 book titled Le temps en ruins: “Future history will not create ruins any more. It will not have time for it.”30 Naturally Augé’s affirmation may also bring to mind Walter Benjamin’s beautifully written and often-quoted text on the Angel of History and on the ambiguous perspectives of our progress and fate.31 We are thus doubtful that it is not only picturesque and sublime ruins that will be hard to find in the future; since the artificial is continually surmounting the natural, we cannot even be sure if Nature will exist at all in the future, or only its debris, without any aesthetic attraction. This keeps reminding us that although the presence of ruins affirms their aesthetically-pleasing struggle through their partial and temporal survival, still, this presence is extremely fragile, exposed to numerous forms of natural and human threats.

NOTES 1. This chapter is a revised and enlarged version of an earlier paper of mine: Zoltán Somhegyi, “The Aesthetic Attraction of Decay: From the Nature of Ruins to the Ruins of Nature,” in Aesthetics in Action. International Yearbook of Aesthetics, vol.18, ed. Krystyna Wilkoszewska (Krakow: International Association for Aesthetics, 2015): 319–26. Some of the considerations have also appeared in: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Layers of the Past: On the Potential of Ruins,” in Learning from Decay: Essays on the Aesthetics of Architectural Dereliction and Its Consumption, cowritten by Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi, (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), 13–24. 2. “The Ruin.” A poem of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet from the Middle Ages, translated by Richard Hamer, quoted in: Anthony Thwaite, The Ruins of Time: Antiquarian and Archeological Poems (London: Eland, 2006), 10–11. 3. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “The Triumph of Time: Romanticism Redux,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 429. 4. “Your Pictures: Decay,” BBC News website, last modified October 13, 2017, https​://ww​w.bbc​.com/​news/​in-pi​cture​s-416​13826​. 5. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 33, 45.

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6. Goethe’s Travels in Italy, Together with His Second Residence in Roma and Fragments on Italy, trans. Alexander James William Morrison and Charles Nisbet (London: George Bell and Sons, 1885), 159. 7. Salvatore Settis, Futuro del “classico” (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), 85. 8. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 4, 95. (Italics in the original—Z. S.) 9. Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 268–69. 10. Jeanette Bicknell, “Architectural Ghosts,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 436. 11. Inger Sigrun Brodey, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility (New York: Routledge, 2008), 66. (Italics and quotation marks in the original—Z. S.). 12. See more in: Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), 21–51. 13. Sándor Radnóti, A rom. Egy téma és egy kép (The Ruin. A Theme and a Picture), Vigilia 42, no. 7 (1977): 471. 14. Małgorzata Nieszczerzewska, “Derelict Architecture: Aesthetics of an Unaesthetic Space,” Argument. Biannual Philosophical Journal 5, no. 2 (2015): 392. 15. Paul Zucker, “Ruins: An Aesthetic Hybrid,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2 (Winter 1961): 119–30. 16. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” trans. David Kettler, in Georg Simmel 1858– 1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 259, 262. 17. Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker Company, 1966), xvii. 18. Brian Dillon, “Introduction: A Short History of Decay,” in Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Brian Dillon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 11. 19. See more on the history of the concept and Gilpin’s interpretation in: Raffaele Milani, Il Pittoresco. L’evoluzione del Gusto tra classico e romantico (Rome: Laterza, 1996), Mark Roskill, The Languages of Landscape (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997) and Brodey, Ruined by Design. 20. Jean Starobinski, L’invenzione della libertà. 1700–1789, trans. Manuela Busino-Maschietto (Milan: Abscondita, 2008), 155. 21. Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism 1775–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3. 22. Springer, Marble Wilderness, 6. 23. Nina L. Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 2. 24. Simmel, “The Ruin,” 265. 25. Tyrus Miller, “A great future behind us. Exploded traditions, avant-garde pasts,” in Retracing the past. Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective. International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Volume 19, ed. Zoltán Somhegyi (Santa Cruz, California: International Association for Aesthetics, 2017), 110. 26. Novalis, Fragmente, ed. Ernst Kamnitzer (Dresden: Wolfgang Jess Verlag, 1929), 656.

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27. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Antik und Modern,” accessed August 12, 2019, http:​//www​.zeno​.org/​Liter​atur/​M/Goe​the,+​Johan​n+Wol​fgang​/Theo​retis​che+S​ chrif​ten/A​ntik+​und+m​odern​. 28. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Aesthetic Deception: On Encounters with the Past,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 121. See also: Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Touch and the Experience of the Genuine,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 4 (October 2012): 365–77. 29. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 106. 30. Marc Augé, Rovine e macerie. Il senso del tempo, trans. Aldo Serafini (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004), 137. 31. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257–58.

Chapter 2

The Golden Age and Fall of Ruins

It is fascinating to see how the same ruined complex, antique monument, or even larger parts of a decaying city can appear in completely different modes, creating various contexts, documenting diverse approaches and interests of artists, thus leading to manifold meanings when manifest in works of art. Within just a few decades, a painterly representation can celebrate the pure and random beauty of the ruins themselves, putting them in the center to highlight the aesthetic qualities of the admired antique grandeur. Alternately, the focus can be on the figures, such that the remnants of the former edifice serve merely to provide an ideal or Arcadian environment for the represented visitor. Still in other cases ruins can become a metaphor of the transience of all human efforts to create something long lasting and of the vain hope that our products can withstand Nature’s overwhelming power and human violence. Or, especially from the turn of the eighteenth–nineteenth century onward, a more Romantic vision dominates, just as nationalistic and patriotic undertones are strengthened. We can thus agree with Anne Eriksen that observing ruins—as well as their visual representation—tells us not only about the ruins themselves but about our own selves, too (i.e., on the ways, modes, reasons, and how and why we see them as such). “What defines a ruin is not the material decay itself, but a specific understanding of it. The ruin is the product of a certain kind of discourse, a way of ascribing value and meaning to certain kinds of decay. . . . Nonetheless, the voices of the ruins are not their own. Their speech does not emanate from their stones, bricks and mortar, but from history and from the cultural context of the spectator.”1 Hence our fascination with ruins can thus also be explained by the fact that when observing them, besides their own aesthetic qualities, we are thrilled by this multifaceted and polyvalent nature of their presence and by the many aspects ruins and their representation can manifest. 23

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In this chapter, while I will mainly focus on the peak period of ruin representations, surveying some of the thrilling aspects of these depictions, I will have some references to both their (pre-)history as well as their decline. As is well known, the popularity of depicting ruins culminated in the Rococo, Neoclassical, and Romantic periods, but there are noteworthy examples from earlier times, too. In fact, they appear as early as Antiquity itself, proving that ruins had a constant aesthetic radiation, inviting and incentivising their observers to respond in and to their presence. What is curious, however, is that from the early eighteenth century onwards the topic opened up to new polyvalent structures. In this period, not only the theoretical but also the artistic approaches to and interpretations of the motif of ruination have multiplied, resulting in a booming and blossoming of thematic variety, within only a few decades. We could even say that the motif has developed and mutated, not unlike the manner in which a real ruin changes and becomes enriched in appearance over the course of its existence. As we saw in chapter 1, throughout the ruination process, ranging from not-yet-ruin to not-anymore-ruin, the remnants constantly change aspects, providing the viewer with new insights, inciting new thoughts, and arousing novel sentiments. This process only stops once the ruin completely disappears (i.e., when Nature leaves so few physical remnants of the former edifice that the viewer can no longer discern the previous outlook, architectural structure, and possible aesthetic qualities of the construction). For those who are interested in depictions of ruins and amazed by the marvellous works of artists whose oeuvre is partly, or in certain cases almost entirely, dedicated to the motif, it might seem that there is a parallel between the history of representing ruins and the phenomenon of the life of a ruin itself. After some initial—though often already quite engaging—early examples, we see a thrilling variety and abundance of great works of art, until we arrive at a point where the gradual weakening and fading of the motif is undeniable. The status of ruins lapses into mere decoration; once they have become well-known touristic assets, without the power to stand as strong sociohistorical statements and fascinating aesthetic revelations, they fail to impress the viewer in the same way as before. This then may remind us of the life of the ruin itself: A building starts becoming a ruin when, through dilapidation, it develops its aesthetic potential as a ruin, only then having its full effect—or, in Simmel’s words, quoted in chapter 1, “generate a maximum of charm,”2 after which becoming less and less captivating. Even if our main focus is on the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries, in order to better understand the paths of diversification followed by the gradual weakening of the motif, it is worth investigating some of the earlier examples, too: how the motif has risen from a subsidiary and applied theme to a polyvalent form that has wide applicability and multiple references. The

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independent and autonomous status of the subject-matter—or, the genre of the ruin-image—was preceded by a long period when the motif of dilapidated buildings appeared only in an auxiliary role. In this context, then, the displayed ruins were rather sporadic decorative elements. Even if they had some more significant purpose and signifying role, it was still ancillary in status, merely refining the main theme and subject matter of the picture. Some of the better-known examples include a Roman relief from the first century (Munich, Glyptothek) showing a rural scene with a peasant and his cow passing in the foreground, and we can notice a circular-formed building behind them, with some parts ruined. The curious detail however is to the right of this edifice, where a massive tree trunk is passing through an arched construction. Although the arch—which could refer to a monumental gate—is not so ruinous in itself (certainly not as much as the round building farther in the background) it still provides the viewer with the strong impression that it had been imagined as beginning its ruination phase. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nature’s contribution is essential in the ruination process, even if this contribution is a rather destructive one. It is this gradual reclaiming and occupation of the human built and artificial by the natural elements that are intriguingly displayed on this Roman relief, where the tree relentlessly penetrates the edifice. However, despite the fact that on this over two-millennia-old artwork, with the process of ruination captured in parallel with its modern readings and in an aesthetically captivating way, the phenomenon of decay itself is not in the forefront of the work. The relief is usually described as a “rural scene,” and we can agree with this classification, hence interpreting it as a decorative panel showing a scene depicting a peasant on his way to or from the fields. The sculptural work would then fit in the series of descriptive everyday life scenes, of which we can find many in both Roman sculpture and painting; and in this way the representation is not focusing on emphasizing (or even finding) any kind of tragic aspect in this scene and view, hence the relief is much more to be placed—as Massimiliano Papini also highlighted—within the tradition of Arcadian and bucolic poetry and presentations of a locus amoenus.3 This decorative purpose and descriptive character of early ruin-representations had shifted in the later centuries towards a more applied use of the motif, when, from the Middle Ages onward, ruins were intentionally depicted to support the major topic of the artwork. As Sylvia Pressouyre reminds us, in many cases ruins’ appearance was connected to the emphasis upon acts of violence or the effects of destruction on the building itself.4 In addition to the examples she provides, one of the best-known group of examples is found in Nativity and Adoration scenes, where the crumbling edifice hosting the Holy Family symbolised the end of the old era and thus naturally referred to the beginning of the period of the New Testament. To quote just one example, Rogier van der Weyden’s St. Columba Altarpiece from around

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1455 (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) in which the ruinous stable dominates the central panel of the picture, thus referring not merely to the physical but also to the theological context of the scene. The slightly asymmetrically set stable is partly dilapidated. In fact, it follows the classical ruination process precisely, which “develops” based on the nature of the building materials: first the lighter, softer, and external elements are destroyed, before the more solid, inner, and supportive parts are eaten up. So it is on Weyden’s painting, where the thatched roof and the upper part of the construction is what has strikingly missing elements, while the load-bearing pillars are relatively intact. The sensitivity towards both the accurate and appealing depiction of the ruin’s dereliction is visible on another “northern” work from almost the same period but in a different medium. Martin Schongauer’s Nativity engraving (ca. 1470) shows the scene—not in a traditional wooden stable but in the remains of a Gothic-style stone edifice, with a continuous narrative presentation of the various episodes in the same picture, including the annunciation to the shepherds in the background and their arrival in the middle ground, observing the Holy Family from the exterior of the former edifice; although, naturally, in the case of a ruin, the distinction between exterior and interior is rapidly blurred. Similar to the above instance by Rogier van der Weyden, here too we can find many elements of the ruination process that makes its representation authentic. Actually, for the modern observer it is quite thrilling that although the depiction of the style of the location contains some anachronism—the placing of the Biblical story in a Gothic context—the rendering of the slow, though unstoppable, decay is meticulously shown. The uneven surface of the stones, the lacking bricks above the main arch, and especially the vegetation running around the left pillar are clear signs of the artist’s intention of providing the viewer with a convincing image of the ruination. However, he does it while keeping in mind the aesthetics of the final image, too. This explains why at the end, looking at it more carefully, the random outline of the decaying masonry is not entirely random but rather seems to be framing the central figures. This accurate and detail-oriented approach of the northern artists in which the display of the edifice’s degradation and the signs of Nature’s role in the process becomes even more apparent when compared with their Italian counterparts. In the art production south of the Alps, one can often have the impression that ruins appear in a clear-cut form: the randomness of the dilapidation is less emphasised, and more attention is paid to the still-intact parts of the ruinous pieces of architecture. For example, in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco Adoration of the Magi (1486–1490, Florence, Santa Maria Novella), where the construction in the background, despite serving as a ruin, lacks some typical ruinous features: the basic parts of the triumphal arch-like structure are practically intact, and its “ruinity” or “ruinousness” is only indicated

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by the fact that entire elements are missing from the monument. Still, the ending of the architectural piece is perfectly straight cut, like the clear level edge of the half arch on the left. And it seems that this is not a random feature unique to Ghirlandaio’s oeuvre; we can see something very similar in Mantegna’s pieces too, especially in the background of his Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1480s, Paris, Louvre). The distant town on the mountain has an imposing, antique-style entrance gate, and both this and another round-arched building are presented as partly ruined. In both cases of Mantegna’s piece however, the broken elements are missing the accidental and irregular shapes that are typical of “natural” ruins and classical ruination: looking for example at the six massive fluted columns of this aforementioned construction in the background, they seem to be sawn evenly and purposefully. This regularity of the ruins is only slightly lessened in the case of the display and arrangement of the architectural remnants around the central figure in the foreground, where there are more signs of spontaneity, including the broken edge of the pillar next to the capital and the appearance of the vegetation slowly overgrowing the broken arch. What we can thus conclude from the observation of these few early examples is that in the beginning ruins were not shown in and of themselves and for their own aesthetic attraction but more for the ways in which their appearance could add layers to the iconographic context of the main theme—naturally this does not mean that we cannot find their presentation aesthetically appealing in many instances. What’s more, apart from the artistic values, the typology of the ruined building and the construction’s architectural style can also be the sign of a growing historical awareness in certain cases. As Andrew Hui convincingly demonstrated, the insertion of classical ruins in the fifteenth century Nativity and Adoration paintings can be regarded as a sign of and reference to a consciousness of not only of the triumph of Christianity, but also of the irrevocably lost antique world, the canonical and defining values that have their rebirth through the work of Renaissance artists and humanists, for whom “the ruin had both evocative and epistemological value,” hence “the birthplace of Christ became the imagined birthplace of classical ruins.”5 This auxiliary role continued in the (early) Baroque period, hence the topics in which ruins could appear were still relatively limited, usually subordinated to a main subject or serving as illustrations for the principal motif. We can find some really fascinating examples in the comprehensive research of Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, who collected thousands of emblems and symbols from close to fifty books from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries.6 Among these, there are a few examples that are closer to those obvious or “classical” meanings and associations that one would straightforwardly connect to the idea of decay, ruin(ation), and destruction. For example, if we look at the image from the book of Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco from

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Toledo from the early seventeenth century, we can see a horseman riding in a landscape with the rising sun, and in the foreground a crumbling semicircular arch.7 The ruins are divided from the rest of the landscape by a stylised river. According to the description of the emblem: all flows, nothing is eternal, solid, or long lasting; even the greatest monuments (the text quotes a couple of the antique wonders) are subject to decay. Another emblem that we can quote is the work of Petrus Costalius from the middle of the sixteenth century that puts the inevitability of decay even more in the forefront but still implies a certain attitude of acceptance and deference to fate.8 The center of the image is dominated by the fragmented remains of a two-storey edifice with a row of semi-circular arches, the lower level of which is partly sinking into the ground, while in the upper part the arches have begun to disintegrate. The inscription explains the emblem in more detail, and despite the emphasis upon the inevitability of destiny, offers the interpretation of death as an appealing rest. Compared to these two rather traditional associations of the ruin-phenomenon, with passing and decay, a third emblem employs ruination in a more surprising context: referring to the concept of friendship. The image, taken from the book of Joachim Camerarius from Nürnberg from the late sixteenth century, shows some remnants of a building fully covered with ivy. However, according to the description, it is not only that the ivy is simply overgrowing the abandoned building’s remains, but that the vegetation also has a key role in keeping and holding the crumbling walls together.9 The “symbiosis” of the ivy and the wall would then symbolise the mutual interconnection and interdependence of people in a friendship. Apart from the positive approach to the phenomenon of ruination and the literally “constructive” appearance of the ivy, this representation also clearly shows the “natural” element in the ruination, (i.e., the ivy overgrowing the crumbling wall seemed just as indispensable an element to those encountering ruination in the sixteenth century as it does for the ruins’ modern interpreters). A later example of an emblem using some decaying elements with connection to temperament: Cesare Ripa’s well-known Iconologia from the late 16th century had many new editions, including the one published in Augsburg by Johann Georg Hertel in 1758–1760, with illustrations designed by Gottfried Eichler the Younger, and engraved by several artists. In the personification of the Melancholy Temperament, we find a standing figure reading a book and holding a closed purse with his other hand, while his mouth is tied with a gag.10 Around him a still-standing edifice is partly covered with vegetation, and some supposedly broken, however quite “clear-cut,” columns are displayed, again, in parts overgrown with plants. According to the iconology book’s description, the elements all refer to the features of the character of the melancholic man, including the interest in scholarly activities and his silent, solitary, and even selfish nature. However, his tendency toward depression,

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gloom, and sense of futility may even lead him to commit suicide, as we can see in the background, where under the round arch is a figure about to throw himself into the river. The relatively small number of cases for the possible application of ruins or crumbling building parts in (early) modern works also naturally explains why the modern iconographical lexica only mention ruins in connection to a few subjects. Andor Pigler’s Barockthemen from 1956 lists just a couple of examples, and several of them are connected to an actual subject matter, for example Marius on the Ruins of Carthage.11 Besides this, Pigler also offers a selection of “Roman ruins” in general, thus indicating that the motif was on its way to full autonomy a couple of decades later.12 An interesting detail is that Pigler’s selection of examples referencing Roman ruins includes—despite the obviously Italian origin of the motif—many Flemish and Dutch examples, too. He is right to do so, considering the fact that in the seventeenth century we can often find numerous aesthetically inspiring and intellectually thought-provoking examples from the northern countries and by northern artists staying in Italy. The growing independence and increasingly important role of ruins in pictorial representation can also be traced by the changing proportions between the depicted architectural elements and the human figures. As Brian Dillon pointed out, “The history of ruins in art records the gradual diminution of the human figure until it is merely a tiny marker of the enormity of the destruction that has been wrought in the scene.”13 On the other hand the increasing independence of the ruin-representations in paintings of the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries and even the genre of capriccio itself—real or imaginary buildings, including ruined ones, grouped together in a fictitious cityscape—are naturally also closely connected to the formation of the genre of the veduta. The view of a city—either the exact, almost “photographic” (if the term was not anachronistic in this context) rendering of an actual city or the more or less modified depiction of it—has a similarly complex (pre)history as the various forms of ruin-representations themselves. It is still discussed whether the famous 18th century vedutas—of which the greatest creators are often at the same time among the most admired ruin and capriccio painters, too—can be interpreted as a proper new genre or merely a direct continuation of a much earlier tradition of at least two centuries before. The Settecento has provided us with perhaps the most amazing depictions of cities (Venice and Rome, among others) where the renderings seem to celebrate the city mainly and “purely” for its own beauty. This explains why many may have the impression that these pictorial approaches to the view were developed in the eighteenth century itself. However, as Filippo Pedrocco and others have demonstrated, the genre can easily be connected back to the pictorial tradition of the turn of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, especially in the large paintings depicting processions and state festivities. As he argued,

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“It seems obvious that, even though the paintings in questions [e.g., Gentile Bellini’s and Vittore Carpaccio’s pictures] have a narrative intent, it is really late fifteenth-century Venice that plays the leading role, in the splendour of its architecture and the opulence of its everyday reality, and that this reality is the true protagonist of the paintings.”14 Or, agreeing with Charles Beddington, we could even add some later examples, including works of the seventeenth century German-born painter living in Venice, Joseph Heintz the Younger whose depictions of religious festivities could serve as important—though a bit isolated—precedents for the later vedutas.15 Therefore these works, with their focus not only on the commemorated event but also on the impressive urban environment, can be considered as adequate candidates for forerunners of the eighteenth century veduta. In many cases even Settecento vedutas are not purely about honouring the beauty of the city, rather they commemorate actual events: the arrival of ambassadors, the festivity of the Bucintoro, dogal festivals and celebrations, etc. From this we can see that vedutas are quite ambiguous and complex. Though it may seem that their focus is exactitude in rendering the city and its celebrations, just as important will be the subjective interpretation of both the view and the subject matter by the painter. Naturally, this has increased in importance along with the growing popularity of Venice as a “touristic” hub. The primacy of subjectivity in the depiction is even more essential in the case of the capriccio, which is, in a way, a genre parallel to the veduta. According to Werner Busch, there are three subcategories within the genre of capriccio; the depicted constructions can derive entirely from the painter’s imagination without a direct predecessor, even if having strong references to classical antique architecture. In other instances, the appearing buildings and edifices do have actual and existing models. However, the originals derive from different locations and often from various styles and architectural periods, hence their being assembled in a particular mode will create the newly concocted fictitious landscape. It is however the third type of capriccio that comes closest to the veduta, as it is here that the view shows an actual location or view of a city. However, the depiction is still modified, for example, with the inclusion or omission of minor elements, or through the change of perspective and viewing angle.16 In all these three subcategories, then, the subjective interpretation and approach of the artist is paramount. Looking at actual painters of capriccio and veduta, we can see some further details that can help us better understand the particular features of these genres, as well as their importance for the appearance of ruins within them. One of the thrilling curiosities of the capriccio is that it is not only the topic or the subject matter but even the style and method of painting that can be a capriccio, too. A nice illustration of this is a work by an early representative of the genre, Michele Marieschi (Capriccio with Boats, Ruins, and Towers,

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without date, Oblastní Galerie of Liberec, Czech Republic). The work in question also has a pendant of the same dimensions (49 x 73 cm) in the same collection; both pieces showing a landscape with typical ruined buildings from different periods and styles. The fascinating aspect however lies not only in the depicted elements and monuments but also in the style and technique of the very depiction itself. It seems as if the fantastic buildings were born right from the thick background as an exuberant and joyful experiment of the painter. This particular feature of the paintings was also highlighted by Ladislav Daniel—curator of a survey exhibition of Venetian paintings from various Czech collections—when asserting in the catalogue, “Some forms [of the edifices] were obviously born from the painter playing with the thick and mellow structure of the background, with the traces of the brush and with the following individualisation of a possible meaning of their forms, hence with their insertion in the construction of the landscape.”17 This painterly technique then will certainly provide the image with a vivid, real, and at the same time dream-like and imaginary character, where the architectural elements of the capriccio are born literally in front of our eyes as a result of the creative process, seeming to be in a constant and fluid transformation. However, these capricious items are, naturally, also truly embedded in the everyday life of the “actual” inhabitants, while some buildings are typical and classical ruins (i.e., non-functional and non-functioning former constructions where the manifestation of time is aesthetically visible in the growing void and in Nature’s overtaking and reclaiming of the constructions), other lessruined edifices are still used in the “modern” life of the new inhabitants who are busily engaged in their daily activities. This living together of the ruined and the continuing elements of contemporary life will later inspire Francesco Guardi’s capricci, too. These examples show how these elements are not simply inserted in the landscape but have a strong connection with it; or, given the phenomenon of Nature overtaking crumbling buildings, we could even describe it as an “organic” connection. Nevertheless, we may trace a somewhat paradoxical aesthetic consequence of this, a sort of constructedness of these pictures (i.e., the painter’s active interest in creating the fantastic elements and then composing them into the picturesque rendering). It is this constructed—or, we can also say staged—character of the pictures that brings us to the investigation of some exciting aspects in the work of one of the most prominent figures of eighteenth century creators of cityscapes and capriccios: Canaletto. In the aesthetic analyses of his works, the intermingling of the various grades of reality and fantasy often takes centre stage in both modern interpreters’ concerns and those of his contemporaries. In an essay on Canaletto, J. G. Links quotes a curious source by G. P. Guarienti from 1753: “He [Canaletto] paints with such accuracy and cunning that the eye is deceived and truly believes

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that it is reality it sees, not a painting.”18 Though succinct, this affirmation brings us right to the core of our inquiry into Canaletto’s works (i.e., that of exactitude, reality, and/or realistic painting and, on a larger scale, authenticity of the representation). Inseparable from this question is the controversy of whether Canaletto was using a camera obscura in order to achieve the renowned verisimilitude of his paintings, a debate that many interpreters have tried to put an end to. Given the many changes on the actual views, a great number of specialists, including the aforementioned Links, do not find it plausible.19 We can agree with these researchers’ opinion that despite the topographic similitude and often almost perfect exactitude, Canaletto still regarded the vistas and vedutas as autonomous works of art, not mere mimetic exercises of visual recordings of the pure outline of the city. Thus he used his artistic freedom to overwrite reality on his paintings, changing the viewpoints, enlarging or limiting the view, modifying angles, adding or omitting architectural elements, or even altering entire buildings to include them in the vista. André Corboz asserted a similar opinion and approach in the reading of the works, analysing numerous examples of how Canaletto modified certain aspects of his views, hence convincingly showing actual occasions of the “elasticity of the canalettian space,” (i.e., occasionally opening up the view, while in other cases stretching it into a narrower outlook).20 This then urges Corboz to interpret the cityscapes of Canaletto not as “topografia” but as “topotesia,” a sort of fantastic topography. From this perspective, the capricci are not an aberration or exception in an otherwise photographically correct series of veduta paintings but just the contrary; they become the real and essential vistas of the city, being the final artistic results of the experimental and creative manipulation of the urban image. Thought-provoking examples of the limitations of the documentary “objectivity” of the veduta—or perhaps exactly the contrary of its extended objectivity—are the cases in which Canaletto had modified the apparently realistic view after the fact. For example, when one of his major patrons, the British banker and later consul John Smith, bought the Palazzo Balbi in 1740 (where he had been living and that he had been leasing since about 1709) and commissioned Antonio Visentini to redesign its Gothic facade in a Palladian, Renaissance style. Once finished, in 1751, Smith asked Canaletto to “update” an earlier veduta from 1726–1727, in Smith’s collection, showing that segment of the Canal Grande, in order to include the new version of the facade.21 This may simply be a modification done on request of the commissioner and an updating of the view to bring it closer to the later reality, however, one could also argue that it is a falsification, since in 1726–1727, during the birth of the original veduta, the facade was not so. One might initially think that the ambiguity in the various grades of “reality-status” of the veduta and the capriccio with possible aesthetic concerns

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Figure 2.1  Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal). A Lock, a Column, and a Church beside a Lagoon, 1740s. Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 67.6 cm (20 × 26 5/8 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2019. Accession Number: 2019.141.6. CC0 Public Domain Designation.

for their “authenticity” are of secondary importance to ruins. However, the function and reasons for the ruins’ insertion in the view and the role they play in the depiction or invention becomes crucial when scrutinising the aesthetics and aesthetic effects of these representations. This also helps to further apprehend the dissimilar approach of Canaletto and one of his younger contemporaries (and, in a way, rival) Francesco Guardi, who bequeathed to us not merely another style of rendering Venice with different overtones but also a variant interpretation of the genre of capriccio itself. Although celebrated for his renderings of the beauty of the special atmosphere of Venice, Guardi had not immediately started as a veduta and capriccio nor even a landscape painter; before the 1750s his focus lies mainly on figure painting. The reasons for his change in interests are often explained through a historical event: the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The war resulted in a rapid decrease of “grand tourists” to Venice and even made many of the veduta and capriccio painters—whose collectors were often the foreign visitors of the city—emigrate. Canaletto departed to England to work on several British commissions and stayed there almost continuously between 1746 and 1755. His celebrated nephew, Bellotto, left

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for various northern European cities in 1747, and Bellotto’s brother Pietro Bellotti left for Toulouse in 1748. As Charles Beddington argued, all this had left “no painter of any real merit to supply whatever remained of the market for view paintings.”22 It is thus very plausible that Guardi—despite the fact that his work is often difficult to date exactly—started to paint vedutas before Canaletto’s return in 1755, presumably in order to fill the market gap and provide various sorts of cityscapes for the visitors who started to return to the city as soon as the war finished.23 Guardi’s evaluation and reception history was not consistent, especially during his lifetime. He was often criticised for numerous reasons, among which we can find some that were directed at rather “materialistic” details. For example, using lower quality and cheaper painting materials and reutilising canvases, while other complaints focused on his painterly skills (e.g., lack of facility in the proper rendering of perspective). However, some of these criticisms and commentary on his work were less exact, and this had misdirected Guardi’s later reception, too. For example, the often-quoted commentary by Gradenigo, from 1764, that described him as “a good pupil of the renowned Canaletto” and praised his ability in use of the camera obscura seems to be less accurate. As Mitchell Merling demonstrated, neither of these two affirmations was entirely correct.24 Gradenigo’s assessment likening Guardi to Canaletto would imply that the younger painter’s skills were comparable to the later style of Canaletto. In fact, it is rather the very early works of Canaletto that may look similar to the mature Guardi’s looser and more vivid brushstrokes—we could quote for example Canaletto’s impressive pair of pictures, both from 1723, right after the painter’s return from Rome, the one titled Capriccio with Classical Ruins, the Basilica of Vicenza, Caio Cestio Pyramid and the Arch of Constantine the other simply titled Architectural Capriccio (both in private collections).25 Hence in these early pieces by Canaletto we can see the free and quick use of the brush that in the later oeuvre becomes more tranquil, precise, and intent upon the accurate rendering of detail. For the younger Guardi, this approach would turn out to be highly influential for the solidification of his own style. The other affirmation in the aforementioned assessment of Guardi by Gradenigo is related to the complicated question of the use of camera obscura. As we saw above, it is still debated if Canaletto had used the camera obscura at all, and many of the researchers agree that his use of this optical tool was rather scarce. Even if he might have possessed one—there is an eighteenth century camera obscura in the collection of the Museo Correr in Venice, with the name A. Canal on it—he still perhaps had only utilised it rarely and more for the general outlines of the view of the city.26 This is also supported by the fact that there are many artistic modifications in the final pictures. In any case, even if Canaletto had used the optical tool occasionally, it was perhaps

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more extensive in his practice after returning from England (i.e., exactly in the works that show less similarity to Guardi’s pieces). The comparison or sometimes direct opposition of the two renowned masters of the Venetian Settecento is thus often pursued based on these differences in the characteristics of their work, and on Guardi’s gradual distancing from Canaletto’s mature style that results in Guardi being celebrated for his “impressionistic” rendering of Venice and its Laguna. Although, given the anachronistic overtone of this word in this temporal context, it is often described as “proto-impressionistic.” However, for our current investigation another feature takes precedence, which also brings us back to our previous considerations of the reality-status and authenticity of vedutas and capricci and their connection to the aesthetic effects of the ruin-representations: Guardi’s choice of subjects. He definitely understood the poetic appeal and possible aesthetic value of the run-down local and “vernacular” Venetian architecture. While Canaletto—whose place Guardi, as we have seen above, partly took as a veduta and capriccio painter from the middle of 1750 onward—generally includes antique-style or actual antique buildings, Guardi brought, developed, and mastered the vision of the Laguna and Venetian landscape with the decaying average houses to perfection. We can then agree with Bernard Aikema’s observation that compared to Guardi’s innovation of emphasizing traditional Venetian architecture in his capricci, Canaletto remained, practically throughout all of his oeuvre, much closer to the ideals that influenced

Figure 2.2  Francesco Guardi. Ruined Archway, 1775–1793. Oil on canvas, 29.5 x 49.7 cm (11 5/8 x 19 1/2 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection. Reference Number: 1933.1080. CC0 Public Domain Designation.

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him during his early career (i.e., inspiration of seventeenth century “Ruinenbilder” that he knew through the works and influence of Marco Ricci).27 Hence while Canaletto’s approach in his capricci focused more on the grandiose and impressive edifices and the ruins they may become, Guardi celebrated the ways a melancholic presence can be born and its essence expressed when painting the modest and architecturally insignificant dwelling places in semiabandoned and dispersed angles of the Venetian Laguna. However, this “insignificance” of the displayed buildings is only from the point of view of an architectural critic or historian, but through the brush of Guardi they do get pictorial significance: the decay embellishes them. As Aikema summarised, “Francesco Guardi’s geniality consist in the fact of providing the shabby Venetian hut the same allusive value as the celebrated classical ruin.”28 This also demonstrates that for Guardi the emotional aspect of the ruined edifice is more important than the building’s historic importance or any cultural, intellectual, or political references. In this aspect Mitchell Merling’s opinion is very close to Bernard Aikema’s, emphasising the poetic presentation of the vernacular decay: “Francesco [Guardi] gave vent to his imaginative facility in his capricci. They follow the same stylistic development already seen in his figure and landscape paintings. But as their handling becomes looser, his ruins seem more closely to approach the emotional core of their subject, the desolation wrought by the passage of time.”29 Guardi’s interest in the poetics of the decline and ruination of the local and simple architectural elements, then, explains not only the melancholic feature of the images but the choice of subject, too (i.e., his focusing on the Venetian and not necessarily ancient Roman examples). At the same time however, and this again proves Guardi’s polyvalent creativity and extended interest, he occasionally chooses actual Venetian examples, or motifs that are easy to associate with the well-known monumental architecture of the city—including buildings of Palladio or Sansovino—as a departure point for his capricci.30 In this way, not unlike the case of other artists like Visentini, Joseph Gandy, and Hubert Robert (see chapters 3 and 5), he anticipated the decay of Venice in a way that may put the work of the modern architects on the same status as the noble antique remnants. At the same time, it would be tempting but all too easy to connect this in a straightforward way to the political decay and the actual historic events of Venice of a few years later. He sensed the aesthetic appeal and deeply understood the essence of the ruination of the local, familiar, and vernacular pieces of architecture, though without the direct political overtones. We can follow the assumption of Andrei Pleşu that Guardi’s works are like “conglomerates of various presentiments,” and even when seemingly focusing on the pompous festivities or grand views of the city, in reality, the same picture also refers to a sort of emptiness and continuous desolation.31 It is due to this duality that his paintings become grippingly

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appealing, since this—as we have seen above—will not result in pure depictions of an anticipated tragic fate of the city but more in the discovery of such elements worth being represented in painting that may not only aesthetically please but also console the viewer. Perhaps the same aspect urged Sartre to summarise Guardi’s art thus: “Venice is present in each canvas—as it was for him, as it is for us, as it has been experienced by everyone and seen by no one.”32 Compared to those artistic and aesthetic questions that were at the core of the Italian artists’ interest in the eighteenth century, their German contemporaries and successors approached the phenomena of ruination and decay from a different perspective, placing emphasis on other aesthetic features and emotional aspects when representing real or imaginary ruins. The contributions of one of the greatest German Romantic painters, Caspar David Friedrich, have a particular importance in this regard. Both in professional literature and in public opinion he is regularly presented as a typical—sometimes almost stereotypical—example of a melancholic and Romantic painter par excellence, a claim often supported by biographical details, including the fact that at the age of six he lost his mother, a year later a sister, and at the age of thirteen his brother died while saving him from broken ice. Naturally these tragic events must have seriously influenced his later life. However, as Hubertus Gassner, among others, reminds us, this should not serve as the exclusive source of explanation for the pictorial world and series of motifs he developed in his paintings; rather we need to bear in mind that his individual inclination towards melancholy was rooted in a widely diffused sentimental attitude of the Romantic artists, which can also be interpreted as a “reaction against the melancholy-ban and obligatory optimism in development of the preceding period of the Enlightenment.”33 The melancholic air in Friedrich’s paintings is thus to be interpreted not solely through the details of his personal life—that would only lead to an over-psychologisation of the reading of the art pieces—but also in the larger context of his era. On the other hand, there is a personal aspect that needs to be taken into careful consideration: his own artistic practice that becomes crucial in the reading of his works, his well-known interest in the carefully mixed proportions of constructing and reconstructing from pictorial motifs he collected during previous study trips (a solution we can also see in the case of his pure landscape compositions). In order to better understand this, it is enough to quote the various forms of appearance of one motif: the ruins of the Eldena Monastery that were depicted several times by Friedrich. The thirteenth–fourteenth century monastery was damaged through a series of wars, and, as it often happens in such cases, the stones of the abandoned and crumbling site were then used for the construction of other buildings. Friedrich made several versions of the subject, not necessarily always focusing on the actual topographical exactitude. Some of

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these graphic works—reproduced and analysed more in detail in an exhibition catalogue edited by Sabine Rewald—demonstrate how the painter treated the motif freely, providing various modes of representation and thus differing levels of reality through a series of art pieces. In certain cases we have a more direct recording with the intention of documenting the motif in a less elaborate, sketch-like original that shows the remnants in an undefined space (on an 1801 version with pen and brown ink, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie), the theme to be later transported in the visual context of high mountains (ca. 1824–1826, pencil and watercolour, Moscow, Pushkin Museum) or showing the object positioned on a hill (ca. 1806, watercolour, wash, and pencil, Schweinfurt, Georg Schäfer Collection).34 From this it seems Friedrich was more interested in the motif of the ruin “in general” and its aesthetic potential in various contexts and thus numerous meanings, rather than the pure recording of the actual historical juncture of a particular site. This explains not only his readiness to transport the decaying remnants among different natural contexts, but also the modifying of certain details in the overall appearance of the ruins and thus also of the entire view. For example, adding a window on the better-preserved high Western wall where there originally were no such openings. This example clearly illustrates that Friedrich had a similar approach to the ruin as to the elements of Nature when constructing his landscape paintings. His working method and technique (often analysed in the literature on Friedrich, with one of the most accurate reconstructions by Werner Busch) included the collecting of raw material and the making of quick sketches during his study trips, but these fragments he would then recycle when composing larger paintings already in the studio.35 The topographical exactitude was thus often less essential for Friedrich because he was more interested in the applicability of the meaning of the ruins in symbolic, as well as religious or even political aspects and modes of reading—unlike many of his Italian predecessors who focused more on the motif’s emotive and nostalgic pictorial role at play in the work. In other words, while in Canaletto’s capriccios a ruined antique temple might bear mainly nostalgic and Arcadian allure, addressing the taste of the grand tourists amazed by the beauty of the remains both in situ and when represented on his paintings, in Friedrich’s works, ruins can serve as an invitation to tackle a present concern. Hence for Friedrich the ruin may become, among others, a sign of and a reference to the actual state of the church, for example, not only the actual religious construction itself but of the Church as an institution, too. The current ruined state can thus be seen as a symbol of the faith itself that, as Jens Christian Jensen argued, has become historic and would require a thorough renovation.36 As Werner Hofmann reminds us, although Friedrich evokes the irretrievability of the past through ruins, still, the critical approach towards

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this present state of the Church does not necessarily mean that the painter excluded the possibility—what’s more: hope—of its renewability and future perfection; especially considering those works where he presented visionary renderings of complete churches in perfect shape.37 This more comprehensive interpretation of Friedrich’s ruined churches was advocated by Hofmann (i.e., observing them together with the idealistic depictions of complete buildings helps us avoid the simplistic reading of the ruins as serving as mere critiques of the present and can instead be interpreted as visions directed towards the different [though in a way, idealised] temporal perspectives of past and future). Therefore, the ruins, especially those of Gothic churches and castles that came into vogue during Romanticism—elevated to the level of antique ones in their evaluation—served for Friedrich both as signs and as testimonies, or, as the artist himself formulated in 1824, they are “powerful remains of past centuries that rise as witnesses of a great past over the sickening present.”38 This approach is similar to another group of works. In Friedrich’s oeuvre we can also find some actual and still-standing buildings imagined as ruins. However, in his case this representation, again, is not so much in the service of comparing contemporary or recent architecture to the grandeur of Antiquity, as it is for Hubert Robert or Joseph Gandy (see chapter 5), but more like an institutional and social criticism of the present. As Helmut BörschSupan assumes, some of his paintings, including a graphic work described as “the interior of the Jakobikirche in Greifswald as ruin” (ca. 1829, private collection) and the large painting destroyed in 1945, Monastery Cemetery in Snow, (1817–1819, formerly in Berlin, Nationalgalerie), can thus be seen as a criticism towards the current state of the Church as an institution that fails to efficiently answer the current and actual challenges of the present.39 Another addition to the aforementioned parallel between his practice of creating landscapes and his compositions with ruins can be traced on the painting titled Ruins in the Giant Mountains (ca. 1834, Greifswald, Pommersches Landesmuseum,). Similar to many of his “pure” landscapes, here too Friedrich creates a strong division between the foreground and the background, like for example in the landscapes Morning in the Mountains (1822–1823, St. Petersburg, the Hermitage) or Drifting Clouds (ca. 1820, Hamburg, Kunsthalle). In this way, following the contemporary, Romantic philosophy of Nature, the other side (i.e., what lies beyond) becomes impenetrable, both unknown and unknowable. The curious part in the case of the painting in Greifswald, however, is that here Friedrich inserts ruins, again those of the Eldena monastery, right in the middle ground; hence they serve at the same time as an impediment and place of transition, especially the large, pointed, arched opening towards the middle of the picture plane. As Hubertus Gassner emphasised, this opening looks almost like the eye of a needle, which provides the viewer with some insight into the otherwise unknowable

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beyond.40 Nevertheless, this insight can be only very minimal; hence the understanding of our existence is not only limited in itself but also limited to the imperfect interpretation of those few elements that are available to us. This is why Christian Scholl argued that Friedrich’s rejection of the world, in its radicality, goes beyond the sentimental ruin-romanticism. And in some of his paintings, for example the Abbey in the Oakwood (1809–1810, Berlin, Nationalgalerie), the painter creates allegories of transitoriness.41 Towards the end of our historical survey already sketched in this chapter, we can have a look at two further examples from the middle of nineteenth century, where we start to see the slow but consistent weakening of certain aspects in the representation of ruination and how this then leads to the attenuation of the force of the subject matter. The Italian painter Ippolito Caffi lived in, visited, and, most importantly, depicted many of the places that can be of primary interest when surveying the changing aspects of the representation of ruins and architectural dereliction. Having lived and studied in Venice (among other cities), his connection to the veduta-tradition of the Settecento is important. However, being a few generations younger than its classical representatives, the genre has significantly changed in his oeuvre. The ruinous buildings depicted in the broad array of the widespread regions and cities he visited during his life seem almost to dissolve, their materiality detached by the lightness of his brushstrokes. The palette is brighter, the light and colour contrasts are stronger, and the details (including the architectural details of the edifices and ruins) are less elaborate than in the oeuvre of his respected predecessors whose work he, in a way, aspired to carry on. These features are readily apparent to the observer, even if we can agree with Annalisa Scarpa that he still maintains much of the “spontaneity” of the realisation of the inspiring symbioses between figure and (built) environment that is so natural and direct in many of the eighteenth century classical representatives of the genre.42 Nevertheless, Antiquity’s most important ruined sites somehow continue to become emotionally less striking, intellectually less loaded, and aesthetically less thrilling. One thus has the impression that despite the majestic beauty of the original objects and despite the remaining parts of the genuine buildings still serving as effective reminders of an important aesthetic inheritance, the ruins appear more like the popular(ized) commodities of the town: everyday environmental elements of a modernised city. Due to the tendency of ruins to become sites of tourism for a wider public, it is harder to distinguish between the few amazed connoisseurs and the disinterested locals—the latter group used to be depicted as unappreciative of their magnificent environment—a topos regularly appearing in the work of the eighteenth century artists, who often depicted the same cities and sights as Caffi. His images are clearer and brighter in both senses of the words, but this comes at the cost of a weakened

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aesthetic strength, not always able to incentivise those profound, intense, and complex considerations on time, decay, the power of Nature, the irrevocability of the past, etc., that we could see in the earlier painters’ work. Needless to say, Caffi’s skills are striking, but the present day viewer may still find an imbalance between his later experiments in style and the utmost concentration on the analyses of the represented subjects’ deeper meanings. This is why, despite the unquestionably pure pictorial quality of his works, the observer somehow still feels the lack of something that would be or at least attempt to go beyond mere documentary depiction, skilful though it may be. An even more ambiguous approach to the depiction of a decaying—and at the same time progressively touristifying—Venice is perhaps even more evident in the case of Friedrich Nerly. He was one of the relatively few German painters in Venice in the nineteenth century (Rome being the home for many German artists in the same period); he stayed there for a long time, from 1837 till his death in 1878. His images seem to grasp and in a way even exploit the myth of Venice, with a curious and oblique pictorial world, not only through the simultaneous references to modernity and the earlier periods but also through the mixing of real and imaginary elements. The ambiguity in his views is made manifest in a rather nostalgic approach to the city. Despite this nostalgia, however, what Nerly is most interested in is not the city with its imagined past but rather an ahistorical and idealised view of it. This will result in a series of hybrid renderings of its current state, a convincing illustration of which could be an aspect that Johannes Myssok analysed; the curious feature being that even if the painter creates a bourgeois (verbürgerlichte) view of the city (i.e., showing it as a place for modern flaneurs in contemporary dress), at the same time Nerly omits some essential references to the modern urban character of the city, for example not painting the newly installed gaslighting.43 Hence, on the one hand accepting and showing the city as a visually delightful place of urban strolling, on the other hand somehow denying its modernity and freezing its temporality by overlooking its changing character, even the restorations, modifications, and additions in its decaying and modernised parts. It gives the viewer of his paintings the impression that Nerly—just like, mutatis mutandis, Caffi, too—is not necessarily representing the site but more so experimenting with its very representability. This assumption can also be supported by Nerly’s interest in creating series. For example, as Andreas Blühm recorded in a catalogue entry, the artist painted a series on practically the same motif, the Piazzetta in Venice by Moonlight, in no less than thirty-six versions, based on his own daytime sketches, observations, and compositions.44 This obviously means that he replaced the sun with the moon, which naturally also explains the, at first sight, surprisingly harsh light in the night scene and the strong contrast between the lit and dark parts of the view. However, despite this slight “cheating” in the execution of

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the painting, the final result certainly appears authentic, so much so that the astronomer Hermann-Michael Hahn managed to calculate the exact day and time depicted in the respective versions of the series.45 This is in line with what we have seen above about “freezing the city’s temporality” by aligning it more with the immutable cosmic elements and their temporal perspective than referring it to the actual and factual details and the flow of time measured and measurable with our (human) means. Perhaps this attempt to slow or stop time is also why Nerly still painted sailboats on its canals rather than steamboats. Hence, when trying to formulate the differences between the main characteristics of ruin-representations and views of cities traditionally connected to the idea and manifestation of decay, we can perhaps explain it best through a change of direction of the domination? Earlier artists seem to be captured by the power of the subject matter, by its vision and appearance, and try to convey this force through their work. But once the ruins’ elemental strength becomes a familiar commodity in the modernised and touristified towns, the roles and direction change, and the ruin becomes subject to subjugation. In other words, what we sense is not the power of the ruin dominating the rendering, but the rendering of the domination of the ruin. And since the more and more superficially touristified locations are not and cannot be such “pilgrimage sites,” as they used to be for earlier truly fascinated ruin-lovers, both their descriptive and, especially, their nostalgic depictions seem weaker. Even the indubitable skills and pictorial talent of the artists cannot stand against the dwindling of the motif. When the ruins and the signs and elements of decay become “down to earth” the dereliction itself loses its aesthetic attraction. One of the possible means of revitalisation, to be mentioned in several subsequent chapters, is the emergence of novel aspects, especially the fascination with recent and contemporary buildings on their way to ruination that can also easily become repetitive and soulless. What, therefore, seems to be sure when observing its history is that the representation of decay itself can decay. This decay, however, is definitely less attractive than the dereliction of actual and classical buildings into ruins. NOTES 1. Anne Eriksen, “The Murmur of Ruins: A Cultural History,” Ethnologia Europea: Journal of European Ethnology 36, no. 1 (2006): 5. 2. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” trans. David Kettler, in: Georg Simmel 1858– 1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 265. 3. Massimiliano Papini, Città sepolte e rovine nel mondo greco e romano, (Rome: Edizioni Laterza, 2011), 206.

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4. Engelbert Kirschbaum, ed., Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 3. (Rome: Herder, 1971), 573–74. 5. Andrew Hui, “The Birth of Ruins in Quattrocento Adoration Paintings,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 18, no. 2 (2015): 322–23. I am grateful to Prof. Anna Eörsi for drawing my attention to this article. 6. Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler. 1996). 7. Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, 99. 8. Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, 95. 9. Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, 279. 10. Page 109 in the modern, facsimile edition of the original book: Edward A. Maser, ed., Cesare Ripa Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery: The 1758–1760 Hertel Edition of Ripa’s Iconologia with 200 Engraved Illustrations (New York: Dover Publications, 1991). 11. Andor Pigler, Barockthemen (Budapest-Berlin: Ungarische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1956), 391. 12. Pigler, Barockthemen, 562–64. 13. Brian Dillon, “Fragments from a History of Ruin,” Cabinet Magazine 20 (Winter 2005–2006): 57. 14. Filippo Pedrocco, Canaletto and the Venetian Vedutisti (New York: ScalaRiverside, 1995), 5. 15. Charles Beddington, Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals (London: National Gallery, 2011), 12. 16. Werner Busch, “Die Wahrheit des Capriccio: die Lüge der Vedute,” in Das Capriccio als Kunstprinzip, ed. Ekkehard Mai (Milan: Skira, 1996), 95. 17. Ladislav Daniel’s catalogue entry of Michele Marieschi’s painting in Ladislav Daniel, ed., Tesori di Praga. La pittura veneta del ‘600 e del ‘700 dalle collezioni nella Repubblica Ceca (Milan: Electa, 1996), 190. 18. J. G. Links, “Canaletto,” in The Glory of Venice. Art in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 219. 19. Links, “Canaletto,” 223. 20. André Corboz, “Sulla pretesa obiettività di Canaletto,” in Canaletto. Venezia e i suoi splendori, eds. Giuseppe Pavanello and Alberto Craievich (Venice: Marsilio, 2008), 32. 21. Rosie Razzall and Lucy Whitaker, Canaletto and the Art of Venice (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017), 162. About the collaboration of Canaletto with Smith, see also Zoltán Somhegyi, “Glory through Decay: Aesthetics around Monuments and Their Ruination,” in Learning from Decay: Essays on the Aesthetics of Architectural Dereliction and its Consumption, cowritten by Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), 25–42. 22. Beddington, Venice, 45, 134. 23. See more about Guardi’s early works and start as veduta painter in Pedrocco, Canaletto, 65. 24. Mitchell Merling, “Paesaggi e capricci,” in Francesco Guardi, 1712–1793, eds. Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco (Milan: Skira, 2012), 139.

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25. Both of them reproduced in Bożena Anna Kowalczyk, Canaletto. Il trionfo della veduta (Milan: Silvana, 2005), 49. 26. See Bożena Anna Kowalczyk’s catalogue entry in Bożena Anna Kowalczyk, ed., Bellotto e Canaletto. Lo stupore e la luce (Milan: Silvana, 2016), 72. 27. Bernard Aikema, “Francesco Guardi, Il ‘picturesque’ e il mito di Venezia,” in I Guardi. Vedute, capricci, feste, disegni e ‘quadri turcheschi,’ ed. Alessandro Bettagno (Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini-Marsilio, 2002), 19. 28. Aikema, “Francesco Guardi,” 24. 29. Mitchell Merling, “The Brothers Guardi,” in The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 325. (Italics in the original). 30. See some actual examples in Merling, “The Brothers Guardi,” 326. 31. Andrei Pleşu, “Az alkony festője. Franceso Guardi,” in A madarak nyelve, ed. Andrei Pleşu (Pécs: Jelenkor, 2000), 126. 32. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Unprivileged Painter: Lapoujade,” in Essays in Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Wade Baskin (New York, Philosophical Library, 1963), 66–67. 33. Hubertus Gassner, “Empfindsamkeit,” in Caspar David Friedrich. Die Erfindung der Romantik, ed. Hubertus Gassner (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 2006), 103. 34. Reproduced in Sabine Rewald, ed., The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the U.S.S.R. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), 64–67. 35. Werner Busch, Caspar David Friedrich: Ästhetik und Religion (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003). For the analyses of Friedrich’s technique with regard to the representation of caves and its implications on the reading and aesthetics of his work, see also an earlier article of mine: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Eternal Distance: On the Significance of Window and Cave Representations in Northern Romanticism,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2014): 60–73. 36. Jens Christian Jensen, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen der deutschen Romantik (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1978), 164. 37. Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich: 1774–1840 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1974), 60–62. 38. Quoted in Gassner, “Empfindsamkeit,” 111. 39. Helmut Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich. Gefühl als Gesetz (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2008), 61. 40. Gassner, “Empfindsamkeit,” 114, image reproduced on p. 221. 41. Christian Scholl, Romantische Malerei als neue Sinnbildkunst (Munich: Deutsche Kunstverlag, 2002), 300. 42. See Annalisa Scarpa, Ippolito Caffi. Tra Venezia e l’Oriente 1809–1866 (Venice: Marsilio, 2016), 13. 43. Johannes Myssok, “Friedrich Nerly in Venedig,” MDCCC 1800 1 (2012): 59–60. 44. Andreas Blühm’s catalogue entry about Friedrich Nerly’s painting in: David Jackson, Andreas Blühm and Ruud Schenk, eds., Romanticism in the North: From Friedrich to Turner (Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2018) 158. 45. Jackson, Blühm, and Schenk, Romanticism in the North, 158.

