Ruins

Angela Sutton

S1156129

3rd year Intermedia

A Brief History of Stuff – Object Biography

RUINS

As I began my research for this paper, I soon realised that there is currently a huge

amount of interest in the subject of ruins. As DeSilvey and Edensor put it, “we seem

to be in the midst of a contemporary Ruinenlust” (2012:1). Given the almost

overwhelming number of books, articles and anthologies that have recently been

published relating to this topic, I decided to narrow down the focus of my research to

a particular area of ruination – that of modern, post-industrial urban ruins. I have,

however, made numerous references to the historical tradition of ruin gazing in order

to situate my analysis of our contemporary relationship to ruins within a broader

context. I have also made a conscious effort not to be seduced by the romance of

decay aesthetics, in an attempt to maintain a certain degree of critical distance from

the subject matter. My evaluation of ruins begins with a consideration of their

potentially trangressive qualities and an examination of why this is such an alluring

proposition to urban dwellers. I then go on to discuss the way in which ruined spaces

seem to embody a peculiar and at times uncanny sense of unstable temporality.

Following this, a reflection on the ways in which ruins and derelict spaces can affect

how we engage with history, and can offer alternative ways of remembering the past.

Finally, I consider both the positive and negative approaches to decay and entropy as

physical processes which act upon material culture.

I believe that the potential for ruins to act as sites of freedom and

transgression centres on their inherent liminality. Turner defines liminal entities as

being “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and

arrayed by law, custom, convention” (1969:95). Although Turner is concerned here

with ritual and rites of passage, this definition can aptly be applied to spaces of

ruination and decay. Derelict buildings are sites in transition – they no longer fulfil

their designated function, yet they still retain some semblance of usefulness; their

futures are usually uncertain and their status is highly ambiguous. In her seminal

work, Purity and Danger, Douglas discusses our often ambivalent feelings towards

ambiguity, because it threatens the order and stability of our social structures. She

observes however, that “it is not always an unpleasant experience to confront

ambiguity” (2002:38), suggesting that where there is danger, there is also intrigue and

power. It is this characteristic ambiguity that opens ruins up to an array of different

uses and interpretations, thus allowing people to engage with them in unconventional

ways. Because a ruin has no clear use or function, there are no clearly defined ‘rules’

for how people should behave within these spaces. This sentiment is affirmed by

Diderot’s description of his experience in a ruin: “Without anxiety, without witness,

without intruders… I can speak to myself out loud, give voice to my afflictions and

shed tears without restraint.” (1767, cited in Dillon, 2011:22) The same can be said of

modern industrial ruins which, according to Edensor “provide unsupervised play

spaces for children and adults, in which a range of adventurous, carnivalesque

activities can be pursued.” (2005:68). For Diderot and also in Edensor’s account, the

ability to transgress social norms is considered a positive thing, a judgement that I

would generally agree with. However there is a danger here of legitimising anti-social

behaviour. To return to the analogy of the liminal stage of ritual, Douglas describes

how initiates are “licensed to waylay, steal, rape…To behave anti-socially is the proper

expression of their marginal condition.” (2002:98). Some people certainly view urban

ruins as places in which it is acceptable to engage in ‘undesirable’ and often criminal

activities such as drug use, prostitution and vandalism. Whilst some might argue that

this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the people that live in close proximity to such sites

may well feel differently.

It is clear that ruins have the ability to undermine systems of authority and

hierarchy. Architecture can be used as a very effective tool for inscribing power

relations; for example, the way that space is laid out and divided up in an industrial

factory can denote hierarchy and subservience. These physical boundaries, however,

are dissolved in a ruined factory – there is no longer a clear distinction between the

offices inhabited by the bosses, and the spaces of production inhabited by the workers.

As Edensor puts it, “all are equal in their status as ruined and decaying spaces”

(2005:67) - a statement which echoes Turner’s observation that within liminality all

“distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homoginized” (1969:95). Edensor

speculates that the reason we are drawn to the disordered and disrupted spaces of

dereliction is because conventional urban space has become so regulated and encoded.

