Sham Ruins

A User's Guide

Brian Willems

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032081311
• eBook ISBN: 9781000529388
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the middle of the eigtheenth century, a new fad found its way into the gardens of England's well-to-do: building fake Gothic ruins. Newly constructed castle towers and walls looked like they were already falling apart, even on the first day of their creation. Made of stone, plaster, or even canvas, these "sham ruins" are often considered an embarrassing blip in English architectural history. However, Sham Ruins: A User's Guide expands the specific example of the sham ruin into a general principle to examine the way purposely broken objects can be used to both uncover old truths and invent new ones. Along with architecture, work by Ivan Vladislavi?, Tom Stoppard, Alain Mabanckou, Aleksei Fedorchenko, Michael Haneke, and Sturtevant is used to develop this thesis, as well as artifacts such as pre-torn jeans, fake histories, and broken screen apps. Using these examples, one of the key questions the book raises is: what is it that sham ruins ruin? In other words, if real ruins are ruins of what they actually are, then sham ruins should be considered ruins of what they are not. Thus sham ruins are about imposing new meaning where such meaning does not and should not exist. They also can show how things we think are functioning well are actually already broken. Sham ruins do this, and much more, by being lies, ruses, and embarrassments. This is what gives them the power with which we can think about objects in new, unintended ways.

1

Not Just Ruins

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213086-1

In the 1740s England, a new fad found its way into the gardens of the well-to-do: building fake Gothic ruins. Newly constructed castle towers and walls looked like they were already falling apart, even on the first day of their creation. Made of stone, plaster, or even canvas, these ‘sham ruins’ are often taken as an embarrassing blip in English architectural history. However, their reevaluation can help in identifying the sham ruins of our own age, as well as in understanding what makes a freshly minted broken object a potent fulcrum for change.

The person at the helm of this art of the fake in England was gentleman architect Sanderson Miller. In the mid-1740s, he started building the sham ruin that solidified the craze, at his family estate, Radway Grange at Edge-hill, Warwickshire. It includes an octagonal tower with windows too big to deflect enemy arrows, and crumbling walls so weak they could only help defend against the most tepid of foes. Now it is a pub called the Castle Inn with its own Facebook page.

Miller’s sham was supposed to be appreciated more than used. As such, it is a prime example of Gothic Revival architecture in England. As art historian Kenneth Clark says of the period, the Gothic Revival aimed “to stimulate the imagination” (46–7) and nothing more. At the same time, such sham structures were not to everyone’s liking. John Ruskin’s take on the period was that “I know nothing in the shape of error so dark as this, no imbecility so absolute, no treachery so contemptible” (371). But figuring out why Miller made what he did and what it was supposed to mean is not straightforward.

He built his structure on the spot that Charles I supposedly raised his standard and rallied his troops during the English Civil War. But the party he held for the official opening of the structure was on September 3, 1750, an anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell. These two dates indicate the difficulty in interpreting this sham ruin. Is it a tribute to Charles I, a Catholic sympathizer, or built-in honor of Cromwell, a radical Puritan who was one of the signatories of Charles I’s death warrant? Are sham ruins just a pretty decoration, part of a picturesque landscape? Or are they meant to illustrate how the original Gothic buildings of England’s Catholic past were not strong enough to last? Are they merely pretty ornaments, or political symbols built in support of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745? According to Lauren Kaplan, it depends on which sham ruin you look at (Kaplan).

Miller’s first sham ruin at Edgehill seems to lie somewhere between a purely aesthetic object and a political statement, a fact belied by the contradictory dates found at its inception and inauguration (63–4). Another construction of Miller’s at Hagley Hall is more clearly polemical. It was commissioned by patron of the arts George Lyttleton (to whom Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is dedicated). Lyttleton was a well-known critic of the original Gothic period of England. Thus, he saw his ruins functioning as what David Stewart calls “images of just destruction” (400), meaning that ruined medieval towers were ways of showing how the dark ages of Catholicism were not strong enough to survive in the present age of reason.

In another example, an intended political effect was eventually watered down. Lord Hardwick, who saw the sham ruins at Hagley Hall and admired their political portent, hired Miller to create something similar for his own estate. Yet due to Miller’s issues with mental health, which began in the 1770s (Headley and Meulenkamp 141), the work was only completed after Miller’s death in 1780. Left to the Hardwick family’s own architect, the political construction was prettified into a merely picturesque garden accessory.

