Reading ‘Ruin Lust’ by Brian Dillon

‘Ruin Lust’ by Brian Dillon, 2014, accompanying book to the Tate Britain Exhibition, 4th March - 18th May 2014

Some notes from reading this book over the last few weeks, a guide through the history of our fascination with the charm and sublimity of ruins, from a Romantic idea of nature’s forces reclaiming, to more complex contemporary notions of war and industrial destruction. 

In the Romantic era:

  • Key artists included Constable, Turner (with his sublime abbeys), Piranesi (influence on Romanticism) and his imagined 'Prisons’ seemingly showing the doomed arrogance of humans.

  • Craze for ruins, become something almost kitsch in art, and in 'follies’, fabricated ruins in aristocratic parks and gardens.

  • Also biblical, apocalyptic depictions of ruination i.e. in John Martin’s work.

  • Influence of classicism in ruin art.

Themes of human arrogance and power-fascination in ruin art:

  • Bank of England depicted in future ruination (Joseph Michael Gandy
    1830) a and commissioned by the architect himself who constructed the building - a strange grand view of his own construction in future ruination.

  • In Nazi Germany, Albert Speer’s concept of 'ruin-value’ in his plans for Hitler’s 'Germania’ - vanity in imagining a civilisation to challenge those of ancient Greece and Rome. 

Ruins today:

  • New urban picturesque, punk playgrounds in urban ruins. Failures of Modernism in towns and cities, social buildings projects. 

  • Confused chronology, visions of the future and the past become indistinct and blurred.

  • Contemporary imagination of destruction - natural disasters less easily pinned on nature, now more complex ecological/industrial ruination. To research: ideas of Robert Smithson

  • Prominent use of time based media - film and photography - to explore ruins (why?). Some key artists: Jane and Louise Wilson, Tacita Dean, films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

// DILLON, Brian. 2014. Ruin Lust. London:Tate Publishing

Aimee Labourne