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 reevaluate 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.
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