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Introduction
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An archaeology of ruins
Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen
Modernity is rarely associated with ruins. In our everyday comprehension, ruins rather bring to mind ancient and enchanted monumental structures; an archaeological dream world featuring celebrities such as Machu Picchu, Pompeii and Angkor Wat. Yet never have so many ruins been produced; so many sites abandoned. Since the nineteenth-century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized and made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production (González-Ruibal 2008).The outcome is a modern ruin landscape of closed shopping malls, abandoned military sites, industrial wastelands, derelict amusement parks, empty apartment houses, withering capitalist and communist monuments. A ghostly world of decaying modern debris that for long was left out of academic concerns and conventional histories – and also considered too recent, too grim and too repulsive to be embraced as heritage.
Recendy the situation of neglect seems to have changed, though, and modern ruins, and processes of decay and ruination, have become the subject of new attention, both inside and outside academia. Some scholars even speak of a ‘turn to ruins … that is analogous to the craze for romantic ruins in the Victorian era’ (Edensor 2011: 162). Genuinely, though of course somewhat programmatically devoted, is the fast growing field of the archaeology of the recent or contemporary past, where studies of the ignored and marginalized have become a hallmark (e.g. Buchli and Lucas 2001b; Burström 2007; Holtorf and Piccini 2009; Harrison and Schofield 2010). However, the scholarly interest in modern ruins is much wider and now engages scholars in a number of different disciplines (cf. Edensor 2005; DeSilvey and Edensor 2012), as evident, for example, in the array of recent books and papers exploring the theme of ruins in literature, philosophy, films, the visual arts, etc. (e.g.Yablon 2009; Hell and Schönle 2010; Dale and Burrell 2011). An artistic concern with modern ruins is also discernible, especially as manifested in the number of photographic works depicting modern decay and abandonment (e.g. Andreassen et al. 2010; Romany 2010; Jörnmark and Von Hausswolff 2011; Margaine and Margaine 2009; Elíasson and Ásberg Sigurðsson 2004, 2011), a record moreover multiplied in the proliferating online ruin imagery (Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2014). The deindustrialization and conspicuous ruination recently experienced in many of of modernity’s most prosperous places, such as Detroit, has similarly attracted news media and led to TV documentaries and other journalistic explorations. Yet another contributor to the impression of this new Ruinenlust is the more or less non-academic urban explorer community, which has been a driving force in making modern ruins an issue in popular culture (Ninjalicious (Chapman) 2005; Rowsdower 2011; Garrett 2013).
Nevertheless, despite an undeniable impact on certain areas of academia, art and alternative culture, and despite the political concerns for the social and economic causes and consequences of ruination, modern ruins themselves still play a very marginal role in the political economy of both the past and the present. Largely left out of heritage charters and concern they are mainly considered as an environmental and aesthetic disturbance, representing a dismal and unwanted presence to be eradicated, or transformed, rather than something to be considered, cared for, or accepted, in its current state of being. Thus, as there was hardly any general craze for ruins in the Victorian age, it was in fact a very selective and elitist dedication, the curiosity for and interest in modern ruins is still a relatively marginal phenomena. The general attitude towards modern ruins is largely negative, making them easy targets for ever more effective campaigns to clean up and restore land-and cityscapes, in order to comply with environmentalist programmes and public aesthetic conceptions.
As indicated by these varied and often conflicting attitudes and responses, modern ruins are an ambiguous and controversial phenomenon within current discourses and practices. These diverse attitudes and responses trigger a number of questions with which this book is concerned. Why have the ruins of our own time been so devoid of value – historically, culturally and scientifically – compared to their ancient counterparts? To what extent, for example, does this bias reflect aesthetic preferences that also impinge on their academic and public reception? And why have modern ruins, despite this long lack of interest, recently re-entered social and cultural discourses and what has caused their current allure? Given this changing attitude, and their own ever more proliferating self-presencing, it is moreover timely to ask to what extent this attention may affect disciplinary perspectives and territories, heritage programmes and practices, and lead to alternative ways of mediating and presenting the recent past, including more artistic ones? Furthermore, recognizing that this new interdisciplinary interest in modern ruins concurs remarkably with the so-called ‘turn to things’ in the social and human sciences (e.g. Brown 2001; Domanska 2006; Trentmann 2009; Olsen 2010; Bryant 2011; Bogost 2012), what also needs to be explored is in what way it affects – and is affected by – this ‘new materialism’, and how it more generally impacts on our conception of things. This also raises the question of what role archaeology, the master discipline of things and ruins, plays in relation to these twists and turns that currendy affect its traditional and devoted fields of interest. To what extent do these changes testify to an ‘archaeological moment’, a new and dedicated concern with real things, broken and soiled things, that will significandy impact on studies of materiality, aesthetics, and the contemporary past itself?