This critique of urban geography is certainly not new. In the 1950s Guy Debord

argued that the way in which the modern city is organised dictates its inhabitants’

pattern of movement as they inevitably follow “the path of least resistance” (Debord,

1955, cited in Bauder and Mauro 2008:25). As an antidote to this, Debord proposed

the practice of the dérive, which allows for a deeper psychological and emotional

interaction with one’s urban surroundings. Edensor believes that a similar effect can

be achieved through physical engagement with ruins, as they “open up possibilities for

regulated urban bodies to escape their shackles in expressive pursuits of sensual

experience” (2005:67). Key to this liberation is the way in which the body physically

moves through a ruined site. Edensor describes how manoeuvring through derelict

space “forces the body to bend, stoop, climb, swerve around obstacles, jump and

weave” (2005:67). I know this to be true from personal experience. A few years ago

myself and a friend broke into the abandoned Middleton Tower holiday park in

Morecambe – once a popular resort for working class families, now a classic example

of seaside decay (fig.1). In order just to gain access to the site, we had clamber up

grassy inclines, prise open the metal fence with our bare hands, and wriggle on our

bellies through a tight opening. Thus our bodies were indeed forced to move and

interact with the environment in unexpected ways – ways that are rarely facilitated by

conventional urban spaces. I therefore agree with Edensor’s assertion that through an

encounter with a derelict site, “the body can rediscover unfamiliar exercises in which a

more expansive physical engagement with its surroundings is induced” (2005:89).

Fig.1 - Middleton Tower holiday park in Morecambe, 2005

An additional way in which ruins emancipate people from the regulations of

contemporary urban life, is the fact that in these spaces, time seems to ‘stand still’.

This notion is perhaps particularly pertinent to citizens of the ever faster-paced

twenty-first century, many of whom could be described as ‘time-poor’. Woodward

celebrates this facet of the ruin’s appeal when he describes a crumbling bridge as “the

still point of a spinning world… It’s decaying embrace was a refuge from the suburban

time-clock” (2002:36). Alongside this notion of escaping from the regimented time of

everyday life, ruined sites also seem to undermine the very notion of linear time, thus

creating a sense of unstable temporality. Derelict and decaying sites simultaneously

contain elements of the past, the present and the future. As Dillon asserts, “ruins

embody a set of temporal and historical paradoxes… decay is a concrete reminder of

the passage of time” (2011:11). By highlighting the passage of time in this way, ruins

can prompt both nostalgia for ‘the good old days’, but also a revulsion against failures

or atrocities of the past. This is particularly true of the ruins of modernist architecture

such as communist housing blocks, which act as powerful symbols of the demise of

modernist utopian ideals – the belief in an upward trajectory of progress is rendered

faintly pathetic in the face of mass dilapidation and decay (fig.2). On this issue,

DeSilvey and Edensor write: “The ruin indexes both the hope and hubris of futures

that never came to pass – whether early capitalism’s promise of abundance and ease,

or socialism’s vision of collective labour and equality” (2012:4). The failings of

capitalism are embodied in the industrial ruins of the very recent past. A particularly

explicit example of this is the city of Detroit, which has suffered unprecedented

abandonment and dereliction as a result of post-fordist economic decline (fig.3). Once

a wealthy and densely populated city, it is presently a “decrepit, often surreal landscape

of urban decline” (Harris, 2009). Detroit also highlights a potential ethical dilemma

that is bound up with current seemingly insatiable appetite for images of urban

dereliction. DeSilvey and Edensor are critical of the phenomenon that has come to be

known as ‘ruin porn’ because it is too preoccupied with the purely aesthetic aspects of

decay, “thereby ignoring the contextual economic and social devastation” (2012:6)

brought about by loss of industry. I am inclined to agree with this position, however a

full evaluation of the issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

Fig.2 – Housing block in Kadykchan, Serbia. This complex was founded in 1960 to house coal miners and their families. At its peak it housed almost 12000 residents.

Fig. 3 – East Methodist Church, Detroit

To return to Dillon’s words – the “reminder of the passage of time” – that is

engendered by the ruin is experienced alongside a very physical, embodied experience

of the present decay, and also thoughts about the future and how this process of

entropy will continue to work upon the site, long after we have departed. The notion

of the ruin as prophetic of the fall and decline of one’s own civilization was a popular

theme for ruin gazers of the nineteenth century. This motif was exemplified in

Gustave Doré’s 1872 engraving The New Zealander, which depicts a traveller from the

‘new world’ sketching the ruins of London thousands of years in the future (fig.4).

Woodward calls this notion “The Ozymandias Complex” (2002:177-204), referring to

Shelley’s poem published in 1818, the final lines of

which read:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelley, 1818)

Fig.4.