Chapter 3

In Front of Ruins

There are many ways of arriving “in front” of ruins—sometimes it is rather like an accidental, unexpected, and sudden encounter with the remnants, while at other times it is a voluntary, planned, and sought-after meeting. Either way, the facing of the physical remains of a decaying architectural complex has long been a curious and fascinating topic of its own; hence not surprisingly we have a series of thrilling examples that put not merely the ruin in the forefront but the very act of observing the ruin itself. The theme will thus be the experience and the very act of experiencing the ruin, where the pictorial analyses of numerous modes of addressing the aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual effect of the encounter becomes just as important as the rendering of the ruin itself. And just as the pure representation of ruins can carry several valences and refer to numerous allusions, those works presenting someone—often the artist himself—before the ruins can offer different readings. Or, inverting this we can also add that the artist, philosopher, or author visiting ruins and then documenting his ideas incentivised by the very observation of the ruins can offer us insight into different interpretations. To illustrate this latter point, we can remember Theodore Ziolkowski’s collection of three German visitors and poets, all—coincidentally—from the same year, 1805, recounting their thoughts in poem-form while travelling in Rome.1 During his Bildungsreise (educational tour), Ludwig I of Bavaria wrote in his elegies of the strong feeling of transitoriness that arise while seeing the empire’s decayed heritage. On the other hand, Wilhelm von Humboldt focused on the intertwining of the city’s classical and current states, while the third poem, by August Wilhelm Schlegel, offers a rather melancholic view of the actual remains when surveying the history of the empire and its decay. Hence we find three very similar situations—all three found themselves in front of the same series of ruined sites, observing the same city in the same 45

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year—while resulting in different ideas and inspirations gleaned through this encounter. And since the encounter itself can easily become both overwhelming and inspiring, it is worth examining how it could become a subject of inquiry all its own. Thus, this chapter will focus on a wide variety of instances and modes of illustrating the different aspects of encountering ruins, as well as the representation of the very experience itself and its analysis. The examination of the “situations” or occasions of encountering ruins—in a broader sense, including also sculptural fragments surviving from earlier times—will help us to better understand our continuous fascination with ruins, and their captivating presence. In the previous chapter we saw how in the beginning ruins were secondary, before becoming a primary topic of artistic representations. That being the case, here I would like to focus on a special subcategory, where the main motif will be the appearance of the observer, sometimes even the artist’s own likeness, as well as his experience before the ruin. In a larger sense, we can say that these works show not only the impressive ruin but also the impressing of the ruin in action, aided by the inclusion of an observer to be impressed upon. Regarding this subgenre (i.e., those ruin-representations that include an observer), it soon becomes evident that we have a similar situation to that discussed in chapter 2. That is, regarding the questions of the independence of ruin-representations, in which the issue at stake was at which point the motif of the ruin is subordinated to another dominant topic, and when it becomes the main subject-matter of a pictorial representation. Just as the selecting of a ruin for its aesthetic qualities could not immediately become a topic and genre of its own, the motif of the impression of the ruins on the observer— manifested for example through the depiction of the observer in question or documenting artist himself—could not automatically become the chief and sole theme of a work of art. To better illuminate this process of gradual independence, another area will also be helpful (to be discussed later in this chapter) as a sort of analogy for the above question: that of the independence of landscape-representation and the subgenre of the artist working on the landscape image in the landscape. One of the earliest examples of representing “ruins with their observer” also proves that initially, the subgenre was rather in the service of a larger context, with multiple layers of meaning with regard to the entire work. An often reproduced and truly thrilling illustration—of which importance, for example, Kai Vöckler emphasised by considering it the earliest example of the proper new genre of ruin-painting too2—from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the allegorical novel written in 1447 by Francesco Colonna but unpublished until 1499 in Venice by Aldus Manutius, shows the protagonist

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observing imaginary ruins; however, their insertion is in relation with the allegorical text itself, highlighting the connection between the nostalgic search for unity amidst the fragments and the pursuit of love. As Michel Makarius observed, this becomes one of the key aspects in the reading of the novel and thus—we can add—of the illustration, too. “This is one of the lessons of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: the ruin arouses nostalgia for an archaic meaning that is forever lost; in return, allegory, which is truth veiled, experiences instant recognition in the ruin.”3 We can see an ambiguity regarding the actual topic when comparing two relatively early examples from the sixteenth century. A drawing by Polidoro da Caravaggio (Landscape with Ruins and a Draughtsman, Firenze, Uffizi) shows a sitting man drawing in the foreground, accompanied by another figure, with the monumental ruins further in the distance. Despite being in the background of the scene, the ruins dominate the image so much that one easily gets the impression that the decaying edifices—and the very activity of the artist shown in the act of drawing them—are the main themes of the representation, without further references to any classical, mythological, or religious content. Compare this to another piece, based on a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and transformed into an etching probably by Simon Novellanus (River Landscape with Mercury Abducting Psyche, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen). We can see two tiny draughtsmen placed in the lower left corner of the image. The wide landscape view shows the area from a higher vantage point, while the middle ground and background is dotted with humble houses, punctuated by a partly derelict castle. However, in this latter example the “real” subject-matter of the work is still a classical theme: In the top right corner Mercury and Psyche feature in the sky, nicely illustrating that neither the landscape with its buildings in differing condition, nor the presentation of the act of observing and drawing the landscape itself had yet arrived to a point of entirely independent status. As a matter of fact, we shall not forget that the tracing of the steps towards the autonomous landscape-representation is also a complicated art historical and aesthetic set of questions in itself, as among others Werner Busch has carefully surveyed the details of the evolution genre’s independence from around sixteenth century onwards.4 Nevertheless, turning to the quoted works above, we can still interpret these rather sporadic examples—just like Bert W. Meijer did—as early traces of experiments in direct observation of the natural scenery and the human interaction within it, as well as the presentation of the early attempts of recording in situ.5 Naturally, these are not yet to be considered examples of proper “plein air” painting rather as heralds of a growing consciousness of the importance of direct observation. However, at the same time, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, we find a truly exciting example that not only documents the growing interest

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in the creation of works that depict the experiencing of ruins by showing the artist or enthusiasts in front of them and opens a series of thrilling questions regarding the complex relationship between (ruin) experience, personal memories, professional education, and artistic practice. The painting in question is the Self-portrait with the Colosseum, Rome, by Maerten van Heemskerck (1553, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum). Although the work dates from the fifties, it is known to incorporate two temporal layers from the life of the painter, as the very figure of the artist appears twice. First, his actual, large-scale half-body self-portrait as an established and mature artist on the left fills almost half of the surface of the painting. Secondly, he appears in a much smaller scale in the bottom right corner, shown as a seated draughtsman drawing the ruined Coliseum. This second self-portrait presents a much younger man—from his thirties, in fact—referring back to his years of study in Rome between 1532 and 1535. This emphasises his direct experience and knowledge of the classical past as a crucial period in his own artistic development, as was done by Lynn Federle Orr: “Here, in addition to suggesting the importance of personal retrospection, which the ruins encourage, Heemsckerck declares his firsthand Italian experience as an important aspect of his artistic credentials.”6 Thus, the most intriguing aspect is not merely the artist appearing while working on his rendering of the ancient monument, nor even the choice of the genre of double self-portrait—what is truly fascinating is the attempt to show the effect of the experience itself, and, in fact, demonstrating it through this particular treatment of temporality. The long-lasting—or, perhaps, still-present—experience of the presence of ruins is manifested in the painting; hence the interpreting of his time spent in Rome as being so important as to choose it as a background for a two decades later self-portrait. The aforementioned curiosity in the exploration of the aspects of temporality, however, lies in the fact that this continuous attention to the impact of the experience in Heemskerck’s life as an artist is put in parallel with his (and in his contemporaries’) ideas about a sort of continuity of the Roman ruins themselves. In a very detailed and informative analysis on the painting, Helmut Puff applies Christopher S. Wood’s and Alexander Nagel’s considerations on the amorphous temporality and anachronic Renaissance, also directing the reader to the fact that the northern artists and humanists regarded time as more continuous or uninterrupted, unlike the Italian humanists who focused upon the revival of Antiquity, obviously requiring an emphasis on the definite interruption of the continuous flow of time.7 Mutatis mutandis, this difference in the approach towards Antiquity, its remnants, and to temporality itself resulted (as we saw in chapter 2) in the difference of the styles of ruins used in late Mediaeval and Renaissance Adoration and Nativity paintings north and south of the Alps. This parallel is then made manifest in the artwork: Just as the Coliseum

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continues to be part of the present city, the aesthetic effect of its viewing continues to have an impact on the artist and his practice. We can thus interpret the painting not only as the visualisation of the act of remembering but also as highlighting the continuation of the experience (i.e., not only the memory of the period of the original exploration and recording of the place, but also how this very remembering of the experience of the site and sight is relentlessly influential). Similarly, Heemskerck’s painting can illustrate some considerations from a recent study by Dylan Trigg on the connection between memory and place. In his words, “Sometimes it is the case that a place provides the defining character to a memory, such that the memory becomes inextricably bound with place, thus rendering it an event.”8 At the same time however, this may also lead to other sorts of issues. Trigg again: “Through bringing imagination into the scene of memory, the identity of what is being remembered comes under question. We remember a thing from the past, but augment that memory in order to preserve its presence. In doing so, the relation between the original experience and the preserved version of that experience draws an increasing distance. In time, we may adjust ourselves to the distance and lose sight of the original experience altogether. Indeed, on an individual level, the experience of this distance may amount to nothing more than a vague estrangement from one’s own past.”9

On Heemskerck’s work we may trace the tentative examination of something very similar, in creating a painting visualising his memory of his experience and of his experiencing of the Coliseum in order to somehow “preserve its presence.” It is perhaps because of the awareness, and even fear, of the fragility of the memory of the experience—or at least, of its intensity—that he chooses to focus upon its continuity. The connection between the similarly uninterrupted flow of personal time—enriched by the still-present youthful experience—and the survival of the antique monument is then also highlighted by the pictorial and metaphorical parallels between the two main parts of the painting. As Puff also considers, there are significant connections and crossreferences between the large-scale face of the artist on the left and the surface of the ruin. In addition to the similarity in the tonality of the two parts, the wrinkles on Heemskerck’s forehead that echo the decay of the edifice, but even the vegetation of the Coliseum is a visual parallel to the artist’s beard, so much so that the monument becomes, in Puff’s words, a “parallel ego.”10 This carefully examined analogy between the ruin and the ruination of the human body on display in the painting is not surprising if we take into account the important fact—highlighted also by Maria Fabricius Hansen—that just a few decades before Heemskerck’s piece there are parallel tendencies in the investigation of buildings and bodies. “In this context, it is worth noting that the study

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of ruins and the representation of the materiality or corporeality of architecture in sections and plans began to manifest itself on drawings simultaneously with studies of anatomy and dissection in the last decades of the fifteenth century.”11 Maria Virginia Cardi has also come to a similar conclusion on the connections between human bodies and (decaying) architecture in the age of expanding anatomical knowledge, and observing the representations of bodies in Andrea Vesalio’s treatise on the human body titled De humani corporis fabrica, published in Bruxelles in 1551, with etchings by Jan Steven van Calcar. “What had been discovered inside the human bodies offered such a wonder of aspects and especially such a quantity of structures, planes, conduits, and tunnels that stimulated knowledge both on the particulars and on the dynamics of the mechanisms. The body was rediscovered as an extraordinary natural architecture.”12 This exciting parallel then continues to trigger the ruin-discourse even as far as the twentieth–twenty-first centuries, as we will see in chapter 8. What we could thus observe from these early examples and also in our analyses in chapter 2 is that the representation of ruins—very often placed in an impressive landscape—changed, and in certain aspects developed, in a similar way: from serving originally as an additional element and reference of secondary importance to a genre in its own right. As anticipated, here we have a parallel with the history of the representation of the landscape itself. What’s more, in placing the motif and subject matter at the centre of our considerations of this chapter, another similar parallel emerges in the development between the subgenres of the representation of the artist working on the landscape image within said landscape and the observing or drawing figure in front of ruins. Despite their thematic differences, both the artist or observer “in front of the landscape” or “in front of the ruins” have become independent subgenres because, apart from the dissimilarity of the subject itself, in both cases the importance of the authenticity of the personal view and the subjective interpretation of the scene began to count more and more. As I examined in an earlier essay, given this aforementioned focus on the artist’s own view—in both senses of the word—it becomes understandable why from the eighteenth century onwards there are more and more pieces of art showing the working landscape artist depicted in—and in front of—the subject he is representing (i.e., shown while observing and sketching the landscape).13 As the artist’s subjective interpretation and elaboration of the represented subject matter became crucial for the viewer of the final artwork, too, the placing and positioning of the artist himself within the landscape he is working on can be considered a statement in itself. In this way, the subjective reading of the landscape—or, in a broader approach, the investigation of the manifestation of Nature through landscape—is pursued not merely through the representation of an artwork but on a meta-level too, when highlighting the presence of the artist in the complex set of acts of experiencing, examining, and representing this very landscape.

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This tendency of the figure of the landscape artist to be visually involved in the creation of the landscape by appearing in it is not unlike what we can see in the increasing instances of artworks displaying figures experiencing, enjoying, investigating, documenting, and measuring ruins. Naturally, just as in the case of the above landscape analogy, it can be the artist himself, thus creating a certain form of self-portrait, while in other cases it is a portrait of fellow artists or other semi-amateur enthusiast observers and visitors working on the immortalisation of the view or recording of the site. In certain cases, it is thus a curious mixture of documenting the presence of ruins and the being in the presence of them, that may also result in an almost paradoxical affirmation and ensuring of the subjectivity of the representation—securing the viewer of the painting that she can see the actual ruin, however, not necessarily merely how it was, but how it appeared to the artist. The diversification and growing typological variety of the subgenre of ruins with the investigating figure(s) or depicting artist thus naturally went hand in hand with the increasing awareness of the necessity of observing the real and original ruins. Of course, here again different approaches and scopes are intertwined (as we saw in chapter 1): that of the artistic and rather scientific recording and reproduction of views of ruins. Regarding the more “academic” or scholarly approach, as Marcello Barbanera also demonstrated, from the Renaissance onwards the antiquarian interest and modes of examination have gradually shifted from the textual sources to the visual documents.14 Here however we have again some diversification between the type and form of documents and objects investigated by the different groups, As Paul Zanker highlighted, from around 1500 onward we can trace a growing interest in ruins but not necessarily and exclusively by the Humanists, who were more curios of written sources, but by artists and architects, among them many northern ones experiencing the captivating fascination of ruins. Although, again, not necessarily all of them, as Zanker reminds us, were equally impressed and enthused by what they saw (e.g., Michel de Montaigne expressed his disappointment in what he saw, compared to what he had been expecting, based on his imagination and literary studies).15 Parallel to this, and as a consequence, the visual sources and documentation of the very remains and ruins inherited from Antiquity grew in importance, serving as a form of historical documentation and testimony to the actual state of the decayed sites. We can also recall Alain Schnapp’s argumentation on the importance of visual documentation that has become more and more common practice from the fifteenth century antiquarians to the eighteenth century researchers highlighting the fact that the exact copying of the remnants, the drawing of the sites, the measuring and documenting of monuments led to an unparalleled and novel form of exploring and reading the past.16 Naturally, this has brought with it the need for constant control and revision of the

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already-published material, and comparison between that seen in books and reproductions, and the real piece of work or architecture in situ. This has also led to the curious ambiguity between the rapidly growing number of reproduced material, with the strong desire, even compulsion, to visit, observe, and further document the sites—not lastly, also to correct and amend the earlier visual records—and often in order to glean new approaches and interpretations of the sites and remnants. Hence authentic visual documentation was a turning point in the reading or even rereading of the past. However, the images were not always fully trusted in their accuracy as Aphrodite Kouria wrote: already contemporary (i.e., eighteenth century) critics raised their concerns about possible embellishment of the view of the sites.17 Nevertheless, all this shows that the striving for continuous documentation—of course, along with the aim of developing one’s own drawing skills through copying of the decayed remains of antique grandeur—lasted for centuries, well after the initial Renaissance antiquarian and humanist interest. In 1775 the German painter Johann Gottlieb Puhlmann wrote from Rome: “Next to each ruin someone is sitting, and when in the holidays we will not have teaching in the Academy, I will also draw some of the ruins of the Palace of Nero.”18 This desire to hold and provide exact visual information incentivised a panoply of different publications and editorial undertakings, including for example Comte de Caylus’s well-known Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines and gauloises from 1752–1756. As Ian Jenkins argued, Caylus’s work “emphasises the primacy of the object over texts,” as for example when Caylus writes in the preface of his book: “I am restricted to publishing in this collection only those monuments that belong to me or were once owned by me”—again, an evidence of these aforementioned tendencies and changed preferences throughout the eighteenth century.19 Those passionately interested in antique culture thus aim to have exact and accurate pictorial and visual representations of the objects—of those remnants, ruins, and artworks that serve as tangible evidence of revered cultural eras. This approach can be placed in parallel with other similar monumental undertakings, for example Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, the first volume of which appeared in 1762. This assortment of works testifies to the increasing importance of the act of testifying itself (i.e., to the awareness of proper documentation and the growing need for visual and pictorial evidence of the presence of ruins). However, it is definitely not by chance that the tendency towards authenticity and accuracy in the representation of remnants strengthened in the very era that was also the peak period for fake or artificial ruins, placed in impressive landscape gardens—although naturally here also we have many subcategories and grades of fakeness and originality. The palette ranges from the newly built, proper artificial ruins through the semi-fake ruins, where

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the inclusion of original material is traceable, till the incorporation or partial restoration and reconstruction or even incorporation of genuine ruins in the estate’s new design (we will see this in a bit more detail in chapter 11). Nevertheless, considerations on the various ways of encountering ruins (i.e., how one comes to be in front of either real or artificial ruins), entered into the planning process of early landscape designers and in discussions and critiques of their work, too. As early as 1776, William Gilpin advocated for a certain authenticity in the maintenance and in the display of ruins: being fascinated by the ruins of Roche-Abbey, for instance, but at the same time criticising Capability Brown’s landscape designing solutions.20 In that case Gilpin’s main concern was that Brown had cleaned and beautified the area too much, and hence the ruin seemed more to be on display, instead of remaining in harmonious relationship with its natural context. Actually, Gilpin goes so far as asserting that compared to the chosen solution that somehow lacks in sensibility towards the essence of the site, it would have been better to destroy the remains of the ruins and build a new castle over them. However, as Gilpin judges it, in its present state the abbey lacks the unplanned informality that is normally so pleasing in these sites. What’s more, the architect shall not necessarily isolate the ruin completely; one of Gilpin’s suggestions was to let the sheep graze right beside the remains of the construction, without railing them off. In the original, ruinous state (i.e., before Brown’s restorative and redesigning intervention), the former abbey’s broken elements were partly buried under earth and vegetation, but now are all brought to the same standardised level, thus isolating the remnants from their ground. According to Gilpin, the current work deprives the ruin of its essence by not allowing the visitor to feel the abandonment, decay, and solitude. In this example the ruin again becomes a point of discussion between different areas and different intentions. Not unlike the situation we saw in chapter 1 with regard to the tensions in the (imaginary) reconstruction of antique remnants between a poetic and archaeological viewpoint, here the aesthetic enjoyment of the ruins is torn between the intentions of the landscape architect and the suggestion of the aesthete. While the former aims to (re)design the area to achieve a novel aspect, the latter suggests focusing on the maximizing of charm (to phrase it in a bit Simmelian way) by creating an autonomous and authentic-looking, somehow “Romantic” and naturally picturesque image par excellence of and with the ruin. The issue at stake, then, is the appearance of the decay, the often divergent intentions of those encountering ruins and/or managing the forms of encounters. In the above example there is a clear tension between the partly divergent intentions of the professionals of the differing fields of architecture and aesthetics, when it comes to the ways and effects of encountering decay. But sometimes the tension is within the same person. Hence when this ambiguity

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or dichotomy between possible approaches to and appearances of the ruin is not merely between the representatives of different profession(al)s and disciplines, but the conflict is born and manifests itself between one’s own expectation and the actual view. This disillusion while encountering decay is almost unavoidable, especially when one has great expectations. For some actual examples, we shall again turn our attention to Venice. We have several curious testimonies from late eighteenth century visitors of the city, whose observations can help us understand the complex questions that accompany encounters with the random and picturesque beauty of decay, especially after having seen them on pictorial representations. Bernard Aikema, for example, quotes two almost opposing testimonies of visitors of Venice that may again help us to understand the importance of the preliminary visual knowledge of a subject. While recording the palaces on the Canal Grande in 1780 William Backford wrote: “I have no terms to describe the variety of pillars, of pediments, of mouldings, and cornices, some Grecian, some Saracenic, that adorn these edifices, as the pencil of Canaletti [sic] conveys so perfect an idea as to render all verbal descriptions superfluous.”21 However, just a few years later, in 1788 Arthur Young expressed his disappointment that the actual city had not entirely met the expectations formed after seeing the pictures of Canaletto: “The city in general has some beautiful features, but does not equal the idea I had formed of it from the pictures of Canaletti [sic]. . . . A poor gothic house makes a fine figure on canvas.”22 This final statement is a succinct way of referring to the pictorial force of transformation (i.e., how the veduta and capriccio painters could convert these sometimes derelict sites into amazing sights), and also fits in the commonly quoted topos that an average building may look better in its partly decayed state (“a poor gothic house”)—especially when painted by a skilled master specialised in the alluring representation of the city that is already alluring in itself. We can add another quote to further illustrate the facets of possible disillusionment when faced with the occasional discrepancy between the real and previously imagined city, Charles Burney in 1773 wrote: “After seeing Canaletti’s [sic] view . . . there was neither the symmetry nor the richness of materials I expected.”23 While this statement of anticlimax is perhaps less inherently connected to qualities of derelict sites—symmetry is quite atypical in ruins, often being among the first features to go in the ruination process— still, we can see that the grade of disillusionment can be in proportion with the expectation born of preliminary visual encounters. The curious fact that numerous eighteenth century travel writings and testimonies refer to Canaletto’s work as a basic source of visual knowledge for the city of Venice makes it even more exciting when we see the situation “reversed”; and here I mean the group of works where interested visitors, Antiquity, ruin, and decay lovers appear “on the other side”; their encounter

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and occasional disappointment recorded not through their own writings, but through their very figures being represented and inserted in a painting, in front of a decayed construction or shown in the act of observing it. These sorts of figures, “average” visitors, and curious, grand tourists often appear on eighteenth century paintings representing ruins, both actual ruins and capriccios. A nice set of examples can be observed in Canaletto’s series of Roman vedutas, for example, painted in 1742, showing the three major triumphal arches (that of Titus, Constantine, and Septimus Severus) as well as the Pantheon and the Forum.24 In each painting we see groups of people observing the ruins, apparently visitors accompanied by antiquarian guides and cicerones. Their activity is emphasised (among other means) through their completely different postures, equipment, and the different dresses than that of the other passers-by around them. Their highlighted difference, especially fuelled by their admiration in contrast to the disinterestedness of the local inhabitants, seems to be a recurrent motif, again, in order to highlight the impression of the antique remnants. Perhaps this aforementioned discrepancy of the actual from the pre-imagined view of Venice may also aid the explanation of why many of the works showing the examination of ruins are by Venetian artists, of which the above series by Canaletto showing the semi-professional visitors and enthusiastic amateurs is just one example. In another relatively well-known piece we find a further layer of meaning and a curious twist, since the painting seems to focus on the scholarly activity of specialised professionals; still, it has a great deal of fantastic elements, almost as if mocking the meticulous, objectivity-seeking work of the documenters. The work in question is by Antonio Maria Visentini, titled Architectural Fantasy (1770s, Venice, Galleria dell’Accademia). It is one of the best examples of this typology, also illustrating how the attempts of real historical interest can still be merged into a fantasy setting, creating a paradoxical work: a capriccio demonstrating the actual documentary work of architects. A group of architects is measuring the antique-style ruins in the foreground. Curiously however, the painting is not (only) about the fascination with and scientific examination of the ruins, but it also refers to the art of painting itself. Several attributes of the picture can be connected to architectural perspective as being an important element in the education of painters, among others: drawing utensils, plumb line, and even Palladio’s Trattato serve as a reference to the theoretical basis of architecture lying next to a drawing figure in the foreground. As a matter of fact, Palladio’s great Mannerist architect’s “spirit” and influence is evident not only in the presence of his renowned book but also in the style of the arcade in the background of the painting. The work can likely be dated to the middle of the 1770s. It has been interpreted as a reception piece for Visentini’s nomination to professor at the Academy of Venice. Although the chair of perspective painting had already

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been established in the Academy of Venice in 1764, and Visentini nominated for the position in the same year, he only actually began to teach in 1772, while the painting itself is first mentioned in connection to an exhibition in 1777.25 If we accept this dating of the work and the relationship between the subject and Visentini’s appointment then we can confidently read the picture as highlighting the importance of architectural and perspective studies in the education of the Academy. The elegantly dressed figures methodically and scientifically measure the classical remnants as a way of studying and preparing for their future professional careers. At the same time however, the juxtaposition of the two types and forms of architecture is what makes the picture particularly fascinating. The intact arcade in the background and the picturesquely ruinous elements in the middle ground—the latter being the subject of examination by the architects—are both composed of similar architectural elements derived from Antiquity, including semicircular arches, columns (some with fluted shafts), elegant capitals, and pediments, as well as series of metopes and triglyphs. Though the elements of architecture are similar in their referring back to Antiquity, the juxtaposition lies in their state and modes of survival. It seems as if the middle and background were differentiated in their “originality”; the supposedly ancient element, the one being measured by the architects, is presented as an authentic ruin, while the background is a Palladio-inspired intact—hence presumably modern—construction. While the architectural “protagonist” is obviously the ruinous one in the middle ground, the background context is also made nobler in this context, assuming a hope that work of such architects like Palladio who created their buildings through the creative reinterpretation of classical antique elements will have just as majestic an afterlife, becoming just as exemplary as the truly old originals. This makes Visentini’s picture a parallel to Hubert Robert’s pair of paintings depicting the Louvre (to be discussed in chapter 5). A further curiosity regarding this very painting is that the elegant ruinous structure in the middle ground reappears in a work by Francesco Guardi (Architectural Capriccio with Roman Ruins, 1770s–1780s, Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli).26 As we have learned of Guardi in chapter 2, his interest was very much directed to the lagunar landscape of and around Venice with the typical local architecture, and this also explains why, even if reusing a classical Roman style and monumental piece of construction in his capriccio, he placed it in a Venetian environment, instead of a noble and imaginary Palladian arcade. Also, the figures appearing in the image have changed: Rather than the elegantly dressed architects measuring the remnants of the construction, here we see people diligently pursuing everyday activities. In the previous example, Visentini’s architects pursued the “proper” documentation of a ruined piece, researching it in a more scientific or academic way than did Canaletto’s Roman visitors. However, despite all the efforts to

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Figure 3.1  Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli). The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments, 1778–1780. Red chalk on sepia wash on paper. Image: 42.2/41.6 x 35.8/34.8 cm, Passepartout: 65 x 50 cm. Schiff Nr. 665. Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1940. Photo credit: Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings.

measure, record, document, and, especially, understand the antique grandeur, some may well fail and fall. In a well-known work by Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) we see a captivating illustration of the overwhelming effect of the antique canon. In this image titled The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments (1778–1780, Zurich, Kunsthaus) a figure sits in front of a fragment of classical monumental sculpture—a huge left foot—above which another large fragment—a right hand—is positioned. The artist (probably Fuseli himself) “moved to despair” places his right arm on the immense fragment while holding his head—possibly partly covering his eyes with the left hand—as a clear indication of his “despair.” At first one tends to read the work as a depiction of the nostalgic and melancholic feelings

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or, to put it even more strongly, tragic despair at the loss of the antique heritage that even in its fragmented state surmounts the era of the modern artist, overwhelming not only physically (the hand-fragment is as high as the sitting figure) but also in its aesthetic and authoritative strength. The morning is thus indicative not only of the fact of the irrevocable loss of classical heritage but also to the again saddening fact that even the little that has survived is still enough to confront us with the mediocrity of our modern era. Hence in the presence of the ruined sculpture the artist is forced to face the impossible task of meeting the heights of Antiquity, depressing him in both senses of the word. At the same time, one may also wonder if together with, and despite of, all the respect Fuseli held for the antique grandeur, there is also a slight irony in his rendering. The reason for this suspicion arises for both compositional and biographical reasons. On the one hand, the positioning of the artist, the minimal environment, and the highlighting of his desperation all result in a theatrically exaggerated directness in the subject matter. On the other hand, considered biographically, Fuseli had been living in Rome since 1770 and the work dates from almost a decade later, during which time he may have grown accustomed to seeing the antique grandeur. Naturally, the primary fascination and impact the classical monuments held for him could last so long even if just a few years later he began to create his definitely less classicist but truly Romantic works analysing the depths of the human soul through often horrifying, imaginative, and surreal pieces. Hence we can assume that the work can be read as a visual statement of tribute to classical works and at the same time criticising the occasionally overtly exaggerated fanaticism of some Antiquity devotees. As a curious parallel, we can cite another work of only a few years later, whose interpretation is at least as, if not even more, ambiguous as Fuseli’s above piece. It is a lesser known but very curious drawing by the French architect Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer, in the Apolloni collection in Rome.27 On this image from 1785 we can see eight men carrying a colossal finger—apparently larger than themselves, about 2 metres high—that is installed perfectly vertically on a base, a bit as though it were an obelisk or column. Another man in the right foreground is directing them, (a bit ironically) pointing at the monumental finger with his own finger, and giving instructions to the carriers. The space around the nine men and the fragment is completely undefined; we only see the distant horizon line. This graphic work definitely raises many questions. There have been some attempts to identify the fragment given the sheer size of the original finger (as seen above, approximately 2 metres).—If there had been an original at all, it must have been a truly monumental work. What further complicates the reading of the piece is that Vaudoyer included some handwritten description in the work:

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Figure 3.2  Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer. Doigt Colossal en Marbre, 1785. Pen, ink, pencil, watercolour, 20.5 x 19.4 cm. Courtesy Galleria W. Apolloni, Rome–London.

“Doigt colossal en marbre, porté par huit hommes au museum à Rome.” What’s more, on the base of the huge finger another inscription refers to pope Pius VI, the founding figure of one of the most impressive museological enterprises of the late eighteenth century. Seen from this perspective, it could refer to an actual transportation event, as it was an oft-recurring scene in late Settecento Rome whenever found and saved antique monuments were carried to the newly established museum. Just as a brief sidetrack and interesting parallel we can quote a recent discovery that may shed some further light on how common these enterprises were, and, at the same time,

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how long-lasting influences these discoveries, transportations, and collecting activities may have. Recently we could read about the novel attribution of a bronze index finger in the collection of the Louvre that was revealed to be part of a set of fragments deriving from a monumental sculpture showing Emperor Constantine, kept in the Musei Capitolini in Rome.28 Although the finger in the Louvre is definitely smaller (about 38 cm) than the one shown on the aforementioned drawing, its story can still illustrate how exciting an afterlife even fragmented pieces can have. Nevertheless, turning back to the presumably fictitious event depicted on Vaudoyer’s piece, I think we can agree with Federica Giacomini, who analysed the piece in her catalogue entry, that the work can also imply another more ironic reading.29 In this light, the work does not document a real event and the proper transportation of an actual piece but is rather an ironic reference to the enthusiastic collecting activity of the pope. As we can see, the overwhelming intellectual and aesthetic power of the antique heritage is emphasised as a pressing force that literally dwarfs the modern man (Fuseli) and may have also slid to ironic levels (Vaudoyer). In other cases we find another strategy to overcome the pressing influence when encountering the classical heritage: The attempts to dominate the remnants with a conscious, scientific, and enlightened approach. Of these, the bestknown example is definitely Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s staged portrait of Goethe (Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1786, Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut), created while the poet was on his long Italian sojourn. My use of “staged” in the description refers not only to the fact that the large figure of the poet is placed in the foreground and occupying a great part of the canvas, but also to the fact that the additional elements, fragments, broken artworks, and even the background landscape are carefully selected and their arrangement composed so as to complement the figure. Most important of these are the architectural and sculptural elements around Goethe: He is sitting on a broken Egyptian obelisk, and behind him we see the fragment of a Greek relief showing a scene from the story of Iphigenia, as well as a Roman capital. As Jutta Assel and Georg Jäger quote Herbert von Einem’s analyses in their considerations on the work, these elements (Egyptian, Greek, and Roman fragments) in Tischbein’s painting included references to, and thus aimed at, embracing the entirety of Antiquity.30 As it is also known, Goethe was working on his own Iphigenia in this period; the fragmented relief behind him thus has a double reference to both classical Greece and Goethe’s own work. Both the individual elements and the arrangement as a whole contribute to the carefully planned and staged character of the work, or, in Brodey’s formation: “The aim of the painting is not only for us to see Goethe, but more importantly to see Goethe seeing the classical ruins.”31 The initial animus and birth of the painting—and of the inspiration for the painting—is well documented, starting with Goethe “realising” that Tischbein wants to depict him. In his Italian Journey, dated December 29, 1786, we read: “Latterly I have often

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observed Tischbein attentively regarding me; and now it appears that he has long cherished the idea of painting my portrait. His design is already settled, and the canvas stretched. I am to be drawn of the size of life, enveloped in a white mantle, and sitting on a fallen obelisk, viewing the ruins of the Campagna di Roma, which are to fill up the background of the picture.”32 The beginning of the work is confirmed by another source, too, dated just twenty days earlier, in a letter by Tischbein, sent to his friend the physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater, on December 9, 1786: “I have started his [Goethe’s] portrait, and will paint him in life-size, as he sits on ruins and reflects on the destiny of human works.”33 Despite the attentive preparations and quite clear preliminary ideas for the composition, the work was created over a long period; even in late August of 1787 the painting was still not considered finished, and it is very probable that Goethe never saw the completed piece. The long execution of the painting can also be explained by the constant elaboration of the initial ideas and of the complex reference system embedded in the work. As we can glean from John F. Moffitt’s detailed survey, which also quotes Christian Beutler’s research on the development of the painting, the posture of the poet probably derives from the seventeenth century artist Nikolaus Berchem’s print of a resting shepherd, the motif having been modified in several drawings by Tischbein and converted into the figure of the wanderer-poet.34 The connection between Goethe’s literary ideals, influences, his own actual work on Iphigenia, and not lastly his joining the respected literary Arcadian Society explains the choice of departure point for Tischbein (and Goethe) in the figure of Berchem’s idyllic shepherd. Hence Goethe is shown—we could also say more overtly: Goethe poses—as someone appreciating and at the same time building upon classical heritage, considering it a material to be potentially reused. As Moffitt argued: “Clearly, for Goethe and his contemporaries classical literature and art were not idols to be blindly worshipped but instead were appreciated as instructive models, like old laws, to be reworked and reformed for wholly new and independent purposes, just as Goethe had so laboriously ‘re-formed’ Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.”35

What is thus crucial from our current perspective is that these features show a certain self-confidence: The poet is an admirer of Antiquity, but instead of being struck by its overwhelming grandeur or paralysed by the comparison of modern art’s achievements compared to those surviving in fragments, he tries to channel his fascination into a sort of mastery of what has remained and what is still present. This can also be interpreted as a possible solution for the “puzzle” and undertaking that Goethe had found with regards to Antiquity, expressed again in his Italian Journey, dated October 27, 1786: “And so it may seem strange to some that we should go on troubling ourselves to acquire an idea of antiquity, although we have nothing before us

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but ruins, out of which we must first painfully reconstruct the very thing we wish to form an idea of.”36 As I wrote in a previous essay, this affirmation reminds us of the classical hermeneutic circle: While our aim is the understanding of Antiquity, for which the ruins should be helpful elements, still it seems almost impossible, since in order to reconstruct the fragments we should first know how the entire and complete original was.37 It thus truly resembles a jigsaw puzzle. However, the difficulty is not only that there are only some fragmented pieces, surviving at random and that they are mixed up, but we do not even have the original photo on the cover of the box of the puzzle to guide us in their reconstruction. Goethe’s answer to this is thus a constant learning and “acquiring” process, discovering, comprehending, and mastering as much of the antique heritage as possible through the investigation and use of the fragments. And, as part of this endeavour, heritage is interpreted not necessarily as an unchallengeable and closed entity in itself but more like a source of possible modern adaptations. This is illustrated by the conscious arrangement of the tangible remnants of the various inspiring classical civilizations through which they become canonical but at the same time reusable material. Through this last example we can see that being in front of ruins may mean understanding their power but having the confidence to respectfully master them and build upon the experience they provide when creating one’s own innovative and new work. NOTES 1. Theodore Ziolkowski, “Ruminations on Ruins: Classical versus Romantic,” German Quarterly 89, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 268–71. 2. Kai Vöckler, Die Architektur der Abwesenheit: Über die Kunst, eine Ruine zu bauen (Berlin: Parthas Verlag, 2009), 16–17. 3. Michel Makarius, Ruins (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 15. (Italics in the original—Z. S.). 4. Werner Busch, “Landscape: The Road to Independence,” in Landscapes from Brueghel to Kandinsky, ed. Jutta Frings (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 16–27. 5. Bert W. Meijer, “La perfetta imitazione de’ veri paesi,” in Paesaggio e veduta da Poussin a Canaletto: Dipinti da Palazzo Barberini, ed. Anna Lo Bianco and Angela Negro (Milan: Skira, 2005), 33–45; both quoted works reproduced on page 38. 6. Lynn Federle Orr, “Embracing Antiquity: The Dutch Response to Rome,” in Time and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, ed. Susan Donahue Kuretsky (Poughkeepsie, NY: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2005), 85. 7. Helmut Puff, “Self-Portrait with Ruins: Maerten van Heemskerck, 1553,” Germanic Review 86 (2011): 272–73.

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8. Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place. A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2012), 53. 9. Trigg, The Memory of Place, 71 10. Puff, “Self-Portrait with Ruins,” 263. 11. Maria Fabricius Hansen, “Telling Time: Representations of Ruins in the Grotesques of Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8, no. 1 (2016): n.p. 12. Maria Virginia Cardi, Le rovine abitate. Invenzione e morte in luoghi di memoria (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 2000), 102. 13. Zoltán Somhegyi, “The Painter in the Landscape: Aesthetic Considerations on a Pictorial Sub-genre,” in Retracing the Past: Historical Continuity in Aesthetics from a Global Perspective. International Yearbook of Aesthetics, vol. 19, ed. Zoltán Somhegyi (Santa Cruz, CA: International Association for Aesthetics, 2017), 42–53. 14. Marcello Barbanera, “Dal testo all’immagine: autopsia delle antichità nella cultura antiquaria del Settecento,” in Roma e l’Antico. Realtà e visione nel ‘700, eds. Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi (Milan: Skira, 2010), 33–38. 15. Paul Zanker, “Le rovine romane e i loro osservatori,” in Relitti riletti. Metamorfosi delle rovine e identità culturale, ed. Marcello Barbanera (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009), 258, 262. 16. Alain Schnapp, “Rovine e senso del passato nell’antico Oriente,” in La forza delle rovine, eds. Marcello Barbanera and Alessandra Capodiferro (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2015), 160. 17. Aphrodite Kouria, Greece in European Travellers’ Imagery (15th–19th Centuries): Identities, Alterities, Metamorphoses (Athens: Panayotis & Effie Michelis Foundation, 2018), 59–60. 18. Quoted in: Brigitte Buberl, “Ruinen als Bausteine einer religiösen Bildungslandschaft,” in Roma Antica. Römische Ruinen in der italienischen Kunst des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Brigitte Buberl (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1994), 68. 19. Ian Jenkins, “Ideas of Antiquity: Classical and Other Ancient Civilizations in the Age of Enlightenment,” in Enlightenment. Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Press, 2016), 171. 20. William Gilpin, Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1776, on Several Parts of Great Britain, Particularly the High-Lands of Scotland, 2nd ed. (1792. I. 21). See some excerpts in Emlék márványból vagy homokkőből. Öt évszázad írásai a művészettörténet történetéből, ed. Ernő Marosi (Budapest: Corvina, 1976), 256–58. 21. William Beckford, Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal (London, 1834, I. p. 101). Quoted in: Bernard Aikema, “Francesco Guardi, Il ‘picturesque’ e il mito di Venezia,” in I Guardi: Vedute, capricci, feste, disegni e ‘quadri turcheschi,’ ed. Alessandro Bettagno (Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini-Marsilio, 2002), 17. 22. Arthur Young, Travels in France and Italy during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (London-Toronto 1927, p. 256). Quoted in: Aikema, “Francesco Guardi,” 18. 23. Quoted in: Lucy Whitaker, “Venice in the Eighteenth Century,” in Canaletto and the Art of Venice, eds. Rosie Razzall and Lucy Whitaker (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017), 17.

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24. All works reproduced in Canaletto and the Art of Venice, eds. Rosie Razzall and Lucy Whitaker (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017), 198–207. 25. Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia (Milan: Electa, 1998), 183. 26. Reproduced in Mitchell Merling, “Paesaggi e capricci,” in Francesco Guardi, 1712–1793, ed. Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco (Milan: Skira, 2012), 155; description on page 176. 27. Reproduced in: Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi, Roma e l’Antico. Realtà e visione nel ‘700 (Milano: Skira, 2010), 273. 28. Vincent Noce, “Emperor Constantine’s Giant Finger Found in the Louvre,” The Art Newspaper, May 30, 2018, accessed August 12, 2019, https​://ww​w.the​artne​ wspap​er.co​m/new​s/emp​eror-​const​antin​e-s-f​i nger​-foun​d-in-​the-l​ouvre​. 29. See the description of the work by Federica Giacomini in: Brook and Curzi, Roma e l’Antico, 403. 30. See: Jutta Assel and Georg Jäger, “Goethe-Motif auf Postkarten: Tischbeins Goethe in der Campagna,” Goethezeitportal, last modified July, 2019, http:​// www​.goet​hezei​tport​al.de​/inde​x.php​?id=4​34. Herbert von Einem’s quoted work is: Deutsche Malerei des Klassizusmus und der Romantik 1760 bis 1840 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1978). 31. Inger Sigrun Brodey, Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility (New York: Routledge, 2008), 146. (Italics in the original— Z. S.). 32. Goethe’s Travels in Italy, Together with His Second Residence in Roma and Fragments on Italy, trans. Alexander James William Morrison and Charles Nisbet (London: George Bell and Sons, 1885), 141. 33. Quoted in: Emil Schaeffer and Jörn Göres, eds., Goethe. Seine Äussere Erscheinung. Literarische und künstlerische Dokumente seiner Zeitgenössen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1980), 93. 34. John F. Moffitt, “The Poet and the Painter: J. H. W. Tischbein’s ‘Perfect Portrait’ of Goethe in the Campagna (1786–1878),” Art Bulletin 65, no. 3. (September 1983), 440–55; especially 445–46. 35. Moffitt, “The Poet and the Painter,” 449. (Italics in the original—Z. S.) 36. Goethe’s Travels in Italy, 110. 37. Zoltán Somhegyi, “Goethe és az antik puzzle” (Goethe and the Antique Puzzle), in “Viharnak kitett szavak által.” Tanulmányok Bacsó Béla hatvanadik születésnapjára (Festschrift for Béla Bacsó), ed. Zoltán Papp (Budapest: ELTE-BTK, 2012), 577–84.

MODERN APPEARANCES

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Ruins in East-West Perspective

“A most spectacular place of Incan engineering prowess, Machu Picchu has served as a staging for aesthetic contemplation, as a blueprint for political agendas, and as a cultural icon to be consumed by the masses.”1 Regina Harrison presents this observation in her contribution to a collection of essays dedicated to multiple aspects of ruins, broadly construed, in Latin America. At the same time, however, we might at first be surprised by the fact that the same sentence—of course, changing the words “Incan” and “Machu Picchu”—could just have easily been written on numerous ruins from other parts of the world. A very similar fate is observable in many examples of the classical Graeco-Roman heritage, of Hellenistic Near Eastern ruins or even of the Great Wall of China. This similarity in the life and afterlife of many ruins of completely different periods, cultures, and areas shows that certain features provide ruins with a sort of universality, sharing a similar fate and perhaps triggering similar feelings. What’s more, this universality is not necessarily a mere modern phenomenon; we can find comparable similarities with regards to the origins of considerations on architecture and its durability as well, durability being an aspect that naturally elicits considerations of possible future ruination, too. As Alain Schnapp demonstrated in his comparative survey on various antique cultures (Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Chinese), there are converging tendencies in the interpretation of architectural monumentality and its survival. “Through the inscriptions on the surface of the walls, or on the bronze vases one is directed towards the future generations, since the ruler, his architects and craftsmen still trust more the eternity of the script rather than the firmness of the walls that they build.”2 The connection between writing and architecture as well as its crucial role in the formation of cultural memory was also highlighted by Jan Assmann in his seminal 1992 67

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book on cultural memory, analysing how in the ancient Egyptian temples the hieroglyphs carved on the walls and pillars have turned the buildings into definitive and authoritative memory-transporting monuments, or, in Assmann’s words, “the temple is nothing other than the three-dimensional, monumental transposition of a book and has all of the characteristics of a canon,” and this is precisely what then results in a certain “codification of knowledge.”3 However, Schnapp further develops this addition to these converging tendencies between the ancient civilisations (i.e., that when it comes to the question of their survival [at least in the memory], most of the antique rulers seem to trust more in the survival of the text than the monumental constructions they erect). These ambiguous hopes, or, even doubts, in the eternity of monumental architecture may point toward some common experience and can signify the origins of rumination on ruination that is thus quite similarly traceable across various antique cultures. At the same time though, we need to complete these above observations with those of Salvatore Settis who questioned the possibility of generalising the ruins’ appeal—as did for example Chateaubriand: “tous les hommes ont un secret attrait pour les ruins”—Settis, highlighting the fact that architectural remnants can have diverging roles and importance in the formation of cultural memory in different civilisations.4 In light of this, it is especially interesting to see that despite many similar considerations on ruination and the common worries regarding the effects of material decay, we have since come to have very divergent interpretations of ruins and of their afterlife, of their “proper” management, or, on a larger scale, even of the question of whether something is to be interpreted as a ruin at all. An abandoned and partly disintegrated ancient Greek temple or Gothic cathedral is quite unanimously considered a ruin. However, for example, an old mud-brick fortress in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, in part ruined and in part restored, perhaps by adding new materials, may raise concerns in some observer with regard to its status as ruin and the authenticity of its management as a site. And the questions of (ruined) heritage as well as the ethical-aesthetic aspects of its archaeological and architectural handling becomes even more complicated in numerous examples from Far Eastern cultures, where certain religious sites are regularly rebuilt by tradition—sometimes even destroying some of the remaining previous elements—every few decades to counteract the (natural) ruination. Therefore we may ask: Which is a ruin? And which is the “real” ruin? Can we really choose and properly explain our selection? What I will argue in this chapter is that despite our possible preconceptions we should see the issue with regard to the local habits, traditions, and cultural framework, instead of automatically and forcefully applying architectural ideas, aesthetic ideals, heritage concepts, and management methods from other parts of the world.

