Search

Renowned art historian and pioneering feminist Linda Nochlin explores how, from the late 18th century, fragmented, mutilated and fetishized representations of the human body came to constitute a distinctively modern view of the world.Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

La historia de las ruinas recientes de América Latina apenas comienza a ser escrita a partir del continente mismo, por quienes habitan el territorio y han vivido el fenómeno de nuestra irregular modernidad. Se escribe a través de la palabra, del cuerpo, de las imágenes. No es una historia estática sino en movimiento, como las ruinas mismas, que siempre están en un proceso de degradación material, convirtiéndose en una especie de segunda naturaleza, como muestran las intervenciones performáticas que reúnen cuerpo y materia, así como la poesía y la gráfica popular que escribe, raya y pinta nuestras ciudades a riesgo de dejar en eso la vida. En este sentido, este libro es, por su diversidad de lugares y épocas, su propuesta interdisciplinaria y transversal, y su realización participativa y colectiva, una gran contribución a esa historia repleta de incongruencias y paradojas que hace que nuestro continente sea tan singular e inaprehensible.

Ruinen und Lost Places sind gleichermaßen Symbole der Vergänglichkeit und Zeichen von Zerstörungsakten. Ihre Betrachtung löst divergente Emotionen aus. Was wird aus diesen Orten? Wer bestimmt darüber? Und wie und aus welchen Gründen werden Ruinen zum Gegenstand medialer oder künstlerischer Auseinandersetzungen? Die Beiträger•innen des Bandes nehmen sich dieser Fragen an, indem sie Ruinen als aufgegebene und im Verfall befindliche Architekturen oder Stadtlandschaften verstehen: Von den ›malerischen‹ Resten antiker Bauten über stillgelegte Industrie- oder Militärareale und verlassene Wohnbauten bis hin zu ›neuen‹ Investitionsruinen.

An illuminating reassessment of the architect whose innovative drawings of ruins shaped the enduring image of ancient RomeGiuliano da Sangallo (1443–1516) was one of the first architects to draw the ruins and artifacts of ancient Rome in a systematic way. Cammy Brothers shows how Giuliano played a crucial role in the Renaissance recovery of antiquity, and how his work transformed the broken fragments of Rome's past into the image of a city made whole.Drawing new insights from the Codex Barberini and the Taccuino Senese—two exquisite collections of Giuliano's drawings on parchment—Brothers reveals how the Florentine architect devoted enormous energy to the representation of ruins, and how his studies of Rome formed an integral part of his work as a designer. She argues that Giuliano's inventive approach, which has often been mischaracterized as fantastical or naive, infused the architect's craft with the sensibilities of a poet and painter. Brothers demonstrates how his drawings form the basis for a reevaluation of the meaning and method of the Renaissance study of ancient artifacts, and brings to life the transformative moment when artists and architects began to view the fragments of ancient Rome not as broken artifacts of little interest but as objects of aesthetic contemplation.Featuring a wealth of Giuliano's magnificent drawings, this compelling book provides an incomparable lens through which to explore essential questions about the aesthetic value, significance, and the uses of the past for today's architects.

Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's'creative destruction.'In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.

Once the playgrounds and raw material for the avantgarde, abandoned places and things—decommissioned military sites, postindustrial spaces, contested and forgotten edgelands—are now just as likely to be seen as assets for entrepreneurs or connoisseurs of the authentically worn-out. This is the age of patina, where the material remains of times past—the fields and factories, test sites, back alleys, machines, and statues—are coveted, adored, mourned, and commemorated, as well as sometimes despised. Through an exploration of a wide range of recent film, photography, art, and writing about place, Landscape as Weapon argues that these abandoned sites are a critical arena for debate about the meaning of space and time under late capitalism.

This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author's fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book's main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author's own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists'reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

Esteemed scholar Françoise Meltzer examines images of war ruins in Nazi Germany and the role that images play in how we construct memories of war. The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of ruins force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgiveness and revenge? Françoise Meltzer explores these questions in Dark Lens, which uses the images of war ruins in Nazi Germany to investigate problems of aestheticization and the representation of catastrophe. Through texts that give accounts of bombed-out towns in Germany in the last years of the war, painters'attempts to depict the destruction, and her own mother's photographs taken in 1945, Meltzer asks if any medium offers a direct experience of war ruins for the viewer. Refreshingly accessible and deeply personal, Dark Lens is a compelling look at the role images play in constructing memory.

In the 1970s, Manhattan's west side waterfront was a forgotten zone of abandoned warehouses and piers. Though many saw only blight, the derelict neighborhood was alive with queer people forging new intimacies through cruising. Alongside the piers'sexual and social worlds, artists produced work attesting to the radical transformations taking place in New York. Artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was right in the heart of it, documenting his experiences in journal entries, poems, photographs, films, and large-scale, site-specific projects. In Cruising the Dead River, Fiona Anderson draws on Wojnarowicz's work to explore the key role the abandoned landscape played in this explosion of queer culture. Anderson examines how the riverfront's ruined buildings assumed a powerful erotic role and gave the area a distinct identity. By telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Anderson unearths the buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene.