By conjuring the image of a once great monument to a once powerful king, now

reduced to an impotent and fractured heap of rubble, Shelley emphasises the belief

that all empires, no matter how mighty, are all destined to the same fate of decline

and fall. A more recent manifestation the Ozymandias Complex can be found in W.

G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, in a passage which describes a journey to a desolate

island off the coast of Norfolk, he writes: “The closer I came to these ruins… the

more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction

in some future catastrophe” (2002:237). Although the image of future annihilation is

certainly tinged with pessimism and melancholy, it has in fact be mobilised as a

positive trope for reinforcing the power and status of modern civilizations. Perhaps

the most famous example of this is the Nazi’s “Theorie vom Ruinwert” or, Theory of

Ruin Value. The motivation for this theory was a state trip to Rome in 1938 during

which Mussolini took Hitler on a tour of the ancient ruins. He was “bowled over” by

these crumbling ruins and saw them as a potent symbol of Rome’s glorious imperial

past. On his return to Germany, Hitler ordered that all state buildings must

henceforth be constructed only from marble, stone and brick as these materials would

produce more attractive ruins in years to come – therefore securing the Reich’s place

in history as a great imperial power. His official architect, Albert Speer, even

produced elaborate drawings of the Zeppelinfeld building as a “romantic, ivy clad ruin

of the future” (Woodward, 2002:27-30). As Hell puts it, “Hitler saw the ruins of

Speer’s Germania as a bridge across generations, reminding Germans in times of

weakness of their mighty imperial past” (2010:187). Another historical figure who

took a similar approach to ruins was Catherine the Great, who ordered the

construction of fake ruins in an attempt to claim a lineage for herself, stretching back

to Greek antiquity. (Hell and Schönle, 2010:6).

Hitler and Catherine the Great sought to use ruins as a tool for manipulating

the way that people view history, however ruins can also offer an alternative

engagement with history which is much more positive. Because many modern ruins

are often left to decay without intervention, they can be said to offer a version of the

past which avoids the potential didacticism of contemporary museum display.

Although modern museums aim to provide an objective account of history and

culture, this agenda is seemingly impossible. This point is made by Thomas, who

discusses the fact that cultural artefacts are thought of as being “concrete, objective,

difficult to distort and little subject to personal or ethnocentric bias” (1991:5). He

disagrees with this assumption, arguing instead that by decontextualising cultural

artefacts through museum display, their use and meaning is inevitably altered, thus

they cannot be considered objective records. To a great extent this issue is overcome

in the un-curated sites of modern ruins because the objects, substances and detritus

are viewed within their ‘original’ context. Of course, I am not proposing that the

history encountered in derelict spaces is more objective than that found in museums,

rather the exact opposite. Because there is no attempt at objectivity, emotional and

spontaneous reactions come to the forefront of the experience, as the “spectator is

forced to fill in the missing pieces from his or her own imagination” (Woodward,

2002:15). Given the fragmentary and often random array of material culture presented

in a ruined site, the history that is encountered is one that relies more on subjective

response than objective fact. As Edensor puts it, “ruins offer different ways of

remembering the past… they provoke sensual and involuntary ways of remembering”

(2005:170). In this sense, the type of remembering engendered by ruins has more in

common in with the cabinet of curiosities, or Wunderkammer of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, than with the modern-day museum (fig.5). “These cabinets

were unsystematic and idiosyncratic in composition, and filled to overflowing” (Ames,

1994:50) – a description that certainly evokes the disordered jumble of ‘artefacts’

found in derelict buildings. Such cabinets of course fell out of fashion and are now

viewed as peculiar curiosities themselves, rather than a legitimate vehicle for

conveying knowledge and historical fact. However the recent intensification of

interest in modern, unofficial ruins and the obvious pleasure that people derive from

engaging with these sites, suggests that this mode of emotional, sensual and

disordered remembering still captivates people’s imagination.

Fig.5 – engraving from Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale, 1599.