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Very often it seems as if there was a standardised and also partly exclusivist image and interpretation of ruins and ruination, as well as a dominant mode of appreciation and visualisation of the ruin’s possible aesthetic qualities. This dominant perspective is the Western model, and this influences not only the “pure” appreciation but also the suggested management of ruins and decayed sites. At the same time, however, this model is recently getting challenged more and more, and the specialities of other regions’ historical, cultural, and social factors are taken more and more into consideration. In our approach we can then follow the patterns of investigation of Wu Hung, who, while examining the interpretation and representation of ruins in ancient and contemporary Chinese art, also suggests departing from the local cultural traditions. “Unknowingly, the Western concept of ruins has become a global one. Thus when ruins in a non-Western visual tradition become the subject of scholarly inquiry, the investigation naturally first focuses on indigenous concepts and representations of ruins.”5 Hence the inclusion or, more accurately, departure from the local significance of the ruin is undeniably useful in furthering understanding of the global fascination of ruins and the possible adequate answers one may formulate in their presence. It is for this reason that in this chapter I suggest viewing the question of the fascinating presence of ruins in a comparative East-West perspective, hence, from a more global and inclusivist point of view. This implies a double examination: On one hand, how the “Western” specialists and ruin-enthusiasts started to extend their interest to encompass more and more of the nonWestern ruins, gradually providing them the same form of recognition that previously was only allotted to the Western ones. On the other hand, we also need to survey some questions connected to what ruins may mean in nonWestern cultures, how the fascination of decaying sites contributes to cultural memory and identity, and what decay and its tangible “results” signifies in the local contexts. Needless to say, the detailed discussion of this could be the topic of an entire book in itself. Hence, in the following I will mention some aspects of the theoretical background of these issues and then examine a few examples of exciting artists’ projects that will contribute to the understanding of the particularities of the fascination of ruins in East-West perspective. When observing ruins in, or from, a global perspective, one of the key issues is that it can often become very challenging to apply a unified or standardisable set of criteria for defining any ruins (i.e., even the most broadly construed definition may be insufficient to encompass each such phenomenon that some—especially someone from the local culture—would describe as a ruin). We can also see this challenge when observing the varieties of ruins with our three basic criteria in mind that were analysed in chapter 1. There I highlighted the importance of functionlessness, absence, and time. Although these criteria are quite broad in themselves, and through these it seems that

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we are able to identify many forms of architectural dereliction, they can still fall short in defining and describing ruins in certain local varieties, which is to say, not all three are applicable in a straightforward way. Upon closer inspection of these phenomena, we find some definite changes in the manifestation of the above criteria when trying to apply them to the actual examples of heritage in their respective local environments on a global scale, although in different grades. It is easy, for example, to accept that the category and ruin-defining force of the phenomenon of “functionlessness” remains more or less general and universal. This can be seen in the cases of a derelict ancient Greek temple, Roman theatre, or Gothic cathedral, but the ruined fortresses in the Arabian Peninsula or decayed sanctuaries in South Asia have also similarly lost their primary purpose and, even later, no further added functions were attributed to them that, as we saw previously, could revitalise them and retrieve them from their ruin-status. In this way “functionlessness” seems to be a more easily adaptable and thus universal criterion, a common feature in all sort of “ruins.” But what of our second criterion for classical forms of ruination: The manifestation of “absence”? With this we encounter some further challenges in our global reading of ruins. For instance, the various building materials used in regional architectural traditions may deteriorate in completely different ways than those of their Western counterparts, resulting in dissimilar modes and patterns of the appearance of absence. Stone constructions and buildings made by fired brick walls may persist significantly longer than mud bricks or wooden structures, and this will also connect this question to the examination of the appearance of the third criterion: time. To have significantly visible and, as we know, often aesthetically pleasing lacuna on an edifice, to have randomly shaped outlines, partially destroyed facades, or unstoppably growing holes in the walls of stone buildings may require stronger natural intervention and more time than the aesthetically inspiring dereliction of a mud-brick construction. On the other hand, this difference in the nature of the construction materials may also result in divergent attitudes towards their maintenance that leads to questions of the authenticity of the current state of the edifice. This may then result in the fact that due to the special ways of formation of “absence” in certain ruins—compared to, for example, the classical Western ruins—it may be difficult to use the category of “absence” as one of the defining factors for the birth and process of ruination and for the explanation of the local decay’s aesthetic appeal. Just like the category of “absence,” the particularity of time or the temporal perspective brings noteworthy issues when considering its global application. In the case of Western ruins, a few hundred years (at least) are typically required for the natural forces to convert the former building into an aesthetically appealing, picturesque, or sublime ruin. But due to the different building

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materials in different areas of the world, this time frame can become significantly less when observing dilapidated constructions. This readily brings us back to the question of “absence,” as Nature’s shaping of the former building into an aesthetically attractive ruin needs time, up until the point at which it falls into a complete decay, where no more aesthetic pleasure can be gained from viewing and experiencing this decay. The amount of time that constitutes the lifespan of the ruin corresponds with the relative durability of the construction material in question. Further, to this we shall add another—perhaps less aesthetic but more social and political—aspect to our temporal analysis. What is considered an important “old” ruin—or, in a larger sense, let’s say, heritage site—may also be influenced by the local history of the particular country. This aspect, already briefly mentioned in chapter 1, then explains why in certain countries a ruined building that is only a few decades old (and hence is at the start of its ruination) may still be significant and highly esteemed by the local public due to its importance and role in the country’s history. We can see this especially in cases where countries have either a short history or have (re)gained their independence in recent decades—obviously these factors add to the appreciation of anything historically important, even recent buildings in ruins. What needs to be highlighted, then, is that what is regarded as an important historic monument within a particular region—as a noteworthy archaeological site or a ruinous former edifice with exemplary status for its role in building the historical and cultural identity of the nation—is not necessarily a ruin from a “Western” perspective. Even if it is similarly functionless as a not-in-use-anymore antique temple, it may be missing aspects and signs of absence and longer temporal perspectives, or presenting said absence in different modes. Still, these edifices can fulfil a very similar role in the building of identity and in creating connections between the (local) community and their own history. The above considerations will then influence the appreciation by local communities and different nations towards surviving examples of their tangible heritage, resulting in the evaluation and often even monument-status of survived ruinous constructions. At the same time however these considerations should also influence the work of those specialists whose activity is any way connected to (the aesthetics of) ruins, including archaeologists, museum and site managers, educators, curators, art historians, authors, philosophers, and even artists. We can see and welcome positive examples of this more inclusivist approach for example in archaeological discourses and in cultural heritage, both on a theoretical level as well as in its actual practice. One of the theoreticians of such an archaeological approach, who is more attentive to and appreciative of specificity and uniqueness and at the same time critical of the sometimes still-dominant Western approaches, is Denis

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Byrne. In an article from 1991, titled “Western Hegemony in Archaeological Heritage Management,” Byrne raised his concerns about the often-totalizing methods of managing archaeological sites that also often results in a “remarkably coherent style” of the display of these areas and in the archaeological heritage management. According to his reading of the situation, the typical (Western) perspective of interpreting heritage as such and the allocation of heritage site status may easily fall short when it comes to understanding the (local) importance of the site and its particular needs and modes of preservation. In his words: “Despite the diversity of local circumstances it is clear that a fundamentally similar approach to heritage management has been taken in most countries and it seems equally clear, to my mind at least, that this approach is essentially the one which was developed in Europe and America.”6 This similar approach would then include not only the actual assessment of the findings but all the infrastructural establishment surrounding their management and conservation. Among these Byrne again finds a similar pattern: For the conservation of the site and the safeguarding of its visibility the countries need to found (and fund) the necessary administrative units, including museums and authorities, of which responsibility will be the investigation, regulation, conservation, maintenance, and display of the findings. They will not only overview the reconstruction but also try to guarantee all sorts of protection and stop the illegal commercial activities or looting of the aesthetically and/or economically valuable pieces from the site. Additionally, these authorities will also aim to publicise the findings and raise public awareness about the importance of the heritage site and its conservation. These are the important elements in Byrne’s critical reading and, in many cases, really essential steps. Nevertheless, the automatic application of a Western heritage management model to other parts of the world may overlook the particularities of these sites that ought to influence the way they are managed. To illustrate this point Byrne adopts Henry Cleere’s distinction between “cultural continuity” and “spiritual continuity.”7 The former is the classical European approach, partly institutionalised during the Enlightenment, that focuses on the material remains of the past and their conservation, categorisation, cataloguing, and display. In contrast, “spiritual continuity” is more typical in societies where the focus of cultural and group identity is on the religious, mythological, or spiritual significance of the place, its construction, or representation, and not on its genuine character. Understandably, from this latter approach arises a different heritage practice that concentrates less on the actual and original piece and its “authentic” conservation and more on its spiritual meaning. Keeping this distinction in mind also aids in explaining those conservation practices that might at the beginning—and, again, from a Western perspective—seem surprising, including the two areas mentioned in Byrne’s article (i.e., the re- and overpainting of faded Wandjina

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figures by Australian aboriginal tribe members or the numerous restorations and enlargements of a Confucian Temple in Qufu, China). These examples show that the above theoretical—and even partly ethical—considerations may have direct bearing not only on the appreciation and assessment of the value of tangible heritage but also on the actual solutions to questions of conservation and restoration. In an earlier chapter, I mentioned the different ways of and several possibilities for managing the remnants of a ruined edifice.8 The first form of handling or treating the ruin is obviously non-management (i.e., when the building in its ruination is left exposed to Nature’s destructive forces, ungoverned, and abandoned). Here of course, without any human conservation effort, the site gradually disappears due to the unrestrained forces of Nature, until it is no longer possible to maintain or reconstruct, neither in one’s imagination, nor in its real physicality. A second approach to the management of the ruined heritage site is when the actual and current form and state of the derelict construction is maintained but without imposing significant additions or reconstructions. With this method the ruination of the edifice is stopped and its decay-time is frozen. Hence, the site is stabilised and perhaps even made safe to visit in order to show the visitors how the form has reached our age, or, more precisely, in what condition it has reached the moment of its conservation. A third possibility for management is a partial reconstruction. Here, it is not only the actual ruined state that is stabilised and shown, but the missing parts are also rebuilt and reconstructed, providing the nonspecialised public with a clear idea of the original space, volume, and grandeur of the now partially survived genuine piece of architecture. As an ideal solution, however, the survived remains of the original edifice and the latter added elements and reconstructions are clearly distinguished and distinguishable, by, for example, using dissimilar colors or even different materials. This question however becomes particularly complex in the fourth option, when the survived parts are entirely demolished—for example, because there has been so little left—and hence there is a complete rebuilding of the original. The various grades of authenticity and accuracy are then very much based and dependent on the technologies applied and on the new building materials utilised, too: if they are compliant with the original building methods and solutions, or if there are materials used that are so novel that they could never have been applied in the original age and thus do not help in attempts to recreate the sense of the former building. However, even with the most accurately and meticulously chosen materials, in such cases of complete reconstruction we will have only the external form, the display and outline of the original, without any “tangible” parts (e.g., genuine materials) that would help the observer feel a “direct” connection to the past. We can thus claim that in complete reconstruction the original “aura” of the building and also its age-value is harmed, and these are aesthetic qualities that cannot

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be restored. A novel feeling for the space can be created and its former characteristics recreated, but the actual presence of the original cannot be reinstated. This is why, considering the various methods mentioned above we can appreciate the complexity of the issue, as can be illustrated with Michael S. Roth’s precise summary: “Objects framed as ruins need our attention and care because they are always threatened by loss, but if we care for them too much, their status as ruins is threatened.”9 The above four approaches towards the management of ruined heritage sites seems to be a quite universally applicable set of options, but there are certainly varieties with regard to the question of which are the preferred solutions, and this is very much based on the local interpretation and assessment of tangible cultural heritage. It would go far beyond the scope of this chapter to enter into the details of the different aspects of possible forms of reconstruction, but what can be particularly useful is to remind ourselves of the aesthetic consequences of the matter. Consider the classical dilemma of authenticity and originality in the case of reconstruction: Till which point can a restored and especially rebuilt construction be considered as genuine and original? The ambiguity of the issue may obviously remind us of the careful consideration that fine art conservators regularly need to pursue before and while restoring broken pieces and cleaning painted surfaces or revitalising their faded colours. And, as it is known, even after the most cautious and prudent restoration and conservation there can always be those critical of the final results of the process. And the interpretation of originality as well as its importance is again dependent upon the local traditions, as we saw in the above examples of both fine arts and architecture, of the Wandjina figures and the Chinese temple. While these were examples of the continuous restoring and enlarging of the work of art, we can add a further example as a thought experiment, this time from the Arabian Peninsula, where in the traditional architecture the use of mud bricks was very common. Given the lesser degree of durability of this material, compared to for example stone constructions, the edifices, houses, and fortresses need regular maintenance and additions to reinforce the walls. Looking from an aesthetic perspective vis-à-vis ruins and the possibilities for interpreting a building as a ruin, the above case of a regularly maintained mud-brick construction is obviously not a ruin. However, further playing with the hypothesis, what if the aged building is already disused for a significant amount of time without upkeep, thus naturally resulting in continuous decay, where Nature eats up more and more parts of the edifice, and only at this point does it begin to receive the traditional additions and reinforcement? Shall we then consider this a form of restoration that is in line with the local customs and architectural traditions and that is at the same time also an attempt to retrieve the edifice from the status of ruin by filling the gaps caused by Nature’s destructive power? Or is

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it more like a fake restoration and falsification of the history and appearance of the building? Actually, from a rigid point of view, it could be argued that it becomes a fake even if the materials and the building technologies are the same as the ones used in the original building at the first phase of its construction simply because the amendments are from our current period and derive neither from the construction time nor from the phase of regular maintenance. This example and the possible questions related to both the authenticity and the aesthetic effect show that the attempts of direct application of a rather Western approach in heritage interpretation and heritage management simply may not be feasible in other contexts and hence may prove that a more global approach would be more adequate when assessing the local examples of heritage and their management (i.e., one that departs from the role and value that any given site plays in the cultural history and national identity in the particular area, region, or country). Another thing to be mindful of when confronted with seemingly inauthentic heritage management throughout the world is the fact that the so-called Western approach to interpretation and maintenance of derelict architectural sites that focuses on maintaining its genuine features (i.e., keeping as much as possible of the original and, if amended, differentiating it from the later additions in a clear manner) has not always been such. In fact, this “conscious” heritage management is a relatively new phenomenon in the Western culture, too. Just think of the well-known practice of spolia (i.e., the stripping of architectural pieces from earlier buildings to be incorporated in new constructions). Sometimes it was pursued because of actual need and practical purposes (i.e., sparing the time and economic resources required in procuring the building material from elsewhere). In other cases, the historical continuity is what counts: A survival that is not only maintained but often even highlighted through the inclusion of the earlier cultural powers’ historical product in the new edifice, as we will see in a bit more detail in chapters 8 and 11. What might be surprising is that, even in the Renaissance itself, which (as we saw in chapters 2 and 3) was a turning point in the history of the methodical examination of ruins through the activities of artists, architects, and of the Humanist scholars and the birth of a more methodological approach to the interpretation of decayed edifices, some of the important monuments were still considered to be fair game as sources for building materials. Even a construction as significant and impressive as the Coliseum itself was used as a stone-mine for the building of new edifices in Rome, sometimes even with official endorsement. A well-known indication of this practice can be found in a bill from the archives of the Vatican, referenced in Christopher Woodward’s book on ruins, which indicates the payment of 205 ducats for the transportation of 2522 tons of stone from the Coliseum between September 1451 and May 1452.10 Another source details the reuse of antique Roman material, as we can

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read in Dirk Syndram’s research on the building activity—that in this case is necessarily also a destroying activity—by pope Nicholas V, for example.11 This also includes the removal of porphyry columns from the Venus Temple in Rome, and the “disappearance” of triumphal columns in order to clear the space for the enlargement of the Piazza di Ponte S. Angelo. Therefore, even during the midst of humanist scholarly investigations of the Antique ruins and their search for a better understanding of the signs and letters of the monumental open-air book inherited from the classical era—as ruins can be interpreted—still, Antique architecture was used not only as an intellectual source of knowledge but as a material source for building, as well. Therefore, we can consider this a sort of transition period in the appreciation of ruins. This aspect was also highlighted by Ulrich Stadler when writing that “ the interest of these theoreticians of architecture [Leon Battista Alberti and Antonio Francesco di Filarete] was directed to the Antique evidences not because but despite the fact that they were ruins.”12 As it is known, this curious ambiguity in approach, the duality of recording and destroying, can also be explained by the fact that in the fifteenth century the differentiation between ruins and rubble was not as distinct as it may be for us today. This blurred margin between the two categories then made it possible to practically destroy an already partly ruined monument by taking away the blocks in order to find still- serviceable pieces among the debris. As we saw in chapter 1, ruins have aesthetic value but not a practical one, and almost paradoxically, rubble may have more practical value from a functional point of view, allowing the observer to find and take away still-usable pieces from among the debris—an activity that we would not do with a classical and aesthetic ruin. However, when this historical sense and awareness is not yet fully established, as was the case in the fifteenth century, the resultant lack of distinction between the two made it possible to “abuse” the Coliseum’s matter for constructing new buildings. It would however be too limiting to think that the above considerations, including the urge to see heritage and its afterlife from a global perspective, partly departing from Byrne’s concerns, affects only the actual management. These ideas and approaches can have consequences to both heritage management and to the representation of the sites. What’s more, there are also consequences for the development and reading of special art projects that are partly or entirely based on the experience of the ruins, and our ability to explicate them with particular regard for their local significance. Hence, so far we have focused on questions related to the management of the actual site, but in the second half of this chapter we shall look at the evaluation and aesthetic qualities of the ruins observed in an East-West perspective through the particularities of their representation.

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Not surprisingly, the gradual opening towards universality—as well as the universal validity of the different approaches to ruins—can also be traced in the history of representation of non-Western ruins. In other words, what we can see in archaeological heritage management is a growing awareness towards the local varieties, specialities, and often the particular requirements for the management of sites. A similar pattern emerges when surveying some examples from the history of representation as well as the appearance of the motif of ruination and decay in contemporary art projects. When examining this opening towards the universality of ruins, we need to keep in mind the double sense of universality. The first signs of global sensitivity of the examination, appreciation, and representation of ruins arose when the cult of ruins began to be extended to include remnants from outside the classical Graeco-Roman world. As surveyed by Alain Schnapp, this phenomenon can be dated to the Enlightenment and is parallel with the achievements of not only a general curiosity about the past but also with the publication of travel documents, voyage reports and, naturally, with the monumental published collections and compendia of numerous sites.13 According to Schnapp’s explanation, this also resulted in the fact that the enlarging and inclusion occurred both geographically and chronologically. This geographical opening means that besides the Greek and Roman ruins, those of the Near and then Middle East, of North Africa, and, later, of Asia gained more exposure and attracted both scholarly and general attention. On the other hand, the temporal framework of the investigation of the past, and hence the aesthetic appeal of the ruined remains of the past, had expanded chronologically too. Thus from this point onward European but non-classical ruins qualified as objects of interest. This of course is a temporal expansion of interest in both directions, pre and post Antiquity, and hence includes prehistoric sites and mediaeval, especially Gothic, ruins. At the same time, however, we have to remember that the increasing interest in the search for traces of the nation’s own historical past (i.e., mediaeval ruins), also coincided with growing national(istic) pride, triggering attention toward mediaeval remnants, especially in those (primarily) northern countries where antique heritage was practically unavailable. All this has led to a more global vision and more inclusivist approach, or, in Alain Schnapp’s words: “Enlightenment thinkers here break with an aesthetics of ruins confined to the Graeco-Roman world and take an incremental step toward a universal vision of the past.”14 Nevertheless, a trend that seems to develop more quickly in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, or antiquarian studies came through a bit slower in the case of actual works of art. Looking at the art pieces representing non-Western sites, we can observe that in the beginning they were very often still presented in a way that is evidently

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heavily influenced by the Western visual forms and canons. There could be various reasons for this. One of them is that many of the actual ruins still derived from the “Western” or Graeco-Roman architectural heritage, even if physically situated in the Near and Middle East, hence their rendering obviously followed similar patterns and styles and resulted in analogous appearances to their actual European counterparts. Another reason is that the first artists were primarily Western travellers and/or travelling artists who unavoidably brought with them their Western training and visual vocabulary. Something similar also happened in Far Eastern examples, including the representations of the ruins of Angkor. As Michael S. Roth wrote: “In Basset’s photographs, a decayed building at Angkor stands before us in sad majesty, a witness both to the extraordinary capacity of people to erect intricate, mighty monuments and to the force of nature to engulf those monuments. But it stand before us in this way because it was framed by a French photographer who reclaimed it as a part of his culture’s tradition of representing and contemplating ruins.”15 All this will only begin to change later when local artists start to turn their attention to the motif of ruins. We must also mention an interesting “challenge” in the work of local artists: How to relieve and liberate themselves from Western-influenced ways of seeing, interpreting, and representing ruins; how to find novel aspects—in both senses of the word—in their rendering of the heritage motif. This becomes especially complex when these artists were actually trained in Western art centres or were influenced by Western forms, even if documenting local heritage. To illustrate these features in the works of Western artists representing non-Western ruins, we can mention a few actual examples and their characteristics by artists working on the image of ruins in the region. In addition to the typical features of ruins (discussed in chapter 1)—their functionlessness and abandoned decay, the continuously growing absence on the original edifice and their temporal distance that separates the time of the building and its decayed phase from the viewer—are not only present but manifest through different means that are also often highlighted in the artistic renderings. These features that we identified as criteria for a classical ruin and the aesthetic manifestation of these features that are visible on a typical ruined building are exactly what inspired the early discoverers and travellers who not only described the derelict sites but also very often immortalised them in different media, including first drawings and etchings, and later, as soon as the new technology was invented, in photography. Among these ruininterested travellers we find various grades of skill and preparedness: The group includes professional artists, semi-amateur archaeologists, and antiquarian dilettanti—dilettante in the positive sense of the word. In any case, those arriving from the West were often strongly saturated with their own visual heritage vis-à-vis ruins and their representation. This then explains

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why in these early representations, for example in the seemingly documentary travel photographs, the compositions so resemble the pictorial world of classical eighteenth and nineteenth century ruin paintings. Naturally we shall not forget that often the technique itself also determines, or at least heavily influences, the style, as it happened with the case of photography, that, being a relatively novel medium, had to find its own aesthetics in the nineteenth century, and gradually detach itself from the painterly traditions. This is the aspect that William Facey and Gillian Grant emphasise in their overview of the early photographs and photographers of the Middle East: “The first of these photographers, understandably, attempted to imitate the painter’s art, producing picturesque views and details architectural studies of ancient and

Figure 4.1  Félix Bonfils. Coupole de Douris, dans la plaine de la Bekaa–Balbek, 1872. Albumen silver print. 29.4 x 22.4 cm (11 9/16 x 8 13/16 in.). 84.XM.422.34. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

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Islamic sites throughout Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.”16 It is particularly interesting to see this continued pictorial tradition in such a novel medium, especially if we consider, agreeing with Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, that in the medium’s early years it was often regarded as objective and hence seemed to be independent from any visual heritage: “Only relatively recently have we come to admit that photography is controlled by pictorial conventions like any other visual medium; for most nineteenth-century viewers the photograph was conceived of as a transparent window onto an objective reality. Although the camera, to use Talbot’s word, was impartial, the photographers were not, and to appreciate their work fully, it is necessary to sort out the influences that shaped their picture making.”17 Just to quote two examples by way of illustration, on a photograph by Félix Bonfils from the 1870s that represents a detail of the Temple of Douris in Baalbek, we see some men among the ruins, on the top of the monument and between its columns, presumably the local helpers of the photographerdiscoverer. The remains of the building are placed quite well within the foreground, allowing just the necessary—almost undisclosed—landscape around and behind the monument. The modern-day viewer of the photograph can easily glean the impression that the figures are placed within the frame to indicate the volume of the decaying construction in particular that, because of the aforementioned feature, no other natural element can adequately facilitate an appreciation for the real scale of the ruin. It is also interesting to note that there is another slightly different version of the same image, with a modified arrangement of men.18 Looking at any of the two versions of the photograph however, due to the careful arrangement of the persons, we cannot help but be reminded of the very similar posture of the figures of many eighteenth century ruin paintings: For example, in Giuseppe Zais’s Antique Ruins (1735–1740, Venice, Galleria dell’Accademia) where we see three men nicely arranged atop broken architectural elements, one of them even having a very similar posture—comfortable, half-reclining-half-sitting—as the accompanying guide on the top of the construction in Bonfils’s photograph. Another example is Francis Bedford’s 1862 photograph showing a temple in Philæ, again set in the middle of the image but allowing a bit more of the natural scenery around and behind the monument, and again with a few figures placed in front of the edifice to indicate the scale of the ruin.19 Just like Bonfils, Bedford made another version of the same site, this time however from a slightly different point of view and without human figures.20 At the same time, the way the ruin appears partly buried provides the observer with the impression that it was actually and physically growing out of the ground and taken more metaphorically, as if more and more of the ancient secrets could be read, deciphered and understood through the reemergence of the ruin. The inspiring rendering of this duality of a partly buried ancient

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Figure 4.2  Francis Bedford. Philæ-The Hypæthral Temple Commonly Called Pharaoh’s Bed, and Small Chapel, 1862, Albumen silver print. 9.8 x 12.9 cm (3 7/8 x 5 1/16 in.). 84.XB.1272.7. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

monument; still-standing strength or gradual reappearance of which can lead to the metaphorical emergence of knowledge is a motif often found in classical ruin-representations. For example, in Jan Baptist Weenix’s mid-seventeenth-century piece Ancient Ruins (Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum—Museum of Fine Arts) the Roman architectural remnants seem to be growing from the ground—in fact, it also results in unusual proportions and levels: The passers-by next to the ruins are almost at the same level as the capitals of the monumental columns. Besides the above characteristics, these examples also illustrate that the early discoverers and ruin-interested artists and travellers were very much occupied by another feature typical of ruins: That of the curious and aesthetically highly inspiring point at which the “balance” of the building starts to falter. Our previous efforts to build and construct in but also actually against Nature is stopped, and Nature starts to reconquer its original domain. This again brings Georg Simmel’s essay to mind: “This unique balance—between mechanical, inert matter which passively resists pressure, and informing spirituality which pushes upward—breaks, however, the instant a building

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crumbles. For this means nothing else than that merely natural forces begin to become master over the work of man: the balance between nature and spirit, which the building manifested, shifts in favour of nature.”21 Hence what appears on these photographs is the classical feature of the struggling stillpresentness of the remnants, before they irreversibly disappear. This aesthetic in-betweenness is thus often highlighted as a kind of transitory phase where the building is not in use anymore, though it is still present in a way. We still have a physical remnant of the edifice, even if it is gradually disappearing. All this clearly shows that initially the traditional canons of classical Western ruin-aesthetics influenced the rendering of non-Western ruins. It is curious to see how this changes in the oeuvre of artists who develop new aesthetic approaches in the interpretation and representation of architectural decay and aim to analyse what the ruin means and how it is relevant in their own local context. This is how the similarity in pattern of developing tendencies becomes more visible between the more inclusivist archaeological and heritage management practices and those modern and contemporary artworks that examine ruins and ruinous sites not exclusively with regards to their Western counterparts but especially in relationship to local realities. In seeking examples of such, we can start by recalling the works of Noor Ali Rashid, who is considered one of the leading photographers and documenters of the Gulf region, especially that of the early decades of the United Arab Emirates, and whose work spans almost six decades. His oeuvre includes the immortalisations of special moments, political events, diplomatic visits, commemorations, and national celebrations, and also a series of portraits. Parallel to this, however, he captured many still-surviving examples of the traditional architecture of the region: old fortresses, watchtowers, and other slowly disappearing examples of the vernacular building tradition of the area. And especially in this architectural photography work we can see definite signs of an inspiring transition. By this I mean that although certain features may remind us of older forms and strategies for showing a ruined edifice, in several aspects he transforms the view, and rather than simply documenting the decaying edifice, he takes it as an opportunity to employ his vision by manifesting the qualities of the aesthetics of the local vernacular architecture. In other words, he affirms that although the ruined edifice may not be as mighty as a classical temple or an extensive imperial palace, the beautiful deterioration it is undergoing may result in pleasing appearances. Hence, through the photos the artist claims these decayed architectural works to be on the same level as other captivating ruins and their representation from other parts of the world. Therefore his architectural photography is not aiming at pure documentation but more so at investigation and experimentation. As we can read in a catalogue accompanying a survey exhibition from 2014: “Amazed by the similarities and fascinated by the differences in the architecture of his birthplace, Gwadar

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and Dubai, Noor Ali consistently photographed architectural elements in the Gulf and further afield. The windows, doorways, poles and opening often became frames for his artistic eye to capture what was beyond.”22 We can find a convincing example of this approach in a photo he took in the 1960s in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, titled View of the Arabian Sea through a Doorway, showing the ruins of a small edifice—actually, captured in its best phase of ruination (i.e., when the dereliction is undeniable, but enough is left of the building to see its general structure and original height, to imagine its spaces and volumes or the patterns of its decoration).23 The curious part is that whatever the chosen point of view—as it can be guessed from the title of the work—it results in an innovative and exciting ambiguity concerning the main motif or topic of the image: Is it the ruin itself or the view of the sea seen through the ruined doorway? In any case, the represented ruin itself also has a curious duality and ambiguity. On the one hand it is placed so much in the foreground that it gives only minimal visual information on the surroundings that the viewer may first assume that the ruin(ation) is the main focus of the artist. On the other hand, the striking whiteness of the sea’s waves shining through the opening of the doorway automatically grabs our attention and recedes deep into the horizon in the background. Hence the ruin is both blocking and framing the view at the same time, serving both as a central object and point of contrast to emphasise the other, just as only a limited and restricted glimpse is provided of an important motif: the sea. Still, this is enough to compensate for what was felt to be missing from the image at first sight (i.e., its natural surrounding and spatial context). The ruined building is thus not a simple exotic motif to be documented or to be represented in such a way that can be pleasing for viewers of another (e.g., Western) part of the world, but rather an object based on which Noor Ali Rashid can develop his own interpretation and artistic approach and create a special reading of the aesthetic qualities of the place. This increased subjectivity will also become evident in another example, through the case of the Turkish Yıldız Moran. Despite the many obvious differences in their professional lives, careers, and oeuvres, they both share an approach to and aim of developing a unique aesthetic or artistic language by focusing on the local relevance of the pictured ruins to emphasise their importance for those who live near it. Yıldız Moran was the first professionally trained woman photographer in Turkey. She dedicated twelve years of her life to photography (1950–1962): including four years of studying photography in London from 1950. After marrying Özdemir Asaf, one of Turkey’s most famous poets, and having three children, she quit photography to focus on her family. However, at the same time she worked in the literary field and did translation work. When later asked about this radical choice to end her prolific and successful career (e.g., from her very first personal show in 1953

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in Trinity College in Cambridge all the photos were sold on the opening day) she justified her decision by describing the energy and intensity required to be and remain a photographer: “Photography is a matter that stays on one’s mind 24 hours a day; it must never fade into the background.”24 This dedication and enthusiasm characterises her attentive vision and her passionate diligence in the broad range of subjects she photographed during her years as an active artist. For our current survey the most relevant series are those pictures, mainly landscapes and architectural photographs, that she took during her travels in Turkey, after having returned from her Western European and North African journeys. Among these series of images shot during her Anatolian voyages in the 1950s, we can find curious representations of ruinous buildings in which we see better-known pictorial motifs—men working in the field, women washing clothes, etc.—but the viewer can also feel the strong emotional attachment to these locations and to their inhabitants. They are thus not the typical figures inserted in the image as staffage or mere indicators of the scale of the monument or to provide an “exotic” or “oriental” ambiance and effect to the image, as we so often observe in both classical

Figure 4.3  Yıldız Moran. Silhouette through the Ruin, Anatolia, Turkey, 1956. Courtesy of Yıldız V. Moran Archive.

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ruin paintings and in the early photographs of Western travelling artists. In Yıldız Moran’s photographs they appear as inherent and constitutive parts of the landscape, just like the ruins themselves. She was thus attentive to the naturalness, dignity, and power of this symbiosis between the decaying edifice, the hosting landscape, and the people inhabiting it, conveying the poetic beauty of this organicity. As Coşar Kulaksiz wrote: “According to Moran, anything with lyricism was worth of photographing. . . . Yıldız Moran does not seek to record or document the time, to capture the moment. As she shares with us scenes that communicate only with her, she allows us to have our own experiences in the same scenes.”25 This emotional attachment and intimate lyricism strikes the observer of these works. For example, in a 1956 work showing a dilapidated wall in Anatolia we find some classical ruin(ation)-motifs, including a stone in the middle of the opening of the wall, on the verge of falling down, barely held in place by the two neighbouring pieces, just like so many 18th-century capricci. We can even remember the faked ruinous facade of Palazzo del Té by Giulio Romano, where some of the triglyphs seem to be falling down.26 In Yıldız Moran’s photograph, this small opening gives the viewer a glimpse of what is behind—a bit like Noor Ali Rashid’s work above—however, instead of the distant sea we find here a group of resting figures. In the naturalness of their position we find not only a quiet harmony with the natural environment in conjunction with the remains of the built environment but also the highlighting and celebrating of this harmony by the visiting photographer. A ruin or derelict place—or an old place just on its way to ruination—may thus appear in a work not solely as an object represented for its own value but as an integral part of the significance of the artwork, adding further layers to its meaning. It is important to see the difference, however: If a ruin is not the main subject of an image, it does not necessarily mean that it could be taken away without harming the essence and meaning of the work—being an “additional” element hardly ever means “redundant.” As we could see even in the early phases of the history of ruin-representations, they had an identifiable role and function in the work. In my next example, the aged building serves not only as a source of inspiration for the artist and the physical context of her works but also—and this aspect is of particular importance in our current chapter—as a means to investigate various questions connected to belonging, dislocation, and relocation, cultural identity, and memory, and also to the role of women and tradition in contemporary societies. In several of her latest series, Güler Ates photographs a female figure wearing a long veil that is not only covering her body and face, but due to its extension and bright color, the veil often becomes a dominant pictorial element in its own right within the image, actually transformed into an almost detached abstract form with a calligraphic elegance. In a 2012 series created during her residency in Rajasthan,

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India, Güler Ates’s figure is immersed in the beautiful and several-centuriesold palace, where many of the rooms and halls show the natural signs of dereliction and passing of time, including the fading of colors, lacking parts in the painting of the walls, broken pieces of the pavement, etc. We can thus see that the visual and color relationship between the fading and darkening tones of the aged environment and the slightly brighter hues of the veil plays an important role in the reading of the work in this series, especially because it was here that the artist was playing with the regular contrast-relationship between the colour of the veil and the figure’s environment. As Josephine Rout wrote on these works: The material basis of colour, as well as textiles made using such dyes and pigments, were central commodities to trade between India and Europe. That these vibrantly coloured silks and cottons were then sold to female consumers only functioned to further define “the East” as feminine. But while these were novelty items in Europe, Güler Ates re-contextualises these by situating them back within the Indian interior. Unlike previous work, in which the figure’s relationship to the setting is ambiguous, in these works the figure blends so well that it almost disappears back into it, as if a return to the “real,” authentic environment only works to create a mirage. Leaving what the image appears to represent to the viewer.27

Hence in this poetic work the aged space is not simply an aesthetic background for the figure, but it provides a loaded historical context, departing from which Güler Ates manages to investigate various questions related, among others, to Orientalism and to the repositioning of tradition and cultural values. And through this “repositioning” we might even find an indirect reference to the well-known and often experienced characteristic and phenomenon of architectural decay (i.e., that through ruination colours are blended, and due to the material absorption they are assimilated into each other). In the work we can thus find an ambiguous sense of homecoming. In the above example Güler Ates examines questions of belonging within the larger context of cultural encounters between the “East” and “West,” but ruins can often become a place for the investigation of personal belonging, especially when surveying what is lost. To this we have to add the almost paradoxical feature that facing ruins and experiencing ruination can also often incentivise a desire for collecting, construed in a broader sense (i.e., not only collecting the physical remains or fragments of an actual [former] edifice but also to document and archive anything that is in any way connected to the life of and life in the building). As we will see in my final two examples, this “collecting” is not a mere documentary act and not even a saving or safeguarding archive-building, but it can potentially be transformed into novel

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Figure 4.4  Gregory Buchakjian. BF4229_Achrafieh_14'11'2010, 2010. From the Abandoned Dwellings series. Photograph.

artistic projects and practices that, needless to say, will shed new light on the aesthetics of ruins and ruination in general, as well as serve as an aid for the better understanding of that particular ruin that inspired the work itself. We can see this for example in Gregory Buchakjian’s research and artworks that started in 2009 as a series of photographs taken on the abandoned interiors of Beirut and then expanded into a large inventory of over seven hundred edifices in their various grades of dilapidation through tens of thousands of photographs. Apart from this, however, his interest in documentation also resulted in a series of artworks connected to the appearance of these interiors, and the research provided the framework for a doctoral thesis, later published in a book that also contains the artistic photos shot between 2009 and 2016. Through this complex project he investigates the pre-Civil War past of the city and the possibilities of his own connection to it, especially without having direct personal memories of that era, as he was four years old when the war broke out. In the artistic project the photos become as multilayered as the entire archival project, since in the series, where the observer can see young women in abandoned interiors, he departed from and reenacted the poet Nadia Tueni’s performance in a 1980 film by Maroun Bagdadi. At the same time Buchakjian wanted the location to directly inspire the person’s appearance in the space, in order to personalise and represent the experience.

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As he formulated: “It was not a matter of reproducing or imitating, but of letting each person perform as dictated by their body, their sensibility, their feelings and their interaction with space.”28 Hence what became important for Buchakjian is to incentivise a sort of personal attachment or, more accurately, a personal response through the interaction in and with the space in the abandoned and slowly decaying environment. We can find a similar and curious attempt at this incentivisation of the creation of a personal interpretation and the creation of a standpoint—­literally standpoint—toward decay in a recent project and exhibition by Tarek Al-Ghoussein titled Al Sawaber in the Third Line Gallery in Dubai, UAE. Despite many formal differences between Buchakjian’s and Al-Ghoussein’s project, in a way they both invite the observer to meditate and ruminate over ruination while experiencing it. Hence the very presence of signs, elements, and references to decay initiates (even forces) the observer to consider and reconsider ruination as well as her own possible involvement in and relation to it. In the show in question, Al-Ghoussein exhibited a series of photographs taken at the run-down site of a government-housing complex, “Al Sawaber,” in Kuwait, before its planned demolition. Apart from some photos of the buildings and their interiors, other pictures showed individual elements both left at the site and taken from it. However, a very curious part

Figure 4.5  Tarek Al-Ghoussein. Al Sawaber, 2017. Installation view at The Third Line. Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai.

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of the exhibition was not on the walls but in the middle of the gallery space: a small assemblage of objects taken from the area and rearranged—or even just arranged—into a circle. Among these the visitor could find typical household items: toys, old fax machines, video tapes, home decoration elements, personal items, etc. all distorted, ruined by time, and deformed by heat. The observer was thus invited and forced to encounter these objects in their decayed physicality, some of which also appeared upon the walls represented in the photographs. The intellectually and aesthetically thrilling part was not the comparison between the actual object and the photographed one and not even the mere fact that these items appeared in reality so much as their neat arrangement. Unlike the actual ruined site where randomness rules—as we have seen in the previous chapters this randomness is one of the aesthetic characteristics that we appreciate in classical ruined buildings, walls, and outlines of edifices—here the tidy, ordered, and circular arrangement of the collected objects left no doubt in the visitor that they are not simply piled up casually, but through their orderliness their being exhibited is emphasised. Their presence is thus highlighted such that visitors necessarily had to establish some sort of a connection to them, the experience and analyses of this experience was physically unavoidable. Here we can also find an indirect link to chapter 3, as the visitor of AlGhoussein’s exhibition happened to find herself “in front of ruins,” or in front of fragments of previously ceased everyday life, where these fragments were arranged and “staged,” just like the ones around Goethe in Tischbein’s portrait. The “exhibitedness” or “stagedness” of the collected items in the contemporary exhibition turned out to be a thrilling strategy to involve the visitor, to invite her to develop her own standpoint and interpretation of ruination and decay. This makes the observer think not only of the actual Al Sawaber—that for most of us who have never visited the site will remain undiscovered and without direct connection and personal attachment to it— but through artistic means turns Al Sawaber into a more universal example, aesthetic case study, or even symbol of decay. And after all, this is what we can interpret as real universality of the ruin(ation) (i.e., wherever it is and wherever its observer, interpreter, or artist is from, the signs of decay can stimulate and even provoke thoughts and lead to aesthetic considerations that can be universally valid and inspiring for anyone open to them). As suggested above, when encountering, visiting, surveying, and analysing ruins it is helpful to consider the local circumstances, features, histories, and traditions connected to the fate of the ruined site, instead of merely applying the aesthetic idea(l)s of one particular culture. At the same time however, when opening up to experiencing the presence of ruins, they will also open up their ability to offer new insights in our shared fate.

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NOTES 1. Regina Harrison, “Machu Picchu Recycled,” in Telling Ruins in Latin America, eds. Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 63. 2. Alain Schnapp, Was ist einer Ruine? Entwurf einer vergleichenden Perspektive (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 8. 3. Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 157, 161. 4. Salvatore Settis, “Nécessité des ruines: les enjeux du classique,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 18. nos. 5–6 (2011): 717–40. Chateaubriand’s affirmation, quoted in Settis’s essay, is from his Génie du christianisme (1802). 5. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 7–8. 6. Denis Byrne, “Western Hegemony in Archaeological Heritage Management,” History and Anthropology 5, no. 2 (1991): 271. 7. Byrne, “Western Hegemony,” 271–72. 8. Zoltán Somhegyi, “The (Future of the) Ruins in the United Arab Emirates,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials, eds. Jeanette Bicknell, Jennifer Judkins, and Carolyn Korsmeyer (New York: Routledge, 2020), 166–74. 9. Michael S. Roth, “Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed,” in Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, ed. Michael S. Roth (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1997), 2. 10. Christopher Woodward, Tra le rovine. Un viaggio attraverso la storia, l’arte e la letteratura (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2008), 15. 11. Dirk Syndram, “Die Baudenkmäler Roms. Wirklichkeit—Kunst—Wissenschaft,” in Zwischen Phantasie und Wirklichkeit. Römische Ruinen in Zeichnungen des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts aus Beständen der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, ed. Dirk Syndram (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988), 11. 12. Ulrich Stadler, “Bedeutend in jedem Fall: Ein Panorama-Blick auf die Ruinen,” in Ruinenbilder, eds. Aleida Assmann, Monika Gomille, and Gabriele Rippl (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002), 272. (Emphasis in the original) 13. Alain Schnapp, “What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition,” Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 2, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 155–73; especially 156. 14. Schnapp, “What Is a Ruin?” 159. 15. Roth, Irresistible Decay, 16. (Italics in the original). 16. William Facey and Gillian Grant, The Emirates by the First Photographers (London: Stacey International, 1996), 8. 17. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, “True Illusions: Early Photographs of Athens,” J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 15 (1987): 126. 18. Reproduced in: Issam Nassar, Patricia Almárcegui, and Clark Worswick, Gardens of Sand: Commercial Photography in the Middle East 1859–1905 (Madrid: Turner, 2010) 101.

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19. Reproduced in: Sophie Gordon, Cairo to Constantinople: Francis Bedford’s Photographs of the Middle East (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2013), 40. 20. Reproduced in Sophie Gordon and Badr El Hage, Cities, Citadels, and Sights of the Near East: Francis Bedford’s Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Egypt, the Levant, and Constantinople (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014), 36. 21. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” trans. David Kettler, in: Georg Simmel 1858– 1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 259. 22. Shamsa Noor Ali Rashid, Lasting Impressions by Noor Ali Rashid (The Royal Photographer) (Dubai-Abu Dhabi: Motivate Publishing, 2014), n.p. 23. Reproduced in: Rashid, Lasting Impressions, n.p. 24. Quoted in: Merih Akoğul, Yıldız Moran (Istanbul: Eczacıbaşi Foundation, 2017), 19. 25. Begüm Akkoyunlu Ersöz and Tania Bahar, Yıldız Moran: Timeless photographs (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2014), 16. 26. Moran’s photo reproduced in Akoğul, Yıldız Moran, 254. 27. See Josephine Rout’s text on the website of the gallery: “Zenana. Güler Ates,” Marian Cramer Projects, accessed August 12, 2019, http:​//www​.mari​ancra​mer.c​om/ ex​hibit​ions/​guler​-ates​-2/. 28. Gregory Buchakjian, Abandoned Dwellings: A History of Beirut (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2018), 35.

Chapter 5

Contemporary Ruins Investigations into a Contradiction in Terms1

A few years ago we read the news about a reconstruction plan for an old building complex in London.2 The former Battersea Power Station had been vacant and abandoned since being decommissioned in 1983, and, as is usual for unused sites and buildings, began its ruination process. A Malaysian consortium had launched their plans to convert the thirty-nine-acre site into 3,500 flats plus a shopping mall, offices, a park, and other service facilities. What’s also interesting is that even before the first step of the reconstruction work had been taken, nearly all the future apartments had already sold, at least, according to The Guardian.3 Of course, we all know how attractive London is in itself, and how it is considered a secure real estate investment. However, besides this attraction to London, I think there is another factor behind this rapid sell out of the flats: Living in an old power station, even if converted into a luxury apartment is different than living in a “traditional” block of flats. But this heightened interest is also connected to the general interest in old buildings, and that interest manifested itself even more evidently in another phenomenon: the patient waiting of visitors to the edifice, who took the last chance to visit the former power station the last weekend it was open to the public. Some of the visitors waited for five hours to see the iconic building that was familiar and intriguing not only to those who lived in its vicinity but to a wider public too, those, for example, who could remember it from the cover of a Pink Floyd album, or from the scenery of Monty Python films and Hitchcock movies. The people who waited so long to enter the complex during the Open House London weekend realised that this was their last chance to see the building as a decaying building, a ruin-like edifice, before the start of its conversion, which would mean reconstruction, development, new use and 93

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function, hence: A new life to be faced by the complex of edifices. It won’t be a decaying building again, or, at least, is not planned to become one in the near future. This curiosity clearly indicates the interest many of us hold for ruined buildings. What’s more, it is not a simple curiosity held by only a few artists or enthusiastic laymen. The ruination process of modern and contemporary buildings—its reasons, phases, features, and results—has become an important subject of investigation within many academic (sub)disciplines, as surveyed by Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor: “With the turn of the century, the ruin gaze suddenly broadened, and the ruins of the recent past, dynamic and unsettled, became the focus of cross-disciplinary study.”4 Given these multiple streams of expansion for both general interest and scholarly studies, it seems that what has happened in the last decades with regard to the aesthetic and scientific observation of contemporary decay is comparable to what we saw in chapter 4, when during the increasing interest in the ruin cult during the age of Enlightenment, both geographically and temporally new areas’ and periods’ remnants were included in scholarly as well as in public investigation. Hence, not unlike in the eighteenth century, the not-only-Graeco-Roman but also Asian, African, etc. ruins and not-only-antique but also prehistoric and mediaeval derelict edifices began to serve as subjects of examination. In a similar way, ruin-scholarship now includes, and even focuses upon, a previously less researched aspect, that of so-called contemporary ruins. However, here we arrive at the middle of our contemplation about ruins, both “classical” and “contemporary ruins.” In this chapter I would like to walk a bit around this topic. Can we talk about “contemporary ruins” at all, or is it a contradiction in terms? Are they in fact ruins? “Real” ruins? Can they be in the same category as “classical” ruins? Here I am arguing that no, they cannot. But what makes the question extremely fascinating is that even if they don’t have the same characteristic or qualities as the classical ones, they are surprisingly popular, and interest in them can thus still be somewhat comparable to that of Antique ruins. I will try to clarify these points of convergence and difference. In both professional and everyday discourse, the term “contemporary ruins” refers to decaying edifices—public and private buildings and monuments from recent times, in some cases no more than a few years or decades old. A popular subgroup of these “contemporary ruins” is “industrial ruins,” a name which alludes to their (former) function, like factories or power stations, many of them having ceased their activity within their visitor’s lifetimes. Hence, in popular discourse the term “contemporary ruins” is definitely not intended to describe those from the classical Antiquity or from the Middle Ages. Of the latter (i.e., ruins that we have inherited from Antique cultures or the “latest” from the Middle Ages and early modern times), are the ones that

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we traditionally define as “classical” ruins, especially in the Western context. They are, as we saw in chapter 1, definable in most cases and their aesthetic attraction is explainable by our three criteria: functionlessness, absence, and time—even if, as seen in chapter 4, certain aspects of ruination and its appearance including these criteria and their universal applicability may occasionally require modification or even be challenged when confronted with examples of architectural decay in non-Western contexts. In particular, the time frame required for an aesthetically appealing ruination may vary depending on the actual, local construction materials and their different deterioration time. In other words, some ruins need more time to achieve that phase of the aesthetically pleasing period between not-yet-ruin and not-anymore-ruin, while some arrive there quicker. Coming back to our main investigation for this chapter: In order to better understand the question and the inspiring issues regarding the aesthetic status of so-called “contemporary ruins,” especially whether or not they can rightly be considered to be in the same class of ruin as a classical one, let’s compare three complexities in two pairings. If we compare the Zeche Zollverein in Essen and the Mount Asama Volcano Museum in Japan, the difference is quite easily understandable. In the first case we have a former industrial building complex, a site where mining started in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the final shift of coal arrived to the ground on 1986. But almost right after that, the opportunities in the former mine, as well as the coking plant was discovered by professionals from the widest range of the creative industry, who started to use the buildings and structures of the site and converted them for new purposes, under the principle “preservation through conversion,” as we can read in the brochure that explains the history of the site.5 Here it is obvious that the place was never actually ruined; its abandoned state and decay lasted only a very short time before the reconstruction that resulted not only in a well-preserved UNESCO World Heritage Site but has also made the complex a protagonist in the RUHR.2010 project (i.e., in the European Capital of Culture events). Since the edifices were quickly converted into an entertainment centre—one can even swim in a pool amidst the old factory buildings—we cannot find any of the above ruin-criteria in this architectural complex. The other building of the pairing is a totally abandoned edifice in Japan that has not come back to life, in either form: neither in its original function, nor in a new one. The Mount Asama Volcano Museum in Gunma prefecture in Japan opened in 1967 as an inspiring way to observe the still-active volcano from the closest possible point and to gain further scientific knowledge on its workings.6 The museum was closed down in 1993, and a new one opened next to it. The old museum is unused and abandoned and continues its ruination process, not lastly due to the intensive natural affect of the volcano

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itself and the climate of the mountain area: avalanches, harsh wind, heavy snowfall. It is now considered as one of the most important and thrilling haikyo—abandoned sites with ruined modern buildings—in Japan, that attracts many visitors each year, even if it is “officially invisible,” since in the new tourist map of the area the old museum doesn’t even appear.7 Coming back to the comparison between Zeche Zollverein and Mount Asama Volcano Museum: We can say that both complexes started their ruination process by falling out of use, but this process was halted very quickly— almost immediately—in the first case, before the former industrial site began a new life far from the function and context of the original complex. A new range of activity, predominantly that of cultural and leisurely interest, had started among the restored remains of the former edifices. In this way, the formerly abandoned site can surely not be considered a ruin. The Volcano Museum on the other hand is still in its ruination process, although, to be precise, we should describe it as being just at the threshold of its ruination phase. In the last two decades, without the constant human maintenance required to counteract it, Nature has begun its reclamation. In this example, then, it is quite easy to distinguish between the not-ruin and ruin—or ruin-like. When taking into consideration this notion of the ruin-like, the question becomes thornier when we compare the same Volcano Museum with a classical ruin, let’s say for example, with the Antique city of Erythrai in Western Turkey: This comparison is the focus of my present investigations. How are these two related to each other? Can the Japanese haikyo have the same aesthetic attraction as the Hellenistic city’s remnants? If we carefully examine our previously established criteria and try to apply these to the sites from the modern times, we find a certain degree of incongruity. They are of course both functionless. The building of the Volcano Museum for instance is not used at all, having lost its original function, and no new purpose has been established or even considered for it. The second criterion is also valid, absence characterises the buildings: Nature has begun to overcome the site, creating a steadily growing void—just think of the broken windows, leaking roof, stand-alone walls that no longer separate rooms. But the application of our third criterion, time, is more problematic. Ruins are not simply old; through their material decay they also make their agedness manifest. We can also say that there should be a considerable amount of time for the gradual ruination (i.e., there should be sufficient time available for Nature to convert the original building into a picturesque ruin). As we saw above, the time frame required for the aesthetically appealing ruination may vary depending on the construction materials: Some elements decline quicker than others. This is why earlier I offered the example of the difference between the deterioration time of stone versus that of mud-brick edifices, which also results in our interpreting a “younger” mud-brick fortress

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as a ruin, just like an “older” Hellenistic temple. This serves to highlight the fact that the time frame for ruination is best considered in relation to the building components. And this is why, as mentioned above, for example, in the case of classical and Western ruins, we have at least a half millennium— for Mediaeval ruins—but in many cases even as much as several thousands of years. In this way we shall say that ruins are defined not only by the fact that they are not in use anymore, and that they have missing elements but also by the fact that very often need a significant amount of time to become aesthetically inspiring. Ideally there should be a notable gap between the date of the start of the ruination process of the original building and the viewer’s own time, and this is what makes it difficult to consider those places and buildings of very recent times, maybe not being older than a couple of years or decades, as ruins. The ruin is thus the temporary result of a long ruination process—only a temporary result, as discussed earlier, if continued to be left abandoned, it gets completely erased. For this reason, “contemporary ruins” as an expression is a contradiction in terms since here the ruined building is our own contemporary, and thus it cannot fascinate us with the aforementioned difference of the time-segments (i.e., when the time incorporated in the appearance of the ruined building surmounts our own time by so much). As Rose Macaulay observed: “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.”8 What Macaulay described as “new ruins” or what in other contexts we identify as “contemporary ruins” are missing a temporal dimension remote enough to be of note and thus do not necessarily impress us through the differences in the time periods between the ruin’s life and our own. We can also agree with Carolyn Korsmeyer that the effect of the ruin’s vision is practically directly proportional with its age: “As the time of a ruin approaches our own, the sense of enormity of temporal scale will fade as familiarity displaces sublimity.”9 We shall only add to this the aforementioned factor of the specificity and property of the construction material that influences the sense of decay. At the same time however, it is also the very materiality and the experiencing of its transformation that may significantly contribute to the explanation of the lure of decaying places of our own times. Therefore, we shall find another way of referring to these sites, instead of “contemporary ruins” that would still refer to their “ruinness.” The term “industrial ruins” is not good either, since not all of them are industrial buildings and not all are directly connected to industrial activity or to the Industrial Revolution. I think, if we do not want to muddle our categories

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and definitions, we can only use circumscriptions like: abandoned, decaying buildings, or more precisely we should perhaps say: buildings on their way to ruination. Hence we can see that what we used to consider “contemporary ruins” are simply not old enough to be categorised as “ruins.” But still we are often attracted to them, in a way that is not entirely unlike our attraction to those classical ones. This attraction is similar in the grade of curiosity but not in the emotions that are generated by the observation. The desire for exploration and curiosity is dominant, not only for the visitors of archaeological sites, but for the fanatics of their “modern version”: haikyo and urbex (urban exploration). But what and why do we enjoy, in the case of derelict modern buildings, if one of the most decisive criterion of being a ruin—time—is missing? The huge amount of time that has passed from the start of decay of the original building and that guarantees the sublime effect in which the power of Nature could be manifested, is not there. But even if we don’t find the temporal sublime, the occasional, random decay can already be observed in the modern ruins. This could help explain the aesthetic attraction. Hence, the site is not pleasing because of the time that it incorporates, but the picturesque appearance still makes the place curious. Still or already? Do we perhaps enjoy the modern buildings’ decay because we see them as future ruins? Shall we then talk about pre-ruins? Do unused buildings fascinate the viewer through the fact that they have and manifest the potential to become “real” ruins with time? When observing modern buildings deteriorating, it is like catching the moment of the start of the ruination process. This possibility of gaining insight into the start of the work of Nature, the importance of grasping the departure of this aesthetic ruination, is a point where we can agree with Tanya Whitehouse, even if our original interpretation of ruins in general diverges to a certain degree, especially with regard to questions of whether ruins have or can have function and purpose, as well as the fact that she does not emphasise the role of time in the ruination process as I do. In her words, “Modern structures are, in fact, ruins . . . time need not be the determining factor in their creation.”10 Despite these differences in our readings of the category of ruins, I can agree with her when she writes: “Time may intensify ruination, as well as its aesthetic impact, and it may ease the pain of bad memories. But all ruins have a beginning, and the aesthetic significance of a ruin, or its potential, may appear very early on in that process.”11 In this way what practically happens is that we observe potential future ruins, buildings that somehow start to “look like ruins.” This also explains why we can often find artistic, aesthetic, compositional, etc. parallels between the urbex or haikyo images and the representation of classical ruins, even if sometimes the unclassical representation of classical ruins seems to be the

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closest to ruined modern edifices. For example, when viewing certain type of haikyo, Piranesi’s sublime compositions may automatically come into our minds. This happens because of the well-known phenomenon of how our visual appreciation is conditioned. When we look at something, all our visual memory interacts with it. We can almost say that we can never see something for the first time, or that we cannot see it purely, without instinctively taking into consideration the pictures of it or similar phenomena that we already know. We might recall from the famous, almost funny episode from the history of the appreciation of landscape how, in the eighteenth century the English aristocrats on their Grand Tour in Italy used “Claude-glasses.”12 Because they were used to the colors of Claude Lorrain’s paintings of real or ideal places of Italy, to avoid the delusion when encountering the “real” Italy, they brought a brownish-coloured glass with them on their trip in order to observe the landscape through a tint—an apt example of how, in the end, reality imitates art and not vice versa. This might also serve as a parallel to understand the mechanism of these “pre-ruins”: We find aesthetic pleasure in viewing them or visiting them because they remind us of the classical ruin-representations. Still, the question is not so simple. It is not merely a visual parallel but a kind of “compensation”—and desperate hope. As the Antique ruins are by definition older than modern ones, we find them more in their natural state if they are ruined, while seeing modern buildings starting their ruination process is strange and sometimes even disturbing. What we try to do against this disturbing feeling of contemporary buildings in decay is to—maybe just instinctively—make them look like classical ones, to represent them in a similar way as an Antique ruin, for example, by focusing on their purely visual qualities. Very often these recent constructions, at the start of their dereliction (especially industrial ruins), are shown in an almost “sterilised” way. As if put in a museum display, they are visually taken out of their contexts and are without reference to their original purpose, even denying the original inhabitants or users of the space, as it was noted by Anca Pusca: “The human traces serve only as temporary reminders of a population that must have been there sometime. The worker disappears physically, as a material fragment, and the image of the world no longer contains him/her: as such, the worker disappears as an ideational category.”13 This reference to Antiquity in the perception and representation of recent ruination is on the one hand due to the aforementioned preliminary load of our visual knowledge: Even if encountering these sorts of ruins for the first time, they remind us of other visions that influence our way of reproducing, representing, or re-elaborating them. On the other hand, it can be that we try to transfer some of the magnificence of the Antique ruins to the contemporary

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buildings in dereliction in order to shield us from their disturbingly melancholic appearance. If we examine it a bit closer though, old and new buildings in ruins do not produce the same type of melancholy—and this is what makes their comparison difficult, as mentioned earlier. We do not have the same emotional responses, and this influences, and potentially also explains, the aesthetic valuation or even philosophical approach and metaphysical status of ruins from different periods. We can certainly follow Oliver Broggini’s affirmation as he clearly described the emotional difference when observing classical and twentieth century ruins: The former transmit a sense and feeling of peace, while the latter are “incongruous,” “sinister,” and “disquieting.”14 Further developing these observations, we can say that classical ruins offer not only peace but a silent, or even calming peace, while ruined buildings originating from the recent past make us rather anxious, and when experiencing them, we certainly don’t have the same noble sense of harmony—even if lost harmony—as in the case of Antique ruins. The force of Antique ruins is their ability to facilitate this calm, settled, and refined peace. We could even mention the “radiation” of the Winckelmannian “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”; and this is what we cannot feel amidst the ruined modern buildings. As Dylan Trigg writes: “Evading a clear temporal enclosure, the ruins of the Michigan Central Train Station lack the noble serenity of the classical ruin. Here, the presence of decay overwhelms. Whereas the ordering of classical ruins is structured by their unambiguous presence, in the case of the post-industrial ruin, ruination has yet to perish.”15 Besides these approaches, Jonathan Hill mentions further aspects that can account for the uneasy feelings generated by the encounter with recent ruination: While ancient ruins are admired, modern ruins are less appreciated, in part because contemporary materials rarely match the stoic grandeur of earlier ruins. But modern ruins are disturbing for other reasons too, intensifying the analogy of a body to a building. In an ancient ruin, decay occurred in the distant past, stimulating general thoughts of degradation and renewal that allow us to contemplate our own life and believe that death is inevitable but reassuringly in the future. In a modern ruin, active decay occurs before our eyes, stimulating particularly disturbing thoughts of our imminent degeneration and demise.16

Based on all this is we can claim that the “settlement time” that allows for the peaceful appearance to be developed does not seem to have been sufficient in the case of recent—or recently started—decay. We can hear a very precise articulation of this un-cosy feeling amidst ruined modern buildings in the very sensitive and inspiring 2012 documentary film of Jeroen Van der Stock on haikyo titled Silent Visitors. Here, one of the characters in the film explains the reasons for her curiosity when visiting these places: “There are

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Figure 5.1  Film still from the documentary “Silent Visitors.” Directed by Jeroen Van der Stock. Produced by Savage Film (2012).