'Porter un regard différent sur des sites endormis, foire jaillir de lo beauté là où l'on ne pourrait voir que des lieux abandonnés.'Genre photographique à part entière, monde fascinant, l'urbex - contraction de urban exploration - consiste à partir en quête de lieux abandonnés (friches industrielles, châteaux, hôpitaux, gares, terrains militaires, navires, souterrains...) et de rapporter des images des vestiges du passé. Dans cet ouvrage à la fois pratique et très illustré, Philippe Sergent vous fait part de son expérience de terrain et vous livre ses conseils et précieuses recommandations. Car une sortie urbex ne s'improvise pas! Toute exploration doit être soigneusement préparée et le photographe doit pouvoir réagir rapidement sur le terrain en fonction des conditions qu'il rencontre (accessibilité, surveillance, dangerosité, luminosité,..). Il aura aussi un travail spécifique de retouche à effectuer au retour, pour restituer les atmosphères si particulières de ces lieux où le temps s'est soudainement arrêté...

This book presents the first sustained study of the stunning drawings of Roman ruins by Haarlem artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574; in Rome, 1532–ca. 1537). In three parts, Arthur J. DiFuria describes Van Heemskerck's pre-Roman training, his time in Rome, and his use his ruinscapes for the art he made during his forty-year post-Roman phase. Building on the methods of his predecessors, Van Heemskerck mastered a dazzling array of methods to portray Rome in compelling fashion. Upon his return home, his Roman drawings sustained him for the duration of his prolific career. Maarten van Heemskerck's Rome concludes with the first ever catalog to bring together all of Van Heemskerck's ruin drawings in state-of-the-art digital photography.

What is it about ruins that are so alluring, so puzzling, that they can hold some of us in endless wonder over the half-erased story they tell? In this elegant book, Robert Harbison explores the captivating hold these remains and broken pieces—from architecture, art, and literature—have on us. Why are we, he asks, so suspicious of things that are too smooth, too continuous? What makes us feel, when we look upon a fragment, that its very incompletion has a kind of meaning in itself? Is it that our experience on earth is inherently discontinuous, or that we are simply unable to believe in anything whole? Harbison guides us through ruins and fragments, both ancient and modern, visual and textual, showing us how they are crucial to understanding our current mindset and how we arrived here. First looking at ancient fragments, he examines the ways we have recovered, restored, and exhibited them as artworks. Then he moves on to modernist architecture and the ways that it seeks a fragmentary form, examining modern projects that have been designed into existing ruins, such as the Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy and the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. From there he explores literature and the works of T. S. Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Joyce, and Sterne, and how they have used fragments as the foundation for creating new work. Likewise he examines the visual arts, from Schwitters'collages to Ruskin's drawings, as well as cinematic works from Sergei Eisenstein to Julien Temple, never shying from more deliberate creators of ruin, from Gordon Matta-Clark to countless graffiti artists. From ancient to modern times and across every imaginable form of art, Harbison takes a poetic look at how ruins have offered us a way of understanding history and how they have enabled us to create the new.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit's decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit's abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit's deterioration as either inevitable or the city's own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

In earlier civilizations ruins were remainders and reminders of the glory of long passed times. People pondered what could still be seen of the palaces, great public buildings and places of worship. The everyday working world was left without any record to commemorate its importance. Ruins now occupy a special place in our contemporary landscape. Nearly everywhere there are vestiges of commercial buildings and machines that many people still remember as vital to their communities. Industrial progress has doomed them in the space of a few decades. They are the relics of America's industrial glory at mid Twentieth century: great structures erected to support the technologies that shaped the country we now live in. In this book of poems and paintings both poet and artist seek to memorialize the recent industrial past of America as both worker and machine fall into oblivion and the declining past yields to the ruthless changes of the present. Audette paints abandoned factories, ships, bridges, and large machines and much smaller artifacts such as discarded railroad couplings, carburetors and machine tools. In contrast, Nothnagle memorializes the intimate lives of the men and women who made and used these engines and devices in the workshops, now abandoned as they themselves have been; their triumphs and victories forgotten. The poems are lyrical and harsh, short and to the point, knowing and critical, like accents on the canvases. The titles say it all, Calling In, Change to Spare, Grudges, Two Ton Bucket, Yard Sale, Buddy, Chance, Funeral, and speak of frailty and strength, chance and misfortune unlike the machines she also writes about This machine was built to last, making parts to be assembled, parts that fit together like they were meant to, parts that always make sense, no matter what crazy people do to people around the world.

This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. The story of ruins in China is different from but connected to “ruin culture” in the West. This book explores indigenous Chinese concepts of ruins and their visual manifestations, as well as the complex historical interactions between China and the West since the eighteenth century. Wu Hung leads us through an array of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema. A Story of Ruins shows how ruins are integral to traditional Chinese culture in both architecture and pictorial forms. It traces the changes in their representation over time, from indigenous methods of recording damage and decay in ancient China, to realistic images of architectural ruins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the strong interest in urban ruins in contemporary China, as shown in the many artworks that depict demolished houses and decaying industrial sites. The result is an original interpretation of the development of Chinese art, as well as a unique contribution to global art history.

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation's history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America's ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.

Cet ouvrage cherche à cerner l'attrait universel des ruines, qui se rattache à l'exigence de l'ombre face à la radicalité des Lumières. Les ruines ne sont pas seulement un motif décoratif, elles sont un instrument méthodologique qui révèle un état de crise, dotées d'un pouvoir critique mais aussi d'une dimension existentielle liée à l'expérience de la perte.