An additional function of museums and heritage institutions is to preserve

artefacts and structures, thus arresting the process of decay. In relation to ruins and

monuments this is a relatively new approach – the official attitude towards such

structures was to allow nature to act upon them; a process which should be subtlety

managed rather than halted all together. However the 1920s ushered in a change of

direction which saw many of Britain’s historic ruins stripped of the ivy so beloved by

the romantic ruin gazers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; their walls were

reinforced in order to prevent any further crumbling and their rugged grounds

flattened and transformed into pristine lawns (fig.6). Glancey suggests that this

agenda of sanitisation was a reaction against the “mud, carnage, filth, despair and

futility” which was brought on by the destruction witnessed during the First World

War (Heritage! The Battle for Britain’s Past, 2013).

Fig.6 – The ruins of Whitby Abbey

In recent scholarship however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the value of

decay and an acknowledgement of the positive contribution it can make to the

formation of histories and the act of remembering. This returns us once more to the

issue of ambiguity – decaying objects have a “tendency to become indistinct and

hybridised” (Edensor, 2005:108), thus resisting the rigid classification systems of

official heritage. Whilst these ambiguous entities would likely be rejected by the

expert curator, in a ruined site they take centre-stage, allowing the spectator to

experience the “dark and mysterious” (Edensor, 2005:135) side of materiality. In

Douglas’ account, the objects that are caught up in this process of decay, but have not

quite rotted into a state of total obliteration, are the most dangerous. This is because

“their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they

obtrude is impaired by their presence” (2002:197). DeSilvey’s ‘excavation’ of an

abandoned Montana homestead is an attempt at a sort of ‘entropic heritage’

(DeSilvey, 2006:335), in which decay is given much greater prestige than it would

normally be afforded in a conventional museum context. One aspect of the project

that I am personally drawn to is the fact that it allows “other-than-human agencies to

participate in the telling of stories about particular places” (2006:318). This notion

allies with Bennett’s belief that waste material, such as the detritus found in derelict

buildings, should be thought of not simply as rubbish, but rather as an “accumulating

pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter” (2010:viii), which engages with and

acts upon its surroundings. DeSilvey describes finding an old newspaper that has been

nibbled into numerous fragments by the rodents that have made a home for

themselves in the homestead. From these fragments she assembles a sort of poem, and

of this poem she writes: “I like to think that the mice and share authorship for this

work” (2006:334). Similarly, the mice, along with the multitude of other natural and

organic forces, can be said to have ‘co-curated’ the whole project. In this sense, the

“material agency of nonhuman and not-quite-human things” (Bennett, 2010:ix) is

recognised and celebrated.

Throughout this paper, I have tried to demonstrate the various ways in which

modern, urban ruins can provide us with positive and enriching experiences. In this

endeavour I have also encountered certain dialogues which hint at the perhaps

dubious ethical issues that surround ruination and decay, and have caused me to re-

evaluate my own enjoyment of ruins. I feel that in order to gain the benefits that these

sorts of ruined sites have to offer, an actual physical engagement with derelict space is

required. By participating in an embodied experience of such sites – rather than

passively scrolling through page after page of images tagged #ruinporn - a purely

superficial consumption of decay aesthetics is avoided.

Bibliography

Ames, M. (1992) Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums, UBC Press. Bauder, H. and Mauro, S. (2008) Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, Praxis (e) Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: Apolitical Ecology of Things, Duke University Press. DeSilvey, C. (2006) Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things, Journal of Material Culture [online] Available at: http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/11/3/318.abstract [Accessed 28th March 2013] DeSilvey, C. and Edensor, T. (2012) Reckoning With Ruins, Progress of Human Geography [online] Available at: http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/11/27/0309132512462271 [Accessed 28th March 2013] Dillon, B. (2011) Ruins (Documents of Contemporary Art) Whitechapel Art Gallery. Douglas, M. (2002) Purity and Danger, Routledge Edensor, T. (2005) Industrial Ruins, Berg Publishers. Glancey, J. (2013) speaking on Heritage! The Battle for Britain’s Past: The Men From the Ministry, BBC Four, Broadcast on 14th March 2013, 21:00. Harris, P. (2009) How Detroit, the Motor City, turned into a ghost town, The Observer [online] available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/01/detroit-michigan-economy-recession-unemployment [Accessed 28th March 2013]. Hell, J. and Schönle, A. Eds. (2010) Ruins of Modernity, Duke University Press. Sebald, W. G. (2002) Rings of Saturn Vintage. Shelley, P. B. (1989) Percy Bysshe Shelley: An Anthology, Parke Sutton Limited. Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Harvard University Press.

Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure, Aldine De Gruyter. Woodward, C. (2002) In Ruins, Vintage.