lots of things left by their owners in haikyo. Their spirits are still living in the space. So even after the owners left, their spirits are still here. I think there are ghosts everywhere.”17 Thus we feel that the (former) active life that filled the space is still too close—the emptiness, destroyed appearance, and decay of the building is more perturbing and often even frightening than in the case of buildings of several millennia, where obviously we are completely conscious of their temporal otherness. The perception of the fact that the former life and activity in the decaying recent building is still too close—although stopped—results in a confusion caused by the tension between sensing the usual and its unusual appearance, or, as Þóra Pétursdóttir formulated: “In the recently abandoned ruin, we are constantly confronted with the coupling of such contrasts; it looks familiar but different at the same time—it is very much like our ordinary world—our home—only utterly out-of-hand. We recognize it and we don’t, simultaneously. Things present themselves independent of how we know them, as liberated from any useful relations, which also makes them present in a very different way.”18 In fact, this indefiniteness or a certain kind of indefinability is precisely what defines contemporary decay, and it may also explain the ambiguous approach of interest and rejection as Małgorzata Nieszczerzewska highlighted: “Abandoned and derelict buildings function both out-of-time and out-of-place as well. Their ambivalence situates them somewhere between ruinophilia and ruinophobia in social meaning, between determined forms of buildings from which they hail and a deformed shape of ruins, and between multitemporal and atemporal dimension of an abandoned architecture.”19

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This disturbing and disquieting feeling that recent ruination can often trigger is also explainable through the surprising encounter with the materiality of objects, an experience that modern city-dwellers are often saved from. The intensity of these sorts of encounters may truly come as a surprise, as Svetlana Boym also reminds us, “the fascination for ruins is not merely intellectual but also sensual. Ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality. Suddenly our critical lens changes, and instead of marvelling at grand projects and utopian designs, we begin to notice weeds and dandelions in the crevices of stones, cracks on modern transparencies, rust on withered ‘blackberries’ in our evershrinking closets.”20 Following a similar direction in the analyses, in a 2005 article Tim Edensor examined in detail how industrial ruins confront the visitor with the disordering of the regular spatial distribution of objects and also with the disclosing of the material properties of these objects. This is particularly visible in the case of former industrial buildings, as they used to be the par excellence sites of pragmatically and functionally organised spaces: “Because materials are usually situated according to regimes of ordering, in ruins the appearance of an apparently chaotic blend can affront sensibilities more used to things that are conventionally aesthetically regulated. . . . Thus moving through ruined space can foreground a sharp awareness of the materiality of things that are usually maintained or disposed of.”21 Edensor is right when claiming that these forms of encountering may provide time and place to a playful and sensual discovery with the material world, which is often significantly more limited in the well-kept urban environment. In fact, this is what can inspire not only grown-up urbex and haikyo fans but also children, using the derelict sites for discovery and games. Nevertheless, we often have another sort of experience when discovering recent edifices at the beginning of their ruination that is not necessarily always positive. Edensor, in another article from the same year, described the phenomenon of involuntary memories connected to these derelict modern sites: Along with other less-regulated places in which signs of the past have not been obliterated or contained and contextualised, ruins are spaces in which involuntary memories may be stimulated. Involuntary memories, in contrast to the conscious use, transmission, and representation of the past, are unpredictable and contingent, and, given that they are enmeshed in sensation and vague intimations of previous atmospheres, they are slippery to describe and represent. Not deliberately sought, involuntary memories come upon us, rekindling the past through unexpected confrontations with sound, “atmospheres,” and particularly smells—largely nonvisual sensual experiences.22

The “ghosts” of industrial ruins—also in the title of Edensor’s second quoted article—may remind us of the haikyo discoverer’s feeling of ghosts still

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residing in the place she is visiting or even intruding upon in Jeroen Van der Stock’s film. The combination of visual and nonvisual experiences—the importance of the latter highlighted by Edensor—trigger involuntary memories, thoughts, and emotions. However, here we have to add another aspect that may help us better understand the perturbing feelings stirred when visiting sites of recent dereliction, as in these cases it is not only the pure encounter with the unusual materiality that may disturb us but the further questions this encounter can pose. Here the “direction” of our thoughts and feelings is reversed, and from a lived or imagined past of involuntary memory it turns to an ambiguous future loaded with anticipations and fantasies, thrills and fears, peculiar joys and threatening perspectives. Through this we return to the aforementioned comparison between sensing and representing classical ruins and contemporary decay and the “desperate hope.” We can assume that the disturbing feature in the latter may also derive from our insecurity: We would like to see our present as just as noble as the past—the past from which we inherited our classical ruins. But we cannot be sure of this, and this makes us face the anxious question: Will all, or at least part, of our present achievement be as good as the old? Curiously however, the rumination on the future inspired by the phenomenon of ruination and decay is not typical only of our own age, and it may be incentivised by both recent and classical constructions’ decay. As a matter of fact, from the rise of modernity we can trace a continuous tradition of these outcries of ambiguous sorrow and optimism. Just two years after the demolition of the Bastille, the French philosopher Constantin-François, comte de Volney wrote: “Who knows if on the banks of the Seine, the Thames, the Zuyder-Zee . . . some traveller, like myself, shall not one day sit on their silent ruins, and weep in solitude over the ashes of their inhabitants, and the memory of their former greatness.”23 In this way the actual greatness of Paris, London, and Amsterdam is confirmed by the image and imagination that even in the case of their possible decay, their silent ruins could serve as memory and refer to their former greatness. It seems that the potential of becoming a magnificent ruin in the future is a kind of “proof” and “guarantee” of the actual grandeur. Volney is not alone in his vision of curiously mixing the observed and admired past and the imagined future. In fact, the eighteenth century can be considered a turning point in the vision and interpretation of the future, and this has thrilling consequences for the arts and the aesthetics of ruins, too. Brian Dillon showed the connection points between the two: “The ruin lust of the eighteenth century begins in part as a way of thinking about—fearing and hoping for—the future.”24 Hence what we can observe is an increasing interest in futurity, and this changing role is a novelty for the era. As Jacques

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Le Goff summarised the changing perspectives of the various temporal segments throughout the major historical periods: Collective attitudes toward the past, the present, and the future can be schematically expressed as follows: in pagan antiquity, the valorization of the past predominated along with the idea of a decadent present; in the Middle Ages, the present is trapped between the weight of the past and the hope of an eschatological future; in the Renaissance, on the contrary, the primary stress is on the present, while from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the ideology of progress turns the valorization of time towards the future.25

This new interest in and possible valorisation of the future is also connected to the fact that the same period was also the time of the significant development of temporal utopias, or, in Gabriela Świtek’s argumentation: “In the late eighteenth century the description of historical reality was more concerned with depicting what could happen rather than reporting what did happen.”26 It is also explainable through the fact that in the second half of the eighteenth century, due to the major geographical discoveries and exploration voyages there was a diminishing of space that had yet to be explored. This had naturally also influenced the types of utopias, changing from the spatial to the temporal. As Reinhart Koselleck argued: “The spatial possibilities for establishing a utopia on our earth’s finite surface were exhausted. The utopian spaces had been surpassed by experience. The best solution for escaping this growing pressure of experience was simple, but it had to be found. If utopia was no longer to be discovered or established on our present-day earth nor in the divine world beyond it, it had to be shifted in to the future. Finally the additional space into which fantasies could stream in was available, and infinitely reproducible, like time itself.”27 A fascinating consequence of this increased interest in the future and in the curious types of utopias can be observed when we see imaginary ruins of or from the future, because, as it can be guessed easily, the interest in the future has naturally reached ruins and their representation, too. In Nina L. Dubin’s words, the 18th century was the period of “novel apprehension of the ruin as an instrument no longer of remembrance but of anticipation.”28 What happens through these changing temporal perspectives is that it is not only the fact that the magnificence of a ruin is imagined in the future, but even that an actual building can be imagined as a magnificent ruin in the future. Hence they are not “contemporary ruins” in any sense of the term, rather contemporary buildings imagined as future ruins. In these cases, the intermingling of temporal perspectives is just as intricate as the mixing of fantasy and reality. This is why many of these representations are comparable and connectable to the tradition of capriccio. They also differ significantly from an “average”

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capriccio, however—for example, from those we saw in chapter 2—since in the classical capriccio we have either actual ruins from different places combined in one view, or we have an imaginary building, ruined or intact, “designed” by the artist for and in his fantastic cityscape. Hence a classical capriccio displays a moment from an imagined time-perspective that is in most cases rather ahistorical. Even if, occasionally, certain temporal references can be discovered—for example, by depending on the conscious choice of the artist regarding the dresses in which (e.g., antique Roman style or contemporary) his figures appear—the ideal and Arcadian air of these paintings seems to escape from a set temporality. Before examining the two best known imaginary future ruins of contemporary buildings—of course, contemporary not with us, but with those eighteenth to nineteenth century painters who were presenting them as ruins—by Joseph Michael Gandy and Hubert Robert, we shall quote two artists whose capriccios, visual (re)interpretations of Antiquity, as well as renderings of classical edifices and their ruination may serve as forerunners for the vision of future decay. As a curious example of this atypical capriccio we can mention Canaletto’s pair of drawings that despite still being closer to the classical capriccio already offer the possibility, especially for today’s observer, of developing a reading of a rather worrisome future. The works in question are from about 1740 to 1745 (Windsor, Royal Collection) and the first displays the corner of the façade of the San Marco church in its actual location and context, while in the pendent image a capriccio is created by using the same segment of the church but placed in a fantasy setting, in the lagoon, with an imaginary shoreline and some ruins in the foreground. As Rosie Razzall has also noted, in the two images Canaletto even changed the direction of the shading—visible, for example, in the arched gates of the church—as if highlighting a temporal difference.29 The capriccio version with the famous Venetian landmark could simply be considered a visual play of fantasy, however for the present day viewer it is hard not to think of it as a worrisome and warning anticipation for the current and still unresolved threat of Venice’s sinking. This actualisation—and hopefully not overtly forced interpretation— of the capriccio shows not only the potential of the drawing and of the genre, too, but also the sometimes hidden strength that lies beneath the possible multiple temporalities of the imaginary renderings. With Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Canaletto’s contemporary, we arrive at an even more intertwined relation between past and present, historical evidence and imaginary supplementation, with possible additional layers of future references. The question of Rome and Venice, the predominance or preeminence of the ruined motifs deriving from these cities in the capricci of Canaletto and Guardi seem to have arrived at a fertile standstill in Piranesi’s oeuvre. Despite his Venetian origin, Piranesi became one of the greatest documenters and

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(re)creators of Roman Antiquity. With regard to ruins, he is much renowned for, among others, his Carceri series from 1749 to 1750 that impressed not only his contemporaries but continues to have fascination throughout the centuries. Although they are easily deployed as illustrations for various (proto-) Romantic, sociocritical, or existentialist interpretations, the departure point could just as much be—agreeing with for example Robison’s reading—not “anguish or personal crisis” but the pictorial tradition of stage-design.30 The reference to this theatrical application of architectural motifs is helpful not only to understand the Carceri series’ “dramatic” strengths, but it also seems useful for the reading of many other works by Piranesi, in which one of their most typical feature is the emphasis upon their displayedness. Hence the focus is not only on their magnificence but on the very showing of this magnificence. Piranesi’s aim was to recreate the grandiose works of Antiquity in a novel and visionary way to demonstrate their actuality (i.e., to not present them as dead and merely historic material without relevance to the modern observers but as something that can still intrigue us). This is why—following Marcello Barbanera’s observation—we can understand that Piranesi aimed at illustrating how and what a modern artist can do with the inheritance of classical monuments.31 Given his erudition in both the artistic and technical aspects of architecture, Piranesi had a clear understanding of the materiality of the constructions, but at the same time he was able to go far beyond this layer and further develop the mere documentary presentation. Therefore, he represents Roman ruins not only to make them present or create the image of their presence but also to actualise their potential. This is what resulted in an almost paradoxical pictorial world, where the artist is showing the ruins’ tangible presence exactly through the fantastic constructions developed out of them—or “architecture as vision” in Ivan Nagel’s words.32 Hence again we find a mixing of temporal perspectives, demonstrating not only what has simply survived but what can possibly be created through the ruins’ present actualisation for the future generations. While Piranesi shows what ruins can be in the present and for the future, the last two late eighteenth century examples investigate what present buildings can become in the future with regard to decay (i.e., actual and intact buildings imagined as ruins), hence “contemporary ruins” in the sense of a contemporary building (imagined) as a ruin. Here we can see that the pleasure of the imagined future ruin as a guarantee for the construction’s actual beauty works not only with entire cities, as was the case for example in Volney’s vision, but with single edifices too. At least, this is a possible way of interpreting for example Joseph Michael Gandy’s two images from 1798 (London, Sir John Soane Museum): The one showing the interior of the Rotunda of the Bank of England—finished just three years earlier by the renowned architect Sir John Soane—and its pendant, from the same year, showing the same part

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of the building imagined as ruin. Besides the imagined aspect and outline of the ruin—definitely fitting the best picturesque tradition in its style—another very curious aspect is the highlighted fascination with time and temporality itself: In the centre of the “intact” view of the Rotunda we see a huge clock that we cannot find in the ruined one. As Brian Lukacher claimed: “In the vision of future ruin, time itself has been torn from the building, the image allegorizing its own temporal disorder.”33 Time that is counted and respected in the functioning building—given its importance as a centre of economic transactions—will have a different role in the imagined ruin: It will be and become the means to highlight the original’s eternal aesthetic value. We are thus in the fictitious position of an imagined future observer, who, by viewing the ruins, confronts his time with the centuries that passed, and that has converted the building into a timeless classic. This is an aspect that connects Gandy’s vision with Piranesi’s striving (i.e., the creation of something novel from and through the noble ruins of the past that in the end may not only astonish the present but survive as exemplary and unique in the future, too). Or, in Lukacher’s words: “This architecture of the mind for Piranesi and Gandy was inspired by a profound engagement with the historical past; by a profound struggle against the limits of their own historical epoch; and by a profound hope for the meaningful endurance of their architectural ideas as pictorial images into an uncertain future.”34 This last aspect in particular, the hope for the “meaningful endurance,” is what motivated Hubert Robert’s renowned pair of paintings. Robert certainly knew a lot about the beauty and fascination of ruins, not lastly because of his long sojourn in Rome between 1754 and 1765. Here the artist was acquainted with many contemporary ways of representing and “using” ruins, and throughout the course of his later career he benefited from this experience, being not only a painter but an adviser for garden planning and designer of “fabriques” (i.e., ornamental structures and temporary or fixed garden buildings). From 1778 onwards he served as a member of a committee supervising the conversion of the Louvre from an abandoned royal palace to the nation’s first museum. And this position led to the thrilling pair of images, representing the Grand Galerie of the Louvre, both executed in 1796 (Paris, Louvre). In the first we see a projected design of the Grand Galerie as an endless corridor, separated by arches that divide segments of the glass roof that allows natural light to illuminate the images. In the ruined version a large part of the roof is missing, thus beautifully illustrating how the sky—or, we can say, the previously excluded Nature itself—now claims more and more space through the growing void as the building continuously loses material elements. Since the first is a project that shows Robert’s own suggested direction for the reconstruction of the palace, we can say that both pictures are imagined or imaginary views, one in the imminent, the other one in the distant future.

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Robert thus analyses his own proposed design as a future ruin. Worth noting, however, is another parallel between the images: the copying artist. Robert painted himself while copying Raphael’s Holy Family in the earlier one and—curiously as a much younger man—on the latter, copying the Apollo Belvedere. Hence the representation of the ruin of the Louvre in an imaginary future is neither a visual joke nor a fully tragic image. It emphasises the present and near-future grandeur of the enterprise of the new national museum and assures its eternal glory by putting it on the same level as noble as Antiquity, by presuming that it can share Antiquity’s glorious fate. In this way what Robert aims to emphasise is that the Louvre as an institution will be just as exemplary for future generations as the Apollo—that the young artist copies and that miraculously remained intact—is for his own. Or, as Guillaume Faroult wrote: “The god of the arts’ famous gesture seems to defy the passage of time, placing at the heart of Robert’s image of disaster a message of hope.”35 Through all this Robert thus mediates the power of the presence of ruins, and—as Marcello Barbanera and Alain Schnapp both highlighted, analysing not only the artist’s works but their reception, too, especially Diderot’s reactions and reading of the paintings in his Salon-critiques—transforms their representation from a picturesque genre into a proper philosophical reflection on the passage of time and of the human condition.36 Although such a point of view would definitely provide us with some hope, others were not so optimistic about ruins in the future. We can remember Walter Benjamin and Marc Augé mentioned in chapter 1, and the latter’s affirmation quoted there: “Future history will not create ruins any more. It will not have time for it.”37 However, here Augé’s considerations can be regarded as parallel to that of the German philosopher Hannes Böhringer, who, already in 1982, when writing about ruins in the posthistoire, expressed his concerns if in future we will have ruins, or never-again habitable wastelands (“endgültig unbewohnbare Wüsten”)?38 A few years later, in his essay from 1989, Hartmut Böhme, referring to Böhringer, also analysed the phenomenon of ruins in the age of posthistoire, claiming that in this era ruins are the ruins of the project of modernity, and they show the “transformation of history into natural history”.39 A similar and rather pessimistic reading of our future can also be found from the architecture-theoretical side in Rem Koolhaas’ famous article or “manifesto” titled “Junkspace.” “Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.”40 And this may also remind us of Gilda Williams’s concerns of the temporal perspectives of architectural decay and its aesthetics: “In future, real ruins may be replaced only by their memories.”41 This anxious insecurity over our culture’s future helps us to explain the difference in emotional and aesthetic responses when observing classical

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ruins and modern buildings on their way to decay, and it also helps us to understand why we are still interested in the latter, even if these inspire grave concerns in us. This perturbation is understandable when we think of the fact that classical ruins have a canonised certainty, their aesthetic value is secured through time as well as art tradition. But contemporary buildings on their way to ruination are like enormous question marks. And today’s perspectives are not in our favour when thinking of the future of our aesthetic culture or of the aesthetic culture of our future, or of our future at all. It is not about being conservative or having exaggerated bias toward antique values. In fact, we can even be more disquieted if we are radical modernists thus worrying about the future of our modernism(s). It is not about preferring one or the other; we just do not leave pyramids—even if we are dying for eternal monuments.

NOTES 1. This chapter is an enlarged version of an earlier paper originally published in French: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Ruines contemporaines. Réflexion sur une contradiction dans les termes,” Nouvelle Revue d’Esthétique 13, no. 1 (2014): 111–19. 2. BBC News website, “Thousands Take Last Chance to See Battersea Power Station,” http:​//www​.bbc.​co.uk​/news​/uk-e​nglan​d-lon​don-2​41939​60; last modified September 22, 2013. 3. Rupert Neate, “Battersea Power Station Developer Sells More Than 800 Flats for £675m,” The Guardian, May 20, 2013, http:​//www​.theg​uardi​an.co​m/bus​iness​ /2013​/may/​20/ba​tters​ea-po​wer-s​tatio​n-dev​elope​r-sel​ls-fl​ats. 4. Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 4 (2012): 466. 5. “Zollverein Unesco World Heritage Site,” accessed August 12, 2019, https​: //ww​w.zol​lvere​in.de​/app/​uploa​ds/20​18/02​/Zoll​verei​n-UNE​SCO-W​orld_​Herit​age-S​ ite.p​df. 6. See more info and images on the website of Michael John Grist, last modified December 23, 2009, http:​//www​.mich​aeljo​hngri​st.co​m/200​9/12/​asama​-volc​ano-m​ useum​-2-hi​story​-of-t​he-ha​ikyo/​. 7. As it was observed by Michael John Grist in his entry, see the above note. 8. Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker Company, 1966), 453. 9. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “The Triumph of Time: Romanticism Redux,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 429. 10. Tanya Whitehouse, How Ruins Acquire Aesthetics Value: Modern Ruins, Ruin Porn, and the Ruin Tradition (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 7. 11. Whitehouse, How Ruins Acquire Aesthetic Value, 100. 12. Ruth Groh and Dieter Groh, “Von den schrecklichen zu den erhabenen Bergen. Zur Enstehung ästhetischer Naturerfahrung,”in Weltbildung und Naturaneignung, ed. Ruth Groh and Dieter Groh (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 92–149.

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13. Anca Pusca, “Industrial and Human Ruins of Postcommunist Europe,” Space and Culture 13, no. 3 (2010): 244. 14. Oliver Broggini, Le rovine del Novecento. Rifiuti, rottami, ruderi e altre eredità (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2009), 9. 15. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 146. 16. Jonathan Hill, The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present, and Future (London: Routledge, 2019), 194. 17. See more info on the film at: Jeroen Van der Stock, “Silent Visitors,” accessed August 12, 2019, https​://ww​w.jer​oenva​nders​tock.​net/s​ilent​-visi​tors.​ 18. Þóra Pétursdóttir, “Things Out-Of-Hand: The Aesthetics of Abandonment,” in Ruin Memories. Materiality, Aesthetics, and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, ed. Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir (London: Routledge, 2014), 361. (Italics in the original—Z. S.). 19. Małgorzata Nieszczerzewska, “Derelict Architecture: Aesthetics of an Unaesthetic Space,” Argument. Biannual Philosophical Journal 5, no. 2 (2015): 396. 20. Svetlana Boym, “Ruins of the Avant-Garde. From Tatlin’s Tower to Paper Architecture,” in Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 58. 21. Tim Edensor, “Waste Matter: The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World,” Journal of Material Culture 10, no. 3 (2005): 321, 325. 22. Tim Edensor, “The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, (2005): 837. 23. C. F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires: And the Law of Nature (1791) last modified January 25, 2013, http:​//www​.gute​nberg​.org/​ files​/1397​/1397​-h/13​97-h.​htm. 24. Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust: Artists’ Fascination with Ruins, from Turner to the Present Day (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 48. 25. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 11. 26. Gabriela Świtek, Writing on Fragments: Philosophy, Architecture, and the Horizons of Modernity (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 2009), 122. 27. Reinhart Koselleck, “The Temporalization of Utopia,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 86. 28. Nina L. Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2010) 13. 29. Both works reproduced in Canaletto and the Art of Venice, eds. Rosie Razzall and Lucy Whitaker (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017), 268–69. 30. Andrew Robison, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi,” in The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 392. 31. Marcello Barbanera, “Dal testo all’immagine: autopsia delle antichità nella cultura antiquaria del Settecento,” in Roma e l’Antico. Realtà e visione nel ‘700, eds. Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi (Milan: Skira, 2010); 33–38; especially 36.

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32. Ivan Nagel, “Piranesi: Der Mythos vom Baumeister,” in Gedankengänge als Lebensläufe. Versuche über das 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Ivan Nagel, (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1987), 26. I am grateful to Prof. Béla Bacsó for drawing my attention to this chapter. 33. Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 165. 34. Lukacher, Joseph Gandy, 8. 35. See Guillaume Faroult’s catalogue entry in: Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Yuriko Jackall, Hubert Robert (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), 255. 36. Marcello Barbanera, “Metamorfosi delle rovine e identità culturale,” in Relitti riletti. Metamorfosi delle rovine e identità culturale, ed. Marcello Barbanera (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009), 45. Alain Schnapp, “Diderot e il passato: dal paesaggio di rovine alle rovine del paesaggio,” in Barbanera, Relitti riletti. 137. 37. Marc Augé, Rovine e macerie. Il senso del tempo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004), 137. 38. Hannes Böhringer, “Die Ruine in der Posthistoire,” Merkur 36 (1982): 373. 39. Hartmut Böhme, “Die Ästhetik der Ruinen,” in Der Schein des Schönen, eds. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 1989), 284–307. Uploaded on Hartmut Böhme’s website, accessed August 12, 2019, https​://ww​w.har​ tmutb​oehme​.de/m​edia/​Ruine​n.pdf​. 40. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175. 41. Gilda Williams, “It Was What it Was: Modern Ruins,” in Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Brian Dillon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 95.

Chapter 6

“Learning from Detroit?”— From Materialised Dreams to Bitter Awakening Aesthetics around Decayed Shopping Malls1

“There’s a lot of dough in shopping malls”—so it was noted by the middleaged architect played by Alec Baldwin in the Woody Allen film To Rome with Love. The partly cynical, partly self-critical observation came from the figure in the film who made a significant professional and especially lucrative career by designing malls, and who served as a semi-imaginary advisor and living conscience for one of the protagonists during his emotional turbulences. The observation seems right—at the beginning. Malls pay off well for their investors and for their designers, shopkeepers, and naturally for the taxcollecting state, too. And to “pay well,” it means that you as customer spend well: both your money and your time. The mall, with its fancy and glittery appearance, somehow provides the illusion of elevating you high above the normal level of your everyday life. In fact, it is most likely this illusion that made and still makes shopping malls so popular, since the first modern ones were built in the late 1950s. When you enter, for a couple of hours you can have everything. Historically speaking, malls were also designed with the implicit intention of creating new centres outside the traditional downtowns. The lure and thus development of the modern suburban lifestyle from the 1940s onward provided the comfort of having a piece of garden and avoiding the crowd of the city centre. Just a few years later, early forms of malls started to appear in these peripheries, for various reasons. Unlike the dense downtowns, land was more available, which also signified a new tax base for the state. These outskirt malls were not only closer to the new homes of the people but were also easier to reach by car. Besides this, the arrival of a new centre with a wide variety of retailers and the opportunity for entertainment and leisure—even if artificially constructed, not in its gradual and “organic” development as in the 113

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case of traditional city centres—might have seemed like a reasonable urbanist concept. Curiously however, malls became so popular and prolific that not much later, from the 1970s on, they started to appear in the old centres and more inner parts of the cities, too, either as a step towards the gentrification of less-reputable areas or as a means of revitalising downtowns that had started to lose customers since they were all pulled out to the outskirts. Interestingly both the frequent visitors of malls as well as their most avid critics see these centres as materialisations of the consumer society’s dream par excellence. The invitation is to buy everything and thus to realise your dream. Or, perhaps we can say they promise you the chance to become part of your dream or even to become your dream: You are what you buy, but what’s more, you are what you dream (of buying), you are your dream. This lure results in the peculiar phenomenon that malls attract a massive crowd to spend enormous amounts of time inside them—even without the aim of buying a concrete product.2 They are thus often considered to be almost akin to “temples” of consumerism, where the activity of shopping substitutes other, more traditional forms of sociocultural engagement and interaction, as was anticipated in 1970 by Jean Baudrillard when writing about the fact that “we have reached the point where consumption has grasped the whole of life.”3 This is why already in the 1980s malls started to be considered as new town squares, though many people were heavily critical of this tendency, and some countries made great efforts in “postponing” their introduction.4 What we saw in the case of antique temples with their courtyards, Christian churches with the Sunday market around them, or mosques with bazaars built in their vicinity has changed in the case of modern malls: They provide the opportunity of shopping and passing time without the spiritual background behind them—“background” both physically and metaphorically. The “shopping experience” or “shopping as a form of entertainment,” as this originally practical and straightforward activity is now referred to, tends to replace any other type of social or spiritual experience, in order to provide the “temple of consumerism” the same qualities as a classical one. What’s more, malls are often globally uniform, characterless, typical “non-spaces,” to quote Marc Augé’s famous category, and adding to that Claudine Isé’s observation that these are “spaces in which a number of dialectically held oppositions— between the diurnal and nocturnal, consciousness and unconscious, real and artificial, body and environment—suddenly become untenable.”5 However, here I am neither examining the moral consequences of this and the state of consumerism, nor judging people whose main source of entertainment is to spend time in malls. I am rather interested in the potential aesthetic qualities connected to run-down malls and toward the questions regarding our contemporary condition that these may lead us to. The examination of these

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questions is not only thrilling in itself but also more and more exigent, as we see a growing number of decaying or soon-to-be closing malls. According to estimates quoted by Josh Sanburn in his 2017 survey article in Time, by 2022 one out of every four malls in the United States could be closed, in other words, from the approximately 1,100 malls, one quarter is likely to cease operations. That is a remarkably large portion of this once successful business enterprise; as we can learn from the same article: “All told, 1,500 malls were built in the U.S. between 1956 and 2005, and their rate of growth often outpaced that of the population.”6 Therefore, I suggest we start our current (aesthetic) examination from the end of the malls’ fancy days, when signs of decay appear on both their formerly glamorous exterior and interior. I find it particularly curious how these malls can “survive,” perhaps not physically, but at least on an aesthetic level. Even after their active life is over, malls can actually influence our lives in an indirect form. In recent years we have experienced an increasing interest in the documentation of these decaying structures. Several art projects and art itineraries, exhibitions, blogs, publications, and conferences examine the questions connected to these edifices and also enquire into how our attention and attitude towards them modifies and influences the interpretation of both our present condition and our future. Among these, some photo series can be of special interest as these compositions often show an unexpected viewpoint and successfully try to highlight the potential aesthetic value of these sites in their run-down state. There are definitely many reasons for this increased interest, among which we can mention the general curiosity in ruination that fascinates many people, even without having a deep or specialised aesthetic education. Another reason can be derived from a rather nostalgic and/or melancholic approach of those who like to “mourn” over the passing and not-everlasting state of anything and everything that in the case of malls might also get a bit of an extra “twist” of anti-capitalism as well as political and social critique. However, certainly one of the most curious features and reasons for interest in decayed malls is the fact that their ruination was definitely not planned. Of course none of our buildings are planned to become ruins, nor do we desire their ruination. Nevertheless, from the history of modern architecture we can occasionally find architects who took into consideration potential ruination, both “natural” and forceful or aggressive. We can for example remember the politically and ideologically very controversial and contested thoughts of Albert Speer and his ideas on the “Ruinenwert” or ruin value. Or, we might also recall—in a completely different ideological context and standpoint—Sir Basil Spence, who, when designing the Trawsfynydd Power Station in Wales in the late 1960s that is now being partly demolished, asked himself: “Will it make a beautiful ruin?”7

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Thus even if as notable exceptions we find Speer and Spence who considered such factors in their constructions—and enlarging the circle, we can also remember Robert and Gandy from chapter 5—malls are typically buildings that try to distance themselves as far from ruination as possible. Continuing our metaphor of their being temples of consumerism, malls must be pretty optimistic about eternity, including not only their own but continuously providing the (illusion of) eternal joy for their customers, too, as a kind of extended present and presence or everlasting moment, where happiness never ends and the warnings and disturbing signs and thoughts of decay are completely excluded such that they would never cast any shadow on this happiness. But let’s concentrate on this decay, with special attention to its representation. As mentioned above, decaying malls invite the observer to visit and document them. Even if the photo works are in most cases merely contemporary allegories of the transience manifest in the ruined buildings—and, in fact, in less successful representations they come too close to a superficial and kitschy representation of decadence—sometimes they manage to treat the malls from a melancholic-nostalgic viewpoint in dreamy visions, which in certain cases make the images at first sight similar to the classical representations of antique ruins, just like we also saw in chapter 5 with regard to other types of buildings. Let’s briefly list a couple of these primary similarities between ruins of classical buildings and decayed malls—similarities both in their physical state and in their appearance when represented—to see what significant differences remain and what they reveal of our present condition. Just like we saw in earlier examples with other more classical forms of dereliction, during any kind of ruination process, Nature starts to reconquer the building. It is a natural phenomenon, since each and every edification effort is unnatural in a way, as we always build against Nature, not lastly to defend us and our valuables from being exposed to various natural elements. Thus not only the buildings’ shapes, volumes, decorations, and colours, but the very existence of any of our constructions is unnatural. However, once their good old days have passed, their status starts to change, and as Nature surpasses the constructions, they become less and less unnatural. As we know from our earlier quoted examples, too, one of the most spectacular and at the same time occasionally picturesque consequences of being reconquered by Nature—and that we can count as another shared feature between classical ruins and modern constructions in decay—is that due to the gradual crumbling and the overcoming of natural elements the general tonality of the view becomes increasingly homogenized. During their active functioning, buildings—both classical and modern ones—normally stand out from their environment. After they cease to be used and maintained—for example, regularly repainted—edifices start to dissolve into their context as it

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was sensibly described by, among others, Georg Simmel in his essay quoted earlier.8 Regarding the representation of decay of old and contemporary buildings, we can again find similar features: Images (painted and photographic) highlight the signs of gradual decomposition of the construction. However, this gradual decomposition does not automatically mean an even and parallel decrease, on the contrary: One of the most appealing specialties of ruination as well as one of the most often documented and represented features is the randomness of decay—we enjoy observing the unconscious “Artist Nature” sculpting the building, sometimes leaving a whole wall almost intact, while other parts of the building are already erased completely. In many cases, both in the depiction of classical ruins and in photos of contemporary constructions in their ruination, we can observe a particular focus on the random forms, the fortuitously-survived parts amidst the decayed elements, and the concentration upon the signs of survival and resistance within the general ruination. Connected to this, we can also often notice how professional artists and documentation-driven ruin-fans focus on anomalies in the appearance of the ruin: for example, putting a strong visual accent on the reversion of the traditional relationship of inside-outside: the fact that we can enter the building not only through its usual openings but also through the former walls, or that we can directly observe the sky from the once covered interior. In a similar way, particular emphasis is given to the showing of “foreign” or “alien” elements inside the building (e.g., vegetation growing out of the former tiled pavement or small plants sprouting on the walls of the building). As Christopher Woodward wrote, the English botanist Richard Deakin was impressed by this phenomenon, such that he published a book in 1855 titled Flora of the Colosseum to list the not less than 420 species that he had found inside the monument.9 Further similarities between the representation of classical and contemporary buildings in ruination can be found in the silence and peace that these sites emanate: A kind of silence that is quite alien to the original function of the buildings, both temples and malls, as they are supposed to be filled with life and lively users. This makes them on the one hand alarming and on the other hand curiously alluring, too, and it might also help us explain the worrisome appearance and ambiguous feelings evoked by the derelict malls. As Dylan Trigg reminds us, the unusual calmness and silence is one of the most important reasons for their anxious aspect: “An occupied shopping mall is prosaic and utilitarian. Left abandoned for a decade, its corridors magnetize. . . . We are accustomed to thinking of departure lounges, shopping malls, and hotel lobbies as cold places, not fit for habitation. Transient space encourages motion and not repose. We are led to pass through it. When we do seek motionlessness in motion-bound space, anxiety is the likely result.”10

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And this of course may again remind us of the differences in the emotions that classical ruins and contemporary buildings on their way towards ruination generate. As we saw in chapter 5, while Antique ruins can be considered and “felt” as calming, contemporary decay is more “incongruous,” as Oliver Broggini’s expression quoted earlier.11 Therefore, the calmness and silence of classical ruins seem more natural, while the recently stopped activity manifested in the derelict and crumbling contemporary site is definitely more disturbing. After listing some of these similarities, our question should be if it is only by coincidence, or is there a—perhaps only unconscious—parallel between our appreciation of ruins of the temples of Antiquity and the ruins of the temples of consumerism, and if yes, what do they reveal for us now? Obviously, some of these features of the buildings are natural physical consequences (i.e., the crumbling, deformation, and erosion are common challenges to any building exposed to Nature). But the way these sites are presented in artworks marks a deliberate and conscious choice—for example the composition, the viewpoint, the special focuses and emphases. Why are these places described in such way, and what can be behind these attempts at aestheticising decay? Following our argumentation from chapter 5, if we agree that classical ruins have in most cases a kind of nostalgic and melancholic ambiance or radiance then it is understandable that contemporary buildings at the start of their ruination process are depicted in a similar way in order to try to make them look like their noble forerunners. Hence, the similarities in the mode of representing classical temples in ruins and decayed malls can be interpreted as an attempt— perhaps even unconscious or instinctive attempt—to dedramatise the modern constructions’ decay by providing the illusion of being able to place them on the same aesthetic level as the Antique ones. We try through any means possible to avoid having to face the failure of our belief that the glamorous dreams materialised in the form of the mall will last forever. In this way, nevertheless, they were trying to be convincingly similar to classical heritage. When observing the often eye-catching images of rundown shopping malls, they clearly show the end of the dream. From the bittersweet melancholia and nostalgia traditionally connected to the classical ruins, what remains here is only the bitter awakening from the sweet dreams. If the building and the values and all the happiness—although a financedriven artificial replica of happiness—connected to the functioning of the malls were the materialised dream, then the malls’ defeat and decay may be the bitter awakening that our eternity, which seemed to be guaranteed through the active consumerism, can also be over one day, pretty soon, in fact. And this makes such a realisation even more worrisome and tragic (i.e., not only the understanding of the fact that believing in the dream was a dead end, but

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also that already in our lifetime we can glean awareness of the Potemkin-like scenery of this failed dream). The long-before canonisation of Antique values had secured the survival of the aesthetically appealing character of the classical buildings, even in the form of ruins. But our current run-down buildings’ future is more ambiguous. During the Neo-Classical and Romantic periods, at the turn of the 18th– 19th centuries, optimistic architects and designers just couldn’t wait for their buildings to become noble, pleasing, and sublime ruins (which could obviously not happen during their lifetime, as it is a longer process), so they imagined them as ruins. Well-known examples were quoted in the previous chapter, Joseph Michael Gandy’s two images from 1798: The one showing the interior of the Rotunda of the Bank of England intact, while the other one is in ruins, or Hubert Robert’s pair of images depicting the suggested reconstruction of the Louvre and its imaginary future ruins. Now it is just the contrary: When we see our very recent dreams—contexts of our desires from yesterday—in a decaying form, rather than pleasing and sublime aesthetic objects, they manifest as worrisome and intriguing portents, like question marks about our (near) future, question marks growing out from the decay, just like the vegetation that starts to grow inside the former building. Perhaps this precise feature can account for the recent interest in futurity that goes hand in hand with the fascination with ruination. As a matter of fact, in the last few years various large-scale art events started explicitly to examine this future perspective, including the 2015 edition of Venice Biennial (titled: All the World’s Futures), in the same year, in 2015 Sharjah Biennial (The Past, the Present, the Possible) or the 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial (The Future Is Not What It Used to Be), and the 2016 edition of Sydney Biennial, quoting the science-fiction author William Gibson in its title (The Future Is Already Here—It Is Just Not Evenly Distributed) just to name a few examples. Naturally I do not intend to say that the representations of ruined malls should directly lead us to the Rilkeian aesthetico-existential imperative to change our lives or our lifestyles. I contend however that they might help us in asking what we have learned or what we can learn from the “detroitification” of our modern and postmodern culture and its symbolic and iconic elements, including the malls that we all use on a daily basis, even if we have started to face their decay. What’s more, we face it in a way that is not even pleasing aesthetically, despite all our efforts at dedramatising this very decay. Obviously, the expression of “detroitification” stands not only for the actual city of Detroit itself, but it can describe and refer more generally to how not only a singular construction—like a mall—but even an entire city can be devastated by economic decline, social tensions, depopulation, speculation, and large-scale bankruptcy fundamentally because of the overly optimistic belief in continuous and constant economic development and prosperity.

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For art lovers it is certainly a tragic and worryingly symbolic sign that for a while there were serious considerations about paying part of the city’s debt by starting to sell works from the collection of Detroit Institute of Art, despite the fact that according to estimates quoted in M. H. Miller’s 2016 article on Detroit’s art scene, the approximated $800 million of the chosen pieces from the collection would only have covered a meagre portion of the $18–$20 billion debt of the city.12 The derelict shopping malls (i.e., those that start to get ruined because of a lack of visitors and consumers that provide life and drive—or economic fuel) are disquieting not only because they mark the end of a dream or are still too close to our time to attain the classical noble patina (as I analysed earlier, the reasons of the “worrisome” character of recent building’s decay), but also because we feel a bit impotent, powerless, and even helpless when observing these sites. We just somehow cannot stop thinking of the large number of new ones that are being built at an ever-growing pace, for example in the Middle East and Far East, even though we see the dead ends of the first ones as warning signs. In this way, we feel ourselves falling deeper and deeper into a downwards spiral. It is this “impotency” of the outsider looking in that brings with it further questions connected not only to nostalgic and aesthetic concerns but also to ethical issues that may grow out of the passion of visiting, observing, and representing these sites in their deteriorated state. In fact, we have quite a broad range of interpretations and judgements about the representation and representability or aesthetics and ethics of depicting run-down contemporary sites, including the edifices and industrial complexes in Detroit itself, some of which have become the most documented sites and sights concerning recent and contemporary buildings in decay. In certain cases these pictures are taken as part of a creative project and hence with “pure artistic” intentions, focusing on the aesthetics of dereliction, including for example the well-known series by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. The photographs—although investigating the decay manifested in the derelict buildings with regard to the particular history of the city—aim to put the works in a larger aesthetic-historical framework and explicitly refer to classical forerunners. As the artists state on their website: “Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city’s ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.”13 A similar theoretical approach and departure point is what we can find in the introduction of Jonathan Jan

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Benjamin Mijs’s photographic essay from 2014: “Detroit’s citizens have made the city an urban museum. Part of the attraction for tourists is what also entices millions to flock to Rome and Athens every year: a chance to see the glory of times past. Like classical cities, Detroit symbolizes the end of an era—in this case, of American manufacturing. The dramatic ruins of wealth sit alongside a wealth of ruins.”14 Putting the dereliction of Detroit in the noble context of classical Antiquity, or, in other words, placing it at the end of an aesthetic and chronological line that starts with the ruins of the Egyptian pyramids illustrates a particular narrative, one that sees in the decaying industrial buildings of Detroit the end of a period and of an “empire,” and this passing would then qualify the remnants for aesthetic enjoyment. The case however is not as straightforward as it may seem in the beginning. Such photographic representations are often criticised based on the particularity that they “decontextualise” the view from the actual reality, as John Patrick Leary highlighted: “This is the meta-irony of these often ironic pictures: Though they trade on the peculiarity of Detroit as living ruin, these are pictures of historical oblivion. The decontextualized aesthetics of ruin make them pictures of nothing and no place in particular. Detroit in these artists’ work is, likewise, a mass of unique details that fails to tell a complete story.”15 This again connects us back to the complex aesthetic and also ethical issues of the temporal vicinity of the so-called contemporary ruins, a mixed set of dilemmas and emotions when encountering—or sensing to have encountered—the “ghosts” in and of derelict spaces. What makes the issue even more intricate is that in many cases, including the innumerous edifices in Detroit or other derelict recent industrial and commercial sites all around the world, there is nevertheless a continuation of life among and next to the “ruins.” As Christopher Woodward wrote in an essay based on his experiences while visiting Detroit: “The urban ruins of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries pose a new aesthetic challenge and, I shall argue, writers, artists, planners and designers are at the very beginning of formulating a convincing response. It is a new challenge, most obviously, because for millions of urban dwellers, modern ruins are on our doorstep, staring us in the eye each morning. They are embedded in buildings, traffic, asphalt and chain-link fence, and not in nature, time is not suspended as it might be in a site that is isolated or elusive.”16 Hence these sorts of derelict sites are not separated physically or emotionally from their former users who are very often still present, or whose presence is still strongly felt. These edifices and areas are not like an ancient archaeological site that is often musealised—naturally, with all the issues and concerns of this institutionalisation, some of which we saw in chapter 4 and will see in chapter 11—or secluded and converted into a display, where the visitor can, with the help of these material remains, try to grasp some ideas

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on former civilizations of which human members are long gone. Unlike those sites, many instances of contemporary dereliction are within an active and continuous living environment and inhabitants have direct personal and emotional attachment to these changing and decaying contexts, for example, those who were working in the crumbling factories or spent their leisure time in the now derelict malls. Their connection to and ambiguous feelings toward the metamorphosed environment is often described by Glenn Albrecht’s 2003 neologism “solastalgia.” Although the term was originally coined to describe the distress of many inhabitants of the open-cut coal mining area in Upper Hunter region of New South Wales in Australia, caused by the mutilated home environment, it can be applicable to other contexts and environments, too. Having its roots in the concepts of solace, desolation, and nostalgia, Albrecht defined solastalgia as “an emplaced or existential melancholia experience with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment. . . . Hence, solastalgia is a form of ‘homesickness’ like that experience with traditionally defined nostalgia, except that the victim has not left their home or home environment. Solastalgia, simply put, is ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home.’”17 As a curious parallel we can mention that the concept describes a similar sensation to what Sara Guyer analysed in her book on John Clare. The poet’s phrase of being “homeless at home” is a phenomenon that Guyer examined, quoting the Detroit-based photographer James Griffioen’s works on abandoned “feral” houses: “His [Griffioen’s] camera takes us to the common, allows us to see the way in which a home can become strange, and to imagine, while presenting only the weeds, the profound despair, loss, and decay that these places hold. If Griffioen points us to the beauty of these spaces, he also presents us with a scene of destruction and abandonment that cannot fully be perceived.”18 Bearing all this in mind, it becomes clear why it is so difficult to accept and merely enjoy the pure aestheticisation of current decay and to get satisfaction from the classical references as sufficient justification for the (seemingly) picturesque rendering of recent dereliction. Another commonly used term is “ruin porn” that is regularly applied not only to singular images or complex art projects but also to the actual observation, physical approach, visiting, or wandering around derelict contemporary sites. Those who are critical of the activity and trend of contemporary “ruinlust” use the expression “ruin porn” in order to highlight its exploitative character, for example taking (aesthetic) advantage of representing the derelict environment of people still living there, or the showing of the deteriorated city mall that was perhaps the lure of some local inhabitants decades ago, who still bear the sweet memories of their first date connected to the place. For them, seeing their living environment as a subject of ruin porn can—understandably—become even more frustrating when the motive of the “ruin” is intentionally isolated and taken out of its

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context, or, in other words, showing it as if it had no context and connection with the still and nevertheless continuing active life. This tendency of showing the crumbling edifice in an out of context neutralisation reminds us of the literal dehumanisation of industrial sites, as noted by Anca Pusca quoted in chapter 5 (i.e., showing the factories without people and the former workers), and this feature in the ruin porn can also be seen—mutatis mutandis—as a similarity with the various forms of objectification of the human body in classical pornography. Nevertheless, the category of ruin porn as well as its aesthetic and ethical evaluation and interpretation is more convoluted. Elizabeth Scarbrough analysed the question with regard to Detroit, scrutinising whether visiting and documenting contemporary urban decay should be considered a form of cultural tourism or ruin porn.19 For some it is less exploration than exploitation, interpreting such visits as forms of “poorism” (i.e., poverty tourism), the form of travel specialising in visiting areas struck by poverty, including slums and favelas. The voyeuristic, exploitative, and objectifying features of these tours are obvious—especially when, as Scarbrough quotes, the tours are called “Urban Safari”—if it is not paired with attempts of making the visited areas and especially its inhabitants benefit from the tours. Scarbrough lists a few of such potential results and possible benefits, including for example the stimulus these tours may bring to local businesses, shops, and restaurants, as well as that, naturally, with more precise framing and objective documentation—and through the better differentiation between photojournalism and artistic photography—it may become apparent that not all of Detroit is ruined, and that it has an active and culturally prosperous life. As an addition to the ambiguous approaches to and interpretations of ruin porn we shall also remember that the investigation of this phenomenon may shed further light on our interest in ruination in general, as well as on what and how the decay of the past may help us imagine the future, especially if our recent past’s dereliction is taken as a point of departure for the rumination on a worrying anticipation of what might grow out from it. We can read this wider theoretical framework in Siobhan Lyons’s introductory essay for a volume of texts she edited on the topic: Ruin porn is so compelling precisely because it is a bewildering form of time travel to the future within the present. . . . It offers an image of our own death while we are still alive. . . . Contemporary ruins are themselves ambiguous, seemingly signalling eventual decay in the future, while also functioning as history-in-action. . . . Yet ruin porn is, in many ways, an expression of a very specific kind of anxiety that is rooted in humanity’s transience, and our rising awareness of this ephemerality. While ancient ruins speak of ancient civilisations in retrospect, contemporary ruins fortuitously reflect and speak of our own

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civilisation while we are still living and breathing. In this respect, our obsession with ruin is well-founded, making ruin porn a useful discourse through which to approach humanity’s ambiguous future.20

Hence, in certain ways reading the observation of and obsession with recent decay can be a basis for reflection or a specific way of learning. Unfortunately however we don’t really seem to be learning from all this, even if we could and should. In the title of this chapter, besides Detroit, I also embedded a reference to Venturi, Brown, and Izenour’s book from 1972 titled Learning from Las Vegas, in which the authors urge the study of the tastes and values of the common and everyday architectural landscape—as they formulated: the “commercial vernacular” as well as the “vulgar and Vitruvian” are just as important as the examination of our classical heritage—in order to define and understand the present.21 Actually, they examined the classical and (their) contemporary together, a bit like what I suggest here (i.e., that analysing the representation of these decayed temples of modern-age commercialism and consumerism in comparison with the iconology and pictorial world of Antique ruins might help us better appreciate our present conditions and possibilities—possibilities or perhaps only ever weakening chances . . . ). As a curious parallel, the authors described Las Vegas and drew their conclusions when the phenomenon of mass-consumerism and the architectural forms and genres serving it were still relatively nascent—while now we can analyse the beginnings of their end. Obviously, what these malls manifest and materialise now is not exactly the future that we would like to face or imagine. Unlike Antique temples, malls do not look nice as potential ruin-candidates. Though we often find it quite difficult to describe the exact reasons for this ambiguity, still we feel that a certain kind of aesthetic essence of the ruination process is missing from these derelict malls, that kind of coherent symbiosis between the elements of architecture and decoration and the signs of the powerful Nature overgrowing them that makes Antique ruins pleasing even in the form of decay. Just think of the precise examination of Venturi, Brown, and Izenour about how commercial signs and symbols dominate the Las Vegas landscape to such a degree that at the end architecture becomes “symbol in space rather than form in space,” and where “the sign at the front is a vulgar extravaganza, the building at the back, a modest necessity. The architecture is what is cheap. . . . If you take the signs away, there is no place.”22 This rapid process of becoming sign at the cost of dematerialising the architecture was illustrated by the regular changes of the “fake” facade of the Golden Nugget Casino.23 As a matter of fact, we start to see the consequences of a similarly failed attempt in the case of decaying malls: The commercial glamour will not provide essential and lasting architectural unity for the construction. As Robert Ginsberg observed: “In making the original invisible, the ruin makes

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visible what is not meant to be seen. The hidden becomes evident, while what ordinarily is present is absent.”24 Hence, though malls tried to hide their vulnerability behind the commercial signs (both physically and metaphorically) as much as possible, when starting to become ruined, they cannot cheat anymore. This is just another symptom of the fact that even while they pretended to be eternal, they turned out to be ephemeral. Just to illustrate this: Often the malls—just like casinos in the exact analyses of Venturi, Brown, and Izenour—disorient the visitors through the constant lighting day and night, a bit similar to what Baudrillard described as the “complete homogenization” of the ambiance in the “sublimation of real life,” where even the seasons disappear through the “climate-controlled domestication” of this artificial environment.25 Malls thus deny the existence of time during their lifetime for the sake of feigning eternity, until the point when time truly shows its existence and power through the ruination. The images of decayed malls show how their masks—the dream-triggering advertising signs, the eternity-providing commercial symbols, and consumerincentivising messages addressing our basic instincts through refined psychological tricks—start to crumble, just like the nonexistent facades of the Las Vegas casinos would if their owners didn’t change the neon every other decade. Actually, we can agree with Venturi, Brown, and Izenour in that: “There is a perversity in the learning process: We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to go upward,” although today we need to be more careful and conscious than ever when learning from Las Vegas, bearing the phenomenon of detroitification in mind.26 Therefore we need to complete the affirmation of the architect in the Woody Allen film, when he noted that there was a lot of dough in shopping malls. Malls truly pay well, but most probably we too are going to get ruined when we will have to pay it back with devastatingly huge interest.

NOTES 1. This chapter is a partially extended version of a paper originally published as: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Learning from Detroit? From Materialised Dreams to Bitter Awakening: Aesthetics around Decayed Shopping Malls,” Serbian Architectural Journal 7, no. 2 (2015): 201–12. 2. See for example: N. R. Kleinfeld, “Why Everyone Goes to the Mall,” New York Times, December 21, 1986, accessed August 12, 2019, https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​ com/1​986/1​2/21/​busin​ess/w​hy-ev​eryon​e-goe​s-to-​the-m​all.h​tml; and an answer for this as a letter addressed to the editor by John Sumser, then instructor at the Department of Sociology of the State University of New York, published in the same newspaper of January 18, 1987.

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3. Jean Baudrillard, “Consumer Society,” trans. Jacques Mourrain, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 33. 4. Cees Gorter, Peter Nijkamp, and Pim Klamer, “The Attraction Force of Outof-Town Shopping Malls: A Case Study on Run-Fun Shopping in the Netherlands,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 94, no. 2 (2003): 219–29; as well as Tony Hernandez and Ken Jones, “Downtowns in Transition: Emerging Business Improvement Area Strategies,” International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management 33, no. 11 (2005): 789–805. See also the detailed analyses of Philipp Dorstewitz, from the perspective of John Dewey’s philosophy, of an attempt at converting an abandoned freight depot into a shopping and entertainment centre in Duisburg, Germany: Philipp Dorstewitz, “Reconstructing Rationality: Agency and Inquiry in John Dewey’s Project as a Foundation for Social and Urban Planning.” PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2008, especially chapter 9: “Mines and Malls: A Tale of Two Cities.” 5. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995); Claudine Isé, Vanishing Point (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 2005), 15. 6. Josh Sanburn, “The Death and Life of the Shopping Mall,” Time, July 31, 2017, 34. 7. Quoted in Clayton Hirst, “Pulling Down Snowdonia’s Power Station Would Be a Nuclear Waste,” The Guardian, December 21, 2009, http:​//www​.theg​uardi​an.co​ m/art​andde​sign/​2009/​dec/2​1/sno​wdoni​a-nuc​lear-​power​-stat​ion-w​ales-​archi​tectu​re. 8. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” trans. David Kettler, in: Georg Simmel 1858– 1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 263–64. 9. Christopher Woodward, Tra le rovine: Un viaggio attraverso la storia, l’arte e la letteratura (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2008), 29. 10. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 155, 161. 11. Oliver Broggini, Le rovine del Novecento: Rifiuti, rottami, ruderi e altre eredità (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2009), 9. 12. See further details in: M. H. Miller, “Don’t Call It Comeback: Detroit’s Postbankruptcy Crisis,” Artnews, September 15, 2016, http:​//www​.artn​ews.c​om/20​16/09​ /15/d​ont-c​all-i​t-a-c​omeba​ck-de​troit​s-pos​t-ban​krupt​cy-cr​isis/​. 13. Quoted from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s website: “The Ruins of Detroit,” accessed August 12, 2019, http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit. 14. Jonathan Jan Benjamin Mijs, “Detroit’s Wealth of Ruins,” Contexts 13, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 62. 15. John Patrick Leary, “Detroitism. What Does ‘ruin porn’ tell us about the motor city?” Guernica, January 15, 2011, https​://ww​w.gue​rnica​mag.c​om/le​ary_1​_15_1​1/. 16. Christopher Woodward, “Learning from Detroit or ‘the Wrong Kind of Ruins,’” in Urban Wildscapes, eds. Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan (London: Routledge, 2012), 18.

