Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 149 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 557 g
Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 149 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 557 g
Reihe: Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art
ISBN: 978-0-262-51637-2
Verlag: MIT PR
The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art's
turn toward site and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists
in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin--an
ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective
memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of state communism and
colonialism. Contemporary art's explorations of the ruin can evoke on the one hand
diverse experiences of nostalgia and on the other a ceaselessly renewed encounter
with catastrophes of the recent past and apprehensions of the future. For every
relic of a harmonious era or utopian dream stands another recalling industrial
decline, environmental disaster, and the depredations of war. This anthology
provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary ruin in cultural discourse,
aesthetics, and artistic practice. It examines the development of ruin aesthetics
from the early modern era to the present; the ruin as a privileged emblem of
modernity's decline; the relic as a portal onto the political history of the recent
past; the destruction and decline of cities and landscapes, with the emergence of
"non-places" and "drosscape"; the symbolism of the entropic and
decayed in critical environmentalism; and the confusing temporalities of the ruin in
recent art--its involution of timescales and perspectives as it addresses not just
the past but the future.
