Catalog essay for Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art, Center for Exploratory & Perceptual Art, Buffalo, New York (1998-99)

Reversible Tomorrows: Art Photography and Progress at the Fin De Siecle

Instead of causing us to remember the past, like old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.

Robert Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments

The activity of the professional conspirator. . . does not in any way presuppose a belief in progress, but merely a determination to do away with the injustice of time.

Walter Benjamin, Central Park

As we approach the millennium the status of “progress,” that watchword of modernity, seems ever more tenuous. Francis Fukuyama, State Department official and ersatz Hegelian, writes dispassionately of the “end of history,” with disabled left-wing utopias consigned to the dust-bin as the market-place emerges as the true engine of historical enlightenment.(1) Computer scientist David Gelernter mourns the world we have lost in his sepia-toned paean to the idealistic 1939 World’s Fair.(2) At the same moment, new configurations of economic, cultural, and political power are emerging that are radically re-structuring the experience of space and time across the globe. Is time “running out”? Or has it simply stopped altogether? Art has, throughout the modern period, played a key role in both corroborating and challenging definitions of progress and processes of historical transformation. At the same time, art has enacted its own drama of progress and redemption within the ostensibly “internal” development of its own formal condition. Within this dynamic photography has enjoyed a particularly privileged status as both the heroic embodiment of a new way of seeing (e.g., Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko), and the disparaged agent of cultural banality and the rationalization of vision (e.g., Bell, Ruskin).

This special issue of the CEPA Journal documents the exhibition “Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art” (September 18, 1998-March 19, 1999). The title for this exhibition is taken from Robert Smithson’s 1967 work, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he describes the suburbs of Passaic as “ruins in reverse. . . This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.”(3) The experience of the ruin suggests a particular mental orientation, a sense of lost promise combined, perhaps, with a desire to redeem that promise in the future. It is a contemplative mode of thought that might lead to nostalgia and resignation or to renewed activism as the past is overlaid with, and tested against, the present. This exhibition begins then with the question of allegory in art, and with allegory as a prototypically aesthetic form of signification. Our intention was to read Smithson, an artist of the 1960’s and ’70s whose works mark the “ruin” of a coherent tradition of formalist, object-based art, through the work of Walter Benjamin, the German critic, whose writings on the decaying shopping arcades of Paris and Berlin constitute one of this century’s most valuable mediations on the concepts of progress, fashion, and consumption. The recent relocation of CEPA Gallery to Buffalo’s restored Market Arcade (1892), patterned after the famous Burlington Arcade in London, provided an additional spatial and architectural resonance for this connection.

The texts that were written for this publication refuse the conventional exegetical function of the catalog essay. As Smithson’s Ruins essay asserts his claim for the legitimacy of a magazine-based, non-object oriented art, we asked invited scholars Eduardo Cadava, Susan Buck-Morss and Peter Osborne to treat their texts as meditations that were independent from, but contiguous with, the themes suggested by the Smithson/Benjamin juxtaposition and crystallized in various ways in the exhibited works. These are essays with, rather than on or over, the works themselves (which are represented by their own pages). Cadava explores the contradictory function of the photographic image, which encourages us to fix meaning in an abstracted moment in time even as it is equally capable of blasting time free from the false continuum of history and progress. Osborne describes the photograph as the paradigmatic “image space” of modern culture, in which the potential “wholeness” of history can be figured. Paradoxically, as Osborne notes, it is only as photography, and the model of visual truth associated with it, has been displaced by the more malleable visual rhetoric of digital media, that we can begin to more fully and critically grasp the significance of the photographic image for modern art and culture. Buck-Morss describes the redemptive power of the artist, even in the face of the numbing barrage of our contemporary image-culture and the barbarism of twentieth century “progress,” to arrest, if only for a moment, the “flow of history sweeping us forward.”