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17. Glenn Albrecht, “The Age of Solastalgia,” The Conversation, August 7, 2012, https​://th​econv​ersat​ion.c​om/th​e-age​-of-s​olast​algia​-8337​. 18. Sara Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 98. 19. Elizabeth Scarbrough, “Visiting the Ruins of Detroit? Exploitation or Cultural Tourism?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 35, no. 3 (August 2018): 549–66. 20. Siobhan Lyons, “Introduction: Ruin Porn, Capitalism, and the Anthropocene,” in Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay, ed. Siobhan Lyons (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 2, 6, 10. (Italics in the original) 21. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, n.d.; orig. 1972), see especially: XI, 18, 83, 161. 22. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 13, 18. 23. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 106. 24. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 51. 25. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 49; and Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 34. 26. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 3.

WHEN IN WORKS

Chapter 7

Cracks in the Walls1

“Don’t trust the concrete.” We find this enigmatic sentence on a series of works by the Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem titled Concrete Block. The art pieces in this series consist of life-size replicas of concrete road blocks that we are all familiar with, whether from direct experience, or from documentaries, press photos, or fiction movies and that are usually placed to block pedestrians and vehicles from accessing certain defended areas, including government buildings, embassies, luxury hotels, etc. In a departure from their usual and expected context and appearance, these pieces are now part of exhibitions. One Concrete Block (2010) for example was placed between two rooms in a 2015 exhibition at the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, partly blocking the visitors’ way while passing to see the other art pieces on the show in the adjacent room. The artwork has various references, and we can peel off several layers of interpretation: The first one is obviously the critique and the doubt in the efficiency of blocking others in their desperate attempt to trespass certain areas. Whether symbolic or physical blocks, (i.e., borders or walls) thousands try to overcome them, as we can regularly read in daily news from all over the world, including, among others, the Middle East, Europe, USA-Mexican border, etc. Hence, the art piece reminds us that we can never be sure that concrete is an efficient solution; naturally, also not forgetting the moral and humanitarian issues and concerns connected to the use and application of such massive objects of physical separation. Another layer of meaning connected to the artwork of Abdulnasser Gharem is more art-theoretical and related to the artwork itself as an object: getting closer to it—as the visitors of the aforementioned show were required to do since they wanted to see the works in the other room of the exhibition—we realise that it is a pure replica. Hence the phrase “don’t trust the 131

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concrete” is also an imperative referring to the importance of a constant critical stance towards the seemingly evident and obvious. Things—just like events, intentions, or proclamations—very often might not be what they seem, and actually that is true also in the case of the work in question: The seemingly concrete block is made of a plywood structure covered with rubber stamps that bear the Arabic text. Indeed, through this process of material

Figure 7.1  Abdulnasser Gharem. Concrete Block, 2010. Rubber stamps and industrial lacquer paint on 9mm Plywood board, 120 x 100 x 54 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Photograph by Capital D Studio.

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transformation the work also reexamines, reinterprets, and even reverses the concept of ready-made. Marcel Duchamp exhibited everyday and found objects, thus challenging the concept of art and artwork by showing unmodified objects of non-artistic origin and non-artistic intention and, in fact, up till today these works are exhibited in spaces that are generally considered places for art, like galleries and museums. Abdulnasser Gharem replays the process the other way around, as he creates an artwork that looks like a simple found object exhibited in a museum context, hence the ready-made concrete block turns out to be a regular(ly) “made” work of art. What’s more, to this complex art-theoretical and historical web of references we can add a well-known personal layer too: Abdulnasser Gharem was, up until a few years ago, at the same time both a Lieutenant Colonel in the Saudi Army and a renowned conceptual artist who: “critically explores daily life and contemporary issues with a particular focus on themes of authority and control” as we can read in the catalogue of the exhibition where Concrete Block was blocking the way.2 Already this work can illustrate how many provocative perspectives the meeting of the two concepts and phenomena of walls or blocks and art can have. Walls, although seeming at first to be rather straightforward and basic elements turn out to be very ambiguous constructions. They can limit and ordinate—or coordinate. They can give a basic structure to our everyday social life. Just think for example of the walls and fences of our homes and gardens that establish the limits of our private sphere and self-chosen separation from the other members of the society. Walls thus can both separate and unify, serving as obstacle and defence. Depending which side we are on, we can feel safe or excluded. Therefore, a wall is an indispensable architectural element separating and at the same time unifying, creating sides and divisions, as well as often triggering the urge to break through them. What aesthetic potential and qualities can we find in the wall, in particular with an additional focus on the cracking wall? Although we often concentrate more on what the wall encompasses, we can really put the wall itself in the focus when examining it in its ruined state: When we can walk, literally, around the standalone sculptural object, or when interpreting it as being the subject and medium of sculptural interventions. This is why in this chapter I examine the role, appearance, and “usage” of walls and show some exciting examples where architects and artists were inspired to find new interpretations of this classical architectural element. Therefore, although at first it may seem that in this chapter I divert from the original topic of the present book, the choice of artists and examples will nevertheless make it clear that the multiple aesthetic issues connected to the wall and its “cracking” nature makes it an essential subject matter to be analysed here. This is also how it becomes apparent why I place special focus on those artists’ who use cracking, ruinous, and/or to-be-destroyed walls as the focus

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of their practice, in order to examine concepts of separation, oppression, and the impact of division on cultural identity. However, despite the fact that we usually think of the wall as an indispensable element, we reflect less often on the questions of its exact function. What is its most basic task? We could point out “separation” as its primary function: a division between here and there, between this side and the one over and behind the wall, between us and them. This separation then automatically selects a group, the group on the one side of the wall, and offers them a different status than the other group on the other side. This is how it immediately serves as a kind of defence, too—separating ourselves inside to preserve us from those who are outside, or isolating them inside in order not to mix with us who are outside. If we are on the “other side,” it may appear that we are left out, or we are closed in. Hence obviously there is not necessarily a positive and negative side of the wall—neither here nor there, neither in nor out is unquestionably favourable or unfavourable. What’s more, this status and especially the change of status can even have compelling intersections: It is enough to think of the famous opening of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel titled Berlin, Alexanderplatz. At the beginning of the story the protagonist, Franz Bieberkopf, gets released from Tegel Prison with his strong conviction that he wants to start a new life. His failure is anticipated by the author in a short summary note even before the first chapter, but we might feel this foreshadowed to an even greater extent by the antinomy pictured in the first chapter: He is free, standing in front of the prison gate, already outside the walls that were—even some hours before—closing him in and separating him from both society and the free life. And how does Döblin summarise the coming events and the beginning of his newly regained freedom in this starting moment of the novel? With the shortest possible affirmation: “The punishment begins.”3 It is not a beautiful life that begins; and the punishment ends only in the sense that his sentence is over, but the new life, out of the prison punishment, will turn out to be the (real) punishment. The questions of the function of the wall becomes more complex if we are not sure or could never be sure of the reliability and efficiency of its separating and unifying force. This insecurity can be imagined through the rethinking of Constantine Cavafy’s well-known poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” In the poem a whole city—including its average inhabitants as well as the leaders—is paralysed by the fear of the coming barbarians. They shall arrive today—from outside our well-known urban context—taking (in their “barbarian” way) control of the well-established (“civilised”) city. And what happens at the end of the day? They are not coming, and paradoxically this turns out to be a sort of a delusion, since, as we can read in the poem: “They were, those people, a kind of solution.”4

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Cavafy precisely expresses this extremely ambiguous concern. The fear of the enemy penetrating from outside blocks everyday life, and this block seems to be resolvable only if the catastrophe really happens and arrives—in the “form” of barbarians. As Matthew Gumpert argued: It has been the fate of the West for most of its long history to be consumed in the act of waiting. Like the jaded citizens of Constantine Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” we always suspected the barbarians were at the gate. It had served our purposes to know they were out there. Indeed, we had looked forward to their coming, not just with a sense of dread, but with something approaching relief. (Blanchot: “The disaster takes care of everything.”) The order of our lives, like those of Cavafy’s generic polis, had been founded entirely on teleological and, indeed, eschatological principles.5

In this case then, when they do not arrive, the un-arrival of the catastrophe will be the real catastrophe, since the city’s inhabitants have to face too difficult—if not directly un(re)solvable—problems. One of these problems that the poem still explicitly forebodes is the typical question of what to do next? What will be; what can be the other solution if there is one: undesired but expected, unpleasant but seemingly without alternatives, not valid anymore? What if we are left without solution? The other problem is not directly referred to in the poem, but implicitly the worrying question is still embedded: What if the barbarians are not coming because they are already here? They are not yet to arrive but have already arrived? Does the wall, our city, our unified division then leak such that they could have already penetrated? Can they really be among us? Can they be any of us? And from here it is just one more small step to the most frightening question: Perhaps we are the barbarians? We took for granted that the wall not only unifies us but also defends us from our (outside) enemy. This insecurity in the strength of the wall (may it be leaking . . . ?) soon turns out to be an insecurity in ourselves, the worry that the physical enemy will become an auto-referential existential fear. In such a case, we cannot be sure what is better: reinforcing the wall or destroying it? Constructing or deconstructing? How can we best save ourselves, our city, and our culture? From within the nexus of these questions, we can interpret an insightful work of Ayşe Erkmen, presented at the thirteenth Istanbul Biennial in autumn 2013. The work, titled bangbangbang consisted of a crane, which she placed in front of the building that contained a large part of the works exhibited at the biennale. The crane held a huge ball, just like the ones used for destroying buildings and walls—the difference in this case being that the wrecking ball was not made of rock-hard metal, but of light plastic. Not only the regular movement of the crane, but even a slight wind made it swing toward the wall

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of the building, without really harming it, of course, the ball being made of a soft material. The work is at the same time worrisome and ironic: referring to the strong potential we have with our tools of quick destruction, but at the same moment disabling the power to destroy by replacing the ball with a harmless one. However, the constant oscillation of the object unpleasantly reminds us of the question that we inevitably have to face: how to respond to the current situation? What to do with our insecurity? What is our new defence strategy? Keeping in mind the thoughts that were inspired by reading Cavafy’s poem, we can wonder what the role and potential of destroying is if we are uncertain of our own status: Are the barbarians among us? Or are we the barbarians? How to defend the culture that we are so proud of, and that gives us the secure and comfortable feeling of supremacy over the barbarians, if we too might be the ones from whom we want to distinguish ourselves through the power of civilisation? In this case, shall we then raise new walls or destroy the earlier ones? Is a continuous and ever-growing separation the right expression of culture? Or is it better to destroy the separation? And what if not (only) destruction but such erection of walls can also be forms of the new barbarism? Also for the meditation on these questions: Was it a good idea to display Ayşe Erkmen’s work right next to the entrance of the main building of the biennial—the event whose title, nota bene, in this 2013 edition was the question: “Mom, am I barbarian?” The work thus has a real actuality, too, referring to the constant change of the city of Istanbul, to the continuous destroying and new construction—in the area of the port, too, where the biennial took place. But we shall not limit our interpretation to this actuality. As Danae Mossman and Sarah Hopkinson wrote in the Guide of the event: Erkmen renegotiates the relationship between industrial objects and processes of sculptural production, and reveals the relationship between objects and the viewer as something much more intimate, complex, subjective, and variable. She disestablishes the fixed narratives of sculpture and its legacies rather than drawing on the more abstract relationship between form and experience as subject matter. Often visitors are, quite literally, inside of the work, thinking or feeling their way out.6

While observing this work, we metaphorically wonder about the next step in navigating our way out from these concerns, while the ball regularly hits the wall as the audio-visual sign of a mega-metronome, reminding us of the urgency of making a decision. Without the sonic and also visual signs of such a “metronome,” another way of observing the pressure and the effects of the passing of time is when walls are ruined (i.e., built divisions that were destroyed “naturally”). The wall may easily lose its function if there is no more danger “outside” of it, and if those who built it to defend themselves are not inside anymore and

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thus not taking care of the construction. When losing its function and task, and especially without the structural and aesthetic upkeep, the wall starts to lose its elements, too. The ruins of a wall are then deprived of any kind of practical function that we can attribute to an existing wall: not separating territories, not bearing any load, and not leading anywhere, for example, as part of a corridor. On the other hand, it may gain an inspiring new aesthetic quality: Being the subject of Nature’s involuntary, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable shaping activity, it can become a standalone sculptural object. Not an endless, circular, and closed entity, not an organic part of a building, just a large-scale—and normally rather long—sculpture, where, as Robert Ginsberg claimed: “The unity of the wall dissolves into the plurality of bricks.”7 Natural forces then start to work on the wall, slowly destroying it, taking elements away, eliminating its original form, modifying its lines, height, and surface. The passing of time is evident in the picturesque appearance of the wall-ruin, the result of the “sculptural” activity of Nature. What earlier did not seem to be possible (i.e., to separate the wall, an integral part, from the entire building) has now happened. From the former complex the wall is separated—and at the same time it is not separating anything anymore. Since the building’s earlier integral part becomes a purely sculptural object we can also say that the wall thus becomes the monument of the former building. A part refers to the whole, a remnant, reminding us of the previous and complete entity. A real monument it will be both in the sense of an object of memory that reminds us of the original complex and in the sense of a monumental sculptural work that we can walk around, observe, and aesthetically enjoy. While it is an entire wall, its two-dimensionality dominates: Encountering it we focus more on its length and height. But at the time of its ruined state, during the decades or centuries while it is being dilapidated, its three-dimensional character becomes more and more significant and evident. The former building element of which two-dimensionality dominated thus will become a three-dimensional object—we can walk around it, having the earlier separating wall in the centre of our perambulation, without facing obstacles when constantly changing the side we are on. And, as the decomposition continues, the wall gets lower and lower, enabling us to come to the other side simply over the ex-wall. Earlier it was possible only through the controlled openings of the wall: gates and doors. As Georg Simmel described the relationship of inner and outer space in his 1909 essay titled “Bridge and Door”: The human being who first erected a hut, like the first road-builder, revealed the specifically human capacity over against nature, insofar as he or she cut a portion out of the continuity and infinity of space and arranged this into a particular unity in accordance with a single meaning. A piece of space was thereby brought together and separated from the whole remaining world. By

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virtue of the fact that the door forms, as it were, a linkage between the space of human beings and everything that remains outside it, it transcends the separation between the inner and the outer.8

But with the natural decomposition of the wall, this getting over, getting out, or getting on the other side is now easy and free to anybody, from either side of the wall. With the natural lowering of the wall its “seriousness” also lowers. A high wall can often be very effectively impeding, but a low wall is just the contrary: tempting, even though the inability of resisting this temptation can have opposite consequences if the wall is low because of its still being under construction or deconstruction. Overcoming a low wall in deconstruction is fun. But overcoming a low wall still in construction can be a dangerous or even deadly sin. According to Livy, this lead to the death of Remus during their conflict: “Remus contemptuously jumped over the newly raised walls and was forthwith killed by the enraged Romulus, who exclaimed, ‘So shall it be henceforth with everyone who leaps over my walls.’”9 We can see a similar trespassing of the wall still in construction in the iconic photograph of Peter Leibing depicting Conrad Schumann jumping over the barbed wire fence—the later Berlin Wall—in 1961. In these cases, from two extremities of history, (mythologically old and recent) the ignoring of the divisive function of the wall—even if a low wall—is a real and proper transgression. However, when the wall loses its function and gets ruined, we just cross over it for fun, without obligations, only for our own historical curiosity and for the aesthetic pleasure of observing the “sculpture” from all sides, picturesquely shaped by Nature. Nevertheless, it is definitely ironic, even if perhaps involuntarily ironic, when the ruined wall—that is now offering the possibility of being walked around, and that is becoming the subject of our attention from any viewpoint—gets separated from us by a thin metal fence, in order to protect the archaeological ruin from further ruination caused by the human touch, jumping, and climbing . . . In the above example, Nature destroyed the wall and this resulted in added aesthetic value. But walls may have new aesthetic value even if they are not entirely destroyed, and sometimes no real or actual harm is needed at all: An illusionistic opening can negate the wall, thus creating a provocative and aesthetically fertile tension between the real existence of the wall and the questioning of its necessity. Already in Antique times we see examples of trompe l’oeil openings that play at the intersection of the massive structure and fine surface of the wall. Where a wall must be for static or divisionary function but space—the illusion of space—is desired, then a painted opening of the wall can be a really pleasant solution. Apart from the well-known and classical examples—The Villa Boscoreale with painted “views” or cityscapes, or Mantegna’s Ceiling Oculus in the Palazzo Ducale of Mantova—we can

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also quote a particular representation that curiously synthetises the illusion of opening and Nature’s aforementioned powerful work: at the so-called Chamber of Ruins in the Weißenstein Castle in Pommersfelden in Bavaria, Giovanni Francesco Marchini painted all the walls full of ruins. But not with conventional representations of ruins—he converted the ceiling and walls of the room in a refined and illusionistic way into the vision of a “real time” destruction, as if they were to collapse right in that moment. The visitor thus happens upon the middle of a sudden natural catastrophe. As Paul Zucker observed, here “the baroque love of the sensation and of extraordinary events is combined with the romantic preoccupation with arousing reflections about the transiency of human life and creations.”10 Hence, in these examples walls were needed but made either invisible, or, with a Baroque pictorial joke, not simply their necessity and endurance are questioned, but also their existence is negated. Yet walls were not intentionally and physically destroyed for opening up such possibilities. However, we can mention some examples where the artist and/or architect goes even further and whereby the wall is physically harmed by deliberate human activity: when the primary function of the wall becomes secondary, and this basic structural element becomes the medium of sculptural intervention. Gordon Matta-Clark—originally trained as an architect—for example, cut out parts and forms from existing and intact buildings, intentionally shaping the wall with the void, just like Nature shapes the remains of an unused building left unarmed and defenceless against Nature’s power. The edge between architecture and sculpture was blurred in his 1974 project titled Splitting, when he cut through a New Jersey house from the 1930s, sinking one part of the original building so that a tiny gap could open in the middle, a gap that of course continually widened towards the top of the house. What’s more, he cut and exhibited the four top corners of the building as sculptures in a gallery, with the unsurprising title: Four Corners. The next year, within the framework of the Paris Biennale, he wanted to split the newly constructed Centre Pompidou, and when his request was rejected, a seventeenth century apartment building was offered to him as subject for his interaction—a building that was planned to be demolished, to give space around the new museum. In this project, titled Conical Intersect, a conical void was cut in the house. The architect’s sculptural intervention here results in a pictorial gesture in and/or through the surface of the wall. He attempted to overcome the dialectics of inside and outside again in his 1977 project Office Baroque, where he sawed out huge circular forms from an office building in Antwerp. As he affirmed: “Light enters places it otherwise couldn’t. Spaces are available to move through that were previously inaccessible.”11 The walls are thus partially destroyed to open up new relationships between light and space, inside and outside, void and volume.

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In another example, the wall’s further characteristic comes into focus: Anish Kapoor shows an ignored “side” of the wall, its third dimensionality through the depth of its volume. It will again become sculptural, but this “sculpturality” does not mean that it will be a real sculpture, like the final result of the left-alone wall that Nature shapes into a perambulatable threedimensional item, or the cut out corners of the New Jersey house in Gordon Matta-Clark’s project. Instead, Anish Kapoor shows the third dimension that the wall already contains within itself, and that we normally do not consider, concentrating only on its height and length. In this way Anish Kapoor’s intervention investigates the basic sculptural potential—the third dimension (i.e. the volume)—when emphasising the depth of wall. He often cuts huge cracks, painting the inner part with vivid colors, or carves perfectly designed semi-circular holes into the wall that—also due to the fine painting inside of it—physically attract the viewer to immerse themselves in the profound depths of the “opened” or semi-opened wall. Hence, the wall is both the medium and the analysed subject of the work—and the result, the final appearance of the artwork, reflects its own creation. This auto-referential interaction will open the new dimension, thus showing the depth of the volume the wall incorporates. The depth of the wall and the aesthetic and social effects of its voluminous character is what inspires the Palestinian artist Hazem Harb, who reflects on

Figure 7.2  Hazem Harb. Untitled #14 from the Archaeology of Occupation series, 2015. Print on Hahnemuhle FineArt Baryta 325 gsm mounted on 3mm aluminium composite, 120 x 204 cm. Courtesy of the artist Hazem Harb. Copyright Hazem Harb.

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the nature of forced separation through the help of photomontages depicting disturbing or disturbed landscapes. Actually, when thinking of landscapes, in general, we normally imagine peaceful or even calming scenery with fine and mild forms that invite the observer to further enjoy the natural beauty. However, the landscape becomes particularly disturbing and disturbed in the way Hazem Harb represents them. In the collage series titled Archaeology of the Occupation the artist used vintage landscape photographs, but added images of bulky concrete blocks on—or above—the original view, thus creating a strong visual and emotional dichotomy between the elements. In this way the observer experiences through the works a thought-provoking parallel between disturbing vision and physical experience and disturbed aesthetic appreciation: The strikingly unnatural concrete forms overlay the original photos of the fine coastal lines and impede the vision to delightfully scan the entire view, just like a real, physical block obstructs the continuation of the discovery of the land when encountering it during a walk. These inserted limits and blocks in the landscape are thus absolutely unnatural in every way, alien to the landscape in their material, formal, and aesthetic qualities, just like any form of forced insertion in the genuine landscape in any part of the world and in any historical period. Hence the artist successfully manages to generalise the issue (i.e., to analyse the question of walls and separation without necessarily referring to one actual case). These blocks could be anywhere and could physically block the way and obstruct the view for any of us. Separation and the power of dividing forces are analysed in a completely different way in the work of Khaled Jarrar. This Palestinian artist created a volleyball out of the reconstituted cement that he chiselled away in secret from the separating wall in the West Bank. The work again has a multiple reference system: volleyball is truly played between two separated areas, though not with an eight kilogram, solid ball. Khaled Jarrar thus really shows the impossibility of the use of the massive item in its present and concrete form. Based on his conversation with children who expressed their sorrow at losing their playground due to the construction of the wall, the volleyball thus directly leads us to issues concerning the effects of separation, especially on the life of the most innocent, including children. Besides the form and weight, the origin of the material is also a direct reference to the fact of separation, and, in fact, Khaled Jarrar used the concrete taken away from the wall in other art pieces, too, including one created in 2013 titled Buddy Bear, where he created a replica of the internationally well-known figure. The bear, symbolising peace, first appeared in 2001 in Berlin, where 140 of them, each representing a United Nations country, were displayed at the site of the former Berlin Wall. When the travelling exhibition of bears arrived at Jerusalem, a Palestinian Buddy was also included as a sign of hope of the nation for international recognition. However, what is important to state is that, just like in the case of

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Hazem Harb above, the work is open and universalises the question, and we can state again that the wall in question could be any wall, not only the one dividing Jerusalem. This is also the case in another work by Khaled Jarrar, again departing from the problem of the same wall, but successfully putting it on a generalised level, such that anybody who’s ever experienced forced separation can view it as a valid reflection on the question. In the two-channel, six-minute video titled BADminton, we see the artist and another person trying to play badminton across the wall that is obviously impossible because neither of them can see the arriving ball, if only in the very last second. Just to illustrate how the topic is a global problem that inspired other artists and thinkers, let’s just remember for example the 1995 film of Margarethe von Trotta titled The Promise, where a young boy throws a ball from West Berlin through the wall, and a couple of seconds later it arrives back to him. Or, we can also quote the renowned “Wallyball,” the volleyball played right on the border of the USA and Mexico that is one of the longest (3500 km) border separations in the world, with the highest number of legal and illegal crossings and numerous deaths each year. First played in 1979 and then restarted from 2006 on, the partly provocative game with the fence serving as net is a kind of absurd symbol of separation and desperate desire to find a better solution, where the two nations literally play on home turf. The partial breaking of the wall and the investigation of its depth and materiality may lead to the complete demolishing of it—or, at least to the examination of the possibility of bringing it down. Overcoming the wall requires an understanding of its “depth” and also serious consideration of the necessity of separation itself. We can never be sure if we are on the right side of the wall, or if there is a right side, or—to continue the metaphor—if there is a wall at all? Similarly, we always seem to find ourselves on one side of a wall but can never be sure if the wall itself is necessary and necessarily divides us? Whether we are really separated from something and from each other, if there really is an impeding obstacle, and whether it really has to be there, or if it is mere surmountable physical matter? In fact, the unavoidable imperative to scrutinise these issues is highlighted by Jorge Méndez Blake in his piece presented in the same thirteenth Istanbul Biennial where Ayşe Erkmen’s “wrecking” ball hit the building. Blake’s installation consisted of a twenty-two-metre-long and sturdy-looking wall that had a significant imperfection in the middle, a starting crack, a strange break in the seemingly massive pattern of bricks caused by the insertion of an extra item in the lowest row of bricks: a book, a copy of Kafka’s novel The Castle that heightened the first row. The adding of this extra piece, a completely alien, unusual, and uncommon material for construction in the massive wall disrupted the entire structure: Even though the wall stood still, the irregularity continued in the higher rows too. In fact, looking at the installation from a short distance,

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Figure 7.3  Jorge Méndez Blake. The Castle, 2018. Bricks, Edition of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, 175 x 1900 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

above the very insertion of the book the wall even had a sort of a bump, again, a feature not common in walls that are intact and supposed to look perfect, strong, and frightening or defending—depending of course on what side we are on, as we have seen above. The interpretation of the work is inspiringly open, allowing the viewer to develop different readings of it. On the one hand Jorge Méndez Blake’s piece can refer to the inaccessibility of complete knowledge, in this way using not only the object of the book but also referring to its content. Just how in Kafka’s novel the protagonist, K., does not understand his own situation and the working of the system, the same way we as observers of the installation cannot take the book out of the construction, thus symbolizing the obstructions in gaining access to the complete understanding and to the entire apprehension of our state. On the other hand—however only seemingly in opposition to the above reading—the installation can also refer to the very power of thought itself. In this latter interpretation, not only the novel in particular, but the book as an object in general is “symbolising culture as a foundation component structuring today’s society as well as an unsettling element, considering the physical defect it caused in the order of the bricks,” as we can read in Fulya Erdemci’s text from the Biennial book.12 Kafka’s inserted novel then—and the culture itself for which the actual book stands as a symbol—does not provide the theoretical basis and especially not the justification for erecting

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walls. Just the contrary, the unstoppable cracking in the massive wall caused by the insertion of a soft item also reminds us of the power of critical thought that may completely destroy and open up entire walls. The rumination on this complex set of not only aesthetic but also ethical questions received an even more directly political tone in a more recent version of the piece, installed in December 2018 in New York, where the artist built Kafka’s Amerika into the wall, and we can easily understand why the actuality and references of this text is important for the Mexican artist. Therefore, from this and other works quoted in this chapter we can sense that even the strongest wall that appears to be an extremely oppressive obstruction can be broken through. Those who prefer erecting walls should bear in mind the sentence “don’t trust the concrete” since critical thinking can make cracks even in the strongest divisions, in order to open up a possible access towards complete freedom. NOTES 1. This chapter is an enlarged version of an earlier paper originally published as: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Art (Out) of Separation: Aesthetics around the Wall,” Serbian Architectural Journal 6, no. 1. (2014): 17–28. 2. See Sarah Rogers’s entry in Isabella Ellaheh Hughes, ed., Walls and Margins (Sharjah: Barjeel Art Foundation, 2015), 30. 3. Alfred Döblin, Berlin, Alexanderplatz, trans. Eugene Jolas (London: Continuum, 2007), 3. 4. Constantine Cavafy, Collected Poems, ed. George Savidis, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 19. 5. Matthew Gumpert, The End of Meaning (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), xxix. 6. Danae Mossman and Sarah Hopkinson, “Ayşe Erkmen,” in Guide to the 13th Istanbul Biennial, ed. Liz Erçevik Amado (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts-Yapı Kredı Publications, 2013), 67. 7. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 4. 8. Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge 1997), 65. I am grateful to Prof. Jale Erzen for drawing my attention to this text. 9. Titus Livius, The History of Rome, ed. Ernest Rhys, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1905), vol. 1. 1.7. 10. Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay: Ruin, Relic, Symbol, Ornament (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968), 239. 11. Quoted in: Philip Ursprung, “Living Archaeology: Gordon Matta-Clark and 1970s New York,” in Die Moderne Als Ruine. Eine Archäologie der Gegenwart (Modernism as a Ruin: An Archaeology of the Present), ed. Sabine Folie (Nuremberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2010), 156. 12. Fulya Erdemci, Mom, Am I barbarian? 13th Istanbul Biennial Book (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts-Yapı Kredı Publications, 2014), 63.

Chapter 8

Eulogy to the Fragment Artworks and Ruination

Broken plaster casts by the Italian Neo-Classical sculptor Antonio Canova; large, partially damaged photographs by the contemporary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto; a torso from classical Antiquity, smashed pieces of a china vase in a work by Bouke de Vries: all of the above-mentioned works derive from different eras, created (and partially surviving) in different media. At first it may seem that practically nothing could connect them. Nevertheless, one aspect can serve as a definite common point between them: All of these artworks have encountered the phenomenon of fragmentation. Obviously the expression “encountered fragmentation” here is broadly construed, referring to various modes in which artworks get fragmented and partially destroyed, and in which this phenomenon appears on and through them. Therefore, fragmentation is a common point, but the reasons for the artworks becoming fragmented are, again, just as dissimilar as the original works themselves. In the following I would like to investigate some questions connected to the aesthetic qualities of such artworks. How are their aesthetic quality and, even, status modified in and through fragmentation and deterioration, compared to their original and genuine state? First we might think that through fragmentation artworks automatically and completely lose their aesthetic qualities or, at least, significantly degrade in this respect, with even a partial deterioration entirely depriving them of their function as aesthetic objects. However, this is not necessarily the case. The somewhat destroyed piece of art might remain a valuable—though fragmented—work, and, on certain occasions, can even increase its aesthetic quality. What’s more, in particular situations this fragmentation and partial destruction can be exactly what makes the object an artwork, “finishing,” completing, and/or complementing the original intentions of the creator. As a subcategory of the latter, some of 145

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the deteriorated works might gain further value due to fact that since their decay the concept of art and modes of appreciation of artworks have changed. In other curious instances a fragment is not only and necessarily an end result, but it can also be a departure point. Therefore, in order to understand the lure of the fragment and fragmentation in art and aesthetics we need to see what sort of fragment we have, what a fragment is potentially for, and how its aesthetic value can be modified in the different possible forms of its afterlife. Already from this we can see that fragments—or, more precisely, the levels of fragmentation within the works—can be completely different. As a matter of fact, issues regarding the relative grade of fragmentation might resemble the question of the level of completeness of a work of art. For many artists the task of finishing the work might be an aesthetically curious and challenging one, despite their mature career and decades of active practice. We can thus ask: When is the work to be considered finished? Can it become “more completed” when the artist regularly comes back to rework it? The question is not only connected to classical examples and to the famous non-finito artworks (i.e., pieces intentionally left unfinished), from Renaissance pieces through Romanticism, but even to contemporary artists like Brice Marden, for whom, as we can read in a survey article on his works in The Art Newspaper by Pac Pobric, the problem of when to consider a painting complete is a central one to be constantly scrutinised while working on the pieces: “There were just so many decisions to make: how many veins should there be and what colours were best? Where should they cross and how should they meet? How dense should the ‘plane image’ (Marden’s favoured term) be, and which areas were best left open”1 Hence the question: Will the piece become another or even a “better” artwork only because the artist keeps working on it? Not necessarily. And in the same way, we can raise the issue: Would some damage necessarily erase all the aesthetic potential of the art piece? These seemingly opposed perspectives and conflicting aspects—that of “completeness” and “finishedness”—may help us understand the complexity of the issue. However, as mentioned, they are only seemingly opposed. We should perhaps rather describe these views as two sides of the same coin, since at the end the basic question still remains the same: At what point is the work the original? Therefore, from the perspective of the creative act of the artist, we may ask: Since when, or after which point, is the object the artwork—or when does it become “The Final Artwork”? What is the last stage in its creation? Which is the last brushstroke, when to stop chiselling away the marble or adding another piece of clay? And from the other end (i.e., in relation to the aspects of ruination that is the locus of interest in this chapter) we can pose the question: Till what point is the work still the original? When does, for example, its decay start to be disturbing? What is the grade of deterioration that definitely and significantly harms

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the appearance of the work and obstructs its aesthetic values from being appreciated? Despite all of the artist’s efforts to preserve the work—and/or after that, the later generations’ striving to maintain the material qualities of the art pieces—a natural sort of deterioration obviously occurs through aging, for example, in the form of cracking the surface of the painting, fading of the colours through the absorbing of dust and smoke, rusting in metal sculptures, etc. In some cases, these are considered natural consequences of the material, for example, most art lovers are not seriously concerned by the patina on an outdoor bronze sculpture. On the other hand, craquelure can be disturbing on certain sorts of artworks, for example on the smooth surface of abstract painting, as it—and its aesthetic consequences—was already analysed by Arthur C. Danto, with regard to a Suprematist painting by Kazimir Malevich that almost a century after its creation had several cracks on its surface. Danto proposes that through the question of assessing what happened to the painting we arrive at much broader theoretical considerations too: Is it an ugly object or an ugly work? That depends upon whether craquelure is internal to the meaning of the work, or merely an external and contingent matter of what happened to the physical object. A half-ruined surface is inconsistent with the spirit of Suprematism, so it must be the object rather than the work to which the cracks belong. The philosophical question concerns the relationship between work and object, and this takes us to the metaphysical heart of the philosophy of art.2

Although the analyses of craquelure and other forms of dereliction can truly lead to the investigation of crucial theoretical questions, in many cases they are still considered to be relatively inconsequential deteriorations of the piece, and the appearance of these sorts of minor impairments can add to the appreciation of the age of the artwork. But what if the work is more seriously damaged, larger parts are missing, or even a great proportion of the original piece is destroyed? It is obvious that here we have a similar situation and a strong parallel with the case of ruins and rubble, edifices whose appearances have significantly been modified due to erosion throughout the ages or intentional destruction. This parallel tendency can be highlighted also because of the fact that just like in the case of fragmentation, ruins also have numerous reasons for being—or becoming—ruins, and these different reasons provide the observer with different modes of possible aesthetic enjoyment of the former constructions. Without repeating the earlier considerations in detail here, we can remember that while many ruins are aesthetically pleasing in their sublime or at least picturesque and romantic appearance, others, especially those that are the result of a sudden, intentional, and aggressive destruction, are in most cases unattractive and often rather disconcerting.

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However, another aspect that further complicates our comparison between the ruination of buildings versus artworks is the question connected to function and functionality. When in the process of ruination, a formerly functioning building becomes potentially aesthetic precisely through this loss of function. We cannot use the edifice in its original nor in a modified function; having lost its purpose, nevertheless, as a ruin it might still bear aesthetic potential. Compared to this however, artworks—in our modern interpretation of the concept—do not have a practical purpose, and/or they can never be reduced to only that. When they do, for example in the case of purely propagandistic or kitschy pieces, they are normally not considered high quality pieces. This difference in function and functionality (i.e., of the buildings originally having and then losing function during ruination while artworks never had them), will then be helpful when comparing forms of ruination in architecture and in fine arts and when investigating the possible modifications, reductions, and additions to the aesthetic value of destroyed or fragmented artworks. In order to better understand the analogy between deteriorated artworks and ruined architecture, it seems worth looking at a couple of actual examples that will also serve as representatives of a few categories that we can establish throughout this investigation. Therefore, in the following I cite some examples of fine art works connected to fragmentation—either fragmented or using fragments or the idea of fragment for the creation of new works—and I will also put them in parallel with certain forms and appearances of architectural ruins, in order to understand their aesthetic potential and the very reasons for this aesthetic potential. As a first example let’s take the classical torso. In this case the artwork has not survived in its integrity and some parts are missing, elements broken off, surfaces faded or in part erased: Hence the piece refers to the original, of which it is a fragment, in a partly ruined form. Nevertheless, we normally still appreciate classical torsos as works with special aesthetic qualities, in which we also enjoy the contribution of Nature in the (negative) shaping of the actual piece, a nonhuman force that creates the work after its original human creator finished it. The torso then, through the absence and despite the absence, is still able to represent and keep present some or occasionally all of the original work’s aesthetic qualities. While constantly under threat of further destruction, we admire its resistance to natural decay and celebrate how it reports on the original state of the artwork. From this we can see that the classical torso can in a way be put in parallel with “natural” ruination. By natural ruination I mean the classical situation wherein an edifice or even an entire city is gradually abandoned, more and more of the original is lacking, it becomes functionless, unusable, and we inherit it in the form of a ruin. Similarly, a formerly entire, complete, and completed piece of art that in its genuine state had a certain aesthetic

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value gets destroyed due to the passing of time, lack of maintenance, and the weakening of the material, therefore its fragmented survival and appearance is mainly due to its age and its exposure to the silent and continuous ravages of time. Obviously in this case the piece that has survived in fragmented form did not arrive at this condition because of intentional human aggression or the sudden destructive forces of natural elements. As we saw above and explained its reasons before, such sudden destruction normally does not leave an aesthetically pleasing final result. Here however, in the classical forms of ruins and torsos we can appreciate the force and aesthetic manifestation of the unstoppable though “natural” degradation and its random shaping of the piece of art that we normally describe as the result of “the passing of time.” In this gradual and “natural” decay, ruins and torsos share the same fate and thus their aesthetic status can be considered comparable. And in both cases the remaining object, an incomplete fragment of the original, continues to bear a certain aesthetic value, not lastly by referring to the former beauty and artistic qualities of the lost genuine piece (i.e., that is lost in its integrity). Besides this possibility of evoking the former piece and creating references to this original work, the aesthetic appeal of ruins and torsos also derives from both the knowledge and proper sensing of the great amount of time incorporated in the pieces, that time that made them ruinous—hence the aforementioned reason as to why we are not attracted by the debris of sudden destruction. Of course, depending on the grade of destruction, the ruin, just like the torso, can even serve as a basis for imitation, becoming an exemplar that may lead us back to understanding the qualities of the partially lost original beauty and at the same time can also be highly influential and inspirational for the creation of new works, as we can see in the oeuvre of artists and architects from the Renaissance onward. However, artworks and buildings, torsos and fragments, ruins and decaying edifices often do not have such a noble afterlife, especially when becoming and being destroyed by more aggressive means. In our next step we shall deepen this aspect. The Italian sculptor Antonio Canova was just as amazed and inspired by the Greek works as many other of his contemporaries, and some of his work became at least just as fragmented, but often to an even greater extent, as many of the classical antique sculptures. However, the ruination of Canova’s work happened despite the artist’s intention, without his planning, and, what’s more, even without his knowledge. In the terrible years of World War I., the collection of Canova’s plaster casts was seriously damaged in the gallery of Possagno, a small town right on the frontline in the tragic battles of winter 1917–1918. During one of the attacks around December 1917, a couple of grenades fell through the roof of the gallery, and because of the explosion, severe destruction occurred among the Pantheonlike collection of Canova’s pieces, shattering and mutilating many of the

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plaster casts. The partial damage or often almost utter destruction of the works was then documented in a series of photographs executed by Stefano Serafin, curator of the Gipsoteca, with the help of his son Siro. The exact date of the creation of the actual photos remains hard to pinpoint, but most likely we can place the majority between October 1918 and October 1922. The two dates as terminus post quem and ante quem are defined by Alberto Prandi, marking Serafin’s return to Possagno after the evacuation of the city in October 1918, and the first centenary of Canova’s death in October 1922, when major celebrations and exhibitions were held, and for which Serafin worked to recompose and reconstruct many of the destroyed works.3 Acquainted with this background information, we are inclined to claim that through and after the sudden and fatal mutilation of Canova’s works, they ceased to be pieces of art with the same aesthetic qualities they held previously. Just as in the case of deliberate war atrocities directed against buildings and even entire cities, the final result of the aggression of WWI that destroyed a great part of the collection results in piles of debris, shattered fractions, and seriously mutilated bits of the once finished originals. When observing the wounded pieces after the explosion in the photos of Serafin, they cannot evoke and incentivise the same aesthetic pleasure as the completed and genuine originals, only sorrowful mourning for the loss and the pointless destruction that is an unfortunate and unavoidable concomitant of war. Apart from this, they also cannot fascinate the viewer in the same way as the “natural” torsos, given the fact that we do know the reasons for why and how they became fragmented. From an aesthetic point of view, it seems that Canova’s works have significantly decreased in their former aesthetic status for another, second reason. No longer being the same integral pieces of art and not having the same sort of aesthetic potentials as before, it is perhaps not so surprising that the documentation of their destroyed state and the various descriptions of the destruction itself were then used for rather propagandistic reasons both during and even after the war. The shattered pieces not only referred to—and became the symbols of—the enemy’s continuous attacks against Italy and its material and tangible cultural heritage, but the sculptures had achieved a status of a certain form of martyrdom. As Alberto Prandi scrutinised it in a catalogue essay, a complex body-metaphor was created in the years of the war, with and through the use of the visual experience of the ruined heritage, including Canova’s Gipsoteca.4 One of the protagonists in this war journalism was Ugo Ojetti, who initially put the erasure of monuments in Italy in parallel with the falling of the human victims. Nevertheless, later on this changed into a greater and more universal metaphor of wounding the whole country itself, as if the singular abolished pieces of heritage were harming the entire “body” of Italy. This allusion to the metaphor of the body of the nation then

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had a second layer of reference too: The mutilated bodies of sculpture could also bear a complex connection to the wounded physical bodies of the war veterans that had prepared another reading of the fractured pieces of art for the coming years: After the conflict, the place where the physical tragedy of the war remained least resolved was in the irreparably mutilated bodies of the war veterans. While the rhetoric of a “beautiful death” could justify the body of the fallen, offering immortality, the irreparably ravaged body had to be transformed into a political body of service to the patriotic rhetoric that Fascism was on the verge of exploiting, thus ensuring its visibility.5

In this way, the fragmentation of the artworks became a politically loaded metaphor for the ruination of the real human bodies. The parallel in itself is not new or unknown to us today because of the ruination of buildings and of the decay of the human body in all its forms (i.e., not only its regular and gradual aging but also its forced destruction have been mirrored in works of art). As Julia Höner formulated in an essay accompanying an exhibition on ruin-representations and the inspiration of ruins in contemporary art: “Bodies and ruins belong together. Not only is the body like ‘a ruin in progress’— being pre-programmed for decomposition—but both the body and the ruin are also comparable when one applies concepts from architecture and psychology.”6 This is exactly what we saw in chapter 3 with regard to Maerten van Heemskerck, as the potential parallels between body and architecture, and especially the aging body and decaying architecture which were already investigated from the Renaissance onward. Nevertheless, this direct use and abuse of the vision and representation of martyred artworks and national treasures with reference to wounded bodies might make us aware of the change in status of the reproduced former artworks too: If they can be put in the direct service of war propaganda, can they still claim to be artworks for their own sake? Do they still have the chance to regain some of their former aesthetic qualities that were harmed throughout the bombing? Of course, one can argue that it is not the scattered pieces in themselves that had become propagandistic but rather the photos created through them. We could also analyse the grade to which the powerful choice of viewpoint, radical composition, forceful close-ups, and eventual cropping have all contributed to the strong visual impact of these propagandistic images. These are all important aspects for understanding the function(ing) of these partly staged photographs. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the fragments served only as abused subject matter for the patriotic images, it can still help us understand the diminishing of the aesthetic values of the sculptural pieces

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themselves. Therefore, one might still believe that these photos could not have been so powerful had they not also highlighted this exact irreversible loss of aesthetic status due to the destruction. Thus the lessening of the aesthetic status of the original pieces that followed their sudden wreckage and the abuse of their reference (both to the genuine artworks’ beauty and to the terrors of war through propaganda images) went hand in hand, mutually reinforcing their negative tendencies: The more the pieces were destroyed the more they were “suitable” for pictorial abuse, and by the same token, the more they were displayed for this purpose the more they lost their remaining artistic and aesthetic qualities. Coming back to our parallel above, somehow it is once again the suddenness of destruction that blocks the arousal of aesthetic pleasures when encountering the fragments of these war-torn pieces. We fail to enjoy the (former) artworks as such, witnessing in the full knowledge that they are the result of war aggression and that their destruction did not happen over the course of a sublime amount of time, but rather that their noble patina and aura was cancelled out in an instant. Similarly, it is for this reason that we do not find aesthetic enjoyment in the vision and photographic representation of bombed cities, or areas destroyed by any sort of human-incentivised catastrophe or bellicose aggression that ruins a place in a moment. Hence, obviously the key point is again the temporal aspect, both in the case of the process of ruination itself as well as in the meagre possibility of attributing aesthetic value to the end result. However, this importance of the temporal perspective with regard to the potential aesthetics of fragments and fragmentation also provides us with the prospect of the creation or sometimes recreation of value of fragments destroyed instantly and swiftly: They might become sources of inspiration for new pieces. This is what happened with the Canova fragments when almost a century after their fragmentation, in 2015, two photographers turned to these pieces and offered two different ways of engaging with the investigation of their aesthetic relevance and presence.7 One can glean the impression that Guido Guidi and Gian Luca Eulisse have reinterpreted the mutilated originals by trying to focus on them from the distance of a century as survivors. This approach that connects the two photographers, despite their many other differences, is exactly what makes their series different from the documentary (and partly staged) war photos taken of these same fragments from the early twentieth century. The propagandistic works necessarily had to concentrate on the brutal circumstances of the phenomena of loss: lost pieces, lost integrity of the original works, loss of the former aesthetic status—and, as we have seen, this approach and patriotic abuse had also contributed to the actual further impediment and obstruction of maintaining or regaining the aesthetic value once belonging to the original. The modern pieces by Guido Guidi and

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Gian Luca Eulisse however emphasise the survival of the singular fragments, not merely through elevating and celebrating them as valorous elements and subjects of new compositions. Therefore, just like the propagandistic war photos of the fragments decreased their aesthetic status, or rather, diminished the opportunity to enjoy them aesthetically, the later artistic project aimed at reestablishing at least some of it. One possible explanation for the reasons why we can find aesthetic appeal in these photos is that Guido Guidi and Gian Luca Eulisse point at general questions of destruction, available to them (again) through the added dimension of temporal distance, when the modern viewers’ personal involvement is significantly less strong, being at this point WWI history for us. Hence we find a similar approach as in the case of the artists in chapter 7, Hazem Harb’s landscape photos overwritten with the concrete blocks or Khaled Jarrar’s concrete volleyball and badminton video: The universalising of an issue will not result in detachment or disinterest in moral responsibilities, but just the contrary, it makes it easier for the viewer of the artwork to get involved in the discussion proposed by the artist through the works, without direct reference to the actual case. The next example of ruined and decomposed works is a curious series of photographs that can again serve as a thought-provoking illustration of the complexity of the questions related to the aesthetic status of partially destroyed pieces of art. The artwork in question is by Hiroshi Sugimoto that was shown in an exhibition in the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco in 2014. The artist presented a large-scale, five-panel work titled Acts of God. Sugimoto took the original photos back in 1999 from a life-size wax reproduction of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, in a museum in Izu, Japan. In 2012 however, the massive flood caused by Hurricane Sandy penetrated the artist’s studio, partly destroying the photographic series that was kept in the basement. The result of the natural interaction is curious, as we are left with damaged photos that nevertheless somehow manage to look as if they were authentically old. The pieces seem to be “eaten up by age,” as the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet formulated it—in Richard Hamer’s modern translation—in his poem quoted in chapter 1. What thus should have been interpreted as a sorrowful event for the artist (i.e., the massive destruction and partial loss of his pieces), turned into an opportunity to create a new layer in the reading of the pieces. With regard to this damage, the artist stated the following: “I chose to interpret this as the invisible hand of God coming down to bring my monumental, but unfinished Last Supper to completion. Leonardo completed his Last Supper over five hundred years ago, and it has deteriorated beautifully. I can only be grateful to the storm for putting my work through a half-millennium’s worth of stresses in so short a time.”8 Even if accepting the artist’s statement as one of the many possible and legitimate interpretations of the tragic event, one might still have some

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concerns with this reading of the aesthetic consequences of the damage. Can we really be so sure that due to the flood’s destructing forces the work successfully managed to incorporate such values that normally would require the actual passing of half millennium’s worth of time? The artwork started as a regular photo project, and according to the artist’s statement, it was left unfinished—in Sugimoto’s reading then it is exactly the partial destruction that had completed it. Hence, the piece was not considered as a finished or complete(d) one, however, it was incomplete not due to natural ruination like a fragmented classical torso but because the artist himself did not (yet) finish it. In his reading then, the finishing of the unfinished work happened through the partial destruction (i.e., a sort of completing by becoming incomplete). The artist considered it finished once the signs of deterioration—that looked like signs of the passing (of) time—appeared on the work, thus the photographs seem like an originally completed series that due to a long and natural destruction process had survived incomplete and ruined. Therefore, at least according to Sugimoto’s description, he appreciated the force of Nature that made the images look much older than they really are. But is this not a bit like cheating? One could argue both pro and contra. Of course, it is not cheating, not in the sense of intentional deception regarding the aging of art pieces, like when art forgers apply complicated and intricate physical and chemical processes to their fake works of art to imitate the passing of the ages on the surface of the pieces. For example, Han van Meegeren’s creating special layers of the picture to obtain the necessary craquelure on the surface of his fake Vermeers.9 However, for some observers, Sugimoto’s above interpretation might look like cheating in the sense of accepting the possibility that such an unplanned, involuntary, and sudden accident could appropriately provide the works with a sort of patina that then would and could make them look completed. Hence without claiming that it is a “forgery,” we need to investigate the exact status and possible aesthetic values connected to these deteriorated pieces of art. If we automatically accepted the artist’s interpretation without any sort of possible critical doubt, it would be akin to allowing and even providing a possibility for something that I have called elsewhere “shortcuts to nostalgia.”10 By this I mean such cultural phenomena—including purposefully built fake ruins in eighteenth century landscape gardens, of which evolution among many others Thomas McCormick analysed in his book,11 or photos taken at deteriorated recent and contemporary buildings that make these edifices resemble antique ruins—that forcefully though unsuccessfully try to raise and arouse nostalgic feelings and interpretations in the observer. As I have pointed out in my previous text, I do not think there can be the possibility of such shortcuts (i.e., of cutting out the necessary amount of time from the deterioration process) and having aesthetically efficient works that

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only artificially evoke nostalgia. Keeping this in mind and getting back to Sugimoto’s piece, the work is really fascinating, having several sources of aesthetic qualities, however, it seems that there is only a formal—we could also say superficial, even literally superficial—parallel between the deterioration of Leonardo’s work and Sugimoto’s. The final aspect may look similar due to the faded colours, blurred edges, discontinuous forms and disappearing shapes, but still the difference in the time, modes, and reasons of and in this very deterioration undeniably exist. Our obvious parallel from the world of architectural ruination would be the rubble left from a city after an earthquake or tsunami has destroyed it. As discussed earlier, the pile of debris that is left over is not aesthetically pleasing, and we do not consider the results an attractive ruin, precisely due to the suddenness of the destruction. In fact, the situation is also very similar to the other aforementioned case, the ruined areas of war-torn cities that were not pleasing, either. Based on this, Nature’s interaction coincidentally may have resulted in adding some sort of aesthetic quality to Sugimoto’s work, but it does not mean that the sublime features of decay can really be speeded up by simply accepting what has happened—otherwise we should also accept that any building that is destroyed in a second by a tsunami could and would automatically become an appealing aesthetic ruin. If Sugimoto considered the remaining photos as complete and completed pieces of art (i.e., not as destroyed artworks) only because of their suddenly becoming seemingly old or their implication of incorporating a large amount of time, then I cannot entirely agree with his interpretation, since the works have not become older, they just show some superficial similarities with an actually and truly old work that had deteriorated due to its age. More strictly or “rigidly” we could even say that after the flooding in the studio they ceased to be works of art—or incomplete works of art as the artist saw them—or ceased to be the same works of art as they had been before, just like Canova’s plaster casts after the explosion, and just like the bombed cities or areas devastated by tsunamis. However, we can still do some justice to Sugimoto’s reading of his own pieces and to his desire to find value and aesthetic interest in the deterioration of the works: The pieces do illustrate and even manifest the power of Nature over humans and their artefacts and artworks. But the works only show this by sacrificing some of their own aesthetic qualities and perhaps even their very status as artworks. They do remain unfinished, and seen from this perspective will be even more incomplete than before. This will then report on the sublime power of Nature but not by completing the work, and not by the works’ incorporating this timeframe, but by their ever incompleteness. Through this approach they can become curious though still unfinished and incomplete art objects, and may also become noteworthy pieces even from an aesthetic point of view, however they will still not

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become complete and completed pieces. We cannot accept the possibility of reading the objects as finished artworks by and because of such destruction, but we can regard them as fragments of an unfinished project that through their very own ruination report on the power of Nature. The “poetics” of the fragment lies in helping us experience questions related to the possible connecting points between grades of age, decay, incompleteness, and aesthetic value, but we shall not forget that this alone will still neither finish nor complete the work. In the case of our next artist we again find a new category in the investigation and appearance of ruination of artworks as well as in the role and aesthetic status of deterioration and in the creation of new pieces of art. In the sculptures and assemblages of the UK-based Dutch artist Bouke de Vries, the fragment changes status—it will no longer be a broken piece that may merely serve as a reminder of the destroyed original, but it will become an autonomous element in its own right to be used in constructing a new original. The focal point will thus not be directed to the past aspect—or the aspect of pastness—in the element’s existence, or towards any sort of intention of restitution by gaining knowledge of the original through the surviving pieces of the fragments, but rather the interest is in the new and creative use of the available fragments. Curiously however, as we will see, in certain works this use of the material may still contain both implicit allusions and explicit references to the reused fragments’ origins, thus embedding the new work into a complex referential system of intertwined temporal segments. Therefore, we can trace the fascinating afterlife wherein the boundaries of the categories of genuine and new start to blur, and thus these concepts overlap to such a degree that already attempts to clearly describe the object and define its status will thrill the observer. In de Vries’s work, initially the fragment seems to lose its ability to testify to the original of which it has only partially survived as a last reminder, not because of the advanced grade of deterioration, but because it is not reconstructed to recreate that particular and actual lost original. His works are not oriented to utilise the fragment to reverse the process and present a more-or-less exact reconstruction of the destroyed original through this very reconstruction process. Instead, by highlighting the role of the fragment as reminder, it becomes an individual element, or, we could say, almost paradoxically, that the broken piece of the genuine original will be the new creative building material for a new original. All this will be particularly interesting if we also consider the curious personal aspect in de Vries’s activity: Besides being an artist, he is also a professional ceramic restorer and conservator. As such, in his practice he continuously oscillates between various types and forms of commitments. On the one hand, as a restorer he is required to completely respect an original and authentic aspect that the client wants him to restore so that the final

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object gets as close to the genuine state of the deteriorated original object as possible. On the other hand, as a creative artist he is free(d) from the limiting boundaries of the restorational usage of the surviving pieces, and can reuse them irrespective of the original object of which they were once part. But what about the aforementioned overlapping concepts of old and new original, and the partially hidden references that the works incorporate? Perhaps it is precisely this double career of the artist-restorer that puts his own works—despite being of course new creations—in some ways still in certain connections to an earlier one, or to a former set of objects. From among his works, some of the obvious examples include the piece titled Map of china of China (2017). As the title describes, de Vries has created the map of the country by assembling various broken eighteenth and nineteenth century porcelain plates. The connecting point between the new artwork and the original—or group of originals, of which fragments are used for the creation of this new original—is investigated on the basis of the well-known metonym, associating China with its great export product in the early Modern Age. However, the fragments here start an independent new life and become part of the new “fractured image”—to quote the title of the exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery where the work was shown. From the broken elements a new work

Figure 8.1  Bouke de Vries. Map of china of China, 2017. 18th and 19th century Chinese porcelain fragments and mixed media. 96 x 122 cm (37 3/4 x 48 1/8 in). Courtesy of Bouke de Vries/Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery.

