Reading 'Place’ by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Miller

Its becoming clear in recent reading about ruins that the ruin has many more meanings than a to some extent clichéd idea of the Romantic grand abbey, or classical ruins. The ruin in art has been used to explore also ideas of memory, nostalgia, allegory, technology, myth and meanings more intangible.  

Dean and Miller’s ’Place’ (Thames and Hudson, 2005) investigated ways artists used more intangible aspects of place - its definition in time, perspective and memory, as well as in physical materiality. I was interested in how these discussions of place could relate to the ruin, also strongly linked to site and time. Some notes:

Places of Nature

  • Places of wilderness such as polar regions seen as almost 'abstract spaces’, with human fears (and hopes) projected on to them.

  • 'Spiritual’ journeys to places - the 'view’ not separate from the viewer, inner and outer spaces, places of the mind.

  • Nature a 'cultural construct’? - feeding the urban imagination, places of natural untouched wilderness actually the “..crowded habitat of cultural minds”. Modern people increasingly blind to true wilderness.

  • Wild nature as a reflecting pool, a measure of all things, all powerful.

  • Nature always a becoming, in action, each place a unique location of change.

Urban Places

  • We 'order’ our landscape - either through physically transforming it (through industry or habitation) or order it with our perception of it.

  • Mathematization of nature, discussions in science and philosophy. John Locke and Isaac Newton - ideas of infinite space, Rene Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz opposed this. Romantics such as William Blake and Caspar David Friedrich in opposition of the impoverishment of nature through mathematization.

  • Western/Christian ideas of space as pure dimensionality - infinite space. A limitless characteristic of God.

  • 'Place’ as a divine being - nothing is outside of place, it’s the limit of all things. Encompasses all but not encompassed by anything.

In ‘Place’, I was particularly interested in this artwork:

‘A Free and Anonymous Monument’, installation at the Baltic, Gateshead. Jane and Louise Wilson, 2003. 13 channel video. See images at: http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/a-free-and-anonymous-monument

      - Representative of more contemporary places of ruination. This art takes its subject as a place of man-made ruination, a technological sublime - it is an installation of the technical and virtual also with the floating installed video screens.

Aimee Labourne