The malady from which all humans suffer is history. "Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by; they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today," wrote Nietzsche. "[They are] fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored." The cow is content to be a cow, "for it is contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left out."
The prejudice of being human is therequirement to reflect. We cannot chew the cud without an awareness of having done this before, or that we will do it again in the future. Worse, we know that the future itself will at some point become the past. And should we, in an instant of bovine tranquillity, manage to forget this, our bloated historical consciousness will prod us back into the dispiriting realisation that everything passes.
How we turn this melancholic experience of loss into a form of satisfaction is the subject of Tate Britain's exhibition Ruin Lust, curated by Brian Dillon (editor of Ruins, a 2011 collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery). The exhibition's title – taken from the 18th-century German compound Ruinenlust – describes thecurious psychopathology of being drawn to that which we most fear. We do not simply stumble across ruins, we search them out in order to linger amid their tottering, mouldering forms – the great broken rhythm of collapsing vaults, truncated columns, crumbling plinths – and savour the frisson of decline and fall, of wholeness destabilised.
The downward drag of ruins can be a dizzying or terrifying experience. Henry Fuseli's The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins, painted in 1779, depicts an aesthete sitting among history's scattered fragments with his hand clamped to his brow in a state of neuralgic meltdown. In The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne's heroine Miriam slips unnoticed into the Colosseum, and there, under its "dusky arches", its "picturesque and gloomy wrong", she throws off her self-control and becomes "a mad woman concentrating the elements ofa long insanity into that moment". After Rose Macaulay's London home is bombed during the second world war, leaving her "sans everything but my eyes to weep with", she goes on to write The Pleasure of Ruins, which confesses to her "intoxication" with "thestunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs".
This hypertrophied response to decay and dilapidation is what drives the "ruin gaze", a kind of steroidal sublime that enables us to enlarge the past because we cannot enlarge the present. When ruin-meister Giovanni Piranesi introduced human figures into his "Views of Rome", they were always disproportionately small in relation to his colossal (and colossally inaccurate) wrecks of empire. It's not that Piranesi, an architect, couldn't do the maths: he wasn't trying to document the remains so much as translate them into a grand melancholic view. As Marguerite Yourcenar put it, Piranesi was not onlythe interpreter but "virtually theinventor of Rome's tragic beauty". His "sublime dreams", Horace Walpole said, had conjured "visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even inthe meridian of its splendour".
Piranesi's engravings were such a potent framing device for the cultural imagination of the 18th century that the actual ruins had to compete with them. Many Goethes and Gibbons arrived in Rome with these images imprinted on their minds, and when this superimposition cleared, the real thing was initially something of a disappointment. François-René de Chateaubriand's account of a visit to the Colosseum in July 1803 conformed to all the requirements of the ruin gaze: "The setting sun poured floods of gold through all the galleries … nothing was now heard but the barking of dogs"; a distant palm tree, glimpsed through an arch, "seemed to have beenplaced in the midst of this wreckexpressly forpainters and poets". But when he returned to this locus romanticus a few months later, hesaw nothing but a "pile of dreary and misshapen ruins".
To be disabused of a fantasy is always a powerful shock. Perhaps thisis why Freud nursed such a strong neurosis about setting foot in Rome. He saw it inhis dreams (as vividly as a Piranesi engraving), and circled it in his travels, but it was years before he conquered his fear of actually being there. He would eventually put Rometo use as a metaphor for the unconscious as a ruined landscape waiting to be excavated. Like Piranesi's figures, we wander among the fragments and eroded inscriptions of the past in an attempt to access its mysteries. We follow traces of memory and discover that memory itself is in a state of continuous decay, that we are our own ruins. This is grim news, and too hard a sell even for Freud, whose consolation was the idea of a usable past, whereby "a crucial aspect of the individual's sense of free will is a knowledge of his own history that does not dominate, overburden, or destroy him".