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is created, where, even if we can still identify the singular constructing elements (i.e., the broken parts of china), they still become part of the unity of the novel artwork: The fragmented pieces of china as object make up a new map of China as subject of the work. If we look for parallel tendencies from the world of architectural ruins, obviously for the aforementioned reasons we cannot think of restoration or reconstruction. Bouke de Vries’s works are not rebuildings of the former piece, but they do reutilise some of their elements. Based on the complex relationship to the original, of which the fragment is a fragment, the closest architectural analogy could be the practice of spolia (i.e. when elements of an earlier building are taken and built in a new one). Well-known examples include capitals and even entire columns that had been taken from Constantinople and were then used to construct Venetian churches, or the eighteenth and nineteenth century practice of reutilising fragments for the creation of fake or artificial ruins. In these instances of spolia we can trace a very similar relationship between the fragment and its original, as the one found in de Vries’s new creations: The broken piece is an active and integral part of the new work of art, though it still bears some connection and direct or indirect reference to the original. Needless to say, the reasons behind the reuse of earlier elements in art and architecture are multiple, and therefore this reference to the deteriorated genuine can also result in different appearances and thus also in different readings. In architecture, spolia is often used to highlight a sense of continuation: The incorporation of the touchable, material elements from the previous building guarantees the continuity of the empire, kingdom, or ideology of the culture from which it is taken, providing visible and, importantly, aesthetic signs of the legitimacy of the inheritors—or, better to say, of the reutilisers—of the former material. With the use of the building material of the former period and culture, the commissioners of the new constructions can not only legitimise their power but are also capable of vindicating the sense of continuity between the past and present, and thus prove themselves to be on the same level of cultural achievement as their predecessors. However, these questions can become even more intricate. As Deborah Howard demonstrated through her profound analyses of the use of spolia in Venice, this practice can incorporate further complex issues and fascinating questions, concerning, among others, the ways and modes of display, reinterpretation, and assimilation of forms and motifs and their contribution to the novel architectural and cultural identity of the city.12 In our other example, the spolia used for the building of fake ruins in the eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape gardens served as a curious and visually pleasing form of authenticating the so-called ruin that was, obviously, an artificial or fake ruin. The embedding of a truly original fragment of an actual ruin into the purposefully and newly built artificial ruin was not

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only an aesthetic decision, but it also facilitated the observer’s meditation on the passage of time. As a strange mixture, it helped to “ferment” the fake ruin by disorientating the visitor who obviously knew the recentness, unnaturalness, and “fakeness” of the ruin but was still attracted to it and pleased by the thoughts of ephemerality of all human efforts that the observation of the artificial ruin incentivised in him. Needless to say, Bouke de Vries’s creations are not “fakes” in the above sense of the practice of spolia (i.e., when elements are embedded to ferment an inauthentic object into a seemingly genuine one). Rather, the contemporary artist uses the broken pieces not to fix but to create an original, occasionally enjoying the additional references that the origin of his building materials incorporate and make manifest. Through this creative process the elements of departure in Bouke de Vries’s works really become fragments in a sort of “noble” sense, remembering Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s approach: “A fragment is not only a broken part but a surviving part. . . . If, when I break a vase, I can collect all the pieces, I say to myself, ‘Let’s try and glue these pieces back together.’ But the disappearance of one piece (thrown inadvertently into the garbage) transforms the remaining pieces into fragments.”13 This defining feature, the surviving character is then highlighted, what’s more, reinforced and secured by the artist’s creative action of providing these fragments with a novel life. Toward the end of this chapter I would like to quote three further contemporary examples where the fragment and partly destroyed art and design work is not only a departure point with its own aesthetic status, but its very ruinousness is also investigated on a meta-level, hence becoming not only an authentic work of its own, but one that further questions the very phenomenon and process of fragmentation itself. These examples—and certainly more could be included from the oeuvre of other artists—show how the concept of fragmentation can be enlarged to incorporate such meanings. One Hand Cannot Clap Alone—the title of the Lebanese Mohamad-Said Baalbaki’s work (2010). Seeing the work alone might not, in the beginning, give too many clues to the observer to better aid understanding, and even reading the title can only partially help in the interpretation. While it is a nice piece in itself due to its sculptural qualities and thanks to its showing a kind of inspiring poetics in its fragmentariness, without knowing the context of the work, the curious art lover might miss a great deal of its aesthetic strength. Understanding the background will however open new layers of meaning in the work; only then can we learn that it is a replica of part of a monumental sculpture in Beirut’s Place des Martyrs that is dedicated to commemorate the Lebanese people executed during WWI. More accurately, it is not only a replica but a recast or substitution, since the left arm of one of the figures in the group on the monument is currently missing. The exhibited work thus becomes a sort of anti-torso, showing exactly that particular part that is

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Figure 8.2  Mohamad-Said Baalbaki. One Hand Cannot Clap Alone, 2010. Alloy cast sculpture, 30 x 90 x 15 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Image Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery.

normally missing in a classical torso. Or, we can say, it can become a symbol based on the proverb that serves as title of the work (One Hand Cannot Clap Alone), illustrating that celebration is not possible when even the signs and monuments of the celebratory memory can become damaged and fragmentary, as happened with the original monument in Beirut that still bears the signs of the Civil War of 1975–1990. The same monument, for which Mohamad-Said Baalbaki recreated the missing arm, serves as a departure point for the Palestinian Mona Hatoum. However, unlike Mohamad-Said Baalbaki, who created an anti-torso to illustrate the threat or even impossibility of remembrance amidst destruction, Mona Hatoum created a small replica out of porcelain biscuit, showing the current state of the original monument, meticulously including each and every bullet hole upon it. In this way, her work has a double reference—it is not by chance that it has the title Witness (2009)—in remembrance of the Lebanese victims of WWI and at the same time of the Lebanese Civil War. However, her statement goes even beyond this double reference and multiple-commemorative act: In this meta-historical monument she also indicates—not only through the porcelain material of the work—the utterly fragile character of memory itself, and hence the responsibility of art to keep our past alive so that it may better shape our future.

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Figure 8.3  Mona Hatoum. Witness, 2009. Porcelain biscuit, 49 x 24.3 x 24.3 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Image courtesy of Alexander & Bonin Gallery.

If we tried to follow our above pattern of approach and methodology of pairing fragmented artworks with forms of architectural ruination, in both of these last examples by Mohamad-Said Baalbaki and Mona Hatoum we would face difficulties in finding an appropriate analogy. It would be as if a war-torn city was later rebuilt as a similar-looking war ruin, which of course would not be pleasing, nor would it make sense. The aforementioned artificial ruins built in eighteenth century landscape gardens are not good parallels either, not only because they are fictional ruins and not based on actual sites and concrete “events of ruination,” but also because—unlike the Lebanese examples—the picturesque fake ruins in the landscape gardens always aim to pretend at natural ruination and offer its aesthetic quality to the impressed

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observer. Mohamad-Said Baalbaki’s and Mona Hatoum’s works are rather to be interpreted as conceptually driven reconstructions based on actual, ruined works, however, not reconstructions of the actual works themselves. Their aim is neither to restore the pieces nor to complete them but instead to show new aspects in the investigation of history, memory, and politics connected to the particular place and manifested in the partial destruction of a monument. The use of the fragment and investigation of fragmentation on a meta-level in order to refer to an original is not necessarily limited to fine art works—just to continue my method of investigating fine arts and architecture—even if, as a matter of fact, my last example is also curious precisely because of a change of status and categorical transposition. In the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennial the V&A exhibited—under the title A Ruin in Reverse—one of its recent acquisitions: A nine-metre-high section from the facade of the Robin Hood Gardens housing project in London, the preservation of this fraction through the purchase was decided a year before, just as the demolition of the estate began. The original buildings were dedicated to the concept of affordable housing in the 1970s, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, and less than fifty years later the demolishment decision was made to make space for a new real estate project. Hence a piece of architecture becomes a sculptural object. The fragment a memory of and reference to the no-longer-existing original edifice has thus become a musealised and monumental piece of art that we can conserve, transport, exhibit, even sell and buy. At the same time, it also becomes a monument to remember the decades of the living complex and the architects’ duty to provide sensible dwelling solutions for those with a limited budget, an issue that is perhaps more dire than ever on a global scale. From all this we can see that the analogy of architectural ruination can be used to better understand how certain aesthetic values can be maintained or even enhanced in fragmented or destroyed works, and how to account for their loss of status in other cases. The fragment’s polyvalent ability and capability to not only refer to the original but also to the process of fragmentation itself may thus result not only in changing and increasing its aesthetic quality but also in a changing of its status and category. We may remember Winckelmann’s words when highlighting the instructive force of the Belvedere Torso, despite its tragic fate that fractured it: “But art, which wishes to instruct us further, recalls us from these sad reflections and shows us how much is still to be learned from that which remains, and with what kind of eye the artist must look at it.”14 Hence the title of this chapter, “Eulogy to the Fragment,” indicates that a fragment or a (former) piece of art or architecture that we inherited in a fragmented form is not simply an object whose only partial survival we shall mourn, but we also have numerous occasions to praise its ability for revival and renewal, for new departures, and for providing us with new and complex aesthetic pleasures.

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NOTES 1. Pac Pobric, “Why the Process of Painting Never Ends,” The Art Newspaper 295, (November 2017): 32. 2. Arthur C. Danto, “Embodiment, Art History, Theodicy, and the Abuse of Beauty: A Response to My Critics,” Inquiry 48, no. 2 (April 2005): 192. (Italics in the original). 3. See more on the history and dating of the photo series in: Mario Guderzo and Alberto Prandi, eds., Antonio Canova: Art Ravaged in the Great War (Milan: Silvana, 2015), especially 113. 4. Alberto Prandi, “Tragic Icons,” in Antonio Canova: Art Ravaged in the Great War, eds. Mario Guderzo and Alberto Prandi (Milan: Silvana, 2015), 23–31. 5. Prandi, “Tragic Icons,” 27. 6. Julia Höner, “Bodies in Ruin,” in Contemporary Ruins, eds. Julia Schleis et al. (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2017), 23. 7. See some of the works are reproduced in: Guderzo and Prandi, eds., Antonio Canova. 8. Quoted on the Gallery’s website. “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Acts of God,” Fraenkel Gallery, accessed August 12, 2019, https​://fr​aenke​lgall​ery.c​om/ex​hibit​ions/​acts-​ of-go​d. 9. More details on his technique in Otto Kurz, Falsi e falsari (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1996), 81–89, especially 85–86. 10. Zoltán Somhegyi, “Shortcuts to Nostalgia? On the Attempts of the Aestheticisation of the Past,” in Max Ryynänen and Zoltán Somhegyi, Learning from Decay. Essays on the Aesthetics of Architectural Dereliction and Its Consumption (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), 43–54. 11. Thomas J. McCormick, Ruins as Architecture: Architecture as Ruins (Dublin, NH: William L. Bauhan, 1999). 12. Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100–1500 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 13. Jacquelin Lichtenstein, “The Fragment. Elements of a Definition,” in The Fragment: An Incomplete History, ed. William Tronzo (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009), 119. 14. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Description of the Torso in the Belvedere in Rome,” in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, ed. and trans. Curtis Bowman, (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001), vol. 1, xviii.

Chapter 9

Ruins as Context and Scenery Temporal Interference as Source of Aesthetic Experience

Visitors to the 2013 edition of the Moving Image Art Fair were perhaps surprised in the beginning but soon enough definitely started to enjoy the presentation. The fair is a specialised event for video art works, held in different cities, where enthusiasts can enjoy the various forms and techniques of the medium. In 2013 it was organised in an old, abandoned warehouse along the Thames in London, just a few minutes’ walk from the Tate Modern. In order to see the pieces, the video-art lovers had to go through the myriad levels and halls of the building—some works occupied an entire (though smaller) room, while others shared a larger hall. Hence, when seeing the individual videos, the visitors necessarily discovered the dilapidated building in conjunction with the works. It can thus be interpreted as a curious interplay of the works with their environment, a double or even triple exploration: Besides enjoying the qualities of the exhibited video works, one could also discover the beauty of the fading building. What’s more, and here is the triple part of the exploration, a special aesthetic experience could be gained by the very interference between these two (i.e., the works and their unusual environment). In this way, the passage from one exhibition space to another room in the same building was not a simple move and served in part to clear the visitors’ minds in preparation for the next video art work. This created a much more active contribution to the whole experience on the part of exhibition visitors; an inspiring invitation to reflect on the connection between the art pieces and their hosting space. For example, the digital works were placed in quite a strong dichotomy against the truly tangible materiality of the place, where this materiality was in fact observable and one could sense it through the very crumbling of the old space. A curious temporal intersection arose between the original age of the building, as understood from its style and design, the time of its decay evident in and through observing the signs of its dereliction, the 165

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Figure 9.1  Interior photograph from the 2013 edition of the Moving Image Art Fair, London. Courtesy of Moving Image.

contemporaneity of the artworks, the “running” time of the works themselves, and the passing time of the visit (i.e., the time spent in the building to see the fair). This mixture of parallel temporal perspectives sensed by the visitor has definitely contributed to the complex art experience. Already from this first quoted example it becomes evident that here I would like to concentrate on a significantly less frequently researched question connected to both the aesthetic experience in general and to the experiencing of ruins and specific artworks in particular. Therefore, my present area of investigation in this chapter is not the question of how ruins appear in other artworks, or where ruins become medium for new artworks (i.e., when the decayed edifice’s still-surviving partial body would serve as primary material for other works of architecture). Instead, I would like to focus on just the contrary, in other words, when the ruin or ruinous building completely changes, comes out from the realm of art, and temporarily hosts art. Rather than a mere subject in an artwork or the pure material for another new piece of art, the ruin will itself become the special spatial “frame,” the place, environment, and context for the presented pieces from other branches of art. This will undeniably become a curious case worth analysing when the unused and decayed edifice seems to acquire a temporary new life—typically for a few days or even for a scant couple of hours—to act as the active context (i.e., scenery for a wide range of other forms of creative expression, including not only the aforementioned video works but also painting, photography, or sculpture).

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The question also becomes compelling because recently we can see a growing tendency to organise such presentations—including exhibitions, art fairs, biennials, concerts, dance performances, etc.—among ruins and decayed spaces. However, considered in conjunction with its popularity, the further analyses of the aesthetic functioning and consequences of this mode of exhibiting are still relatively less researched. The phenomenon itself does get mentioned in specialised historians’ and theoreticians’ work or in the theoretical research of exhibiting and performance,1 although one can often feel that the aesthetic significance and consequences of the changing modes of experience deserves to be investigated in more detail. From among the scholars dedicating attention to the phenomena we can mention Tim Edensor, who surveys various intersections of ruins and art or ruined environments and forms of creative processes pursued in them, however, in his analyses and examples he focuses more on the instances of the creative act and how the space triggers and invites artistic activities—similarly to, for example, Joanne Hudson, who analyses derelict urban environment as spaces for graffiti or writers’ source of inspiration2—and less on the aesthetic consequences of when such a space hosts artworks. In his 2005 book titled Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, Materiality he argues: “Ruins are unpoliced spaces in which a host of artistic endeavours may take place, blurring the distinctions between practices deemed transgressive and rational.”3 After this definitionstatement he examines some of the forms of art that one can often find in ruins and decaying spaces, especially in an abandoned home or a derelict industrial complex. Among these he puts graffiti in first place, the ruinous environment being a primary place for it not only due to the large available surfaces but also because the (semi)illegal activity can be pursued more easily in a less surveilled area compared to more regulated urban spaces. Besides graffiti, Edensor mentions the practice of creating assemblages in such derelict areas, since the decaying matter and the very experience of its materiality itself truly invite even nonprofessional artists to play with the available source. After these he turns his attention to some actual examples of partial reutilisation of abandoned spaces, including a project by the Sozo Collective in Smethwick, Birmingham, temporarily occupying a not-in-use-anymore industrial space, where the partial restoration of the building and the producing of artworks on the spot were in tandem, resulting in an exhibition in the space itself. Edensor’s assessment of the 2003 project and exhibition then highlights some of the important points that underpin the aesthetic relevance of such practices: Works tried to convey the physicalities and social relations embedded in the working conditions of previous workers, they utilised found materials to forge sculptures and pictures, and they created works that dramatically clashed with the ruined industrial space. . . . The multiplicities of the ruin were creatively explored by these artists to collectively produce a multi-faceted exhibition

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which explicitly drew upon the materialities, spatialities and histories of a site to provide a dramatic contrast to conventional kinds of display and the venues in which they occur.4

Following these considerations, we can see that the key lies in the unusual and surprising relationship between the presented or performed artworks and the hosting location, the dichotomies in the circumstances of showing pieces of art in the crumbling locale can add further layers to the meaning of the art piece—whether created on the spot or earlier elsewhere—and at the same time the practice can also put the derelict site’s history in question, scrutinising its former functions, reasons for decay, and even possibilities of and suggestion for its renewal and/or survival. Despite the aforementioned fact that the topic is relatively less researched compared to other aspects of the aesthetic potential of ruins, the phenomenon itself is not entirely new. We can find earlier examples of utilising ruins and old and abandoned spaces as hosting places for other works, events, and performances. From descriptions and pictorial sources we can reconstruct the active interest of eighteenth and nineteenth century art aficionados who found entertainment by enjoying torchlight visits and night processions in the Coliseum—a possible parallel to the so-called light shows in our days. The spectacular and often quasi-mystical experience of seeing the ruins of the Coliseum in such way had then influenced the appreciation, presentation, and vitalisation (or revitalisation) of ruins. For example, in the case of Carl Gustav Carus, such a visit could inspire both the way in which the ruins would appear in an actual painting and how the painter experienced a certain form of harmony between Nature and the ruin itself. Carus visited the city and participated in a torchlight night visit to the Coliseum in 1828, which resulted not only in a Romantic painting with strong moonlight showing the amphitheatre with hermits (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Galerie Neue Meister) but also his often-quoted exclamation found in his diary: “I have never seen a human work that seemed to me so much more like the work of Nature as this enormous construction.”5 On certain occasions these served political motives, for example, in 1849 when celebrating the “Birthday of Rome.” This was the first proper and most authentic celebration of the event, as we can learn from Marxiano Melotti’s survey. Earlier, in the first half of the nineteenth century, this festivity was rather carnivalesque and mainly celebrated by the foreigners living in Rome: “Especially before the Italian unification, Rome, with its crumbling ruins and its unique rural and pastoral views, depicted by the artists of the Grand Tour, was an area particularly suited to stage the para-initiatory activities which were part of proto-Romantic and Romantic cultural tourism. In fact, the city was a sort of large theme park or, rather, a place that hosted the set of

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complex functions that are now concentrated in theme parks.”6 In the celebrations of 1849 however, in search of a new identity for the city and a new content for the festivity itself, the Coliseum was glamorously lit and torchlight processions took place. We can have some visual impressions of these modern celebrations in a series of works created from 1845 onwards by Ippolito Caffi, whose work was mentioned in chapter 2. As a painter whose work and life is connected to the Italian Risorgimento, he, among others, focused on the dramatic effect caused by the Bengal lights, in the colours of the Italian flag, or, as John A. Pinto noted: “The patriotic colors of the Bengal lights vest the ancient arena with a distinctly modern political identity, suggesting that the might and authority of ancient Rome will be revived in a newly unified Italy.”7 Thus the vivid celebration of a modern Italy by the crowd gathered in the Coliseum is put in the context of the classical ruins whose power is still manifest despite their ruinous form. At the same time as this series of events from the history of politically loaded presentations and “uses” of the night view of the Coliseum, we shall also add the well-known episode of Hitler’s night visit to the site during his state visit in Rome in May 1938, where—as among others, Julia Hell and Christopher Woodward analysed—the dramatic illumination and sophisticated mise-en-scène, for which forty-five thousand lamps and over 150 km electric cables were used, put the antique ruin in the service of modern political purposes and of imperial propaganda.8 Already these forerunners and earlier examples show that the tendency of using a ruined scenery as a context—even if sometimes in a heavily loaded political context—for artistic events, celebrations, and tourist attractions is not entirely new, though it definitely seems to have increased in the last couple of decades. One of the reasons for this growing interest could in fact be the ability of the particular environment to provide the observer with a singular and novel form of experiencing the presented or shown artworks. The unusual location stands out from other possible environments that the visitor might expect, and hence the presented works of art will also have a special appearance, in no small part due to their unexpected context. This will make the visitor become more conscious and attentive to the not-automatically-evident relationship of the piece and its environment that will contribute to better understanding of the work itself—aesthetically a very rewarding phenomenon one can experience, especially when seeing a well-known work of art or enjoying a very familiar theatrical or musical piece in such an unconventional venue. In order to better appreciate the nature of this complex effect and experience, as well as the aesthetically fruitful interference between artwork and exhibition space, we first need to observe the particular part (i.e. the hosting place), the ruin itself, and, especially, what, if anything, is modified in the case of appearing as scenery for other forms of art? Without repeating my previous considerations in regard to this issue in depth, I just want to briefly

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refer back to the three elements or criteria of the ruination process, analysed in more detail in chapter 1, that I think can define a “proper” ruin’s existence: functionlessness, absence, and time. A ruin lacks and/or has lost any sort of practical function and purpose—until it has done so, it cannot be a real ruin, perhaps only an old edifice in need of maintenance. Absence is also a defining criterion; the ever-growing void, the shaping of the negative space, the gradually becoming incomplete through the missing pieces show the constant ruination of the original construction. Lastly, the temporal framework that allows for the natural elements to unintentionally destroy the left-alone building impresses the observer, making us think of the sublime amount of time aesthetically manifested in the ruins that so profoundly surmounts our own given time. Among ruins we can “aesthetically” encounter not only the power of Nature but also the passing of time. But what happens with these criteria when the ruin becomes a hosting space for other forms of art? Naturally “absence” remains—even if the remnants of the former building appear as a temporary context for an exhibition of artworks or the performing of musical and theatrical pieces, it is not rebuilt, physically it will not become less incomplete, and in the visitors’ appreciation it keeps its decayed appearance. As for the loss of function, it might be tempting to state that in such cases the ruins’ functionlessness changes (i.e., they attain a function when they appear as the context for other branches of art). Nevertheless it is not necessarily and entirely the case: If ruins did get a proper new function (e.g., as official “exhibition spaces”), then they would cease to be ruins. If we insist that a ruin has a new function—for example when creating the conditions of properly hosting such events, including redeveloping the site, making it safe to visit, adding all kinds of facilities, seats, restrooms, and cafeteria—then we are already at the questions of renovation and restoration (i.e., at the point when the ruin is not a ruin anymore but gets the chance of a second life through this very reutilisation). Considering our third criterion, time, the temporal aspects are also “constant,” in the sense that even if the former building will appear as a temporary context for an art event, the original edifice will maintain its ever-growing temporal distance from us as contemporary viewers and visitors. Hence the temporal framework of the former building that separates the edifice’s original life from our own will remain, and the time of this decay continuously increases. What’s more, this special temporal perspective will contribute to the particularity of the total phenomena of ruins when they appear as host and context for artworks and events: The signs of the passing time mark the building and, at the same time, the signs of Nature’s interaction upon the decaying construction (i.e., Nature working in time also modifies our experience and experiencing of the shown or performed works of art). Having seen the general features of ruins and also that these do not particularly change even if the ruin appears as a context for other works, we can turn our attention to the aforementioned interference between the works and the

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space itself. Through this interference, what was previously taken for granted (i.e., the hosting space) will be questioned; it will not be obvious and transparent or invisible anymore. In many cases we do not “see” the space when observing or enjoying the exhibited or performed artworks, but now, due to the ruin’s particular appearance, we are inevitably compelled to take this aspect into consideration also. As the shown art pieces will not appear or will not get performed in an environment where we are used to perceiving them, the space interferes with the pure perception and possible aesthetic appreciation of the works. Curiously however this does not only result in the works’ standing out from their context, but the context itself is just as “outstanding,” and this leads to the apparent questioning of the relationship between the work and the hosting space. Hence, here we have a tendency in which the two components mutually reinforce the aesthetic strengths and potentials of the other: The presented pieces of art gain more notice through the particular location, and at the same time this also increases our focus on the specificities as well as on the peculiar qualities of the space itself. Novel aspects of the environment can become visible, and through the exhibiting process the visitors can discover such qualities that, without such a juxtaposition, may easily have remained hidden and unnoticed. This mutual reinforcing (i.e., when the contrasting of contemporary pieces in an ancient and ruined environment aims to disclose further qualities of both the site and the piece) was one of the intentions behind the organisation of an exhibition of Sir Antony Gormley’s sculptures, for example, exhibited amidst the ancient ruins on the island of Delos. As Demetrios Athanasoulis, head of the department of Antiquities in the Cyclades summarised it: “There is no past without the present, and we live in times where there are any number of windows through which to view the past. . . . To be limited to the academic reading of any site’s historical significance is rather old-fashioned. . . . It took me some time to convince people of our goal to offer a new way of interpreting our relations with antiquities through artworks that can act as a catalyst to facilitate diverse readings of the past.”9 Just as we saw above in my first example of the Moving Image art fair in London, the presentation of the works will become an experimentation with context: On the one hand it is a certain sort of decontextualisation, and on the other hand also recontextualisation. The pieces are taken from the typical locus of their presentation and put in another space. However, this novel contextualisation of the artworks does not mean depriving them of any of their former qualities or making the ability to experience them aesthetically more difficult. Just the contrary, the play with the contextualisation, the novel setting of the art pieces, the emphasis on the special features of the decaying place, and the negating of the straightforward neutrality of this hosting space will all contribute to the experience and better understanding of the pieces. Let’s see, with the help of a few actual examples, what exactly it is that we can learn about the works by encountering them while presented in this mode.

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Experiencing works of art in such a context is truly a multisensory experience: adding or providing further senses to the perception of the pieces. When watching the video works in the dilapidated warehouse in London, the dusty smell of the ageing walls provided an olfactory contribution that one cannot experience when watching the same pieces in a well-kept museum or in a trendy contemporary art gallery. The same applies to the curious auditory experience among ruins, for example the sounds caused by the cracking floor and stairs weeping under our bodyweight while climbing a just-about-tocrumble nineteenth century villa in Büyükada, where, as part of the 14. Istanbul Biennial of 2015, a video by Ed Atkins was shown. In a similar way, the night birds’ sonic interaction and the chilly temperature are (while perhaps uninvited although unavoidable) additions to an open-air concert amidst the ruins. These phenomena provide the sensations of such elements that are normally meticulously excluded from the sound-proof and constantly climatecontrolled modern performing halls. Hence, it is somewhat comparable to what Tim Edensor described in an article when analysing the discovery of the—at least in the beginning—unfamiliar sense experiences while visiting decaying industrial sites: “In the ruin, the dissolution of sensual familiarity and the advent of sensual surprises may be initially overwhelming, repulsive or arresting, but it also has the potential to provide a stimulating experience by this distinction from the familiar. . . . The strong sensations experienced in the industrial ruin are repellent but also delightful, for they provide unexpected pleasures, imaginings and desires.”10 The different forms and increased amounts of senses involved( i.e., the multisensory experience that is created through the unusual environment becomes important not only in itself but also because it contributes to the experience of how I sense myself—my own self—when encountering the artwork). This approaching of the piece of art through such uncommon circumstances—sometimes even in partly dangerous environments, uneven levels, rupturing floors, dirt, dust, and rust of industrial waste, etc.—will turn the aesthetic experiencing of art into a self-reflective experience. Throughout the newly arisen senses called upon in the process of experience, the work might easily gain more sense. This is aided by the fact that investigating its meaning, qualities, and effects is done under the influence of such sensory experiences that are generally not triggered in traditional museum contexts, or at least not as strongly or directly, and not resulting in such conscious investigations of the experience itself. And it will be these further aspects of our considerations—urged by the inclusion of new senses while experiencing the work—that will help us pave the way for new interpretations of the presented works. So far we have seen how the inclusion of more senses can enrich the experience of the work. However, apart from the senses, or besides the sensuous

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level, we can identify another area of interference wherein the ruinous environment can significantly contribute to the better understanding and opening up of further layers in the works, on a rather cognitive or intellectual level. It is the case that apart from the random aesthetics of the decayed building, its history—especially the history of its very decay—becomes crucial in the interpretation of the works. From the many possible examples, let me quote some from different parts of the world, where we can also see the different grades of political engagement in this approach, too (i.e., what sort of reflections the conscious choice of the ruined location can contain). The two-millennia-old archaeological site of Baalbek in Lebanon provided the impressive location for some of the works in the exhibition titled The Silent Echo, curated by Karina El Helou and organised by the French nonprofit organisation STUDIOCUR/ART, in 2016. The exhibition, however, did not simply play with the possibilities of juxtaposing temporal perspectives (i.e., placing some of the contemporary pieces amidst the remnants of the magnificent Antique temples and the archaeological site museum), but through the works it actively explored the actuality of the site in and for the current discourse on the relevance of heritage. According to the curator Karina El Helou’s intention: “The silent archaeological findings are echoes of a lost time, while contemporary artworks echo the archaeology displayed in the Museum.”11 Thus through this double transmission—investigating the past through the referencing of some actual works and constructions from the past—the exhibited contemporary pieces are building upon the historical material. In certain cases this metaphor of building upon the material could be taken literally, as in the work of Ai Weiwei, who brought over and rearranged the foundations of a traditional Chinese house that had been demolished due to the rapid modern expansion of the city where it stood. Another work by Cynthia Zaven not only referred to but directly involved the ruined space in her multi-channel sound installation: Twelve loudspeakers arranged in a circle in the middle of the Bacchus temple circulated a musical composition, but throughout the unfolding, the piece became disordered and then reestablished. The different permutations of the installation, in Kaelen WilsonGoldie’s words “all induce a kind of vertigo through mechanical and epochal time, history in free fall.”12 And this is exactly where and why the context of the actual ruin, with its two-millennium history, was needed to demonstrate the dichotomy between the attempts to measure the passing of time and our own perception of it. Compared to the subtle references as well as aesthetic and philosophical questions triggered by the exhibited works in the Baalbek exhibition, another show in Baghdad referred to the forced, sudden, and cruel destruction in an ad hoc exhibition space more directly. The Al-Hadi shopping centre in the Karrada district of the Iraqi capital was destroyed by a suicide truck bomb, killing

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more than three hundred people on July 3, 2016.13 As a way of expressing solidarity with the victims, the Iraqi-Canadian artist Riyadh Hashim invited fellow artists to participate in a pop-up show organised in the debris of the commercial hub. Even if the show on August 30, 2016, was visible only for a few hours before the police—despite the previous verbal permission of the mayoralty of Baghdad—closed it down, many people could see it, including two boys from the neighbourhood who helped with the installation, and who had lost many of their friends in the attack. Especially for them, as well as for other visitors who regularly used the mall and knew many of the victims, the exhibition and its location had a particular significance, and the pieces would have surely appeared differently in such a context, than in a neutral, safe, and intact exhibition space. The shown works of art and installations had references to the actual tragic event and some of the site-specific pieces powerfully occupied the space that, apart from hosting the brief exhibition, also directly influenced the creation and perception of the works. As the organiser Riyadh Hashim recalled “When I first walked into the building, I felt the souls of the victims still floating in mid-air.”14 A statement that at first may remind us of the haikyo-explorer’s observation quoted in chapter 5 (“I think there are ghosts everywhere”), although the tragicality of the experience of the visitors and artists of the Baghdad show seems incomparable to the more entertainment-like urbex experience where the personal involvement in the previous functioning life of the location is less direct—especially when exploring the now abandoned home of a stranger. Naturally, in the example from Baghdad, unlike Baalbek, it is not a classical ruin that provides the context for the show but the sudden destruction of a space that did not have time to become an aesthetic ruin. The artists nevertheless still chose to stage the works directly there to invite the visitors not only to see the works but also to think about their connection with the space loaded with the memory of the horrific event. Despite the geographical and temporal differences, we can cite another example where the circumstances of presenting artworks had a similarly strong connection with the derelict space. Asja Mandić examined the history of contemporary art exhibitions during the war in Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995; especially the question of how the special location (i.e., the debris of former buildings as hosting spaces for exhibitions and site-specific installations) added further layers of interpretation when perceiving the works: Engaging with these sites was a point of departure for most of the artists; it both challenged the content of their work and provided a means of expression, as they moved away from mainly formal considerations to socially engaged art. . . . Exposure to great physical risk and direct confrontation with death became the driving force of their artistic action, for which they risked their lives. . . . The

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building [the post office of the city] lost its practical use but through the artists’ intervention and visitors’ presence, it became a site of memory, commemorating the death of many civilians and the death of a civilisation. It became a monument charged with heavy symbolic meaning.15

Hence the interpretation and perception of the works in the exhibition lead to an existential experience, in which both the production and enjoyment of artworks had become at the same time a life-risking activity as well as depository and guarantee of resistance and the survival of human culture, despite the inhumane circumstances. The exhibitions of Baghdad and Sarajevo clearly indicate that within such contexts of presenting artworks, they can easily become inextricably connected to the space and its memory, in particular to the modes and reasons underlying its destruction, which makes the visitors ruminate on the history of the place and reinforces the community to whom the space matters. All this then illustrates that the deliberate choice of untraditional venues for art events can have—and in certain cases we can even state it stronger: should have— connections, direct or indirect references, and even some kind of engagement to the history of the decay of the location itself. It is an imperative that often has its own challenges and even controversies, as Mary Elizabeth Anderson claimed when describing her creative and experimental education practice with her students in the “ruinscapes” of Detroit: By clearing these sites of refuse and seeking to cleanse the soil, replacing brownfields with patches of wild flowers, murals, performance venues and informal social spaces, participants are seeking to cultivate a more attractive, welcoming environment for those who live in and around the ruined site. And yet, on the other hand, these creative interventions do not exist outside the economic and social structures that have produced the very environmental problems that they wish to abate. In fact, they are intimately interwoven.16

Nevertheless, the examination of the reasons, modes, and results of decay as well as—especially in the case of architectural decay caused by sudden war or terrorism-related human aggression or by massive economic decline—the suggestions that such artistic activities, exhibitions, and performances can offer that illuminate possible ways toward reconstruction, regaining hope, and recreating a responsible community are not simply useful but truly essential. Based on all the above considerations, to answer our question about the reasons for the popularity of these sorts of art events in or among noble classical ruins, derelict industrial buildings, or war-torn rubble, we can say that their attraction lies in the fact that completely new ways of aesthetic and intellectual experience can be born here. New possibilities arise in the aesthetic

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“working” and effects of the shown pieces of art that enrich the experience. The encounter with multiple temporal perspectives and the intrusion of such sensory stimuli (sonic, olfactory, etc.) that are normally excluded from both traditional and high-tech contemporary spaces of exhibition and performance can inspire, sometimes even overwhelm, the observer and incentivise the viewer not only to open up to new readings of the presented works but, on a meta level, even to meditate on this very increase of senses and meanings. In other words, visitors can ruminate not only on the genuine qualities of the artwork, not only on the further meanings the shown piece can attain in and through the particular location, and not only on the possible reasons why the work was chosen to be presented in that very location but also on how these added layers are constituted through the presentation process. We may remember here Sophie Sleigh-Johnson’s observation on the temporalities of ruins: “The meaning of the ruin today is not found in its capacity to simulate the past, but in existing as a threshold between varying temporalities, a presence of an absence. The ruin is in a constant state of becoming, a process where nothing is determined in advance.”17 Adding to this we can argue that it is precisely this temporal flux as well as the unpredictability of the hosting environment that makes derelict architecture a fascinating place for presentations, where the forms of perception and aesthetic experiences can become just as novel and incalculable as the mutilation of the hosting environment. What’s more, all this can better explain why we are much less inspired by the Disneyfication of culture, offering pre-chewed aesthetic experiences through fake recontextualisations; for example, when eighteenth century or carnivaldressed musicians play the most popular Vivaldi excerpts in neatly restored and deconsecrated Venetian churches. This artificially simulated recontextualisation seems a mere fake retrieval of the original temporal context of the work—a necessarily incomplete imagination and unsuccessful re-imagination of a possible past. On the other hand, through the decontextualisation and recontextualisation of exhibited or performed artworks in unusual locations, among ruins or even rubble as context and scenery, we can enjoy the encounter with different temporal perspectives aesthetically manifested in a multisensory art experience. NOTES 1. See for example the exciting thematic issue on “Ruins and Ruination” of Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 20, no. 3 (2015). 2. Joanne Hudson, “The Affordance and Potentialities of Derelict Urban Spaces,” in Ruin Memories: Materiality, Aesthetics, and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, eds. Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir (London: Routledge, 2014), 193–214.

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3. Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 33. 4. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 34–35. 5. Carl Gustav Carus, Reise durch Deutschland, Italien und die Schweiz, im Jahre 1828, Bd. 1. (Leipzig, 1835), 168. Quoted in: Andreas Dehmer, ed., Italienische Landschaft der Romantik. Malerei und Literatur (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2016), 56. The painting is reproduced on p. 55. See also Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick, Gerd Spitzer, and Bernhard Maaz, eds., Carl Gustav Carus. Natur und Idee, Katalog Volume (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 117–18. 6. Marxiano Melotti, “The Last Gladiators: History, Power, and Re-enactment,” L’École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, L’Atelier international des usages publics du passé, June 16, 2015, http:​//usa​gespu​blics​dupas​se.eh​ess.f​r/wp-​conte​nt/up​ loads​/site​s/7/2​015/0​6/MEL​OTTI-​artic​olo-E​HESS-​14-ma​ggio-​low.p​df. 7. John A. Pinto, City of the Soul. Rome and the Romantics (New York: Morgan Library & Museum, 2016), 86. 8. See Christopher Woodward, Tra le rovine: Un viaggio attraverso la storia, l’arte e la letteratura (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2008; orig. 2001), 33; and Julia Hell, “Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep?” in Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 182–84. 9. Quoted in Helena Smith, “Antony Gormley is the New Kid on the Block in Ancient Greece,” The Guardian, May 4, 2019, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ar​tandd​ esign​/2019​/may/​04/an​tony-​gorml​ey-de​los-i​sland​-anci​ent-g​reece​-new-​works​. 10. Tim Edensor, “Sensing the Ruin,” The Senses and Society 2, no. 2 (2007), 226, 230. 11. Quoted from p. 3 of the pdf version of the catalogue of the exhibition, available on the website of STUDIOCUR/ART, accessed August 12, 2019, http:​//www​ .stud​iocur​art.c​om/fi​les/c​atalo​gue_p​df/3_​CATAL​OGUE-​The-S​ilent​-Echo​-The-​Silen​ t-Ech​o.pdf​. 12. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “Temple Talk,” Artforum, October 11, 2016, https​:// ww​w.art​forum​.com/​diary​/kael​en-wi​lson-​goldi​e-at-​the-s​ilent​-echo​-in-b​aalbe​k-640​09. 13. Hadani Ditmars, “Baghdad Pop-Up Show Rises from the Ruins. Artists Restage Exhibition First Seen in Bombed-Out Shopping Centre,” The Art Newspaper 284 (2016 November): 12. 14. Ditmars, “Baghdad Pop-Up Show,” 12. 15. Asja Mandić, “The Formation of a Culture of Critical Resistance in Sarajevo,” Third Text 25, no. 6 (2011): 726, 728, 730. 16. Mary Elizabeth Anderson, “Moving, Writing, Failing: Spatialities of Ambivalence in Detroit’s Ruinscapes,” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 17, no. 2 (May 2012): 194. 17. Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, “Ruin Hermeneutic,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 20, no. 3 (2015): 174.

AFTERLIFE

Chapter 10

Mall with Lamassu Imitated Decay and Aesthetic Education in Thematic Commercial Centres

The question today is not “what to shop” and not even “to shop or not to shop,” but something more like, “what is there to do other than shop”? More precisely “What other sources and forms of experience await me when and while shopping?” This dilemma arises from the fact that by now malls and shopping centres are noticeably more complex than their predecessors—and, in fact, according to their investors and builders they do need to be different and more comprehensive if they want to successfully avoid facing a similar fate as the one we saw in chapter 6. Apart from the simple and straightforward action of acquiring a needed product or consumer good, today there are plenty of further “added” elements in a shopping mall that we cannot really find in the first generation of these commercial centres from the 1950s and 1960s. It has become commonplace for malls to be so much more than “simple” shopping places. They combine the need and desire of shopping with other leisure activities, preferably pointing to and attempting to satisfy any sort of requirements and wishes the visitors and customers may have. As Daniel Schulz pointed out in a survey on the architecture of malls: Today’s shopping centres are upscale places which provide unique experiences for everyone, old and young, singles and families. The strategy of how to lure shoppers changed during the last past years, today a shopping centre is a multifunctional place which offers not only shopping. . . . With the economic development and the improvement of living standards, consumption no longer means shopping with a purpose for consumers only, but the experience and enjoyment during the shopping.1

One of the tactics used to keep consumers inside the mall for as long as possible—knowing very well that the more time one spends in the commercial 181

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centre the more money one spends too—is to offer a great, impressive, and almost overwhelming variety: variety of activities and variety of the range and level of services and entertainment offered. This also explains the mall managers’ astute selection of shops and their placing within the centre too: The retail offerings vary in their price and quality of product, obviously with the aim that practically anyone can find an item that fits her resources in the subtle proportion of quality and price—when one needs a pair of trousers or a new teapot, she can choose an easily affordable though less delicate massproduced item or an acutely designed, branded fashion product, since they are both available in the same mall, though in different shops, levels, and zones. Not surprisingly however, variety describes not only the selection of retail shops but also the other possible ways of passing the time. Since malls provide various forms and also diverse levels and standards of entertainment and experience, many of them attempt to offer a truly all-encompassing assortment. And, as we saw above, this assortment characterises not only the range and sorts of entertainment but also their quality. For instance, one of the basic non-shopping services offered in malls is food; the visitor can have a broad array of culinary experiences that ranges from basic and affordable fast food in the food courts to fine dining in rather pricy, elegant, and highend restaurants. If I finished my considerations at this point, it might seem like a straightforward success story: A consumer hub where practically every possible commercial, entertainment, and leisure desire can be satisfied, with the added value of a wide price range for each to select from. This could then seem like a possible way out of the cul-de-sac of the classical malls, which were so often found to be a dead end, as we saw earlier. However, as is relatively well known by now, this development of commercial centres is not as directly triumphant as it may seem, and many cannot happily welcome the latest trends and developments in mall design and function(ing). One of the most striking and almost “frightening” results is their engulfing tendency: These complex shopping-plus-entertainment centres efficiently overtake and substitute the position and role of more traditional town centres. That exact part of the classical urban pattern that normally gives towns their very essence starts to fade quickly, as those characteristics and special features of the town that are the most visible and sensible (i.e., what makes the spirit of a particular city unique), drawing in visitors to visit a town, are consumed. Curiously however—as we will soon see—this overtaking of the classical city centre by the mall does not necessarily mean that the new centre of urban pattern in the form of a mall is physically placed somewhere else (e.g., in the suburb or in the sprawl). In more recent developments it can appear right in the old town centre, too, in a way overwriting the previous historic parts. In order to appreciate this recent phenomenon, it is worth recalling a

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brief overview of the history of malls and urban concepts connected to them, so that we can better understand these changes and challenges in the contemporary urban pattern. The birth and spread of malls initially went hand in hand with the fashion of suburban living and the rapid growth of the sprawl. Already in the middle of the twentieth century we can see the increasing fashionability of living outside of the historic city centre. What’s more—at least at the beginning— the time spent commuting did not seem to be too high a price to be paid for having a suburban life and lifestyle, with all its apparent advantages, including, among others, living in less crowded spaces, the illusion of being “closer to Nature,” preferably with one’s own garden. The lure of suburban living grew significantly when certain commodities and facilities mushroomed for the benefit of the burgeoning middle-class inhabitants, of which the mall is definitely one of the most important examples. The reasons for the immediate popularity of the first malls were manifold, including the fact that they provided the opportunity to find any sort of required commercial goods close to the (suburban) living space without having to either stay in or reenter the old city centre after work or during the weekend. Plus, their ease of reachability was facilitated even more by the steadily growing number of personal vehicles and the infrastructural investments in the road network, especially in the newly developed areas. The first malls did not focus too much on special architectural features, typically being one unique block containing smaller individual shops. Nevertheless, this seemed to be sufficient for their early popularity, and the overall phenomenon of consumerism grew at such a pace that it started to overtake other forms of classical sociocultural engagement. Shopping became not only a necessity but also a primary form of entertainment, with the obvious consequence of incentivising the feeling of having to buy everything on display, even if most of the “shopped” goods were (and are) not necessarily needed. The initial success of malls—which brought with it the positive financial consequence of heavy tax incomes for local municipalities—dwarfed the drawbacks of their developments, including the quickly falling number of customers in the old but small shops in the downtowns, whose owners and shopkeepers could not efficiently compete with the malls’ variegated offerings of products and of “shopping experience.” Actually, in this case history seems to repeat itself: The tension between the privately owned shops or small-scale family businesses and the giant department stores arose as a serious challenge in the nineteenth century, and it was almost immediately observed and criticised by the most sensitive thinkers and artists, for example in Émile Zola’s novels. Hence the pressing character of the attractive mega-offers provided by the nineteenth century department stores and their relationship to small retailers is similar to what would happen less than half a century later. However,

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in this comparison we have to mention two further shifts: First, while in the nineteenth century battle, the department stores still occupied the downtown areas, often literally neighbouring the traditional small shops in the city centres; in the twentieth century malls were—at least, in the beginning—outside of the centre, though still having a lure immense enough to attract a good number of customers away from both their immediate neighbourhoods and from the centre, too. As a second feature of this historical comparison of similar tendencies, we can see how modern malls start to incorporate the department stores themselves, eradicating them from the town centres where they had previously eaten up the little family-run retailers. And, history again repeats itself: Just as department stores had lured away costumers from the small shops in the nineteenth century, the mall did the same to department stores in the twentieth century, and something very similar is happening to malls themselves in the twenty-first century, with commercial centres often losing ground to the variety and comfort of online shopping. As for the geographical changes and consequences, we find more and more new but rather homogenised suburban areas that pretend to be cities, though without either a proper character or an organic connection to their wider context, resulting in an “unimagined sameness,” to quote Michael Sorkin, who described these spiritless cities and urban dwellings in 1992 as: This ageographical city is particularly advanced in the United States. It’s visible in clumps of skyscrapers rising from well-wired fields next to the Interstate; in huge shopping malls, anchored by their national-chain department stores, and surrounded by swarms of cars; in hermetically sealed atrium hotels cloned from coast to coast; in uniform “historic” gentrifications and festive markets; in the disaggregated sprawl of endless new suburbs without cities; and in the antenna bristle of a hundred million rooftops from Secaucus to Simi Valley, in the clouds of satellite dishes pointed at the same geosynchronous blip, all sucking Arsenio and the A-Team out of the ether.2

The sprawl that at the beginning seemed to be not only a comfortable, closeto-Nature, and reasonable solution but ideal and utterly rational(ised) concept of urbanism became a quasi-nightmare for many of its inhabitants, curiously in several cases for the same reasons that made it (look) pleasing at the beginning. One such factor is the sprawls’ predictability, a characteristic whose consequences were clearly summarised by Andres Duany, Elizabeth PlaterZyberk, and Jeff Speck in their fascinating survey: Unlike the traditional neighborhood model, which evolved organically as a response to human needs, suburban sprawl is an idealized artificial system. It is not without a certain beauty: it is rational, consistent, and comprehensive. Its performance is largely predictable. It is an outgrowth of modern problem

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solving: a system for living. Unfortunately, this system is already showing itself to be unsustainable. Unlike the traditional neighborhood, sprawl is not healthy growth; it is essentially self-destructive.3

Hence the artificiality in the rapid expansion of the sprawl may detach not only the suburb from the traditional city (centre) but also the inhabitants from the new space itself, as well as from each other. The lack of organic development of the area—something that we might nostalgically call “local history”—ends up producing disorienting feelings, limited social and communal life, and characterless neighborhoods. But why is the sprawl’s controversial history important here with regard to our main area of investigation of malls, forms of decay, and their popular aesthetics? Because suburban malls did, practically right from their early days, substitute themselves for the traditional city centres. In the first phase they did so only with the practical functions they offered (i.e., serving as a place to acquire any commercial goods needed for the everyday [suburban] life). But they soon started to become spaces of the lost city life, with all its missing features, attractions, and, most importantly, experiences and entertainment. Almost ironically, they managed to do so by replacing a traditional town centre and its features with an artificial and planned simulacrum, in a place where it stands out as completely unnatural and inorganic in appearance. What’s more, in recent decades we find more and more examples of malls placed in an old—and often partially abandoned, half-void, or even deteriorated—town centre in order to revitalise it and boost its local economy. Thus, malls rebuild and start to function in those very neighbourhoods whose decline, in a certain sense, they themselves are to be blamed for. In the midst of this constant competition for customers’ attention, from the point of view of developers, the loss of the classical town-experience turned out to be very “useful.” Providing the attractive combination of shopping, leisure, entertainment, and even certain sorts of cultural activities, too—even if in the form of events that are often considered to be popular rather than high cultural—the new generation of malls could, and still can, act as efficient new centres. Centres not only in an urbanistic or geographical sense—especially because the commercial hub is often no longer in the actual, and/or former, physical city centre—but also in the sense of becoming new social centres and points of reference for larger and larger segments of the entire community. Adding to this, their special features help the complex commercial centre to stand out from its other mall competitors in the same city or region. The earlier uniform malls that in many cases completely lacked special properties and individual features now tend to appear more and more unique and characteristic, very often by including added “touches”: particular thematic concepts that appear not only in superficial decoration

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but influence the entire complex right from planning till operation. If earlier malls were typical Augé-ian “non-spaces,” they now strive to be as singular as possible, becoming “the” space to be. Of course, pushing products is still the priority of those who are the “real” customers of the mall developers (i.e., the renters of retail spaces), but both the operators and the shop-owners have learned that products sell better if placed in a special environment, hence the particular experience creates a special mood as context for shopping. Offering this experience for free together with the actual selling of consumer goods turns out to be an effective weapon against not only other competitors, like other malls of the same area for example, but against another form of ever-growing threat: online shopping. As Chris van Uffelen highlighted, the online trading of commercial goods is constantly usurping a larger and larger segment of the market, even with such phenomena as the owners of online shops opening traditional stores on a downtown high street or in a mall to serve rather as consultation space and showroom, while the actual acquisition mainly happens online.4 When connected to a multisensory experience (e.g., visual by enjoying the glamour of the shops, bodily by walking around, olfactory by smelling the perfumes in the alleys, auditory by listening to the light background music, etc.) malls can still offer something extra compared to armchair internet shopping, even if, as expected, with the advancement of virtual reality this will not last forever either. What we can also see is that all these new particular features added to the latest generation of shopping centres results in another curious shift: Previously malls were built in order to serve the inhabitants of the suburban areas and the sprawls, providing them comfortably close, attainable (and fake) city centres—they were placed just right, such that one would never have to drive too far for shopping and entertainment. Nowadays however, people are ready to travel great distances, often taking international or even intercontinental flights to visit and experience the “best” shopping hubs. Malls have become cultural attractions, just as much as traditional cultural attractions, including monuments, museums, or natural sights and places of historical importance are getting more and more commercialised. It is this feature that brings us back to the main subject of this book, since it plays upon and experiments with architectural heritage, more precisely, references to and imitations of classical styles, often together with the signs and effects of decay that can also be part of a mall’s strategy to distinguish itself. The blurred boundaries between real monumentality and monumental attraction unfortunately seem to be commonly accepted as a legitimate approach for developing the speciality and individual characteristics that are so desired in a highly competitive business environment. This is why, after these historical considerations as well as a brief overview of the current challenges that cities and communities face amidst the rapid development of contemporary

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malls, I would like to mention some actual examples, mainly from the United Arab Emirates, as illustrations of these reflections and as an invitation to further consider some less-often analysed areas and aspects of these questions. The choice of location for these examples is partly subjective and can be explained by the fact that when writing these lines I reside in the country as an expat, but also because the UAE in general and Dubai in particular are well-known for the spectacular investments that are largely directed to the attraction and all-inclusive entertainment of visitors. The shopping malls and thematic commercial centres that were built in and around Dubai in the last two decades are among the most admired, not only by their customers but also by the specialised professionals who consider their financial and marketing success. Let’s then see what we can learn from them with regard to understanding contemporary popular culture as well as the uses and abuses of heritage and signs of decay. The popularity and uniqueness of malls in Dubai, unlike in other cities with longer history, can be explained by the characteristics that meant malls, due to the rapid development and booming physical extension of the city, did not necessarily vacuum away social life from an old, traditional town centre but often the contrary: They have instead created new ones. Mega malls, many of them having either a part or even the entire complex designed as theme parks created certain new forms of public spaces, where, very often, traditional social interactions are created, rather than recreated or imitated. This can also be explained by the fact that even physically they have become ersatz town centres, not lastly because they were built amidst a constantly developing urban pattern. Following Markus Miessen’s observation, many of the malls in Dubai have thus skipped the phase of being first in the periphery and then moving “back” to the centre, because they themselves are the centres: While the 1950s shuttled the shopping mall to the periphery, Dubai has turned this situation inside out. Whereas most Western malls are located in suburban areas, Dubai locates them at the epicenter of its urban sprawl. Different from the strip mall, this typology operates as a fully autarkic organ: it produces interiority rather than conventional urbanity. . . . While the mall has historically been a spatial product of the periphery, in the Gulf it tends to be at the very heart of the city.5

