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Ruins evoke meditations, and none more than those of Rome. Not only historians from Gibbon to Toynbee have been inspired by those ruins. Writers of the German Classical period from Goethe to Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and A.W. Schlegel, not to mention Ludwig I of Bavaria or August von Platen, have reflected in their poems on the glory of that Roman past and its meaning for the present. The German Romantics, in contrast, shifted their gaze from antiquity to the Middle Ages and to such monuments as the castles of Heidelberg, Weibertreu, and Marienburg and the monastic ruins of Eldena and Sankt Wolfgang. Poets from Brentano and Chamisso to Eichendorff and Kerner regarded them not so much as cultural-historical treasures for the cultivated few but, rather, as popular symbols of nationalistic pride and future unification. Classicists and Romantics alike sought to preserve those pasts through memory and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at photography of ruins in the U.S. Particular focus is given to photographs by artists Walker Evans, Robert Smithson, and Camilo José Vergara. According to the author, these artists' images captured the process of entropy as theorized by philosopher Georg Simmel. It is suggested that their photographs presented a darker and less romantic image of ruins than was seen in 19th-century European pastoral art. Details on the relationship between nature, American industry, and waste in the photographs also are presented.

Here, we present an iteration of our theoretical/creative writing project Hashima, begun in 2012. The paper is a collaboration and draws on the different discourses, practices and sensibilities of a performance theorist, a geographer, and a visual artist. For us, Hashima, located off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, and a former site of forced labor and intensive offshore coal-mining, is a provocation for experimentation. Hashima, exploited and abject, has offered itself, unsurprisingly, to the fetishistic gaze of artists, photographers urban explorers, and ruin enthusiasts. The logic here is to control representation, and to determine and fix the meaning of the island as always in reference to something else and elsewhere. Paradoxically, there is no sense of temporality or transformation in these representations of ruins; time has been stopped in an image. By contrast, we want to draw out the allegorical value of Hashima not as a site of loss, but as a baroque, blasted landscape of monstrous becomings that resists, and forefronts, this tendency to collapse history into nature. In the following, we introduce the island before turning to an exegesis of Walter Benjamin's writing on German baroque tragedy in order to demonstrate how representation itself becomes tainted through a material encounter with the baroque's two primary topoi, the ruin and the labyrinth. To do this, we finish with a creative narrative and two images illustrating our methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]