It's as if Freud was trying to sequester not only the past, but the catastrophic imagination that made it into an artefact, the ruin aesthetic itself. This had peaked during the Romantic period, when artistic movements such as the German Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Desire") privileged emotional turbulence and intense subjectivity over the cold geometries of Enlightenment reason. Dispensing with the restraints of classical unity, the Romantics were flushed with feeling, with inconstancy, hopeless love, angst, dreams and tempests. They were impassioned, psychically unbound and never happier than when staring through themist at the jagged silhouette of agood old ruin. Time's acid was their natural high, and it accounts for the hallucinogenic flare inthe paintings byConstable, Turner, Richard Wilson, John Sell Cotman and John Martin thatdominate the early section of Tate Britain's exhibition.
Ruin lust was so intense that it could not be sated by actual ruins – those that had been neglected into existence – so it began to make them up. Hubert Robert, the ultimate ruiniste, painted agallery of the Louvre as it looked in 1796 and then demolished it in another canvas. Joseph Michael Gandy did thesame forthe Bank of England, depicting it inastate of near total ruination that prefigured by more than a century the London blitz. The Duke of Cumberland's ruin at Virginia Water, near Windsor, combined ancient columns brought from Leptis Magna with newly built parts that were then carefully "destroyed" to achieve the look of antiquity – the genuine fake. Such forgeries appeared in parks all over Europe, from Potsdam to Paris toKew Gardens in London, where Sir William Chambers' Roman triumphal arch was made to order and "aged" with ivy andasmattering of stone fragments "seemingly fallen from thebuildings" (a willed dishevelment thatis still carefully curated today). At Pommersfelden Castle in Bavaria, the walls of one room were covered with ruins that tumble down on the visitor. The illusion, painted by Giovanni Francesco Marini, is so realistic one canalmost hear the masonry falling.
The ruin business boomed as a canon of taste and then, come the French Revolution, it exploded into afull-scale drama of dissolution. The revolution's principal achievement, according to Chateaubriand, was to ruin the old ruins and produce lots ofnew ones. "I cannot better depict society in 1789 and 1790," he wrote, "than by … likening it to the collection of ruins and tombs of all ages heaped pell-mell." How to face the confusion of a world knocked out of joint? Chateaubriand's response, anticipating Freud, was to reconstruct: his 42-volume Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, he said, was an "edifice" built out of "ruins and dead bones". In his hands, the ruin aesthetic was both a monument to history and the art of surviving it.
This philosophy of revenance, of leaving the necropolis with something that can be made to live again, is a wayof resisting collapse rather than submitting to it. In 1896, the Lumière brothers screened a film of the demolition of a wall, then stunned audiences by running the projector backwards, thus reversing the ruin. Kurt Vonnegut repeated the experiment in Slaughterhouse-Five byrewinding an allied bombing raid: "American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, suckedbullets and shell fragments from some of the planes andcrewmen … the formation flew backwards over aGerman city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes."
This reconstructive imagination fuels the work of Cornelia Parker, who famously exploded a garden shed with the help of the British Army and then reassembled its charred debris, painstakingly suspending each fragment on invisible wires from agallery ceiling. The retrieved "shed"hovered in fragile equilibrium somewhere between its original form and its exploded aftermath. Similarly, Rachel Whiteread reminds us that aruin is a paradox of two forces, dissolution and persistence. When shecasts the void inside a shed, or an entire house, she then has to remove the structure itself. But this erasure isnever total, because when the negative space is revealed in concrete, so too is the outline of the structure that once contained it. Tacita Dean, who gets herown section in Ruin Lust, buys upthe last remaining stock ofKodak 16mm film to make a film aboutit* obsolescence. The medium itself may be exhausted, but not beforeit produces the memory of its own oblivion.