This also helps explain why the growing number of expat immigrants enjoys these centres just as much as the local Emirati population. What’s more, the new malls try to attract as many consumers as possible both through their great variety and in the way they promote and show their specific features, including the aforementioned design experiments referencing various sorts and sources of heritage. Some of the malls could be

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interpreted as “city specific,” in the sense that their design is based on an actual and unique model or motif. A typical example of this is the “Outlet Village” in the outskirts of Dubai that is entirely derived from the forms of San Gimignano in Italy. In the wide corridors between the shops typical elements of an Italian street and piazza are regularly placed, including fountains and ivy. More surprisingly, though understandably—understandably for the sake of proper imitation of all the features of the original—in the fake-brick covering of the facades of the shops, the beauty of the random irregularity is also meticulously reproduced. We can even find reference to the dangers of the weakened resistance of aged edifices against earthquakes: The metal hooks and fasteners often seen in old Italian edifices to strengthen their structure are also reproduced in the shop facades, though obviously with no practical necessity. Thus this example of ruination—or, more accurately, reference to a nonexistent ruination—becomes unauthentic, not only because the building is anything but ruined: newly built, regularly maintained, and just imitating the styles of the Middle Ages from a completely different part of the world, but also because the ways, modes, and reasons of ruination of the original, imitated model are different than what the local environment would produce (some forms and examples of this latter fact were mentioned in chapter 4). Other malls are not so monothematic, that is, based on one particular city, but rather “country specific,” taking inspiration from the different periods of architectural history of a certain country. Again, Italy serves as model for the “Mercato Mall” in Dubai, where the overall appearance and details of the interior decoration resemble not a singular Italian city but several of the countries’ well-known artistic periods. Romanesque and Venetian Gothic facades stand next to early Renaissance and even Art Nouveau elements, thus converting the whole place into a postmodern eclectic mix. Another mode of thematic commercial centre can be dubbed “person specific,” like the “Ibn Battuta Mall.” Here the design was inspired by the journeys of the great Arabic traveller and scholar of the fourteenth century, dividing the malls into different geographically thematised sections based on the regions Ibn Battuta visited. Apart from the general large-scale interior design solution, further region specific curiosities were added: In the “Chinese” zone we find a reproduction of a large ancient-style oriental ship; in the Indian, a life-size sculpture of an elephant awaits the selfie-hungry shoppers; in the Middle Eastern and North African sections, huge domes and intricate geometrical patterns impress the visitors; etc. What’s more, there is also a thematic exhibition dedicated to Ibn Battuta, focusing on his travels, discoveries, descriptions of the countries visited, and the tools he used. Then there is a shopping attraction that aims at no less than the representation of the entire world: The “Global Village” is a huge open-air entertainment centre with large park areas, restaurants, and food courts, amusement park,

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artificial channel, and, most importantly, semi-open-air pavilions dedicated to countries and regions, sometimes even to continents. All of the pavilions have an enormous facade and portal decorated with country or region specific attributes, and upon entering the venue one can find small—compared to the huge facade, definitely smaller—retail shops selling typical local products of the country. It is a bit like visiting many airport duty-frees one after the other, buying souvenirs from countries that one has never actually visited. All these examples quoted above share some commonalities, apart from the obvious fact of being shopping destinations where a certain theme, subject, or idea defines the character of the complex. They are also similar in their way of not only referring to but actually using the aesthetic power of classical architectural and cultural heritage in the contemporary commercial setting—a feature that is, of course, a general marketing strategy, and that is not only Dubai-specific but observable on a global scale. As is often stated and analysed by scholars and critics of malls and theme parks, today these mass-scale shopping and entertainment centres substitute not only traditional town centres but also such aesthetic experiences as could be gained by encountering genuine classical forms of architecture. Through references to classical architectural heritage—both to its integral as well as a decayed form—an attempt is made to trigger a certain sensation and connection to the past, of course, on a rather popular cultural level. Occasionally though it still may create a certain sense or feeling of “pastness,” a bit in the sense of the term as used by Cornelius Holtorf when investigating the concept of authenticity, wherein he distanced pastness or the “quality of being (of the) past” from the actual age of an object: “Pastness emancipates archaeological authenticity from the object’s inherent material substance. . . . The perception of pastness can be brought about by processes other than genuine aging over time.”6 Holtorf quotes, among others, Disney theme parks as examples; however, something very similar applies to the thematic malls, too, since many of them can be interpreted, as we saw above, as a certain form of theme park, with their main architectural and design features centring around one particular theme or stylistic motif in order to diversify and specialise the shopping experience and make it unique compared to the other possible locations with similar retail offerings. What is curious for us now in the present discussion is the aspect that in such environments visitors are relatively less occupied with the authenticity of the environment. Better to say, the experience of pastness is not necessarily strictly connected to an actual past, and the encounter will not become less intensive by awareness of the artificial nature of the location. In Holtorf’s words: “The level of attention given to material clues and other details in Disney theme parks ensure that guests do not feel obliged to admire the verisimilitude of what ultimately is artifice. Instead, these parks

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immerse guests in ambiances that put the very distinction between reality and fake behind them.”7 At the same time however, the blurring of the distinction between real and fake and the relativisation of the importance of the distinction can be a quite risky practice, because, as I have briefly discussed in chapter 8, this might lead to the attempts at and illusion of having “shortcuts to nostalgia” (i.e., as if the aesthetic effect and “nostalgic power” of ruins could be efficiently replicated with artificial means). The situation was aptly described in Carolyn Korsmeyer’s argumentation: “While marks of age may be replicated—chips, cracks, signs of wear—they do not have the same effect as something that is truly aged—that came to be the way it is now by the long process that altered it from the way it was when it was first made. Damage—real damage not simulated damage—can be moving, an affective element of this sort of encounter.”8 There can be several explanations for the popularity of such total immersions in a heritage environment—even if in a fake one—and it would perhaps be too simple to reduce its explanation to the otherwise obviously and sadly existing lack of awareness or sensibility to the differences between original and remade or between authentic and fake, and, what’s more, the lack of awareness and even interest in the importance of the question itself. Besides these, we can see that the establishment of a new space or revitalisation of an already existing but less frequented area often creates community and community space, too. Therefore, we should not neglect the power of such projects’ and architectural endeavours’ contributions—irrespectively of whether we assess it as positive or negative—to not only community building but also to community engagement, including awareness and discussions on heritage, too. This itself has its own benefits, challenges, and drawbacks, as we can learn, for example, from Trinidad Rico, who examined the ambiguous results of the development of Souq Waqif in Doha, Qatar.9 Although the project has reanimated life around the old souq, the practice of reconstruction is definitely questionable from a (Western) heritage perspective (i.e., the partial or entire demolishing of actual old buildings and rebuilding them, often using materials that are not common and were not used in the local architectural tradition). An interesting aspect however is that the development raised critical tones not only from foreign specialists but also within the local community, even if partly for other reasons: “The examination of local heritage projects as destructive of an authentic but neglected heritage originates from local critics as well: the type of shops that now occupy this tourist hub, and the practices taking place to attract tourists are often cited as unauthentic and even problematic—particularly the smoking of shisha at open sidewalk cafes, not appropriate by local standards, yet part of a stylised performance of orientalia.”10 Hence the criticism was directed not only towards the questionable process and inauthentic reconstruction that focused more on the forms than

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on the materials but also towards the touristification that resulted in a certain form of stereotyping of the local culture. Despite these and other similar sorts of criticism, these revitalising and rebuilding projects remain popular. Another example is the recently opened Al Seef in Dubai, a long walking area along the Dubai Creek, newly built in the style of the old city. The traditional-looking buildings imitate the vernacular architecture, and, again, mock signs and references to ageing are abundant, including cracks on the facades or ersatz rust. It is in a way not only surprising but perhaps also worrisome to see how the unauthentic nature of the place is often not disturbing to visitors, but, what’s more, that the fake place can, despite its fakeness, lead to considerations on actual, real, and even a lived past. For example, after the opening of the area, the local newspaper Khaleej Times wrote about some of the visitors’ reactions, including that of an expat living in Dubai for over twenty-five years, hence having witnessed a great part of the recent boom of the city, and for whom the new development: “gives a chance for his family to enjoy modernity and convenience, while recalling their memories of when they first came to Dubai.”11 It is tempting to interpret the popularity of this immersion and its nostalgic reactions with the particularity of heritage perception and heritage experience that Eric Langham and Darren Barker analysed, departing from Edward Hall’s distinction between low-context and high-context communication.12 Based on this theoretical approach as well as on Langham’s and Barker’s actual audience research connected to their practice as a cultural heritage consultancy active in the Arabian Gulf states, they came to the conclusion that high-context communication was very often preferred (i.e., ways of transmitting heritage models and interpretations where the information is not merely through explanations, descriptions, or illustrations but through more complex ways of engagement and activities). In other words: “high-context communication experiences, characterised by a relatively high degree of interactivity, often with the active participation of the spectators,” with “integration of cultural activity into daily life.”13 Langham’s and Barker’s apprehension of the local preferences for encountering remnants of classical heritage content can thus also be very helpful in understanding the popularity of an actual immersion in a (fake) past environment. This actual, tangible, direct encounter with an imitated original creates some sort of connection to the referenced genuine that is not available, and of which cultural, historical, or aesthetic strengths and values are arbitrarily used or sometimes even abused. We can see a curious parallel example of this from another part of the world, as well a pair of artworks inspired by its inquiry: Jiang Jiehong mentions a 2007 real estate development in Hangzhou, China, with several theme parks, including a square taking and recomposing well-known architectural elements from Saint Mark’s Square in Venice, a bit as if it were a real-life capriccio.14

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The photographer Zhang Peili took two shots of the square from two slightly different viewpoints, but in the second the observer can notice a crack on the freshly completed and not-yet-used decorative pavement. One could also interpret this as a symbol of how this fragility reveals the inorganic nature and fabricated context of the area through the immediate cracking of the fake. In Jiang’s reading however, despite the quick deterioration—or, we could also say, perhaps, exactly through this—the site can still serve its purpose: “Nevertheless, the square probably looks Venetian enough for the local people in China (just as Westerners appreciate what generally passes for Chinese food overseas). St Mark’s Square, originally built over five hundred years ago and forming the social, religious and political centre of Venice, finally travels to Hangzhou, where a ‘fetishization of the foreign’ takes place.”15 It thus becomes obvious that despite its popularity among local consumers and the mass-scale tourism it enjoys, all this practice is not without risk. The over-banalisation of architectural and tangible cultural heritage can easily become an actual danger, or, to put it a bit stronger, it is not much better than the actual, physical destruction of a piece of architectural remnant: While in the latter case it is the material of the original work that is destroyed, in the former it is the aesthetic strength—that we automatically connect to the presence of (some of) the original that has survived—that is harmed or destroyed. The possible dangers of practices connected the “externalised memory” and “nostalgia industry,” as well as its consequences on urban design and design policies is critically analysed in detail in Tim Edensor’s 2005 book. He also warns of the limiting effects for the readings of architectural remnants through reconstructions motivated by the touristification of places: “At historic tourist sites, memory is increasingly organised according to ‘heritage’ which ‘fixes’ history and potentially limits the interpretative and performative scope of tourists.”16 These risks of the loss of potential and a certain irreverence for heritage and ruins through “domestication” were highlighted by Þóra Pétursdóttir too: Of course things may be contextualized and made meaningful in all kinds of ways. Importantly, however, the ruins themselves should not be seen as simple cultural tools or symbols in that process but also as sources of value and significance. They are actively part of the process through their “affective presence,” in the form of an immediacy that cannot be reduced to mediation or transmission (Armstrong, 1971: 26). Therefore we should also be aware of the possibility that a heritage domestication or normalization may quite literally drain things of their meaning—subjecting them to “sameness,” to frozen and manicured heritage, easily brings their own critical “antiphonal voices” to silence.17

Agreeing with this, and thus highlighting the vulnerable nature of the aesthetic features and strength of classical architectural heritage and ruins, we

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can argue that their fake rebuilding, and convincing imitations in commercial contexts should not be considered as substitutes for encountering real heritage material, not even on the grounds of community building or the justification of offering immersive context-based experiences for shoppers. Amidst the rapidly growing number of such simulacra and the apparently just as rapidly decreasing sensitivity towards the proper understanding of the importance of being able to differentiate between real and fake, current prospects are not bright. The regular abuses and misapplications of the value of traditional artistic and architectural forms and materials for financial and often also political reasons—the deeper analyses of both would naturally deserve not only a separate chapter but a book of its own—constantly put more and more pressure on the physical remnants of heritage and thus also constantly threaten the ability to distinguish what it is that has really survived through them. In such circumstances, what sort of potential can the imitated originals still have? Can something of their genuine value still shine through the over-polished imitation? It may sound overly optimistic, perhaps also a bit naive for some, and at the same time also an insufficient consolation, but occasionally we may hope that the imitations can be seen as a sort of springboard to arrive at the original. In this sense we cannot and should not entirely exclude the possibility that this “superficial” reference to classical architectural heritage and its decay—literally superficial, as it appears only on the surface decoration of the construction—may also have some educative aspects (e.g., introducing the visitors to the appreciation of actual decay and incentivising some sort of aesthetic pleasure by drawing their attention to the search for signs of passing time and ways of encountering real, genuine examples of heritage). This may not only provide us with some slight hope but can also remind us of the fact that the question is more intricate than it seems at first sight. Even if it is tempting—although definitely an oversimplification—to directly label, demean, and dismiss the new generation of thematic shopping malls as kitsch replicas of originals or elements taken from originals, might not be the best strategy if one intends to challenge and confront their dominance in popular culture. Needless to say, I do not intend to uncritically accept any and all malls and their popular aesthetics but would like to draw attention to the fact that sometimes it is worth considering for a moment if there was any potential in their functioning and appearance, even in such “distant” areas as for example in (art) education, or at least in directing someone’s attention to more authentic aesthetic values and experiences. Of course, if someone has the occasion to be exposed to only the fake and imitative, she will definitely lose the properly inimitable and unreproducible qualities that a genuine art or architectural work provides. That sort of experience can never be effectively substituted. However, a personal educational episode helped me in

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understanding how even these simulacra can still serve in certain cases: in a first-year art history survey course I was teaching on the ancient “lamassus” (i.e., the Mesopotamian human-headed, winged, and lion or bull-bodied gatekeeping and protective deities), mentioning the special features that their body have, five legs, hence appearing to be standing firmly from the front but seemingly passive when observed from the side. A few weeks after the lesson, one of my students, who had never visited the actual Near Eastern archaeological sites or even seen lamassus in museums or reproduced in books, showed me a photo she took while visiting the Iranian pavilion in the aforementioned “Global Village,” highlighting the fact that in the reconstruction the lamassu had only four legs . . . The curious detail from her art history lesson was thus intertwined with the experience of observing an inattentive reproduction of a real monument, and the comparison made her aware of certain sculptural qualities and means of expression in a classical piece of art. An actual example of how artworks can not only serve as bases for imitations, but also how the simulacrum can guide someone back to the original and its aesthetic strengths. Thus—in an optimistic and perhaps ambitious way—this surprising episode from my educational practice can be interpreted as a compelling demonstration of the not-entirely-faded power of art: Even if the classical references, allusions to historical styles, anachronistic ornaments, and fake signs of the passing of time in mock ruination are only intended to establish a peculiar appearance for a commercial enterprise, the values of the superficially copied originals can still shine through the imitation. Hence the imperfect copy may have the possible power to incentivise an impetus to discover the original and learn more about the genuine through this comparison. NOTES 1. Daniel Schulz, ed., Shopping Centres: Planning and Design (Hong Kong: Design Media Publishing, 2015), 8. 2. Michael Sorkin, “Introduction,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), xi. 3. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 4. 4. Chris van Uffelen, Malls and Department Stores (Salenstein: Braun, 2014), 9. 5. Markus Miessen, “Bringing the Mall Back to the Center,” in With/without: Spatial Products,Ppractices, and Politics in the Middle East, eds. Shumon Basar, Antonia Carver, and Markus Miessen (Dubai: Bidoun and Moutamarat, 2007), 135.

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6. Cornelius Holtorf, “On Pastness: A Reconsideration of Materiality in Archaeological Object Authenticity,” Anthropological Quarterly 86, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 431, 439. 7. Holtorf, “On Pastness,” 440. 8. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Real Old Things,” British Journal of Aesthetics 56, no. 3 (July 2016): 224 9. Trinidad Rico, “Islamophobia and the Location of Heritage Debates in the Arabian Peninsula,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses, and Practices, eds. Karen Exell and Trinidad Rico (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 19–32. 10. Rico, “Islamophobia and the Location of Heritage Debates,” 25. (Italics in the original) 11. Sherouk Zakaria, “Al Seef: A Place for Living the past in Dubai,” Khaleej Times, August 15, 2018, https​://ww​w.kha​leejt​imes.​com/n​ation​/duba​i/al-​seef-​a-pla​ ce-fo​r-liv​ing-t​he-pa​st-in​-duba​i. 12. Eric Langham and Darren Barker, “Spectacle and Participation: A New Heritage Model from the UAE,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses, and Practices, ed. Karen Exell and Trinidad Rico (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 85–98. 13. Langham and Barker, “Spectacle and Participation,” 89. 14. Jiang Jiehong, An Era without Memories: Chinese Contemporary Photography on Urban Transformation (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 89. 15. Jiang, An Era without Memories, 92 (Quotation marks in the original). 16. Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 133 (Quotation marks in the original). 17. Þóra Pétursdóttir, “Concrete Matters: Ruins of Modernity and the Things Called Heritage,” Journal of Social Archaeology 13, no. 1 (2012): 47. Quotes and italics in the original. The referred book in the quoted text is by Robert Plant Armstrong, The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology.

Chapter 11

What Remains of That Which Has Remained? Against the Eradication of Ruins1

Perhaps it is only an accident, but recently there has been a sudden flood of books, articles, photo albums, online image galleries, and other forms and forums of analyses, including academic conferences and foundations of specialised scientific research groups, not only about ruins but specifically about the “ruins of ruins,” that is to say, the purposeful and methodical destruction of historic monuments. Both the more scientific works, with their plentiful references and bibliographies, and the more popular ones produced for the general public aim to cover the history and the present state of purposeful destruction and to enumerate its possible causes. The authors try to approach the issue from the widest possible range of angles and to discover the political, religious, economic, or simply culture-specific causes generally behind the acts I call “ruin clearance,” the final eradication of historical monuments previously preserved as ruins, surveying, for instance, the history of such destruction from Antiquity to the present day, or casting the phenomenon as a new form of iconoclasm.2 It is possible that this is only an accident, that a number of researchers have all reached the point of publishing work on that subject at roughly the same time. Yet we are inclined to attribute the increased lay and scientific interest in the eradication of ruins to more than mere coincidence and instead to the advance of cruelty of an intensity long unseen in the Western world, of the Islamic State, whose violent and carefully self-documented massacres and destruction purposefully generate that increased attention. The chaotic political situation in the Middle East, one of the most terrible wars of recent years, and the terrorist organisation that has gained ground in its wake necessarily attract attention worldwide. Even in today’s much analysed world of “infotainment,” in which the boundaries between serious news consumption and (superficial) entertainment are blurred, and the constant flood of information 197

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and images that barrage the consumers with the latest world events—who, of course, often take an increasingly passive and indifferent attitude to them— news of that kind, still gets through the heightened barriers of even those less sensitive average media consumers. As the terrorist organisation advanced, it destroyed Mesopotamian and Syrian monuments of inestimable value in moments, reducing the statues to torsos in the best case, but in the worst (and more frequent) case simply to debris, while buildings that had been standing since classical Antiquity were demolished and became not ruins but piles of demolition waste. As we know by now from previous chapters, the term “ruin” does not necessarily have a negative connotation. Being in ruins lends a kind of noble aura to buildings, and posterity views their condition as a kind of aesthetic and historic compensation: Although the building has not survived the millennia in its original splendour, at least it survives and remains a part of our world as picturesque ruins, allowing modern visitors to ponder the laws of history or fate, the power of time and Nature. After all, ruins of the traditional type—that is, ruins that are not “produced” by human aggression or sudden natural disasters—can really inspire awe in most of us. As we stroll among ruins, seeing the plants that have taken hold in the cracks of once strong walls, the random, zigzag contours, and glimpses of the outside world visible through the gaps in the walls and from what was once the inside of the building, we get a concrete, tangible sense of the passage of time: The crumbling of stone and brick is in direct proportion to the passage of majestically powerful and almost unimaginably long time. In recent years, however, we hear and discourse less about those “classic” ruins, and the ruins of ruins occupy the limelight instead. Instead of the picturesque ruins that have degraded naturally, through the forces of Nature and over an almost inconceivably long period of time, in the case of the ruins of ruins we simply see the shapeless piles of debris left after historic monuments are blown up. Instead of the melancholy and nostalgic illusion of classic, or we could say organic decay, the purposeful eradication of ruins only serves as a bitter reminder of reality. The mounds of debris with no picturesque qualities that results from violent destruction does not allow the viewer to contemplate the ultimately doomed yet noble defences that ancient cultural artefacts put up against the destructive forces of Nature, as in their case the destructive forces were amplified in an unnatural fashion, using artificial means to accelerate the total eradication of the structure. The above-mentioned phenomenon that elicits the awe of posterity is missing here. The visual appearance does not contain, display, and, we could say, make factually palpable the continuous progress of millennia, whose starting point is designated by the still discernible though slowly decaying original form of the “classic” ruins, and whose current end point is the moment of viewing. In the case of the debris

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of blown-up monuments, the bomb does not only explode the remains of the building but also that structure and perspective of time. In the wake of purposeful destruction, the building travels the same trajectory in a matter of seconds, and without the imprint of millennia, it clearly no longer carries any aesthetic value. So the traditional fundamental question associated with ruins changes: The question is no longer “What remains?” but rather “What remains of that which has remained?” What do they or what do we leave of that which has defied the forces of Nature for millennia until now—and, also an important consideration, of that which many previous cultures have retained or even actively maintained out of respect? The eradication of ruins results in a transformation of the ontology of works of art and historic artefacts. As we have seen, the starting point is a completed, intact building or structure with a function and a certain aesthetic value. It may be more or less elegant, elaborate, opulent, or modest, undecorated, undistinguished. Through the classic process of the formation of ruins, such a structure becomes a ruin, but it remains a phenomenon with aesthetic value—we could even call it a work of art, although as we saw in chapter 1, it is not a work of art resulting from purposeful and creative human activity. Indeed, it often happens that the aesthetic value of a mediocre or quite undistinguished architectural work actually increases in the course of the natural formation of ruins: It will be more “aesthetic” as a ruin than it had been when it was still a functional building in use. But the eradication of ruins renders all buildings and monuments in ruins completely and irreversibly devoid of their status as actual or potential aesthetic objects. Practically irrespective of whether the original structure had been valuable or insignificant, as a ruin it retained or gained some aesthetic value. But the debris left of the ruins erases all aesthetic perspectives forever. Therefore, the eradication of ruins is truly the end of the line, the final phase of the cruel fate of the building, with no opportunity for an authentic return and no hope of aesthetic compensation. In that case, the erased ruins lack all aesthetic attraction in the manner of historic monuments destroyed suddenly by Nature just as by purposeful destruction: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc. also nullify the aesthetic dimension. The natural and the human purposeful acceleration of the temporal process of the formation of ruins equally render the formation and survival of valuable ruins impossible. After these considerations, it is worth taking a closer look at some ­background. Why the purposeful eradication of ruins? What do we build by destroying, by the wilful and violent elimination of the character of ruins as ruins? Ruins have power. This may seem a surprising claim at first—we may think that a building is only powerful only when and as long as it remains

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intact. Yet a building can be meaningful in all its forms. While still in use, a monarch’s palace serves to demonstrate the extant power, the omnipotence of the ruler, with its thick walls and strong defences. As ruin, it will continue to serve as a reminder of the former ruler, which can be particularly disturbing if the old ruler differed from his successor not only in terms of history but also in ideological, religious, or cultural perspectives, and if, perhaps, the successor also has an inferiority complex. Therefore, although the ruins are now ruins, through their survival, however fragmented, and their spectacular and also aesthetic, nostalgic, and melancholy presence, they may present a serious challenge to the representatives of the new ideology, who do not wish to retain, let alone actively maintain, the reminders of the past (and therefore certainly earlier) civilization, at least not at any cost. They may not wish to retain them in particular if posterity finds the monuments, even in ruins, more impressive than the present conditions, reminding the people (subjects?) of the present of the “good old days.” As a result, the hand of posterity is continuously forced, it must break the power of ruins: their disturbing ongoing survival, their emphatic and spectacular presence must be handled in some way. Ruins therefore become a sort of problem; they are always in the way. Cultural liabilities, ideological burdens, monument protection chores, urban planning challenges, obstacles to property development: It depends on the situation, but something always has to be done about them. The ruins resist for a while, they are (semi) successful in their struggle against Nature until they are finally erased by time—literally from the face of the earth. It is an inspiring paradox: Ruins are powerful, but they cannot defend themselves, neither against Nature, nor against man, who sometimes wishes to accelerate the work of Nature. Jealous posterity makes use of this when it tests and exercises its power over ruins, for which it has various opportunities. One of those, so often seen today, is eradication, the artificial amplification of the natural process of decay, when the decision-makers of posterity, as the “anointed masters of history” censor the remaining pieces of the past physically, by destroying them altogether, and they hope that they will not only erase them in their materiality but also erase the offending period from historical memory as well. The other opportunity is seemingly quite the opposite: The fervent enthusiasts of posterity spare neither time nor effort nor resources to conserve, reconstruct, or rebuild ruins and fragments, or even to transport them from their troublesome and chaotic locations so as to reassemble them elsewhere, for instance in their own museum, in safety. I wrote “seemingly” above because, although the various methods of conservation appear to be the opposite process, and although any kind of maintenance and “harvesting” of ruins appears to be an incomparably more attractive approach, still, in one respect, that outcome has an end result that may come quite close to that

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of complete eradication: The one-time building no longer survives as ruin. Just as the natural formation of ruins is itself unstoppable, the purposeful transformation into rubble—that is to say, the eradication of ruins—is also irreversible. So even if it may seem surprising at first, the complete preservation of ruins, their presentation for viewing in a comfortable and safe fashion, their touristification, in particular their Disneyfied commercialisation and their reconstruction or transportation in many cases eliminates many of the genuine aesthetic characters of the ruins in a similar way that complete destruction does. Perhaps that implies an excessively strict definition of ruins, or it may place an emphasis on the excessively Romantic aspect of traditional ruins, but if we look at the conditions applicable to ruins or the process of becoming ruins described above, ruins can only remain ruins in the original, “untouched”—and continuously decaying—form; they can only meet the “Romantic” ideological and aesthetic requirements applicable to them in that condition. This is an aspect to which Robert Ginsberg also reminds us: “The ruin is sited, attached to its ground, rather than blindly adrift in a world not its own. The ruin reshapes its ground, regrounding itself, and laying claim to the visitor who enters upon its ground. Thus, the ruin is not transportable as an object of art. It has being in the way that museum works do not. Attachment to the earth intensifies the vitality of its existence, while contributing elements of nature add to its aesthetics powers. The ruin is at home under the rain and wind.”3 And yet, despite all that, we are naturally inclined to favour the various methods of maintenance, conservation, replacement, and reconstruction over the complete eradication of ruins that have defied time so far. At least something should be left of the original to allow us to wander around and wonder about the ravages of time and the destruction we do ourselves—if nothing else, at least a few fragments that allow us to establish a sort of “direct-transcendent” relationship with the past. For along with the survival of the original work, the active regarding of the fragments or in some cases a physical relationship with them also plays a crucial role in the perception of the past. For instance, walking around the ruins, or touching the stones may forge a magical link between the viewer in the present and the reminders of the past. This is what Carolyn Korsmeyer had in mind when she emphasised the importance of tactile perception in the process of learning about the past, quoted in chapter 1: “Touch furnishes a sense of being in actual, literal contact with something. The urge to touch is common when encountering objects singled out for their age and historical uniqueness.”4 The magical force that emanates from original fragments guarantees their importance and intensifies their cult. Therefore, even if the reconstruction is inaccurate, still, the intention of posterity is not the erasure of the entire fragment, but, on the contrary, its preservation. Indeed, the ruin, or pieces of

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it, will be indispensable for justifying the reconstruction or the idea or ideology that the reconstruction serves. There are many exciting examples of that mechanism, and perhaps one of the most interesting and aesthetically most exciting varieties is the issue of artificial ruins, and in particular the inclusion of real fragments of ancient structures in artificial ruins. We could mention many such examples from Tata in Hungary to Virginia Water in Surrey: In the former case, stone fragments from the abbey at nearby Vértesszentkereszt were used, while in the latter case, architectural elements from Leptis Magna in Libya were incorporated. In these constructions, the fragments of original ruins “authenticate” and “ferment” the artificial ruins (as we saw in chapter 8), even if it is public knowledge that the artificial ruins are only imitations, pieces of scenery carefully designed to evoke a certain mood, a meditative backdrop. On the other hand, as Sophie Thomas pointed out, for some the construction of fake ruins can be considered examples of a “reparative gesture that has the effect of healing an historical breach: by attempting to stage, or represent, the harmonious coming together of nature and culture, one symbolically repairs the damage inflicted by human history.”5 Elizabeth Wanning Harries goes a step further when she puts the practice in a more political perspective: Designed to reflect the continuing, unconscious work of time and weather, the artificial ruin reveals the hierarchical divisions of the society that engendered it. Designed as a meditation on the fall of empires, it reflects the continuing power of one imperial class to dictate what should be seen and valued as history. Designed to provoke deep thoughts about the transitory nature of man’s works, it provides, throughout its history, an opportunity for ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption.6

Given all that, perhaps it is not unexpected to claim that the powerful attraction of ruins that holds preservation-minded posterity in thrall is the very same force that moves the censor of monuments who aims to destroy them altogether. It is the very survival of the ruins that is found disturbing, that is why the objective is complete annihilation to the extent that nothing remains, nothing that can be approached or touched, or reconstructed, either in reality, or even in the imagination. What’s more, it is as if those with eradicating intention were actually pleased with the sight of erasure, using destruction as promotional material for their ideology and presenting the empty spaces left behind with pride. This is how we can draw a connection to modern iconoclasm and at the same time how it differs from its antecedents. The destruction of earlier cultures’ or other nations’ and religions’ tangible elements of memory and cultural artefacts is not a new phenomenon: we can trace it from Antiquity, the Roman damnatio memoriae, and Byzantine

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decades of iconoclasm onwards. In present-day destructions, however, this form of destruction is motivated not only by the intent to erase the enemy’s cultural heritage but also to raise awareness of this very destruction and the commensurate display of power by the destroyer. This is the aspect present in such an exercise of power that highlights the difference between modern day iconoclasm and its antique origins, including the aforementioned damnatio memoriae, of which classical form Jacques Le Goff characterised in his book History and Memory as: “The power to destroy memory is the counterweight to power achieved through the production of memory.”7 Hence the difference in present-day destruction is the conscious intent to display this destructive power itself. At that point, the external observers anxious to save the historic monuments make a mistake that—if only indirectly, and, most importantly, against these observers’ wishes—in fact virtually aids the work of the terrorists. As Jason Felch and Bastien Varoutsikos convincingly argued in their commentary published in the online edition of The Art Newspaper, the impact of the destruction wrought by the Islamic State at Palmyra was only increased by the conscious, cutting-edge propaganda campaign they used to document that destruction and its viral Internet exposure, thus one could witness “the collision of iconoclasm and clickbait.”8 That is to say, the propagation of the terrible images across the Internet actually supported the goal of the terrorists to make their ideological propaganda heard as far and wide as possible. This aspect was also stressed by Erin Thompson and Thalia Vrachopoulos in a catalogue essay of an exhibition they curated and titled The Missing: Rebuilding the Past, originally shown in the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, in 2015, then travelled to Jessica Carlisle Gallery in London: “These messages attract recruits, impressed by reports that bemoan the destruction and dwell on how powerless we are to stop it. Thus, while Twitter is attempting to disable ISIS-affiliated accounts, the media is spreading their propaganda for them.”9 On the other hand, these ethical questions and complex dilemmas regarding media usage also contribute to the understanding of some artworks that investigate the terrible circumstances and consequences of the terrorist practice and our moral responsibility to resist. For example the Iranian Morehshin Allahyari’s pieces synthetizing fragments of historical material and elements of digital technology, again departs from the same dichotomy, as Julia Höner wrote: Allahyari’s promising artistic approach of combining historical fragments with digital technology does not, however belie the fact that her works have arisen as a result of the many dissonances between the physical and digital worlds of our globalized present. For instance, when human lives and cultural heritage are being destroyed by ISIS with the most atrocious method, yet at the same time

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many of its battles are being fought using digital high-tech tools and its image propaganda is spread via virtual data highways.10

Nevertheless, Felch and Varoutsikos are also right to warn us that complete silence or ignoring the cruel facts would not serve as a solution, either. The correct response is to present the images and the videos exactly as what they are: not news media, but purposefully and carefully compiled propaganda.11 That is the only way, they say, that we can avoid becoming unwitting accomplices of the terrorists in creating the image of the cultural and also physical absence of the historic monuments. Since, after all, the absence that remains in place of the destroyed monuments is not merely an intangible, historic one, but often also a factual, spectacular, and ominously empty one, as in the case of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban—where the dark holes in the mountainside represent the absence of the statues both symbolically and in reality. Yet it is questionable how effective the official and international condemnation of such acts can be, such as the 2016 September ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague sentencing Ahmed Al Faqi Al Mahdi to nine years of prison for the 2012 destruction of a mosque and nine mausoleums that were World Heritage sites in Timbuktu. The sentence may create a precedent, but it will not bring back the monuments themselves, and the question remains as to the deterrent effect the ruling may have on extremist groups that are attempting to erase or strongly relativize the very objects of value that a number of international organisations, including UNESCO and its advisory body the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), wish to protect with the assistance of the court. Nor is the situation improved by the otherwise justified suggestion that the purposeful destruction of cultural heritage should be considered as crimes against humanity. In his commentary in the wake of the ruling of the International Court of Justice Robert Bevan, a member of the above-mentioned ICOMOS, argued that in his view in such cases the destruction is not merely the destruction of valuable objects but an act of dehumanisation as well. As he put it: “When cultural attacks are intended to erase identities and memories in the name of religion, politics or conquest, they are a crime against humanity—an attempt to dehumanise and devalue. Where there is also an intention to destroy a group in whole or in part through cultural deracination as much as murder, it should count as genocide.”12 Hence we are left with the debris of the exploded mausoleums and the dark absence of the Buddha statues on the mountainside, monuments built from a sort of negative space as mementos of persistent tensions. With those negative monuments, the destroyers create reminders of their own race to accelerate the natural formation of absences using their artificial instruments so as to

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use the violent emptying of the space once occupied by the monuments as a means of remaining masters of time and remembrance in posterity—although they fool themselves by thinking so. Such an intention to erase was not unknown in ancient history, either. Therefore we must render our above observation more precisely: Despite the increased interest in the destroyers of historic monuments and the damage they’ve caused in recent years, the historical phenomenon is in fact not novel, but rather it is the continuation of a long-standing practice with numerous precursors. The destruction of conquered regions and cities, and the wrecking or theft of their works of art has been known since classical Antiquity, although, we should add, we also have accounts going back to the same classical Antiquity of generals despairing at their inability to prevent the destruction, such as the despair of Marcus Furius Camillus at the destruction of Veii in 396 BC, as described by Plutarch, or that of Marcus Claudius Marcellus at the sacking of Syracuse in 212 BC, related in the histories of Livy.13 In fact, a special subcategory of this latter phenomenon could be what Julia Hell called “imperial ruin gazing,” in other words, observing “the metropole of a mighty empire in ruins while thinking about the future of his own empire.”14 In fact, all these examples also seem to contribute to the idea—developed among others for example in a series of papers published in the thematic issues of two professional journals (i.e., in the European Review of History [Revue europenne d’histoire] [2011] and in Ókor: Folyóirat az Antik kultúrákról [Antiquity: Journal on Antique Cultures] [2016])—that despite the fact that antique cultures did not have the same concept of ruins and especially of the aesthetics of ruins that had been developed in modernity (of course, with all its mutilations throughout the centuries), we still have important antique examples describing the experiences of and encounters with certain forms of ruination that may nevertheless serve as a sort of forerunner for the later aesthetics and appreciation of ruins.15 The examples from Antiquity, from later periods as well as contemporary ones, indicate that the destruction may be driven by a mixture of various motivations and goals. It may be tempting to simplify the issue by attributing the destruction of historic monuments to a single reason, for instance in the case of the Islamic State, but in reality—as in previous centuries—there is actually a complex mixture of, among other things, religious, political, cultural, and last but not least economic intentions. Given that this was also the case with iconoclasm, it is no surprise that researchers often interpret the purposeful eradication of ruins using the model of iconoclastic tendencies. One of the recurring motivations attributed throughout the centuries is the intention to erase, physically and publicly, all objects, works of art, and historic monuments that serve as reminders of the ideology of the previous state, religion, cult, or culture, etc. Yet as, for instance, the Byzantine iconoclasm of

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the eighth and ninth centuries was not motivated exclusively by theological reasons but also the desire to break the economic power of the monasteries, the Islamic State also destroyed, on the one hand, due to theological and “cultural” reasons, but on the other hand it also established an active trade in the archaeological objects found in situ or already in museums in the territories it occupied. This contradiction incentivised Noah Charney to draw a parallel with Nazi practices: “The organization (ISIS) accepts the value of antiquities but also destroys them, an illogical hypocrisy reminiscent of Nazi theories on ‘degenerate’ art.”16 As of ISIS’s looting activity, however, it is ironic—or we could consider it a punishment for the collectors who support the terrorists with their purchases—that in many cases, thankfully, the objects placed on the market are forgeries. According to the estimate of Maamoun Abdulkarim, general director of Antiquities and Museums in Damascus, up to 80 percent of the antiquities smuggled out of Syria and sold are not genuine.17 The extremist groups really do reinforce their belief that they are masters of history and civilization by the eradication of ruins, the iconoclastic destruction, and the sale of stolen and/or forged artefacts. The carefully choreographed propaganda they spread online is very much intended to show them in that light with pride. Naturally, the other approach mentioned above, the restoration, completion, reconstruction, or transportation and reassembly of ruins, is an incomparably better and more attractive one. As we have seen, however, the fragments of historic monuments do not survive as ruins in the ontological or the aesthetic sense in that case, either: human intervention changes the natural process of the formation of ruins, completion creates a new temporal perspective, transformation into a safe site (a centre of tourisms open for visits) arrests the formation of ruins at a particular moment, while complete removal and reassembly of an architectural work on a different continent may result in an entirely decontextualising deracination. As Andreas Huyssen reminds us: “We live in the age of preservation, restoration, and authentic remakes, all of which cancel out the ideas of the authentic ruin.”18 Therefore it can often be the case that a fundamental aesthetic value is harmed through the above modes and attempts at preservation, exactly something that makes the ruin, or at least makes the perception and appreciation of a ruin; or, in other words, something that concerns the appealing aesthetic values of ruins that Peter Lamarque described: A key point is that the aesthetic appreciation of a ruin focuses on the ruin as a ruin. In effect, a ruin has become a new kind of object inviting a new kind of response, different from the response that the original building might have elicited. To appreciate a ruin aesthetically is not a weakened form of an aesthetic response to the original, even if part of the appreciation might involve imagining

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what the building must have looked like. It is an appreciation of an object in its own right.19

Therefore, despite all these controversies mentioned above it is obvious that the second approach is to be preferred, as its practitioners do attempt, in their own way, to conserve and maintain the heritage that remains in fragmented form, even if they do so at the cost of ruins no longer remaining classical ruins and the loss of the original historic and cultural context and circumstances to a large extent or even completely. However, this also raises another problem. Are not those who reconstruct ruins from their own historical perspective and according their own historical narrative to be considered “masters of history” in a somewhat similar way? Are they not involved in the appropriation and domination of the past in a comparable mode, particularly if they actually remove the fragments, put them back together in their own country, and then exhibit the fragments? The notion may be correct—partially. It is a fact that anyone who finds remnants of a historic monument and disassembles the ruins, moves the pieces, and then stores and exhibits them in another country, sometimes in a completely different cultural context, is not only making a major investment but also assuming responsibility: It takes not only effort but also courage to make the decision concerning the supposedly final fate of the work and to justify such a decision. There is no doubt that the initial motivation is fundamentally positive, as, after all, they undertake to preserve historic monuments—in contrast with the extremists’ intent to destroy them completely and forever—even if the price of preserving the set of physical objects is their collective removal from their original environment. At least something still remains that connects us with the past. Therefore, that intention is certainly to be applauded: It preserves that which refers back, and, though indirectly, it maintains the connection with history. Sadly, the establishment and the management of that connection have been wrought with conflict in the past, as they are today. Conflicts of interest are nothing new: The issues around the fate and the survival of ruins and archaeological finds, fragments, and all objects preserved from the past—including the options of completion and removal—were already raised around the birth of the science of archaeology, when the first experiments of amateur enthusiasts only just began to be overtaken by a (more) precise, scientific type of research. As we saw in chapter 1, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the question was already raised: In the case of works and historic monuments preserved in fragments, which aspect of the sculptural or architectural torso will be the more important, the part that remains, or the absence? Naturally, the connection with history and the continuity with the past is facilitated by the remaining, tangible pieces of “objectified time,” while the absence,

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through the instinctive urge, the enticing desire to complete the objects, supports the creation of a (new) interpretation, a poetically actualised past recreated in the imagination. One of the most striking examples of this—and the beginnings of the politicization of archaeology—is offered by the various approaches to the interpretation of Roman antiquity during the above period. As this also demonstrates, the absence, the incomplete will become definitive and inspiring in relation to the creation of aesthetic value and the interpretation of the poetics of ruins and fragments against the other approach, more burdened by considerations of (current) politics, which concentrates on that which remains. But those disputes were conducted not only during the periods of late Classicism and Romanticism; they are also present in today’s discourse and in the reception of art history and archaeology to the sciences. This aspect was the focus of an exciting exhibition of archaeology and (cultural) history and the large book of excellent essays that was published to accompany it. The exhibition, shown at the Salt Galata Museum in Istanbul at the turn of 2011 and 2012, summarised its fundamental thesis remarkably well in its title: Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire 1753–1914, in which the verb scramble could equally be taken to refer to the difficulties of moving around the terrain to be explored, the semi-buried ruins of cities, and a kind of race, a competitive occupation of positions for the past, for ownership of the past.20 The gradual—and gradually increasingly self-aware and scientific—exploration of the past was cast as the continuation of an unfinished book, and it was no accident that such a reference was made in the installation of the exhibition: in some sections, vertical “winged cases” were erected that visitors of the exhibition could open like gigantic books so as to evoke the impression that the historiographic production of the past is far from complete, and the method of writing and processing it is not set in stone, either. As a result, the exhibition and the volume of papers that accompanied it aligned with the narrative in the history of the science of archaeology and art history, which became stronger a few decades ago, that sees the academic development of archaeology as a modern scientific discipline in connection with the imperialist endeavours of the great powers of the period—initially the Western ones, and then the Ottoman Empire as well. Under that approach, the many archaeological digs conducted in the Eastern Mediterranean and Turkish regions, first by English and French, and shortly afterwards by Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, and Turkish explorers, and the removal of fragments, statues, and often entire complexes of buildings were not motivated by purely scientific objectives but also by the desire to reinforce the historic and current status of those nation states. Naturally this political concern paralleled a scientific and epistemological shift, as Bruce G. Trigger described it in 1984:

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Yet the notion that the material remains of the past could be a source of information about human history independently of written records had to await the replacement of cyclical and degenerationist views of human development by the widespread intellectual acceptance of an evolutionary perspective. This occurred within the context of accelerating technological change that characterised the Industrial Revolution in Europe. It was also accompanied by the development of modern nationalism, in which a sense of the solidarity of states became focused less on kings or princes and more on its citizens as a collective group.21

In the accelerating race to collect archaeological finds in the nineteenth century, nations competed to possess and, especially, display for the public the largest number and the oldest—from classical Antiquity or even before— archaeological objects, which would not only cast them as the rightful heir to a venerable history but also, based on a kind of progressive or evolutionary view of history, as the fulfiller of human civilization, the leading power of the modern age that, through possession of the past, could also stand at the peak of the present and become the master of the future. For that very reason, while those nation states appear to be masters of history in the same way as today’s, and of course yesteryear’s destroyers of ruins, their intention was actually quite the opposite: In the endeavours of the great powers of the nineteenth century, the survival, the maintenance, and the bringing forth of the ruins acquired fundamental importance because that was the only way for the archaeological remains and entire complexes of buildings dug up and removed to fulfil the hope attached to them, namely the elevation of their careful guardians to the prized status of the highest form of civilization. After the earliest examples, all the nations joined in the competition, and with some historic irony, one of the last ones to do so was the Ottoman Empire, the very state whose huge territory contained the sites of a number of highly significant classical civilizations, and where most of the archaeological explorations by Westerners had taken place. The increasingly protectionist Ottoman heritage protection dictates issued in 1869, 1874, and 1889 allowed less and less opportunity for the exportation of the archaeological material found by foreign expeditions. As a result, the history of Ottoman Turkish archaeology exhibits a close parallel with the country’s modernisation and its “opening to the West.” All of this has had an influence on a number of aspects, for instance, the justification of the appropriation of ruins. The “customary” nineteenth century justification often included an explanation motivated—to some extent—by a sense of superiority, one that still influences discussions of the issue today. The apologists of the period claimed that the locals were incapable of appreciating the value of the ruins, so it was perhaps better to move the finds to a museum in a city in Western Europe or North America.

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It is a difficult question, how far the somewhat nationalistic or even racist overtones of the above (self-)justification are dampened by the fact that in many cases the practice of imperialist powers of taking an active responsibility for the past was actually justified by subsequent history: We would probably all prefer to continue admiring the Buddhas of Bamiyan in, say, the British Museum, to their absence in the photos taken of those dark hollows in the mountainside. As a brief digression it is worth noting that the intention of great powers to connect the beginning and the end of civilization through prestigious structures also serves as a possible explanation for the customary architectural design of a good many museums of archaeology as well as art. It seems quite natural that from London to Budapest—or even from New York to Istanbul—those temples of the “religion of art,” the museums, should imitate ancient Greek temples, but there are further interesting details that support the notion that the ideology analysed above played an active role in shaping the appearance of the newly built institutions to house ancient pieces of art: The Istanbul Museum of Archaeology, originally established in 1846, had its facade designed at the turn of the nineteenth century by Alexandre Vallaury: inspired by two of the institution’s most notable works of art, the so called Alexander Sarcophagus and the fourth century BC Sarcophagus of the Morning Women from Sidon. As a result, archaeological fragments from ancient times are linked directly to contemporary endeavours, and the work of ancient art displayed inside the museum determines the shape of the building that houses and displays it. As Wendy M. K. Shaw put it, by using the sarcophagi as sources of stylistic elements, the museum performed a double function: “If the use of the Sarcophagus of the Mourning Women as a model for the museum is a pragmatic expression of the discursive agency of the Ottoman museum as it related to archaeology, it also resonates as part of a general understanding of a museum as a mausoleum, both a repository for the dead and a place of memorialization.”22 Another exciting example of a connection between a historic object on display and the building housing it is furnished by the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and in particular its hall that houses the eponymous Pergamon Altar of Zeus. In a sense, the building was erected to contain another building, so in the case of the Pergamon hall, the external and the internal spaces intermingle. As Can Bilsel put it in his book on the history of the museum and its exhibition strategies: “The modern Pergamon Room is translated into an impression of the ancient Pergamon Altar, as seen both from outside and inside.”23 All this indicates that in the course of “saving,” the context of archaeological finds, fragments, and archaeological remains is altered fundamentally, and the above-mentioned power of ruins is also transformed: Instead of demonstrating the wealth and power of the original builder, they come to

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proclaim the (new) historic status and power of their “savior.” It is interesting to view contemporary monument protection news, even the development of the last few years from that perspective, for instance the question of which countries—former great powers or ambitious new regions—are the ones that try to take the initiative in protecting (at times actually meaning removing) monuments in, for example, Syria and Iraq. In addition to the British, French, American, and German mega-museums, the United Arab Emirates are also staking a claim. We can remember for example the 2016 Abu Dhabi Conference on Safeguarding Endangered Heritage, with the participation of internationally recognised experts and organised in the capital of the Emirates that resulted in, among others, establishing ALIPH (International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas).24 It is perhaps also not a complete accident that the two-thirds-size replica of the Palmyra Arch of Triumph destroyed by the Islamic State—reproduced completely using 3D printing technology in collaboration with UNESCO, Dubai Future Foundation, the Institute for Digital Archaeology, as well as the Universities of Oxford and Harvard—was exhibited after its London (Trafalgar Square!) premiere in, among other locations, New York and Dubai.25 Based on these observations I am inclined to draw a moral from the history of archaeology and to approach protective endeavours with slight caution, or at least not take them at face value. It is highly probable that as in the past, today we are also unlikely to achieve a completely disinterested approach or scientific objectivity, and the accommodation of monument protection with the ambitions of great powers—or at least the ambition of cultural dominance—has not become any easier. Yet of course, all of that is still different from and better than the complete eradication of cultural heritage driven by shortsighted religious, political, or cultural fundamentalism and fanaticism. Managing the (after)life of ruins is a complex issue, perhaps without a completely reassuring resolution. As we have seen, if we wish to enjoy ruins as ruins in the aesthetic sense, they must be allowed to remain just that: ruins. All protective reconstruction, renovation, modernisation, and “visitorfriendly” safety modifications carry the risk of falsification, while complete removal not only decontextualises the archaeological work but in many cases also puts the find in the service of new and rather alien (ideological) objectives. But we must accept that any such solution is still incomparably better than total and intentional annihilation.

NOTES 1. This chapter is a slightly extended version of an earlier paper originally published in Hungarian: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Mi marad abból, ami megmaradt?

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A romtalanítás ellen,” Ókor: Folyóirat az Antik kultúrákról (Antiquity: Journal on Antique cultures)15, no. 4 (2016): 3–10. 2. See for example the books by Paolo Matthiae, Distruzioni, saccheggi e rinascite: Gli attacchi al patrimonio artistico dall’antichità all’Isis (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2015) and Maria Bettetini, Distruggere il passato. L’iconoclastia dall’Islam all’Isis (Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore 2016). 3. Robert Ginsberg, “Aesthetics Qualities in the Experience of Ruins,” in Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience, ed. Michael H. Mitias (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 169. 4. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Aesthetic Deception: On Encounters with the Past,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 121. 5. Sophie Thomas, “Assembling History: Fragments and Ruins,” European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 182. 6. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 82. 7. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) 68. 8. Jason Felch and Bastien Varoutsikos, “The Lessons of Palmyra: Islamic State and Iconoclasm in the Era of Clickbait,” The Art Newspaper, April 8, 2016, accessed December 3, 2016, http:​//the​artne​wspap​er.co​m/com​ment/​comme​nt/le​ssons​ -from​-palm​yra-w​here-​islam​ic-st​ate-c​ombin​ed-ic​onocl​asm-a​nd-cl​ickba​it/?u​tm_so​ urce=​weekl​y_apr​8_201​6&utm​_medi​um=em​ail&u​tm_ca​mpaig​n=ema​il_we​ekly.​ 9. Erin Thompson and Thalia Vrachopoulos (curators), The Missing: Rebuilding the Past (New York: Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, 2015), n.p. 10. Julia Höner, “Morehsin Allahyari,” in: Contemporary Ruins, eds. Julia Schleis et al. (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2017), 36. 11. See some further considerations on these questions and their contextualisation with regard to the history of exhibiting in Zoltán Somhegyi, “The Human Image Seen through the History of Exhibiting,” in The Human Image in a Changing World: Proceedings of the 5th World Humanities Forum, Busan, South Korea October 31— November 2, 2018 (Seoul, KR: World Humanities Forum, 2018), 621–26. 12. Robert Bevan, “Attacks on Culture Can Be Crimes against Humanity,” The Art Newspaper, September 27, 2016, accessed December 3, 2016, http:​//the​artne​wspap​ er.co​m/com​ment/​comme​nt/at​tacks​-on-c​ultur​e-can​-be-c​rimes​-agai​nst-h​umani​ty/. 13. See more examples in Matthiae, Distruzioni, saccheggi, rinascite, 24–25. 14. Julia Hell, “Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep?” in Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 170. 15. European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 18, nos. 5–6 (2011); Ókor: Folyóirat az Antik kultúrákról (Antiquity: Journal on Antique cultures) 15, no. 4 (2016). 16. Noah Charney, The Museum of Lost Art (London: Phaidon, 2018), 115. (Quotation marks in the original).

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17. Patrick Cockburn, “Fake Antiquities Flood out of Syria as Smugglers Fail to Steal Masterpieces Amid the Chaos of War,” Independent, September 6, 2016, https​ ://ww​w.ind​epend​ent.c​o.uk/​news/​world​/midd​le-ea​st/sy​ria-i​sis-c​ivil-​war-a​ntiqu​ities​ -fake​s-pal​myra-​a7228​336.h​tml. 18. Andreas Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity,” in Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 27. 19. Peter Lamarque, “Reflections on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Restoration and Conservation,” British Journal of Aesthetics 56, no. 3 (July 2016): 297 (Italics in the original). 20. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, eds., Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 (Istanbul: SALT Galata, 2011). On the volume, see a review of mine: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914,” European Journal of Archaeology 17, no. 2 (2014): 361–65. 21. Bruce G. Trigger, “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist,” Man 19, no. 3 (1984): 356. 22. Wendy M. K. Shaw, “From Mausoleum to Museum: Resurrecting Antiquity for Ottoman Modernity,” in: Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, eds. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul: SALT Galata, 2011), 436. 23. Can Bilsel, Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. (Italics in the original) 24. See more about the initiative and the theoretical background of safeguarding heritage in Thomas G. Weiss and Nina Connelly, Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict Zones, J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy Number 1 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2017). 25. Lauren Turner, “Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph Recreated in London,” BBC News, April 19, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36070721.

