Ruins

The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art's turn towardsite and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay hasled in particular to the concept of the modern ruin--an ambiguous site of artistic and architecturalmodernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those ofstate communism and colonialism. Contemporary art's explorations of the ruin can evoke on the onehand diverse experiences of nostalgia and on the other a ceaselessly renewed encounter withcatastrophes of the recent past and apprehensions of the future. For every relic of a harmonious eraor utopian dream stands another recalling industrial decline, environmental disaster, and thedepredations of war. This anthology provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary ruin incultural discourse, aesthetics, and artistic practice. It examines the development of ruinaesthetics from the early modern era to the present; the ruin as a privileged emblem of modernity'sdecline; the relic as a portal onto the political history of the recent past; the destruction anddecline of cities and landscapes, with the emergence of "non-places" and"drosscape"; the symbolism of the entropic and decayed in critical environmentalism; andthe confusing temporalities of the ruin in recent art--its involution of timescales and perspectivesas it addresses not just the past but the future.

Brian Dillon is the UK editor of Cabinet and the author of In the Dark Room, Sanctuary, and The Hypochondriacs. He is an editorial board member of TATE Etc. and Art Review, and a regular contributor to numerous journals including Artforum and frieze. Since 2008 he has been AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Kent, Canterbury.