The tradition of the “ruin” in the modern period began with the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-eighteenth century, which laid the foundations for the Neo-classical revival, and which would provide a suitably venerable cultural legitimacy for the republican aspirations of the burgeoning French middle class later in the century. The emergence of the anticipated ruin, the re-framing of contemporary structures as if seen from the distant future, dates back to the work of Piranesi and artists such as J.M. Gandy, whose Architectural Ruins-A Vision (1832) portrays John Soane’s Rotunda of the Bank of England as an ivy-strewn and decaying pile. Ruins have always been instrumental. In re-designing the city of Berlin the Nazi architect Albert Speer promulgated what he called a “theory of ruin value,” which involved the use of conventional masonry techniques (rather than reinforced concrete) in the building of certain symbolic or ceremonial structures so that they would decompose more rapidly, thus hastening the process by which future Germans could gaze back with awe and nostalgia at their own heroic past.(4) The anticipated ruin allows us to take up an aesthetic distance from our own era, and to imagine ourselves fitting comfortably into a broader continuum of historical progress. This sentimentalizing and legitimizing function is central to the traditional use of the ruin within modern culture.

Fig. 1. Komar and Melamid, Scenes from the Future: Guggenheim Museum (1975)

Fig. 2. Komar and Melamid, Scenes from the Future: Kennedy Airport (1975)

Can the ruin be used to challenge this tendency towards self-satisfied nostalgia? How can artists “excavate” the fragments and ruins of modernity and return to them some of their lost political significance? This is a question that is raised by a number of the works in this exhibition. One answer is suggested by the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, who turned the tradition of the “anticipated ruin” against itself in a series of witty paintings from the mid-1970’s (Figures one and two). In Scenes from the Future: Guggenheim Museum (1975) and Scenes from the Future: Kennedy Airport (1975) Komar and Melamid reframe these icons of utopian modernism as picturesque ruins situated in Poussin-like landscapes.(5) While Komar and Melamid invoke the traditions of Salon painting to collapse the past into the present, photographic-based media are, arguably, even more suited to this task. A number of artists in the “Ruins” exhibition exploit a similar tension between the ideal and its ruined embodiment. Martha Rosler’s In Place of the Public project explores the failure of the modern public sphere; Kim Abeles, in her Smog Plates, uses the very dust of industrial pollution as a recording medium; MANUAL, in Et in Arcadia Ego: History, point to the destructive effects of the mythic Arcadian image of nature; Renée Green’s installation examines the complex intersection of memory and political nostalgia in Smithson’s “anti-monument,” Partially Buried Woodshed; and Robert Flynt and Chris Packard’s Blind Trust: Guides for the Uninfected offers a dialogical meditation on the ruins of desire and loss in the face of the AIDS crisis.

In the face of the impending fin de siècle redemption is clearly in the air. TV shows like Brimstone and the surprisingly successful Touched by an Angel evoke the drama of reconciliation and the metaphysically-augmented healing of emotional trauma, even as the detainment in London and (as of this writing) the possible trial of General Augusto Pinochet on charges of genocide seems to promise an equally therapeutic resolution of past historical traumas. At the same time our cultural capacity to almost instantly transform history into spectacle remains unimpeded. Following on the heels of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, tourists are already being lured to Johannesburg and Soweto to “visit the church of survival where people were gunned down fighting for freedom,” (Imbizo Tours in Ferreirasdorp offers a “real cultural experience”). This dynamic is hardly new. Within weeks of the Paris Commune, with the graves still freshly dug, the London travel agency of Thomas Cook was organizing tours of the city’s smoldering ruins.(6) Art has long played a key role in the aesthetic insulation of violence and oppression; trafficking in the pleasures of an empathy untouched by nagging questions of culpability and political justice. At the same time art has been, and remains, capable of arresting and challenging this process. Throughout “Ruins in Reverse” we find artists seeking to reclaim some sense of the social context in which time is experienced, not as mere duration or as a medium for nostalgic projection, but as the site of a never fully resolved struggle between what is and what could be.

NOTES

1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1993).

2. David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York: Free Press, 1997).

3. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations, pp.53-57.

4. Francesco Dal Co and Sergio Polano, “An interview with Albert Speer,” in Oppositions 12 (Spring 1978), pp.41-52.

5. See Komar/Melamid: Two Soviet Dissident Artists, edited by Melvyn B. Nathanson with an intro. by Jack Burnham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979).

6. See Alisa Luxenberg, “Creating Désastres: Andrieu’s Photographs of Urban Ruins in the Paris of 1871,” Art Bulletin, March 1998 (vol. lxxx, no.1), p.119.