Memory, of course, is history's subaltern. It is the instrument by which the past asserts its right over the present. To escape this mortmain, you have to get to a place with no memory. For Goethe, this meant North America, which had "no ruined castles / And no primordial stones", and was therefore unencumbered by "useless old remembrance / And empty disputes". In the New World there were no creepy shadows of antiquity (which is why Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne sent their characters to Europe to be ruined), andpioneers of the future such as Henry Ford could cheerfully dismiss history as "more or less bunk".
But ruin lust would have its way, even with great modernisers such as Ford. "I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world," he declared, and promptly spent a fortune commissioning an estate on the outskirts of Detroit modelled on a Scottish baronial manor, complete with crenellations, turrets and a grotto. While his Model-Ts glided off the gleaming new production lines of Detroit (the "city of tomorrow"), he took to pacing his grounds like a restive laird. On the west coast, William Randolph Hearst gorged himself on theultimate ruin pastiche, a vast, mad hybrid of Roman temples, classical statues, mosaics from Pompeii, Renaissance choir stalls and even a 400-year-old Italian refectory ceiling. All these bits were packaged up by Hearst's agents in Europe and shipped to California, where they were seamlessly bolted together to satisfy his desire to live today as if it were "just like the past". This idea of wrapping a ruin around a building wasalso taken up by young American universities, whose steel frames and concrete slabs were concealed behind stone cladding splashed with acid to simulate age (steps were made from soft stone so they would wear down more quickly). This "collegiate gothic" was outfitted with battlements, pointed arches, gargoyles and, essential to the ruin aesthetic, ivy(hence Ivy League).
The fretful backward glance, the mania for duplication – how anxious Goethe's land of the present turned out to be. Its new ruins were endlessly repeatable, a quotation of the picturesque sublime rather than thething itself. Ironically, as the conservation industry mounts guard on these kitsch fantasies, the genuine made-in-America ruins are left to rot. Henry Ford's estate is now an über-curated National Historic Landmark, while the great industrial buildings ofDetroit that delivered his mass-production modernity are decaying, blighted hulks. Their ruination is an ongoing, unmanaged process, and this makes them all the more satisfying to the melancholic imagination, which yearns for the intermediate moment.
To save any ruin from its own decay is essentially to deny its status as a ruin. Not to save a ruin is to lose a memorandum from the past that may offer us a means to estimate our own lives. But the message of the "eloquent ruin" is not always salutary or heroic. When it speaks to the horrors of human agency, we tend to shun it rather than re-enter the depths of those horrors. WG Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction meditates on the material and moral ruination of Germany at the end of the second world war, and the gruesome "efficiency with which they cleaned everything up". How could this unprecedented downfall leave "scarcely a trace of pain behind in thecollective consciousness"? Sebaldquotes an American military psychologist who, after interviewing the survivors of the allies' all-out bombing raids, reported: "The population, although obviously showing an innate wish to tell its own story, [had] lost the psychic power of accurate memory, particularly within the confines of the ruined city."
Traumatised eyewitnesses to the firestorms often resorted to the same verbal stereotypes – "a prey to the flames", "that fateful night", "all hell was let loose", "we were staring into the inferno" – a mechanism of repression that came straight from the conventions of German Ruinenlust. When Wolfgang Staudte was searching for locations in the rubblescape of Berlin for his 1946 film, The Murderers Are Among Us, he came across a devastated block and instructed labourers working on a burst water pipe there "not to wreck anything". For Sebald, to conjure an aesthetic effect from the remnants of such destruction is to make "the real horrors of the time disappear through the artifice of abstraction".
In reminding us that the art of catastrophe is often a device for banishing the memory of human misery, Sebald's short book is a plea torestore the moral dimension of ruins. He would have been depressed by Stephen Jay Gould's ecstatic contemplation of the wreckage of the World Trade Centre ("Ground Zero canbe described, in the lost meaning of a grand old word, only as 'sublime', in the sense of awe inspired by solemnity"), or with the artfully shot cliches – the child's toy, a single shoe – in news footage from today's "theatres" of war. Ruin lust, it seems, will never have its fill.