What becomes apparent is that a fair amount of background knowledge is necessary in order to understand the context of this rather trite object. Kaplan foregrounds this fact by arguing that for the twenty-first-century viewers, sham ruins are simply “exotic” in the sense that they are not firmly rooted in the past, because they are fake, but they are also not located in the present, because the context of their production is generally lost to the average viewer (56–7). Thus, sham ruins become objects lost in time, holding no real meaning except to generate a sense of wonder about what strange creatures they are.

On the other hand, contemporary viewers of sham ruins have sometimes subsumed them into thought on ruins in general. Thus, the way that real ruins confuse the clear separation of inside and outside, foreground processes of decay, engender a nostalgia for the past, or contrast the sterile present with a feral history is considered equally applicable to the fake ruins that mock them.

However, in order to make the separation between sham ruins and real ones a bit clearer, a simple question can be asked: what is it that sham ruins ruin? In other words, if real ruins are ruins of what they actually are, meaning that the ruins of the Acropolis are a real ruined Acropolis, then perhaps sham ruins should be considered ruins of what they are not. It is this fundamental insight which will inform much of the thought in this book. Sham ruins are about representing what is unrepresented. They are about imposing new meaning where such meaning does not and should not exist. Real ruins represent the decay of real objects. The decay of sham ruins is fake, at least when they are first constructed. Sham ruins are lies, ruses, and embarrassments. And this is what gives them their power as objects with which to think about using things in new, unintended ways.

Early Sham Ruins

The first example of a sham ruin is usually taken to be one built around 1510 by Girolamo Genga for the garden of the Duke of Urbino’s Pesaro Palace in Venice. It included a staircase supposedly copied from one in the Belvedere Court of the Vatican. It is known through a description in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects: “The Duke caused the Palace at Pesaro to be restored, and also the little park, making within it a house representing a ruin, which is a very beautiful thing to see” (Vasari 2:384–5).

Rose Macaulay, in her classic book on ruins from the 1950s called Pleasure of Ruins, comments on how many more sham ruins like the one at Pesaro Palace were built. Her comment then addresses one thing that sham ruins ruin: they ruin time.

How many more of these were there? They were not written about, gossipped about, written up, as the later follies were; they took their places quietly, decorating gardens and landscapes with broken arches and columns, believed, no doubt, by later generations to have fallen into ruin. How can one tell? Increasingly, ruin assumed its place as the romantic background, the foil to the practical bustle of living, the broken arch through which a distant vista showed, stretching into infinity, stretching back to the long dim reaches of the past.

(16)

Macaulay highlights the way sham ruins become indiscernible from actual ruins over time. Both kinds of ruin stand next to each other as equals. When this happens, the passage of time that real ruins record can no longer be trusted. In this way, time is ruined by sham ruins.¹

In other words, it is not so much that, as William Viney argues, “Making and marking time … forms a crucial component in the building of ruinous follies and folly gardens” (146). Rather, sham ruins disrupt time, instead of merely marking it. And while for Kaplan the exoticness of sham ruins removes any political dimension from their understanding, Macaulay designates an even more fundamental disruption: they make historical evidence untrustworthy. Interest in ruins as historical evidence started in fifteenth-century Italy, with Flavio Biondo’s Rome Restored (1444–8) and Triumphant Rome (1479) (Breisach 156). The untrustworthy effect of sham ruins, on the other hand, reaches out into the past, unsettling knowledge about the ruins that came before, and of those out into the future, invalidating the real ruins to come. The real number of sham ruins will always be unknown. However, this is true not only for the sixteenth century but also for the sham ruins of our own time. The patina of antiques and the wear-and-tear of originals can too easily be faked. However, ruse is not the only function of the sham ruin.

In the seventeenth century, another Roman sham ruin was built. The aim was presumably to fit new architecture into the ruins of the old buildings surrounding it (Bratton 100). The Italian architect and creator of the baroque style of sculpture, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, built a bridge with an intentionally absent keystone at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, where it can still be seen. Called the Ponte Ruinante (or ‘falling bridge’), Bernini’s work was a functioning bridge, providing access to the upper area of the Palazzo’s gardens. Its ruined aspect was mere appearance.