Chapter 12

“Time Transformed into Space” Orhan Pamuk and the Museums of Remembrance1

“Whatever the context, collections are necessarily made up of works ripped from their environment—and, in this sense, they are ruins”—as Michel Makarius wrote and we saw in chapter 11 some of the many complicated questions connected to the institutionalisation of display, to the “management” and more or less fortunate afterlife of archaeological findings, to the collection, transportation, reassembly, and exhibition of ruins and fragments.2 I also argued that despite the intricate issues involved in these practices, it is still incomparably better than the complete eradication and annihilation of ruins motivated by shortsighted and fanatic ideologies. In the concluding chapter of this book I would like to offer some considerations on museums as institutions of and for the fragments of history, focusing on the relationship between museums and remembrance. I aim to illustrate with some examples how the exhibited pieces may not only help us to remember the original from which they stem and descend, but in certain cases they can thematise, illustrate, and even question the very process, nature, and efficiency of remembering itself. In Johann Zoffany’s famous painting from 1782 (Burnley, Art Gallery and Museum), we see Charles Townley busy in an enviable place—and situation. The English collector is sitting in his library with his art-loving friends, in a partially real, partially imaginary setting. We see the company in a room that, instead of clear, Neo-Classical lines, is reminiscent of the sometimes stiflingly crowded furnishings of Baroque and Rococo interiors. The reason for that overcrowding is that—at the request of the collector who had ordered the painting—the artist included all the most notable pieces in Townley’s entire collection in one room. So the work had multiple objectives: on the one hand, depicting the collector and his friends while they are at work, and on the other hand to present the collection itself as well, to make sensible its 215

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astonishing nature in terms of both size and quality. This is a typical so-called conversation piece, a work which, similar to Zoffany’s other even more famous painting The Tribuna of the Uffizi, (1772–1777, Windsor, Royal Collection) aimed to depict elegant courtly or upper-middle-class groups not in official and formal group portraits but in a more relaxed, informal manner.3 As Townley put it in his oft-reproduced letter from August 1781: “Mr Zoffany is painting, in the Stile of his Florence tribune, a room in my house, wherein he introduces what Subjects he chuses in my collection. It will be a picture of extraordinary effect and truth.”4 That passage makes it clear that the purpose of the painting is to present and to captivate: a veracious image of the key pieces in the collection—or, more precisely, a more or less veracious one, because although he really did own all those pieces of art, they were certainly not installed so crowded together, in the manner of a warehouse. The way they were chosen and arranged in the space of the painting is the work of the painter’s imagination. However, along with the “truth” of the depiction, it is at least as important for the patron that the painting should have an “extraordinary effect,” as we can read in the above letter (i.e., that it should captivate the viewer). Yet it would be inaccurate to interpret it as a sort of bragging: It is a better approximation to say that the collector actually wished to see his own captivation reflected. Knowing Townley’s life story, that’s not all surprising: Instead of the “traditional” single trip, he visited Italy as a Grand Tourist three times: in 1767–1768, from 1771 to 1774, and finally in 1777, not least because his unquenchable enthusiasm for antiquities urged him to bring home more and more pieces of art, which he then went on to exhibit to the public at his London house while he was still alive and then had donated to the classical collection of the British Museum. In effect, Townley becomes a collector of art in the painting, shown in the process of the archaeological-historical examination and aesthetic appreciation of the objects, who, in the course of his noble and pleasant activity, is constantly under the magic spell of those objects. That effect, that enchantment, is not caused merely by the historical value or the aesthetic quality of the objects but also through the operations of memory: The painting he had ordered helped him to remember the objects, but in the image, he remembers through them. As a result of his personal attachment to the objects of art, their discovery and transportation home, their catalogization, exhibition, and regular presentation to visitors, the painting connects a number of temporal perspectives: In the course of scholarly work with the objects, he remembers the classical age as such, which amounts to a sort of personal recreation, imaginary reconstruction of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The painting also evokes memories of the collector’s own recent past, the journeys that he had begun fifteen years prior to the date of the painting. This explains the client’s request to have the painter include as many works of art in the image as

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possible, as he was fully aware that among other uses, the objects also serve to remind him of his own enchantment and experiences. The inspiring power of encounters with what had once been, and the definitive role of souvenirs in that process were not rare phenomena among the collectors and scholars of that era: Something similar with only minor changes can be observed a few years later in the case of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. That other “northern” traveller also wished to record his enthusiasm for and his enchantment with the classical age, just as Townley had done. According to the famous anecdote, Schinkel had his portrait painted by Franz Ludwig Catel on the way home from his Grand Tour, which had taken him to Southern Italy as well, in 1824. Although the painting shows the famed architect in Naples, with the island of Capri in the background, it was actually painted—as we know from Schinkel’s memoirs—in Rome, where the portrait artist placed his subject in the visual background using careful composition, making sure to include all the antique art treasures that he had collected and later donated to the Museum of Berlin.5 That biographical detail offers a precise description of the desire, characteristic of the impassioned traveller, researcher, and collector, to use all available means to record his experience somehow: He hasn’t even reached home, but he already knows that he wishes to remember, and he consciously—if not very spontaneously—prepares for that remembering using a commemorative painting. This commemorative act—or, the appealing force of commemoration, collection, and recreating through creative rearrangement—can of course result not only its becoming a subject matter of a painting but an actual place and space, too; and this is one of the ways Sir John Soane’s famous house and then museum in London can be interpreted. Through its density of art objects, it definitely stands in parallel with Townley’s depicted study room. Although established a couple of decades later, the intention clearly shows a similar motivation: In the densely filled rooms we have a never fully attainable desire to collect as many tangible and aesthetic remains and references of the past as possible. The avid collector and renowned architect accumulated not merely fragments deriving from Antiquity but also paintings, sculptures, reliefs, casts, building designs, and books, and he created an overwhelming display of these pieces in his house. In 1833 he bequeathed both the property and the entire collection to the nation, with the condition that the manner of display should remain the same. In this way the modern visitor can enter, for free, and visit this highly curious place, a certain form of temple dedicated to classical culture that exactly through the extremely passionate ways and modes of collecting and displaying is blurring the boundaries of museum and (monumental) artwork.6 In other words, one cannot be sure if they are visiting a museum of a collector or if one has physically wandered into an actual, majestic piece of art, an immense assemblage that is both encyclopaedic in

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its aim and disorienting in its appearance. As Brian Lukacher summarised the features of the exhibition (or of the monumental artwork): Soane’s museum aggressively resisted narrative and pedagogical clarity. It had precious few clean sight lines. History was not organized, chronologies and epochs were not defined, the distinctions between original works of art and copies, or even between the artificial and the natural, were not made explicit. Objects and forms were denied independence; they were taken out of themselves and transformed into unexpected accretions of history and architecturalsculptural ensembles that blurred categories of cultures and styles. Active processes of seeing came up against the sepulchral density of antiquity. The past, however, was not simply past—it was reflected and distorted, constantly coming under divergent angles of vision.7

This is how, in John Wilton-Ely’s formulation, Soane “was to create a unique sequence of interiors with complex spatial and structural ambiguities” where “the spectator is led through a kaleidoscopic progression of sensations and emotions.”8 It is not by chance that Soane’s house and museum are often compared to many of Piranesi’s etchings showing the abundance of antique remnants overwhelming in fantastic spaces. What’s more, the future perspective of Soane’s collection is also imagined in his own description of the house from 1812—titled Crude Hints Towards an History of My House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields—as if investigating it as a future ruin and from the point of view of a future antiquarian.9 It is also understandable that Soane’s approach is put in parallel with Laurence Sterne’s, as Jonathan Hill analysed: “Like Sterne, Soane’s method as a designer and a writer was picturesque, fragmented, self-conscious, meandering narration, exploiting incompletion and ruination as a means to engage the reader and the viewer.”10 Naturally all this play with perspectives also reminds us of his close collaborator’s Joseph Michael Gandy’s depictions of Soane’s actual Bank of England imagined as ruins, as we saw in chapter 5. At the same time all this confirms the visitors’ experience that this overwhelming and disorienting accumulation of objects in the labyrinthine museum with its narrow physical space offers a broad mental space for new connections between the works: novel aesthetic explorations throughout the exploration of the exhibition and the discovering of intellectually fertile cross-references among the pieces. The commemorative act will thus become not only one documenting Soane’s imagination, and the display is not only recording how he reassembled classical culture with and through these fragments, but the contemporary visitor can also understand more, through the museum visit itself, how creatively memory may work. The primary encounter with objects from the past constitutes the initial station of the process of remembering. It is followed logically by the desire

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to have the works contemplated continuously, which is thus the birth of the longing to collect and exhibit them. The examples above serve as good illustrations of how memories themselves, the objects (of art) that motivate or even carry them, and the wish to exhibit those objects are closely interconnected. Most museums end up becoming an exhibition space for that temporal perspective reconstructed by the works, where memories become the objects of public and cultural remembrance. The temporal orientation that is generated by the objects collected and their physical exhibition is married to them forever, and it, or more precisely the time fixed in the objects, is the basis on which the museums are built. Naturally, all of that remains valid after a private collection becomes a public one, where, therefore, it is no longer a specific person, but a “nation” remembering through the objects on display. In this way we can see that the objects exhibited in classical museums serve the (re)construction of memory: They work against forgetting. The objects, which exist, help us remember a time that no longer exists, as they impel visitors to traverse the spaces that were created for the objects. It is at the end of Orhan Pamuk’s 2008 The Museum of Innocence, the celebrated Turkish author’s first novel published after he won the Nobel Prize, that we read this: “Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”11 This statement is a perfect summary of the transformation that museums, as an institution, wish to achieve. However, the process can have odd stages and digressions, and one of those is actually illustrated by the novel I just mentioned and the real (?) museum that is connected with it. In what follows, I shall compare two museums that, each in their own way, have rethought the modes of creating and processing memories. Pieve Santo Stefano, an obscure, small Italian town at the triple border of the regions of Tuscany, Umbria, and Emilia-Romagna that is rarely frequented by tourists, is home to the Piccolo museo del diario (Tiny Museum of Diaries). As the name suggests, this museum does not collect historical objects—say everyday household objects or works of art with aesthetic value—that may help us remember times gone by, but, rather, it collects remembering itself, in its most clearly objectified form: personal diaries, private notes, memoirs, and letters. A direct experience of how fragile the past can be was certainly part of the motivation for the establishment of the museum: The original mediaeval town had been razed to the ground quite pointlessly by German troops as they retreated in the summer of 1944. It was a pointless operation because neither the size nor the location of the town justified the placement of land mines all over it. Today, the little town that was rebuilt from the rubble has hardly any notable historical buildings except for a few churches and public buildings that were spared. The majority of the houses were destroyed, but the experience of how the tangible aids the

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media of remembrance, for instance that the very structure of the town could disappear in a moment without any reason has not been forgotten—bitter testimony to Aleida Assmann’s statement, who, following Heiner Müller, has claimed that the initial impetus for the work of remembering is always some shocking event.12 As a result, the town became an ideal venue for the reconstruction of memories and rebirth through memories: Forty years after the town’s destruction, in 1984, the journalist Saverio Tutino began to collect diaries, in fact memoirs in any shape and form, and to arrange them in an archive that is open to the public. Right in the first round, in response to just a few adverts placed in newspapers, hundreds of private documents were sent in, and today they number over seven thousand. In the wake of its success, the initiative has developed further: In 1991 the town founded the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (National Diary Archive Foundation), which began to publish the semiannual journal Primapersona in 1998, featuring selections from and discussions of the newly received memories, and the museum also hosts regular presentations, readings, festivals, and experimental documentary films. Mario Perrotta’s play, written and staged in 2011, Il Paese dei Diari (The Town of Diaries) led to the wonderful idea of also presenting a part of the archives to the general public as a museum, inaugurated in 2013. The museum itself is then the place where those interested can get personally involved in the process of remembering. The exhibition, designed by the specialists of the Milan design studio Dotdotdot, transformed a few rooms of a floor in one of the town’s remaining old buildings, the Town Hall, into an interactive and “multisensorial” exhibition space where history, as experienced, was made perceptible in various ways. Memoirs are not only available for viewing, they can also be read, browsed, heard in full—and even heard in totality: In one of the rooms, the constant and chaotic noise of many diary extracts being read out at the same time is a literal realisation of the idea by Saverio Tutino, the founder, that through the diaries we can hear “the whispering of the others.”13 Elsewhere, instead of involuntary listening, active participation is required: In another room, one wall is completely filled with colour drawers, which need to be pulled out to start the corresponding recording. This literally places the decision in the visitor’s hands as to what and how much to accept—or take away—of the personal memories of others. All of this demonstrates the unique nature of the museum and archive: The emphasis has been shifted to the remembrance of personal, experienced history. This is not history as written or perhaps even constructed by professional scholars, but rather, it is about the extent to which the thing we traditionally term history were actually perceived by the man in the street, people whose lives do not feature in any official history books. The experiences of everyday residents then help us—according to the introduction of the museum’s

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Figure 12.1  Installation view from the Piccolo museo del diario. Photograph by Luigi Burroni.

website—“to write history from the bottom up,” so that after all, the personal memories do add up to the history of the community, the country, and more than a century, now.14 It is beyond doubt that the writings of untrained rememberers trace out a special view of history, and that there is no justification for the claim that these documents are in any way less authentic, on account of their subjectivity, than the summaries of history written in “official” archives and libraries by the specialists of the field. They certainly are not for the peasant lady Clelia Marchi, who, in the winter of 1986, donated to the newly established archive her memoirs handwritten on her wedding sheet, over two metres long. That sheet is a unique historical document not only of a life coming to an end, but also of a disappearing form of life. For Clelia Marchi, that was her own experienced history, and the object truly deserves its place of honour in a separate room and a special museum case at the institution, which we could rightly call the museum of real memories. If we can call the Piccolo Museo del Diario in Pieve Santo Stefano the museum of real memories, my other example is quite the opposite. The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul may be termed a real museum of fictitious memories. It was established by Orhan Pamuk, and it opened in 2012, a few years after the publication of the eponymous novel. Naturally, the name is no accident, the museum is closely linked with the text. The book describes a love affair between Kemal, a well-off upper-middle-class young man in his

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thirties and the heir to an Istanbul trading company, and Füsun, who works as a shop assistant at the beginning of the novel, in which waiting, desire, and objects of remembrance that stand in for their referents all play important roles in the form of Kemal’s passion for alleviating the pain caused by the absence of his love, Füsun, by obtaining objects. After the short and passionate initial phase of their love affair, Füsun marries someone else, but Kemal keeps visiting her for another eight years in the house that, along with appearing in the novel, has also become the real museum. Every time he visits, he takes away with him an object that reminds him of Füsun: They are objects that were in some, or rather any kind of connection with his love, say a saltshaker that she had touched when they had dinner together, individual cards, combs, and even many thousand cigarette butts collected over the years. Visitors—who should preferably see the museum after reading the novel—can walk around the floors of the building to view the everyday objects installed in exhibit cases in the sequence of the chapters, which, in turn, remind readers of the events and descriptive passages of the novel, in the same way that, at the end of the book, the fictitious founder, Kemal also remembers his love in a museum environment. The process works both ways here, as the text itself already contains references to the exhibition: In his first-person singular sentences, the fictitious narrator, Kemal, often analyses the objects on show, looking back and explaining the character of the exhibition. As to whether the Museum of Innocence is a true museum, that is an exciting question. We can see quite easily that it is real—it is in a brickand-mortar building, it is tangible, it can be visited, you have to buy a ticket, and it even cooperates with other institutions. The curator of the 14th Istanbul Biennial (held in 2015), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, has also used the venue to show a very strong, intense abstract expressionist painting by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948). It was very natural for the piece by the American painter of Armenian extraction—in which the longing for a lost home appears through organic, abstract shapes—to be displayed in the “museum” of Kemal’s longing for his love.15 Yet it is also a part of the “realness” of the museum that it is built on—or from—the tokens of an imaginary narrative. We see actual objects: everyday objects that were once used by people before the author Pamuk collected them. They are, however, transmuted by their roles in the novel, and the simple objects, or even waste to be thrown away such as the cigarette butts mentioned above, are filled with content and significance. The museum itself is special because it draws attention to that process of transmutation. The entire work, that is to say the novel and the real museum that goes with it, is rendered even more interesting by the fact that the original imaginary narrative is itself about remembering. As a result, the fictional story is rendered real by the actually existing “fictitious” museum. It is actual and fictitious at the same time: Although it can be visited, it was

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born in an imaginary story (written earlier); the novel’s protagonist and narrator told the story of its foundation and often provided explicit commentary about the objects, in the text. The fictitious and the real are also connected by a “directly ontological link” when, on one of the last pages of the novel, the reader finds a complimentary ticket: Thanks to the narrator, Kemal, each owner of the novel may visit the museum for free, they only need to get the relevant page stamped at the ticket office. This also shows that the foundation of the museum was not an ad hoc decision of the author. Pamuk has also published another book in connection with the museum, which, at first, seems more akin to a “conventional” catalogue, illustrating the museum cases and the majority of the objects shown in them with many colour photos interspersed with short texts about the processes of writing the novel and installing the museum. In that publication, titled The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk emphasises that although he had planned the novel and the museum in parallel from the beginning, the museum is not simply an illustration of the novel, just as the novel is not simply a guide to the exhibition.16 Yet the question remains: What is the actual purpose of the museum? Who or what is it a museum of? Is it a museum of the fictitious protagonists of the novel, Kemal and Füsun? The everyday lives of the Turkish (upper) middle class of the 1970s and 1980s, or the entire second half of the 20th century? Or is it a museum of the actual author, Pamuk, who, as we have seen, has also published another book about the (his) museum? Or a museum of the novel? Or, and this is the most likely interpretation to my mind, is it a museum of Istanbul itself, the setting of the novel and Pamuk’s beloved city, which contains and unites all the previously mentioned possibilities? In relation to that last idea, it is interesting to note how often the theme of remembering is examined in relation to Istanbul. Perhaps due to the recursively layered structure of the city’s history, or the mixed emotions (nostalgia and the Westernized feelings urging the overcoming of the former) evoked by its former role as the centre of an empire, this city stimulates us to face up to the past, including the personal past embodied in our memories. Illustrations of that point include not only one of Pamuk’s earlier books, perhaps a more directly subjective city story than The Museum of Innocence,17 but also one of the perhaps less “loud” but all the more thought-provoking pieces shown at the Istanbul Biennial. It is a piece by the artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset, who were also the curators of the 2017 edition of the Istanbul Biennial and today work in Berlin. We could define the work as a long performance: At one of the venues of the Biennial in the city’s Karaköy quarter, in a building that had once been a Greek school, there was an almost completely dark room, illuminated only by desk lamps, where, throughout the opening hours of the exhibition, seven young men seated at seven desks worked on their diaries or memoirs.18 Viewers could watch them from the doorway, but they

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could also enter the room (once a classroom) and quietly read what the writers were working on. However, it soon became clear to visitors that the focus of the piece by Elmgreen and Dragset was not the actual text being written by the diarists but the showing forth of the activity itself, that is to say, the use of very simple, minimal instruments to make a forceful statement to the art-loving visitors of the Biennial about the responsibility of remembering. In the darkened room, the reading lamps casting light on the diaries as theatrical spotlights directed the attention of viewers to the process, or we could well say, the duty of remembering—or, more precisely, the cultivation of memories. So with this piece, Elmgreen and Dragset criticized our frequent failure to remember, which was rendered all the more significant and emphatic by the allusion to the classical form of making notes: The participants in the performance wrote in longhand. The duo used this to evoke the conscious, active, and responsible character of remembering at the very moment when, in today’s excessively digitized world, instead of carefully written notes that are intended to last for decades (or even “an eternity”), we attempt to preserve the moment using signs—in particular the billions and billions of visual quasi-memories—that offer the illusion of an eternal present but that are in fact quite insignificant and ephemeral. Therefore, the Museum of Innocence is at least as much a memorial to the city of Istanbul as to the plot of the novel. Istanbul is not presented simply as an ancient and modern metropolis, or even the location of the memories, but as a motivator of the process of remembering. Based on all this, we may come to the conclusion that in a certain sense both museums, the Piccolo Museo del Diario in Pieve Santo Stefano and the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul can be called “meta-museums,” institutions that examine the birth of memories and the process of remembering itself. They are also related by another characteristic: The Italian museum fits the new ideal of museums dreamed up by Pamuk himself, perfectly. The author published his “manifesto,” which can be read on the website of the Museum of Innocence, with the main claim that in contrast with the conventional structure of traditional museums—which appear as monumental illustrations or even demonstrations of universal historical narratives—it would be more important to exhibit the microstructures of personal experience.19 In the points of the manifesto, it is a recurring notion that instead of the powerful mega-institutions exhibiting “The History of Mankind,” powerful in both senses of the word (i.e., physically large and also often in the service of powerful ambitions of (cultural) policy), the focus should be shifted to the real stories of individual human beings, naturally accompanied by a change of scale, in smaller, more modest museums. Of course, The Museum of Innocence is itself a semi-fictitious example of such a museum, where the objects of the imaginary protagonists, and their descriptions, introduce us to everyday

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Istanbul life in the 1970s and 1980s, but the Italian Piccolo Museo del Diario, where we can learn about actual, directly experienced human lives, is an even better match for the ideal set out in Pamuk’s manifesto. Every museum is based on some form of remembering; they are places where we wish to remember through the objects on display. The metamuseums I have examined bring forth that very process of remembering. By presenting the birth of memories and examining the transmutation of objects and the processes of remembering, they actually work directly with time. They analyse the possibilities of grasping the passage of time and infusing it with meaning. The structures of memory remind us of the responsibility of remembering. The objects exhibited within the museum space uphold those perspectives, or, as we read in Pamuk’s novel, if successful, they transform “Time into Space.” NOTES 1. This chapter is a partly enlarged version of a previous text originally published in Hungarian in honour of Prof. János Weiss: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Térré vált idő. Orhan Pamuk és az emlékezés múzeumai,” in Töredékes dialektika (Festschrift for János Weiss), eds. Judit Bartha and Zoltán Gyenge (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2017), 249–57. 2. Michel Makarius, Ruins (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 169. 3. For more detail about the genre and the Tribuna painting, see for instance Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Conversation Piece: Scene of Fashionable Life (London: Royal Collection Publications, 2009), 6–22, 130–37. 4. Quoted in Dan Cruickshank, London’s Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London’s Georgian Age (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 380. 5. For more detail about the painting, see for instance Birgit Verwiebe, ed., Kunst der Goethezeit (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1999), 140; and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Reisen nach Italien: Tagebücher, Briefe, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, ed. Gottfried Riemann, (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1982), 227. 6. See some further considerations on this museum within the context of the history of exhibiting in an earlier article of mine: Zoltán Somhegyi, “From the Public Nature of Art to the Nature of Public Art: Considerations on the Changing Spaces and Modes of Exhibiting,” Serbian Architectural Journal 9, no. 2 (2017): 191–200. 7. Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 160. 8. John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum, and Soane (Munich: Prestel, 2013), 92, 94. 9. Sir John Soane, Crude Hints Towards an History of My House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with an introduction by Helen Dorey (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2015). See also Lukacher, Joseph Gandy, 157; and Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum, and Soane, 92–97.

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10. Jonathan Hill, The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present, and Future (London: Routledge, 2019), 167. 11. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage, 2009), 510. 12. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: C. H. Beck, 2010), 18. 13. “fruscio degli altri,” Piccolo museo del diario, accessed August 12, 2019, https​ ://ww​w.pic​colom​useod​eldia​rio.i​t/it/​prese​ntazi​one/.​ 14. “storia scritta dal basso,” Piccolo museo del diario. 15. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms: Guidebook of the 14. Istanbul Biennial, (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and ArtsYapı Kredı Publications 2015), 33. 16. Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, trans. Ekin Oklap (New York: Abrams, 2012), 11, 18. 17. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage, 2006). 18. For more about this piece, see Adnan Yildiz, “Elmgreen and Dragset,” in Mom, Am I Barbarian? Guide to the 13th Istanbul Biennial, ed. Liz Erçevik Amado (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts-Yapı Kredı Publications, 2013), 272–75; and about the Biennial, including this piece: Zoltán Somhegyi, “Barbarians instead? Fragile Dichotomy at the 13th Istanbul Biennial, 2013,” Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East 14, no. 1 (2014): 14–21. 19. Orhan Pamuk, “A Modest Manifesto for Museums,” accessed August 12, 2019, https​://ma​sumiy​etmuz​esi-e​n.mys​hopio​.com/​page/​a-mod​est-m​anife​sto-f​or-mu​seums​.

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Whitehouse, Tanya. How Ruins Acquire Aesthetics Value: Modern Ruins, Ruin Porn, and the Ruin Tradition. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Wilkoszewska, Krystyna, ed. Aesthetics in Action. International Yearbook of Aesthetics. Vol. 18. Krakow: International Association for Aesthetics, 2015. Williams, Gilda. “It Was What it Was: Modern Ruins.” In Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Brian Dillon, 94–99. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen. “Temple Talk.” Artforum, October 11, 2016. https​://ww​w.art​ forum​.com/​diary​/kael​en-wi​lson-​goldi​e-at-​the-s​ilent​-echo​-in-b​aalbe​k-640​09. Wilton-Ely, John. Piranesi, Paestum, and Soane. Munich: Prestel, 2013. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. “Description of the Torso in the Belvedere in Rome.” In Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, edited and translated by Curtis Bowman, xiii–xviii. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001. (orig. 1759). ———. Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, edited by Curtis Bowman. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001. Woodward, Christopher. “Learning from Detroit or ‘the Wrong Kind of Ruins.’” In Urban Wildscapes, edited by Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan, 17–32. London: Routledge, 2012. ———. Tra le rovine: Un viaggio attraverso la storia, l’arte e la letteratura. Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2008. World Humanities Forum, ed. The Human Image in a Changing World: Proceedings of the 5th World Humanities Forum, Busan, South Korea (October 31–November 2, 2018). Seoul, KR: World Humanities Forum, 2018. Wu, Hung. A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Culture. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. Yildiz, Adnan. “Elmgreen and Dragset.” In Mom, Am I Barbarian? Guide to the 13th Istanbul Biennial, edited by Liz Erçevik Amado, 272–75. Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts-Yapı Kredı Publications, 2013. Zakaria, Sherouk. “Al Seef: A Place for Living the Past in Dubai.” Khaleej Times, August 15, 2018. https​://ww​w.kha​leejt​imes.​com/n​ation​/duba​i/al-​seef-​a-pla​ce-fo​ r-liv​ing-t​he-pa​st-in​-duba​i. Zanker, Paul. “Le rovine romane e i loro osservatori.” In Relitti riletti: Metamorfosi delle rovine e identità culturale, edited by Marcello Barbanera, 256–77. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009. Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Ruminations on Ruins: Classical versus Romantic.” German Quarterly 89, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 265–81. “Zollverein Unesco World Heritage Site.” Accessed August 12, 2019. https​://ww​w.zol​ lvere​in.de​/app/​uploa​ds/20​18/02​/Zoll​verei​n-UNE​SCO-W​orld_​Herit​age-S​ite.p​df. Zucker, Paul. “Ruins: An Aesthetic Hybrid.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2 (Winter 1961): 119–30. ———. Fascination of Decay: Ruin, Relic, Symbol, Ornament. Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968.

Index

Page references for figures are italicized. 15th century, 27, 29, 51, 76 16th century, 27–29, 47 17th century, 27–29, 30, 36, 61, 81, 139 18th century, 5–7, 11, 15–16, 23–24, 29–31, 34, 37, 40, 50–52, 54–55, 59, 79–80, 85, 94, 99, 103–106, 154, 158, 161, 168, 176, 207 19th century, 16, 23–24, 40–41, 79, 95, 105, 119, 158, 168, 172, 183–184, 207, 209–210 abandonment, 14, 28, 36–37, 53, 68, 73, 78, 87–88, 93–98, 101, 117, 122, 148, 165–168, 174, 185 Abdulkarim, Maamoun, 206 absence, xv, 3, 7–11, 14, 16, 69–71, 78, 95–96, 125, 148, 170, 176, 204, 207– 208; lacuna, 7–8, 14, 70; negative space, 8, 170, 204 Abu Dhabi, 211 aesthetic qualities, 3, 7, 23–24, 46, 69, 73, 76, 83, 114, 137, 141, 145, 148, 150–155, 162, 216 aesthetic value, xvii, 11, 35, 40, 76, 107–109, 115, 138, 146–156, 162, 193, 199, 206–208, 219

afterlife of ruins/archaeological findings, xviii, 56, 67–68, 76, 146, 149, 156, 215 aging, 11, 14–15, 151, 154, 189 Ai, Weiwei, 173 Aikema, Bernard, 35–36, 54 Al-Ghoussein, Tarek, 88–89 Alberti, Leon Battista, 76 Albrecht, Glenn, 122 Allahyari, Morehshin, 203 Allen, Woody, 113, 125 ambiguity, 9, 15, 19, 30, 32, 41, 47, 53–54, 58, 76, 83, 86, 103, 117, 122–124, 133, 218 Amsterdam, 103 Anderson, Mary Elizabeth, 175 Angkor, 78 Antique Ruins, 76, 80, 94, 99–100, 116, 118, 124, 154 Antiquity, 16–18, 24, 39, 48, 51, 56–62, 77, 94, 99, 104–108, 121, 197–198, 202, 205, 208–209, 217–218 archaeology, 16, 140, 141, 173, 207– 211; archaeological perspective/ approach, 10, 53, 68, 71–72, 77, 82; archaeological site, xvi, 14, 98, 121, 194; archaeologist, 8

243

244

Index

ars gratia artis, 7 artificial ruins, 4, 15, 52–53, 154, 158– 159, 161, 191, 194, 202 artist: depictions of, 46–51, 57–58; Nature as. See Nature, as artist; Subjectivity of, 30, 37, 50 Asaf, Özdemir, 83 Assel, Jutta, 60 Assmann, Aleida, 220 Assmann, Jan, 67–68 Ates, Güler, 85–86 Athanasoulis, Demetrios, 171 Athens, 52, 120–121 Atkins, Ed, 172 Augé, Marc, 19, 108, 186 authenticity, 11, 86, 153, 156, 158–159, 188–193, 202, 221; of representation/ documentation, 26, 32–33, 35, 42, 50, 52–53, 56; and ruins management. See management, and authenticity Baalbaki, Mohamad-Said, 159–162 Baalbek, 80, 173 Backford, William, 54 Bagdadi, Maroun, 87 Baghdad, 173–175 Bamiyan, 204, 210 Barbanera, Marcello, 51, 106, 108 Barker, Darren, 191 Baroque, 27, 139, 215 Battersea Power Station, 93 Baudrillard, Jean, 114, 125, beauty, 29–30, 33; of ruins, 23, 38, 40, 54, 85, 107, 122, 149 Beddington, Charles, 30, 34 Bedford, Francis, 80, 81 Beirut, 87, 159–160 Bellini, Gentile, 30 Bellotti, Pietro, 34 Bellotto, Bernardo, 33–34 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 108 Berchem, Nikolaus, 61 Berlin, 134, 141–142, 210, 217, 223 Berlin Wall, 134, 138, 141

Beutler, Christian, 61 Bevan, Robert, 204 Bicknell, Jeanette, 10 Bilsel, Can, 210 Blake, Jorge Méndez, 142–143 Blühm, Andreas, 41 body. See ruins, and body Bologna, 7, 14 Bonfils, Félix, 79, 80 border, 131, 142, 219. See also walls Boym, Svatlana, 102 Böhringer, Hannes, 108 Börsch-Supan, Helmut, 39 Brodey, Inger Sigrun, 11 Broggini, Oliver, 100, 118 Brosses, Charles de, 17 Brown, Capability, 53 Bruegel, Pieter, 47 Buchakjian, Gregory, 87–88 Budapest, 210 Burney, Charles, 54 Busch, Werner, 30, 38, 47 Byrne, Denis, 72, 76 Byron, George, 16 Caffi, Ippolito, 40–41, 169 Calcar, Jan Steven van, 50 camera obscura, 32, 34 Camerarius, Petrus, 28 Canal, Antonio. See Canaletto, Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Giovanni Antonio, 31–36, 38, 54–56, 105 Canova, Antonio, 145, 149–150, 152, 155 capriccio, 5, 29–35, 38, 54–56, 104–105, 191 Caravaggio, Polidoro da, 47 Cardi, Maria Virginia, 50 Carpaccio, Vittore, 30 Carus, Carl Gustav, 168 Catel, Franz Ludwig, 217 causes of ruination/decay, 11, 14, 74, 147–148, 175, 205, 218 Cavafy, Constantine, 134–136

Index

Caylus, Comte de, 52 charm, 17, 24, 53 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 68 China, 13, 67, 73, 157–158, 191–192 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, 222 Clare, John, 122 Claude-glass, 99 Cleere, Henry, 72 Coliseum, 6–7, 15, 48–49, 75–76, 120, 168–169 collecting, 31–34, 60, 86, 89, 149–150, 209, 215–220, 222 Colonna, Francesco, 46 Colosseum. See Coliseum commemoration, 30, 82, 159–160, 174– 175, 217–218, 236–237 consumerism, 114–120, 124–125, 181– 183, 186–187, 192, 198 contemporary art, 77, 82, 146, 151, 159, 172–174 contemporary ruins, 14–15, 93–109, 121, 123; impact of, 96, 99–103, 116–118, 121, 174 continuity, 16, 48–49, 72, 75, 137, 158, 207 Corboz, André, 32 Cosalius, Petrus, 28 Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de, 27–28 craquelure, 147, 154 Daniel, Ladislav, 31 Danto, Arthur C., 147 Deakin, Richard, 117 death, 28, 100, 123, 138, 142, 151, 174– 175. See also decay; ruins, and body debris, 18–19, 76, 149–150, 155, 174, 198–199, 204 decay: aesthetics of, xvi, 4, 9–15, 18, 23, 26, 36–42, 53–55, 70–71, 78, 82, 85–89, 98–103, 109, 115–125, 146–149, 155–156, 170–173; elements of, 4–5, 42, 95; imitated, 189, 193; inevitability of, xvi, 28; interpretation of, 27–28, 36, 50, 69,

245

75, 77, 88–89, 151. See also death; ruins, and body deracination of ruins, 200–201, 204–207 DeSilvey, Caitlin, 94 deterioration: as “completing” artwork, 145–156; differing modes of, 70, 95–96 Detroit, 113, 119–125, 175 Diderot, Denis, 108 Dillon, Brian, 14, 29, 103 disappearance, 8–11, 16, 24, 73, 76, 82, 99, 159, 220–221 Doha, 190 Douris, 79 Döblin, Alfred, 134 Duany, Andres, 184 Dubai, 83, 88, 187–189, 191, 211 Dubin, Nina L., 17, 104 Duchamp, Marcel, 133 Edensor, Tim 94, 102–3, 167, 172, 192 Eichler, Gottfried, 28 Einem, Herbert von, 60 El Helou, Karina, 173 Eliot, T. S., 17 Elmgreen and Dragset, 223–224 emotional impact of ruins, 3, 12, 100–103, 122. See also melancholy; nostalgia Enlightenment, 37, 72, 77, 94 Ephesus, 5 Erdemci, Fulya, 143 Eriksen, Anne, 23 Erkmen, Ayşe, 135–136, 142, 154 Erythrai, 96 ethical issues, 68, 73, 120–123, 144, 203 Eulisse, Gian Luca, 152–153 exoticism, 83–84 experience of ruins 4, 14, 13–14, 18, 45–51, 68, 76, 86–89, 97, 150, 168, 205; encountering, xvii, 7 45–6, 62; Impact of, xv, 15, 46, 199–200 Facey, William, 79

246

Index

fakeness, (imitate, mock, artificial), 75, 124, 176, 186, 188, 189–194; fake ruins. See artificial ruins Faroult, Guillaume, 108 Felch, Jason, 203–204 Filarete, Antonio Francesco di, 76 film, xix, 87, 93, 100–101, 103, 113, 125, 131, 142, 220 Forum Romanum, 17 fragmentation: in artworks, 47, 57–58, 60–62, 89, 145–162, 203, 218; and memory, 17, 160, 201, 215; and ruins, 11, 28, 86, 147–149, 161, 200–202, 206–210 Friedrich, Caspar David, 37–40 functionlessness, xv, xvii, 5–8, 14, 69–71, 78, 95–96, 148, 170 Fuseli, Henry, 57–58, 60 Füssli, Johann Heinrich. See Fuseli, Henry Gandy, Joseph Michael, 36, 39, 105– 107, 116, 119, 218 Gassner, Hubertus, 37, 39 genuineness. See authenticity Gharem, Abdulnasser, 131–133 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 26–27 Giacomini, Federica, 60 Gibson, William, 119 Gilpin, William, 15, 53 Ginsberg, Robert, xiii, 6, 124, 137, 201 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6–7, 17, 60–62, 89 Gorky, Arshile, 222 Gormley, Anthony, 171 Gothic, 6, 13, 26, 32, 39, 54, 68, 70, 77, 188 Gradenigo, 34 Graeco-Roman, 67, 77–78, 94 graffiti, 167 Grand Tour, 33, 38, 55, 99, 168, 216– 217 Grant, Gillian, 79 Griffioen, James, 122 Guardi, Francesco, 31, 33–37, 56, 105

Guarienti, G. P., 31 Guidi, Guido, 152–153 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 18 Gumpert, Matthew, 135 Guyer, Sara, 122 Hahn, Hermann-Michael, 42 haikyo, 96, 98–102, 174 Hall, Edward, 191 Hangzhou, 191–192 Hansen, Maria Fabricius, 49 Harb, Hazem, 140–142, 153 Harries, Elizabeth Wanning, 202 Harrison, Regina, 67 Hashim, Riyadh, 174 Hatoum, Mona, 160–162 Heemskerck, Maerten van, 48, 151 Heintz, Joseph, 30 Hell, Julia, 169, 205 Henkel, Arthur, 27 heritage, 45, 58, 60–62, 67–68, 70–78, 80, 118, 124, 150, 173, 186–193, 203; site management/ preservation, 71–77, 82, 95, 204, 207, 209, 211 Hertel, Johann Georg, 28 Hill, Jonathan, 100, 218 history, 7, 9, 18–19, 23–24, 27, 29, 33, 36, 38, 45, 51, 55, 71, 75–77, 86, 104–109, 120, 123, 125, 138, 153, 160, 162, 168, 171, 173–175, 183–188, 192, 197–211, 215–224 Hitler, Adolf, 169 Hofmann, Werner, 38–39 Holtorf, Cornelius, 189 Hopkinson, Sarah, 136 Howard, Deborah, 158 Höner, Julia, 151, 203 Hudson, Joanne, 167 Hui, Andrew, 27 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 45 Huyssen, Andreas, 206 iconoclasm, 197, 202–205; of ruins. See ruin clearance.

Index

imagination, 10, 16–17, 47, 49, 51, 53, 56, 103–108, 119, 123–124, 134, 172, 176, 202, 206, 208, 216, 218, 222–224 industrial ruins, 15, 94–97, 99–102, 120–121, 123, 167, 172, 175 Isé, Claudine, 114 ISIS. See terrorism Islamic State. See terrorism Istanbul, 119, 135–136, 142, 172, 208, 210, 221–225 Italy, 16, 29, 99, 150, 169, 188, 216– 217 Izenour, Steven, 124–125 Japan, 95–96, 145, 153 Jarrar, Khaled, 141–142, 153 Jäger, Georg, 60 Jensen, Jens Christian, 38 Jiang, Jiehong, 191–192 Kafka, Franz, 142–144 Kapoor, Anish, 140 Keats, John, 16 Koolhaas, Rem, 108 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 3, 18, 97, 201 Koselleck, Reinhart, 104 Kouria, Aphrodite, 52 Kulaksiz, Coşar, 85 lacuna. See absence Lamarque, Peter, 206 landscape, 4–5, 28, 30–31, 33, 36–38, 46–47, 50–53, 56, 60, 80, 85, 99, 124, 141, 153–154, 158, 161 Langham, Eric, 191 Las Vegas, 124–125 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 61 Le Goff, Jacques, 104, 203 Leary, John Patrick, 121 Leibing, Peter, 138 Leonardo da Vinci, 153 Leptis Magna, 202 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 159 Links, J. G. 31–32

247

Livy, 138, 205 London, 83, 93, 103, 106, 162, 165, 210, 211, 216, 217 Lorrain, Claude, 99 Louvre. See museums, Louvre Ludwig I of Bavaria, 45 Lukacher, Brian, 107, 218 Lyons, Siobhan, 123–124 Macaulay, Rose, 13, 97 Machu Picchu, 67 Makarius, Michel, 47, 215 Malevich, Kazimir, 147 malls, 93, 113–125, 174, 181–194 management: approaches to, 68–74, 77, 211; and authenticity, 68–75, 202, 206; global/inclusive approach, 71, 76, 82; Western (hegemonic) approach, 69, 71–72, 75 Mandić, Asja, 174 Mantegna, Andrea, 27, 138 Manutius, Aldus, 46 Marchand, Yves, 120 Marchi, Clelia, 221 Marchini, Giovanni Francesco, 139 Marden, Brice, 146 Marieschi, Michele, 30–31 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 139–140 McCormick, Thomas J., 154 mediaeval, 6–7, 48, 77, 94, 97, 219. See also Middle Ages Meegeren, Han van, 154 Meffre, Romain, 120 Meijer, Bert W., 47 melancholy, 16, 28, 36–37, 45, 57, 100, 115–116, 118, 122, 198, 200 Melotti, Marxiano, 168 memorial, 10, 210, 224 memory, 49, 85, 87, 98–99, 104, 108, 122, 137, 160, 162, 174–175, 191–192, 200, 202–205, 215–225; cultural, 67–69; involuntary, 102–103 Merling, Mitchell, 34, 36

248

metaphysical approach, 17, 100. See also ontology Middle Ages, 3, 25, 94, 104, 188. See also mediaeval Miessen, Markus, 187 Mijs, Jonathan Jan Benjamin, 121 Miller, M. H., 120 Miller, Tyrus, 17 modernism, 17, 109 Moffit, John F., 61 Montaigne, Michel de, 51 monument, 7, 11, 16, 23, 26–28, 36, 48–9, 58–59, 68, 71, 75, 76, 78, 80–81, 94, 106, 109, 120, 137, 150, 159–162, 175, 186, 194, 197–211 Moran, Yıldız, 83–85 Mossmann, Danae, 136 mourning, 10, 58, 115, 150, 162, 210 Moving Image Art Fair, 165–166 museum, 59, 133, 172–173, 200–201, 206, 209–211, 215, 217–225; Musei Capitolini, 60; of Innocence. See Museum of Innocence; Louvre, 107–108; management, 71–72; Mount Asama Volcano Museum, 95–96; Piccolo Museo del Diario. See Piccolo Museo del Diario; ruin as, 14, 121 Museum of Innocence, 219, 221–225 Müller, Heiner, 220 Myssok, Johannes, 41 Nagel, Alexander, 48 Nagel, Ivan, 106 nationalism, 23, 77, 209–210 nature: as “artist”, 7–9, 11–12, 18, 71, 117, 137–140, 148, 154–156; power of, 15, 23, 41, 74, 82, 98, 124, 155– 156, 170, 198–199; reclamation by, 4, 11, 14, 24, 31, 81, 96, 107, 116; ruins and, 4, 5, 8, 11, 26, 38, 73–74, 168, 199–201; and suburbanism, 183–184 negative space. See absence neoclassical, 24, 119, 145, 215

Index

Nerly, Friedrich, 41–42 new ruins. See contemporary ruins New York, 144, 210, 211 Nicholas V., pope, 76 Nieszczerzewska, Małgorzata, 11, 101 nostalgia, 16, 38, 41–42, 47, 57, 115–116, 118, 120, 122, 192, 198, 200, 223; shortcuts to, 154–155, 190–191 not-anymore-ruin, 9–12, 14, 17, 19, 24, 95 nothingness, 8–10 not-yet-ruin, 9–12, 14, 19, 24, 95 Novalis, 17 Novellanus, Simon, 47 Ojetti, Ugo, 150 ontology, 199, 206, 223 Orientalism, 86. See also exoticism Palestine, 140–141, 160 Palladio, Andrea 36, 55, 56 Palmyra, 203, 211, Pamuk, Orhan, 215, 219, 221–225 Papini, Massimiliano, 25 Paris, 139 Pedrocco, Filippo, 29 Pergamon, 10, 210 Perrotta, Mario, 220 perspective, 34, 55–56; temporal. See temporal perspective Pétursdóttir, Þóra, 101, 192 Philæ, 81 photography, 83–84, 138, 141, 145, 150, 152, 192; ruins and, 3–4, 15, 78–80, 82–83, 85–89, 117, 120–123, 151–154, 166 Piccolo museo del diario, 219–221, 224–225 picturesque, 5, 7, 13–16, 19, 31, 53–54, 70, 79, 96, 98, 107–108, 116, 122, 137, 147, 161, 198, 218 Pieve Santo Stefano, 219–221, 224 Pigler, Andor, 29 Pinto, John A., 169

Index

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 99, 105– 107, 218 Pius VI., pope, 59 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 184 Pleşu, Andrei, 36 Plutarch, 205 Pobric, Pac, 146 poetics, 16, 36, 156, 159, 208 politics, 16, 36, 38, 67, 71, 82, 115, 144, 151, 162, 168–169, 173, 192–193, 197, 202, 204–205, 208, 211 popular culture, 187–189, 193 Pound, Ezra, 17 Prandi, Alberto, 150 pre-ruins, 42, 98–99, 104–109 presence of ruins, 3–5, 8–9, 14–16, 18–19, 23–24, 36, 46, 48–49, 51–52, 58, 69, 74, 89, 100, 106, 108, 121, 176, 192, 200 Pressouyre, Sylvia, 25 propaganda, 148, 150–153, 169, 203– 204, 206 Puff, Helmut, 48–49 Puhlmann, Johann Gottlieb, 52 Pusca, Anca, 99, 123 Qufu, Confucian Temple, 73–74 Raffaello. See Raphael Rajasthan, 86 Raphael, 108 Rashid, Noor Ali, 82–83, 85 Razzall, Rosie, 105 recent ruination. See contemporary ruins religion, 192, 197, 200, 205, 211; and art, 25–27, 30, 38–39, 47–48; and heritage, 68, 72, 202–205, 210 restoration: of art, 155–156, 158; of buildings, 167, 170, 72–73; of ruins, 41, 53, 73–75, 170, 206 Rewald, Sabine, 38 Rewett, Nicholas, 52 Rico, Trinidad, 190 Riegl, Alois, 11 Ripa, Cesare, 28

249

Robert, Hubert, 36, 39, 56, 105, 107– 108, 116, 119 Robison, Andrew, 106 Rococo, 24, 215 Romano, Giulio, 85 Romanticism, 16, 23–24, 37, 39–40, 58, 106, 119, 146, 168 Rome, 17, 29, 34, 41, 45, 48, 52, 58–60, 75–76, 105, 107, 113, 120–121, 168–169, 217 Roth, Michael S., 74, 78 Rout, Josephine, 86 rubble, 10, 175–176; ruins vs., 4, 10, 18–19, 76, 147, 155, 201 ruins: afterlife of. See afterlife of ruins; and body, 48–50, 85–88, 100, 150–151; causes of. See causes of ruination; classical, 11, 14, 15; conservation of. See management; criteria of, xvii, 5, 12, 14. See also absence; functionlessness; time; documenting, 23, 38, 45–46, 51, 78, 82, 123; emotional impact of. See experience of ruins; eradication of. See ruin clearance; as exhibition space, 165–176; fake. See artificial ruins; fans, 4, 42, 54, 102, 117; Industrial. See industrial ruins; lifespan of, 5, 9, 10, 12–14, 17, 71; management of. See management; as motif, 5, 24–29, 36–38, 42, 46, 77– 78, 83–85, 105–106, 158; presence of. See presence of ruins; vs. rubble. See rubble, vs. ruins; ruin clearance, 231. See also iconoclasm ruin porn, 122–125 ruins of ruins, 197–211 Sanburn, Josh, 115 Sansovino, Jacopo, 36 Sarajevo, 174–175 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 37 Scarbrough, Elizabeth, 123 Scarpa, Annalisa, 40 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 217

250

Index

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 45 Schnapp, Alain, 51, 67–68, 77, 108 Scholl, Christian, 40 Schongauer, Martin, 26 Schöne, Albrecht, 27 Schulz, Daniel, 181 Scott Brown, Denise, 124–125 self-portrait, 48–51 Serafin, Siro, 150 Serafin, Stefano, 150 Settis, Salvatore, 8, 68 Sharjah, 83, 119, 131 Shaw, Wendy M. K., 210 shopping malls. See malls. Simmel, Georg, 12, 17, 24, 53, 81, 117, 137 Sleigh-Johnson, Sophie, 176 Smith, John, 32 Smithson, Alison, 162 Smithson, Peter, 162 Soane, John, 106, 217–218 Sorkin, Michael, 184 Speck, Jeff, 184 Speer, Albert, 115–116 Spence, Basil, 115–116 spolia, 75, 158–159 Springer, Carolyn, 16 Stadler, Ulrich, 76 Starobinski, Jean, 16 Sterne, Laurence, 218 Stock, Jeroen Van der, 100–101, 103 Stuart, James, 52 subjectivity, 13, 30, 50–51, 83, 136, 221 sublime, 14–16, 18–19, 70, 97–99, 119, 147, 152, 155, 170; temporal, 14–15, 19, 98, 152, 170 suburban sprawl, 182–187 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 145, 153–155 Świtek, Gabriela, 104 Sydney, 119 Syndram, Dirk, 76 Szegedy-Maszak, Andrew, 80 Tata, 202

temporal perspective, 10–11, 14–15, 39, 42, 70–71, 105–109, 119, 152, 166, 170, 173, 176, 199, 206, 216, 219 terrorism, 175, 197–198, 203–204, 206 Thomas, Sophie, 202 Thompson, Erin, 203 time: criterion of, 5, 9, 11–16, 18–19, 31, 70–71, 96–98; fleetingness of, 9, 23, 28, 36, 40, 123, 125, 139, 224; passing/flow of, 42, 48, 86, 108, 136–137, 149, 154, 159, 170, 173, 194, 198, 201, 225 Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm, 60–61, 89 touch, 18, 138, 158, 201–202, 222 tourism, 24, 30, 33, 38, 40–42, 55, 121, 123, 168–169, 190–192, 201, 206, 219 Townley, Charles, 215–217 tragic, 25, 37, 58, 108, 151, 153, 162, 174 Trigg, Dylan, 8–9, 49, 100, 117 Trigger, Bruce G., 208–209 Trotta, Margarethe von, 142 Tueni, Nadia, 87 Turkey, 13, 83–84, 96, 208–209, 219, 223 Tutino, Saverio, 220 UAE. See United Arab Emirates Uffelen, Chris van, 186 United Arab Emirates, 13, 82–83, 88, 131, 187, 211 urbex, 98, 102, 174 utopia, 102, 104 Vallaury, Alexandre, 210 valorization of past, 104 Varoutsikos, Bastien, 203–204 Vaudoyer, Antoine-Laurent-Thomas, 58–60 veduta, 29–30, 32–35, 40, 54–55 Venice, 29–30, 33–37, 40–41, 46, 54–56, 105, 119, 158, 162, 191–192; Venetian art and architecture, 31,

Index

35–36, 55–56, 105, 158, 176, 188, 192 Venturi, Robert, 124–125 Vesalio, Andrea, 50 violence, 23, 25, 197–199, 205. See also iconoclasm; ruin clearance; war Virginia Water, 202 Visentini, Antonio Maria, 32, 36, 55–56 Volney, Constantin-François, 103, 106 Vöckler, Kai, 46 Vrachopoulos, Thalia, 203 Vries, Bouke de, 145, 156–159

Weyden, Rogier van der, 25–26 Whitehouse, Tanya, 96 Williams, Gilda, 108 Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen, 173 Wilton-Ely, John, 218 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 100, 162 Wood, Christopher S., 48 Woodward, Christopher, 75, 117, 121, 169 Wu, Hung, 69 Young, Arthur, 54

walls, 7–8, 13, 28, 38, 67–68, 70, 96, 117, 137–13, 198; and artwork, 85– 86, 89, 131, 133, 138–144; Berlin. See Berlin Wall; as division, 131, 133–142, 144 and identity, 133–137; Great Wall of China, 67; Wandjina figures, 72–74 war, 18, 33–34, 37, 87, 97, 149–153, 155, 160–161, 174–175, 197 Weenix, Jan Baptist, 81

251

Zais, Giuseppe, 80 Zanker, Paul, 51 Zaven, Cynthia, 173 Zeche Zollverein, 95–96 Zhang, Peili, 192 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 45 Zoffany, Johann, 215–216 Zola, Émile, 181 Zucker, Paul, 12, 139

About the Author

Zoltán Somhegyi (b. 1981) is a Hungarian art historian with a PhD in aesthetics, currently based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and working as chair of the Department of Fine Arts of the College of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Sharjah, and from September 2020 he will continue as associate professor of Art History at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. As a researcher, he is specialised in eighteenth–nineteenth century art and art theory with a strong interest in contemporary arts and art criticism. He curated exhibitions in six countries, participated in international art projects, and he often lectures on art and aesthetics in academic conferences. He is the secretary general and website editor of the International Association for Aesthetics, a member of the Executive Committee of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences, and consultant of Art Market Budapest: International Contemporary Art Fair. He is the author of books, academic papers, artist catalogues, and more than two hundred articles, essays, critiques, and art fair reviews. His recent books are Learning from Decay: Essays on the Aesthetics of Architectural Dereliction and Its Consumption (coauthored with Max Ryynänen) and Retracing the Past: Historical Continuity in Aesthetics from a Global Perspective–19th Yearbook of the International Association for Aesthetics (editor and contributor). He is advisory and editorial board member of numerous academic journals of aesthetics. Learn more at www.zoltansomhegyi.com

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