Figure 1.1 Lodging house for female workers at an abandoned herring station at Eyri, Strandir, Northwest Iceland
Photo: Bjørnar Olsen
This book addresses these topics and questions and in this introduction we shall start exploring some of them by focusing on four partly overlapping issues. First, we shall briefly discuss some possible causes of the largely negative reception of modern ruins as compared to more ancient ones; second, we shall look closer at their role in remembering and how things, abandonment and ruination may challenge current conceptions of memory; third, we shall explore how modern ruins and thing-oriented perspectives may help rethink heritage in relation to aesthetics and ethics, and, finally, we shall more explicidy discuss the role of an archaeology of the contemporary past in relation to some of these issues. Hopefully our preliminary explorations will help setting the agenda for the book and the chapters to follow. However, rather than complying with the common introductory trope of edited volumes, where the editors synthesise and summarize – and often thus pre-interpret – the contributions, tying them together to form an evidendy tight, focused and consistent whole, we choose to leave open such scrutiny. This also because we acknowledge that things – ruins – do not bow to any one approach. We therefore embrace the great differences among the contributions and avoid any attempts to mould them together. Instead we could say that what truly unites them is a deep concern for ruins and the richness of their materiality. As follows, this introduction ought to be read first and foremost as a reflection of the editors’ opinions and their views on the matters discussed. We do not propose, nor do we expect, that these are necessarily shared by the other contributors.
Ruins old and new
For centuries, classical and Gothic ruins inspired poets, artists and scholars, motivated philosophical mediations and served as instruments of contemplative and aesthetic pleasure. Later they became the concern for national care and legal protection, anchors for identity and belonging, and today they are even considered holders of universal cultural significance and human values. The unsetding qualities of the modern experience have been seen as instrumental in bringing about much of these concerns fuelling a desire for roots and a stable identity in an increasingly unstable world (Lowenthal 1998).The fact that the modern condition also produced its own derelict monuments and ruins, its own conspicuous heritage, was, however, far less spoken about. Being modern and ruined, made modern ruins ambiguous and even anachronistic, and their hybrid or uncanny state made them hard to negotiate within established cultural categories of waste and heritage, failure and progress. They became matter out of place – and out of time.
Thus, when trying to explore in more detail their fate in modern discourses and practices we should at first note that there is an effective history of norms, values, and distastes involved. For one thing modern ruins lacked the qualities that were thought to distinguish real ruins and were thus deprived of ‘ruin value’. While connoisseurs of ruins always have favoured stone, the preferred building material of the archetypical ancient civilizations (Yablon 2009: 8; Cnattingius and Cnattingius 2007:10), modern ruins are made of iron, glass and concrete, materials which through their very fabric prevent them from fulfilling the aesthetic expectations associated with a proper ruin and graceful decay. Throughout the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth-century, architects, artists and other intellectuals felt a growing concern for the use of these inauthentic materials and the architecture they afforded, as expressed for example in arcades, exhibition halls, factories and bridges (Buck-Morss 1989: 127–9; cf. Benjamin 2002: 33). One argument used to denounce these constructions was that they were unable to produce gentle ruins of the kind left us from classical antiquity (Yablon 2009: 8); the constructors did not have true command over their ‘modes of decay’ (Ruskin 1849/2001:68–9). Later and more infamously the notion of ruin value was claimed have developed to a’theory’ (and even a ‘law’) by Nazi architect Albert Speer. Unable to age and ruin in a refined way, Speer claimed that modern materials and constructions were unsuited to form the wished-for ‘bridge of tradition’ that could inspire future generations. It was ‘hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate the heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past’ (Speer 1970: 56).
Another serious defect of modern ruins is of course their immaturity. Their presence thus acts as a temporal disturbance, a noise that provokes our assumptions of time, history, progress and sustainability In the dominant conception of them, ruins are old, they have an ‘age-value’ (Riegl 1903/1996) that also is imperative to their legal and cultural-historical appreciation as heritage (Cnattingius and Cnattingius 2007:12). However, this ‘untimeliness’ (Yablon 2009) is not only provoked by their awkward timing but also by their wrong pace. Unlike classical ruins presumed to have decayed slowly and gracefully over centuries, modern ruins are often fast ruins, sometimes too fast. The financial crisis of the late 2000s has made such premature ruins conspicuous worldwide; abandoned construction sites, holiday resorts closed before the first guest arrived, apartment houses, and even entire towns that have bypassed the habitation phase and immediately entered the unanticipated distant future of ruination. Though age-value, according to Alois Riegl, is at first glance revealed ‘in the monuments’ outmoded appearance’ (1903/1996: 72), value, he argues, does not increase in direct correspondence to age, but with the ruins’ slow and uninterrupted ...