Both these Roman sham ruins were formed out of a similar intention: to blend in. Located in the heart of Rome, these fake ruins were constructed amid real ones. They were meant to match their surroundings, and as Macaulay describes it, many sham ruins of the time have actually now become completely indistinguishable from their genuinely crumbling surroundings.

However, the sham ruins which are the focus of this study are different. Rather than fitting into their surroundings, they stand out from them. Sham ruins are not majestic players in the eternal city; rather, they are embarrassing hemorrhages littering the backyards of people with too much money and too little taste. They are ugly, flimsy, and utterly useless. Sham ruins feature “Towers that no one ever climbed, turrets that no one could enter, and battlements that no one rose to defend” (Mumford 78). Sham ruins impede serious thought. They are signs of a complete lack of culture. This is as true for the sham ruins of England as those of Ireland (Howley), France (Robinson), Canada (McAleer), and California (Perusse).

The Exform, and Not

The way that sham ruins can be both political and uselessly aesthetic finds a somewhat cloudy mirror in what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “the exform,” meaning “the site where border negotiations would unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted, products and waste” (x). The discarded, excluded, and rejected make up the exform, which features “an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political” (ibid.). Bourriaud is interested in art made out of what is usually considered trash, whether that is the kitschy objects of Jeff Koons or the repurposed old newspapers and bottle caps of George Adéagbo or El Anatsui. Such marginalized and cast-off objects are of interest because they can be used to instigate change in two different ways. First, in order for a subject to change, something has to break (9). Second, in order to challenge a dominant system, “one must first conceive its nature as precarious” (36, emphasis in original). The exform, meaning art created from waste, fits into both strategies for change. Waste can consist of broken objects, and broken objects can be reminiscent of broken systems.

Therefore, Bourriaud conceives of the exform as waste, in other words, it is “what the process of production leaves behind” (97). This waste is then repurposed by artists into strategies for change. Sham ruins are both similar and different. They are similar because their broken nature can function as a fulcrum for change. However, they are different because they are not waste, meaning they are not the actual by-product of the production of something else. Rather than being objects of waste, sham ruins are new products which are purposely wasteful. They have not lost their function but were never meant to function, at least not as the buildings they represent. This difference gives sham ruins a strange power. They are not ruined objects, like waste, but rather objects which ruin.

This difference is seen in the way that eighteenth-century priest and theorist of the picturesque, William Gilpin, describes the difference in building a sham ruin in comparison to building a fully functioning building. For Gilpin, the sham ruin is much harder to build, because the construction of weakness is an art that few know:

It is not every man who can build a house, that can execute a ruin. To give the stone its mouldering appearance, to make the widening chink run naturally through all the joints, to mutilate the ornaments, to peel the facing from the internal structure, to shew how correspondent parts have once united; though now the chasm runs wide between them, and to scatter heaps of ruin around with negligence and ease, are great efforts of art; much too delicate for the hand of a common workman; and what we very rarely see performed.

(67–8)

Yet the hand of an artist is not enough for the completion of the sham ruin. The work needs to be completed by nature (68), which eventually leads the ruin to become a part of nature, and thus to be potentially ruined itself (Dillon 59). Gilpin sees nature as completing the aesthetic work of the ruin, and a prime example of the picturesque quality of all ruins (cf. Wölfflin 24). However, another aspect is added by keeping Macaulay’s comments in mind. Macaulay argued that it is impossible to know all the sham ruins of the past because the real erosion of time has made them indistinguishable from real ruins (16). This is the active nature of sham ruins that is not contained in the idea of the exform: reaching out into the future in order to disrupt ideas of authenticity.

The future aspect of ruins has been noted before. As Brian Dillon has shown, Hubert Robert painted the future ruins of the Louvre in 1796, and architect and artist Joseph Gandy was commissioned in 1830 to create a painting of the Bank of England – lying in ruins in the future – to be included on the walls of its own rotunda (Dillon 17). Ruins can thus function as “routes out of our own moment” (53), meaning that they indicate both past states of solidi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• Preface Page
• 1 Not Just Ruins
• 2 The Potential of the Past
• 3 Total Replication
• 4 Homes on Fire
• Index